Required Viewing In the Era of Trump

It's times like these, when the world is going to shit and we're getting exhausted just thinking about it, that the soul cries out for a recharge. For inspiration to action, in the form of a story to get attached to. But not just any story. The kind of story that takes the very issues we're facing, pairs them with engaging characters, and dares to say "we're not powerless."

Required viewing in the Era of Trump is stories that go to the heart of what it means to resist evil. And so I present my top five picks for movies and TV series we need to revisit when we're feeling like throwing in the towel:

Princess Mononoke

In Princess Mononoke, the title character, Ashitaka, is the last crown prince of a persecuted ethnic group, the Emishi, that was supposedly wiped out five centuries before. In a battle to save his village from the crazed Boar god Nago, he is injured by the demonic presence that had driven the boar mad, and cursed with a demon mark that will eventually consume his body and kill him. As a result, he is ordered to leave his village to prevent the curse from spreading. And with him goes his people's last hope of survival.

As he journeys west, he soon discovers that Nago was transformed from a god to a demon because of what has been happening to the forests; man has been destroying the forests to build forges and get to the iron ore in the ground beneath them, in order to build weapons that they use to hunt the animals that guard the forest. Ashitaka soon learns that what drove Nago mad was rage at the forest's suffering, and the humans that have caused it. His fight is then taken up by Okkoto, another Boar god, who wishes to exterminate the humans and save the forest.

In particular, the humans of a village called Irontown, led by Lady Eboshi, and the men who follow her partner Jigo, a monk who seeks the favor of the Emperor against the local warlord Asano. In Irontown, Ashitaka is enraged to learn of the destruction Lady Eboshi's efforts have caused. But it's tempered by learning that the citizens of Irontown are the most downtrodden members of society. Brothel girls, lepers, etc. Lady Eboshi takes them all in and gives them a place to both feel safe and have a purpose.

But as a result of her destruction of the forest, Lady Eboshi has earned the hatred of the Wolf god Moro, and her three children: her two Wolf pups, and her human daughter San (the eponymous princess), an abandoned child that was thrown at her feet by her own parents when they escaped Moro's wrath. Rather than eat her, Moro adopted her as one of her own. Due to Lady Eboshi's efforts to destroy the forest for its wood and iron, San (and to a lesser extent, Moro) has made it her mission to kill her.

Later on, a plot unfolds between Lady Eboshi and Jigo to harvest the head of the Great Forest Spirit to gain the Emperor's favor. They're successful, but the result is that the Great Forest Spirit drains all life from the landscape while searching for his head. Ashitaka and San return it to him, ending the destruction and repairing the land.

On the surface, the film seems relevant only because of environmental issues. But it's so much more than that. At its heart, Princess Mononoke is a film about the destructive power of hatred, and how we must end the cycle with empathy and compassion for all creatures, not just the ones we belong to.

V: The Miniseries

I'm not even going to pretend this piece of 1983 sci-fi wasn't campy as all get-out in the way that only 1980s TV sci-fi could be. But what it lacked in special effects -- because what Star Trek: The Next Generation contributed to the medium hadn't been invented yet -- it made up for in being horrifyingly on-the-nose in its depiction of the rise of fascism and the normalization of atrocity.

The Visitors present themselves as curious and benevolent explorers, and gradually take over the planet using every tactic in the dictator's playbook: propaganda, suppression of knowledge, recruitment of sympathizers, and brainwashing. And it's left up to a small but resilient band of resistance to push back and eventually find a way to beat them.

First by (literally) unmasking them and showing their true nature to the cowed human population, and then by finding a way to fight them and actually win. You'll also never watch the Nightmare on Elm Street films the same way again after seeing Robert Englund as an adorkable alien Minion With an F in Evil.

I'd say more, but I don't want to spoil it. It's that good.

Disney's The Hunchback of Notre Dame

While it doesn't follow the book too well because Victor Hugo was a huge fan of "rocks fall, everyone dies" and Disney is...well...not, it frankly does a much better job of capturing the spirit of Hugo's work -- his entire body of it, not just this novel -- better than most of the other film adaptations of the story.

Because a major theme of Hugo is calling out the rank hypocrisy he saw, and it's the same hypocrisy we're fighting today. The hypocrisy that allows Frollo to claim he's a righteous man of virtue and purer than the rest of us common, vulgar, weak, licentious masses after murdering a young unwed mother on the steps of a cathedral venerating the Virgin Mary is the same hypocrisy that allows white Evangelicals to claim Trump is sent by God to save the United States while he's cheated on every wife he's had and stolen billions of dollars from contractors by not paying them for their work.

Disney's version is ultimately the story of an oppressed populace finally deciding there is a line they will not let anybody cross, and defending their beloved faith and the cathedral that represents it from the corruption and rot of those who would use it to do exactly the kind of shit Jesus flipped tables over.

We can take lessons from Quasimodo. When we get mad enough, we can move stone and shrug off chains because we're all made of something stronger.

Blue Submarine No. 6

Back when this aired on Toonami in 2000, every teenager and 20-something who watched it at midnight with the lights off started recycling and going green like Captain Planet himself was going kick their asses with his bare hands because the thought of a flooded hellscape and half of humanity drowning was that horrifying. Little did we know we'd be facing exactly that fate in real life not two decades later.

But rather than a single mad scientist, the cause is greed and religious zealotry, because a bunch of fossil fuel tycoons have teamed up with Evangelical cult leaders since they have a common vested interest in bringing on the apocalypse.

But like Princess Mononoke, there's more to it than just the environmentalism. It's also about breaking the Cycle of Revenge, and two sides that have been taught nothing but how to kill each other learning to either coexist or ensure their mutual destruction.

It's required viewing because Zorndyke's forces encapsulate perfectly what we're up against; a brainwashed cult blindly following their creator whom they believe will lead them to inherit the future, no matter completely fucked up it is. It also posits a way to get through to them. Not by violently nuking them into oblivion, but by proving what they've been taught wrong. As anybody who has left a cult will tell you, they started to question things when they saw that people on the outside did not, in fact, behave the way they'd been told they would.

Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country

I could not in good conscience make a list of this nature and not include what's got to be the best of the Star Trek films with the original series cast. What makes this one imperative is that it deals with the opposition to peace by those who either fear the other side, or profit from war. And that's another huge factor that we're facing with regard to terrorism and political unrest in general.

As Kirk says at the end, people can be very frightened of change. What we need to face now is that there is an entire faction of our government that is so desperate to hold on to power that they. will. do. anything. Even if that means selling out the country to hostile foreign actors. Because the idea of having to adapt to changing demographics terrifies them.

They believe the future is the end of history, simply because it means the end of white men holding the pens that write it. If we're ever going to move forward, we need to find them, unmask them, and foil their plots.Even -- especially -- when they're on our own side.

Cishet White Men and the Scourge of Progressive Performance Art

It's an odd thing when a cishet white man is called out on his various sexist/racist/LGBT-phobic sins after basing his entire public persona on "getting it." It's like a surgeon lancing a large, deep abscess; everyone gets hit in the face with all the pus and poison that's managed to stay hidden so far.

Currently, that abscess is on the ass of one Louis CK as he moons his audience. After #MeToo collected him back in 2017, he had a pretty good opportunity to put his money where his mouth is, eat that bag of dicks, and take responsibility for himself and his actions like he'd been urging his male audience members to do for his entire career. Instead, he decided the real victim in all of this was himself (rather than the women he choked his chicken in front of), and shat his pants accordingly.

Because cishet white men start life on the lowest difficulty setting and get infinite lives, he could even have taken the light dragging he received that second time around and learned something from it (namely, how to tell better jokes). Instead, he decided his Woke White Guy Costume had outlived its usefulness, and went Full Fedora this past week.

He's not the first, unfortunately. Nor is he going to be the last. Cishet white men pretending to get it and then losing their shit when people (most often women, POC, and the LGBT community) point out they don't quite practice what they preach is a tale that's been reenacted for literal centuries, and doesn't look to be going out of fashion anytime soon. We can just see that shit in real-time now thanks to the internet.

Because the thing that cishet white men loudly proclaiming how "woke" they are keep overlooking is that if they got it even half as well as they purport to, they wouldn't have to keep telling us. It would be inherent in their everyday speech and actions, and would not require a spectacle. But like Mommy Fortuna's Midnight Carnival, spectacle is all they've got because the reality is disappointingly mundane, and the truth melts their magic. Always.

These types wear progressiveness like anime fans wear costumes at conventions. They do it to get noticed. They do it to get attention and praise for their efforts. And they do it to enter and win contests. It's a fucking hobby for them, and when the act is over, they can take off the suit and makeup and wig and go back to being their privileged asshole selves.

Louis CK's latest antics are what happens when someone points out their Evangelion plug suit is made of old garbage bags instead of PVC.

It's no accident that these are the same guys who love smart, confident, successful women until they have to interact with them.

Men like Louis CK love the ideal of equality. They love the talk and the MLK quotes and the rainbow flags. But when marginalized people gain real power -- when women, for example, are able to end his career by telling the world he's a creepy piece of shit -- the game changes. Going back to an earlier post of mine, they're fine with equality until it means there are consequences and they have to actually change their behavior in order to avoid them.

Then, the costume comes off. The jig is up, and since equality won't get them the prizes they're after, the act is worthless. Might as well go back to being a chauvinist asshole.

Oddly enough, anime itself predicted this kind of pseudo-woke douchebag two decades before it was cool. If you were anywhere near a television tuned to Cartoon Network around 2001, you probably caught at least one episode of Gundam Wing. And if you were one of the geeks that I knew in college, you caught a whole lot of episodes. But in case you didn't or you're too young to have heard of it, let me introduce you to one Quatre Raberba Winner.

The short version is he's a richer-than-God teenage boy with Daddy Issues (sound familiar?) who has grown up in relative comfort most of his life. Like with servants and shit. And his father controls the resource satellites for a particular colony. The members of that colony voted him off the island because even benevolent tyranny is still fucking tyranny, and in response, Quatre's father tried to make off with the aforementioned satellite. The colonists, not keen on letting him engineer a massive food and water shortage due to a temper tantrum, fired on the satellite just long enough to kill him so they could recover it. Quatre decided everyone was insane except him and blew up a colony or two himself because hey, if he has to live with Dead Daddy Issues, everyone in space should die.

All Quatre's missing is the man-bun and Bernie campaign bumper sticker. His family's power and privilege -- literally controlling the food and water supply for that colony -- were called out and questioned, and his father absolutely lost his shit over it. And rather than see that the people had the right to defend themselves, Quatre even more thoroughly lost his shit and decided the facade of being decent wasn't worth it if people don't automatically bend the knee.

So he fucking killed them.

It's a chillingly prescient storyline when seen through the lens of angry white men today who explode into violence at the notion that the behavior they feel entitled to engage in is no longer acceptable, and it illustrates the thing at the very heart of the Performance Progressive mentality: they're more concerned about not looking like bigots than not being bigots. Their "wokeness", like the Winner family's "generosity", is not born out of true passion for human rights or the desire to actually make the world better; the Winner family just wants to maintain control of the colony, and these guys just want to bang some feminists.

And when both are denied the thing they want?

The jig is up. The mask comes off. And people fucking die.

Conservatives Make Shitty Artists Because Conservatism Kills Art

"Hollywood is out of ideas!"

It's the great lament of the era of endless reboots and re-adaptations. There is nothing new in Hollywood, so they've resorted to remaking past efforts shot for shot.

Folks? That's not just a lie; it's an insidious, mean-spirited goddamn lie that serves to undermine artists and all the important work they do, and to shield the people actually responsible for the problem. There's no shortage of amazing ideas in Hollywood; they're just not getting made into movies because the thing we've run out of is obscenely rich people willing to risk a very tiny fraction of their wealth to produce good art.

The average budget for a major studio film runs about $250 million. Backers generally want some assurance that they're going to see that money again, so everything from scripts to casting is built around the question of how much return on investment can be squeezed out of ninety minutes in a dark theatre. As a general rule? The worse the economy is, the worse the movies get because financiers are too scared to do anything people might not pay their carefully budgeted money to see.

You can see this across all decades. The 1920s gave us The Jazz Singer, Metropolis, Steamboat Willie, Nosferatu, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and all the other classics your grandparents went to see. Movies that pushed the envelope in terms of storytelling (for the time) and topics to see what they could get away with. Because the public had money to burn, and Hollywood was more than happy to see how many different ways they could make them do so.

Then the Crash of '29 and the Great Depression hit, and we got a little thing called the Motion Picture Production Code, more commonly known as the Hays Code. It wasn't a law, but a set of rules put forth by the industry itself to control the moral content of all films produced from 1930 to 1968. The generally accepted reasoning for the Hays Code was the plethora of raunchy films and equally raunchy Hollywood scandals that lived up to the Roaring 20s moniker. And indeed, the proposals for the Hays Code started as early as 1927.

But the actual adoption of it in 1930? Was all about money. As in, people were too broke after 1929 to have the kind of disposable income needed to attend movies, so Hollywood had to maximize profits by producing as few flops as possible. This meant making sure films were safe enough to not ruffle feathers and put people off going (remember, home video didn't exist; a movie's theatre run was the only money it would ever make). And so, the Hays Code was adopted for almost four decades.

As a result? In the early days of the Code, while filmmaking technology improved, films themselves stagnated as far as being creative and daring. The bad guy always lost, the good guy always won, authority was always respected, gender roles strictly enforced, and nobody the audience was supposed to hate was ever sympathetic. It was, quite literally, like watching the same goddamn movie for almost twenty years.

There were small bright spots that we still regard today as creatively daring, and that's only because of artists like Hitchcock and DeMille who read the Hays Code and went "challenge accepted, motherfucker." They adhered to the Code, but subverted the shit out of it. Films like Notorious (1946) with its two-and-a-half-minute kissing sequence where the actors parted every three seconds to stay within the guidelines. Frankenstein (1931) with its "Now I know what it feels like to be God!" that just skirted the line without stepping over it. The Wizard of Oz (1939) with the eponymous Wizard's moral ambiguity all over the place. And of course, Casablanca (1942) with the famous gambling scene.

Those are the movies we remember, the ones that dared to be risky. Everything else was aggressively forgettable.

And as enforcement of the Code began to weaken after John Burstyn, Inc. v. Wilson in 1952 officially extended First Amendment protections to film, movies began to more outwardly flout it. The Code was even re-written in 1956 to be a little less stuffy (and slightly less racist), and then abandoned altogether in 1968 when it became evident that both the public and most of Hollywood were frankly getting bored and restless with it, and the more daring films were proving to be far more profitable. And it's no accident that this profitability coincided with the end of the Depression and the beginning of the near-constant-wartime economic boom of the 1940s through the late 1960s. People had more money to drop on movies, and were thus more likely to go out and see stuff that might not be their usual bag.

And like clockwork, the recession of the 1980s brought back the general spinelessness of the 1930s, just without an official Code to adhere to. Execs simply refused to back movies they thought were too avant-garde. And so the early 1980s movie landscape got us the same general lack of creativity. There were, again, a few bright spots that we still celebrate today, and again we do so because they dared to break the mold, take a risk, and live a little crazy. Some examples being Raiders of the Lost Ark, Blade Runner, The Shining, Poltergeist, Tootsie, and The Neverending Story.

As the economy picked back up? The 1990s gave us more plentiful riskier shit. Terminator 2. Jurassic Park. Schindler's List. The Silence of the Lambs. Seven. Good Will Hunting. Event Horizon. 12 Monkeys. Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. The Hunt For Red October.

The early 2000s swung back the other way with recession of the Bush 43 years. Shit, I can barely remember movies that came out between 2000 and 2009, other than the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Harry Potter, and Kill Bill. Film was that fucking bland.

The economic recovery of the Obama years yielded another crop of Hollywood getting its groove back with Avatar, Inception, Mad Max: Fury Road, Deadpool, The Help, Hidden Figures, 12 Years a Slave, Moonlight, and the Captain America film series.

And now? Here we are again. Back to playing it safe, because the economy is on the edge of a knife and we're being governed by a madman intent on driving it straight into the ground in order to get what he can out of it while making sure everyone else is fucked. As a result? We've had exactly two memorable, daring films since Trump took the nation's helm, and they were Black Panther and The Greatest Showman.

To give you an idea of how far we've backslid in terms of daring, The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) depicted three on-screen homosexual encounters. It's 2018 and Freddie fucking Mercury can't even be the bisexual man he was in his own goddamn biopic. Hollywood is that scared.

It all goes back to movies having that giant quarter-million-dollar price tag that investors may not ever see again because people don't have the disposable income to take a chance on a film they might hate. So they only throw their money at movies they can be reasonably sure will at least break even. And as a result? Only the safe shit gets made, with very few exceptions. Film, like everything else, gets more conservative when the cash flow dries up.

And artists take the fall for not having deep enough pockets to just make movies for the hell of it. Art stagnates. Art dies. Dinosaurs can't breed when they're all one sex. Unless, of course, life finds a way. And it has; on the small screen.

By contrast, a typical one-hour television episode only costs about $5-7 million, and the maximum is about $15 million for series like Game of Thrones. And episodes can be financed in small packs to see how the show performs before committing to larger budgets. Investors are far less worried about money, and ergo far more willing to take risks. Which is why we've seen some stuff from both cable TV and streaming services that would frankly never see the light of day in any other medium. Amazon Prime's Lore and Jack Ryan, Hulu's The Handmaid's Tale and 11.22.63, and Netflix's Stranger Things and Orange is the New Black have all dared to push boundaries with regard to content that appeals to more than just straight white men. And the trend doesn't look to be stopping anytime soon.

Conservatism kills creativity because the lifeblood of art is change. Art needs new ideas to live, and risk-takers to thrive. Conservatism -- the fear of change, the rejection of the new, and the preservation of the status quo at all costs -- is inherently anti-art and anti-artist. This is why in authoritarian states, which are always conservative, art and its expression are among the first things to be clamped down on. You take away their will to resist by taking away any source of enjoyment or hope. In the words of Gmork, people without hope are easy to control, and whoever has control has the power.

The small screen is giving the Empress a new name. Long live Fantasia.

Trump's Worst Nightmare Just Came True

I've spent almost 24 hours trying to get my thoughts regarding the 2018 midterms into something that isn't screaming possum memes. I'm not sure how successful I'm about to be, either, but here we go.

Democrats did as well as could be reasonably expected last night. Taking the Senate was always an impossibly tall order. Too many Democrats up for reelection, many in vulnerable red state seats. It was all but assured Republicans would keep control of the chamber, and highly likely they would pick up a seat or two (which they've done).

But it's a pyrrhic victory. The Democrats not only flipped the House, but also 7 governorships and 200+ state legislature seats. Despite gerrymandering and voter suppression.

So what does it mean now that we control the House? Let's break it down:

• Any further attempts to repeal the ACA are dead in the water. That shit will never make it past a blue House.
• Indeed, any shitty, dangerous legislation coming from the GOP Senate will not survive a blue House vote.
• Democrats now control all House committees. Of particular relevance right now? Judiciary, Oversight, and Finance.
• House Democrats now have subpoena power to request whatever documents they need, and the ability to release whatever information they wish to the public as long as it's not classified.

What this means for Trump is that his life is going to be a living fucking Hell for the next 2 years. Everything he's done will be under the microscope, because these will not be partisan shitshow window-dressing investigations, but actual ones. And his criminality will become public record.

For a narcissist like Trump? This is the worst thing that could possibly happen to him. Being held accountable for his shit, and being so publicly.

And he's already starting to panic. Not even half a day after the midterms, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions has resigned. And Trump is looking to replace him with someone a lot friendlier. Unfortunately for Trump, this is going to work about as well as it did for Nixon, because now that we have an actual check on his power, you better believe House Democrats are going to investigate the holy fuck out of this. They're already planning to bring in Mueller for public hearings should Trump find an Attorney General willing to fire him.

I don't want to make any predictions for the future of the Trump Administration. But I will say that there is no scenario that bodes well for him. In 2020, there will be twice as many Republican senators up for reelection as Democrats. Considering how close the races were last night even in GOP strongholds, none of those seats are truly safe. And depending on what House committee investigations uncover? They may be even less so. Particularly if Trump's popularity drops below 30% (which is not at all unlikely).

If Trump becomes more of a liability than an asset? Republicans will have no choice but to turn on him, like they did with Nixon. The question is whether Trump will resign, or have to be impeached, convicted, and dragged kicking and screaming across the White House lawn.

For now? Winter is here.

This Is the Greatest Show: "The Greatest Showman" Was the Refutation of 2016 We All Needed

When you think of media produced after the 2016 election that ostensibly gives the current administration the finger, lighthearted musical films are not generally going to be part of that repertoire. And indeed, The Greatest Showman was originally planned as a simple good time full of catchy music. But that all changed in November 2016, and what we got instead is a film so meticulously layered with meaning that it's less like circus peanuts and more like a funnel cake with all the toppings.

The creative team behind the film had started out with a simple, flashy, embellished version of P. T. Barnum's life and legacy. But when Donald Trump was installed in a bloodless coup and proceeded to take a great steaming dump all over basic human decency, the script was revised to work from a new angle that, true to the man it's based on, didn't just flip the Trump Administration the bird; it did so while riding backwards on a donkey and dressed as a giant penis.

Barnum is most famous and remembered not for the circus company that bore his name for over a century, but for his unique approach to the "human curiosities" sideshow, or what were termed "freak shows" at the time. Medical science was still in its infancy -- 1890s America still legitimately believed in vampires as the cause of "consumption" (what we know today as tuberculosis) -- so people with extreme deformities or mental disorders were a subject of revulsion. Others before Barnum had managed to turn the disgust into fascination, but it was Barnum's showmanship and marketing of "freaks" like General Tom Thumb and bearded ladies as actual performers that transformed public opinion of them into something wholly positive (Charles "Tom Thumb" Stratton was an international sensation, and his marriage to Lavinia Warren, another Little Person, was the celebrity wedding of its day).

In the current era when everyone from Black people to Mexicans to Muslims to transgender people is being increasingly reviled simply for being different, the message that needed to be sent was becoming more and more obvious. And it's something the crew felt a duty to put out there.

You can see the beginnings of this thread in the song "Come Alive" when Barnum is recruiting the freaks. Selling them the chance at being paid to be themselves, and to be free and out in the open:

I see it in your eyes
You believe that lie
That you need to hide your face
Afraid to step outside
So you lock the door
But don't you stay that way

It's essentially the same thing he sells Carlyle in their number ("The Other Side"), the chance to both make money and be free of the constraints of upper-class respectable society in which he's comfortable financially but his soul is on life support ("Now is this really how you like to spend your days? Whiskey and misery and parties and plays?"). The only difference between Carlyle and the freaks is the latter have nothing to lose. The end result is the same for both in that they get to finally make a living being who they are.

Now, Barnum himself is far from perfect. He's a huckster at this point, barely believing his own hype about personal empowerment that he's hawking to the freaks. But it doesn't really matter, because they believe him. And in turn, believe in themselves. Performing and being showcased as entertainers and seeing the cheers and applause from the crowds at the museum for the first time is otherworldly for people who have spent their whole lives being pariahs.

It's this rift, between the man Barnum sold himself to be and the deeply selfish asshole he was turning into, that really sets up his fall later on. But unlike the Wheelers, he has a net to catch him: the freaks, who have become his literal fire-forged family, whether he realized it or not.

For all of its historical inaccuracies, this is one part of the real-life Barnum that the movie nails perfectly. Barnum began his career as a pretty awful human being, exploiting a loophole in New York's anti-slavery laws in the 1830s to lease a blind, mostly paralyzed elderly black woman named Joice Heth for exhibition. Many of Barnum's initial "curiosities" featured the kind of in-your-face racism that permeated antebellum New York City.

But as with most good stories, real and fabricated, there's a twist.

While a huckster who sold his audiences glittery crowd-pleasing fantasies, the other side to real-life Barnum is that he paid his performers handsomely and made sure they were physically cared for, well into old age. Including those like the Davis brothers, a pair of mentally challenged Little People siblings, whom he could have easily gotten away with cheating. While he did exploit them in the most literal sense, it's important to remember that this was the 1840s; there were no other opportunities for "freaks" to make a living other than sideshows. There was certainly no job they could hold that would net them $200,000 in the mid-19th century (the equivalent of more than $5 million in today's money).

It's the kind of delicious, popcorn-flavored irony that only a troll like Barnum would revel in. He played to all sorts of bigotry to get the public to open their wallets, and then turned around and paid the very people they looked down upon more money than the haughty crowds would ever see in their entire lifetimes.

We don't know what made real-life Barnum change his mind later and join the abolitionists. But the fact is he did, even switching parties and running as a Republican during his stint in the Connecticut legislature in 1867 (when the Republicans were the literal party of Lincoln). While The Greatest Showman notably shies away from Barnum's real-life racist exhibitions, it does touch on his early bigotry when he starts to abandon the freaks (who feature prominently people of color) in favor of the blonde, blue-eyed Jenny Lind.

And again, while the film doesn't directly address Barnum's political ventures, it still acknowledges his change of heart in other ways. Most notably, in the penultimate musical number "From Now On" in which Barnum, after losing the museum to fire and his wife and daughters to his lust for fame, realizes that the family he built was what he really wanted, even if he was too blinded by having money and fame for once in his life to see it:

For years and years, I chased their cheers
At the crazy speed of always needing more
But when I stop and see you here
I remember who all this was for!

It’s one of the greatest things about this movie; Barnum may be the protagonist and the star. But the movie flat-out states that he and the circus owe their success to the freaks. That for as much as Barnum helped them be what they are, open and proud, they are key to him having a show at all.

And nowhere is this more evident than in their tearjerking showstopper, "This Is Me." At the height of Barnum’s race and insatiable thirst for more, he keeps them out of Jenny Lind’s post-concert soireé in order to impress the upperclassmen since he wants their money. The freaks, led by Lettie the Bearded Lady, use the very confidence Barnum sold them to crash the party.

The scene is the most memorable and moving one of the whole film for so many reasons, not the least of which is it being written as an artfully direct "fuck you" to the results of the 2016 election. But in the spirit of Barnum himself, it goes way beyond that.

In the latter half of the 20th century, freak shows saw a sharp decline in popularity and a very quick phase-out, as advances in medical science took the mystique out of physical deformities and mental and neurological disorders. But human nature being what it is, we’ll always need people to look down upon and shun for being too different. We always need a Tall Poppy to cut.

Beginning in the 1940s, the visible LGBT community became that group. We became the new freaks, with our crazy makeup, stuffed bras, loud and clashing colors, shaved heads, dyed hair, multiple piercings, giant tattoos, and general not giving a single paltry fuck anymore. And the freak show -- the hiring and display of people on the fringes of society for the entertainment of those within it -- was reborn from its (well-deserved) ashes as Vaudeville and burlesque revivals. Which in turn became the bedrock of the musical theatre golden age beginning in the 1950s.

The arts, and particularly theatre, has always been a safe haven for freaks, whatever that word has meant. In the mid-19th century, it was people with too many or too few limbs, odd-shaped heads, exceptionally hairy women, Little People, and giants. In the mid-20th, it was men and women and everyone in between who didn’t obey the social rules governing who you could be attracted to or the clothes and makeup you could wear. The stage and the theatre has welcomed them all, throughout history. The original "low-brow entertainment" was the one place where people deemed too "other" everywhere else could finally be celebrated and even loved.

"This Is Me" is a deliberate love and thank-you letter to all the queer people who have kept theatre alive for the last century or so, by reclaiming it as our own modern freak show. Where we’re paid to be ourselves, and America at least pretends to love us for a couple hours.

In this way, Barnum himself goes beyond being a complex character. He represents the old guard American attitude toward poverty, wealth, and diversity, and its evolution. He goes from viewing poverty as a moral flaw he must overcome in order to be successful and worthy in the eyes of the elite to seeing the snobbery of the rich as the moral flaw, and neither needing nor wanting their approval. He goes from seeing those who are different as useful tools to achieve success to seeing them as equals deserving of the same respect he is. For they also came from nothing and risked it all.

Likewise, Carlyle represents the next generation, viewing extreme wealth as not worth the wound in his soul that is pretending to be someone he isn’t, and that the social class one is born into should not be the sole determinant of one’s future ("It’s up to you, it’s up to me, no one can say what we get to be!"). He also views those who are different as fellow humans, deserving the same basic decency as anybody else.

Hence, Barnum passing the cane of ringmaster on to him. As the older generation’s harmful attitudes die off and evolve and as the newer generation takes over, the Greatest Show On Earth -- humanity itself -- gets better and better.

Because as the real-life Barnum said, and as the film quotes him, "the noblest art is that of making others happy."

What the Backlash To #MeToo Reveals About the Male Psyche

Besides the fact that it's fragile as fuck.

It's no surprise that a movement like #MeToo has garnered its share of detractors. And those detractors all seem to have one thing in common: they really really want men to be able to rape who they please.

The single biggest thread I've seen running through the criticisms of #MeToo is that it's punishing men for their sexuality, and punishing men for having a sex drive. And this honestly reveals something utterly horrifying about men and how they think; "rapist" is their sexuality. At least according to 1) themselves and 2) women they've brainwashed with the fear of getting raped.

Because that is the only thing that explains the conflation of punishing people who rape and abuse others with punishing men "for being men." The only way that makes any sense at all is if you think men raping people is the natural order of things. And if you think that, you only reinforce why #MeToo is both necessary and long overdue.

But that's always been the story of men. It's how men first seized the power they have. They took it out of others' hands through sexual violence, and have kept it out of others' hands by shifting the responsibility for preventing rape onto their victims. They hold onto power by being simultaneously brutal and infantile. Adult enough to rape, immature enough to not be responsible when they do it.

If you think this is nuts? Congratulations, you're a decent human being.

The backlash to #MeToo is rooted in exactly one thing, and that thing is the fear of being outed as someone who has committed sexual assault or abuse (or has shielded someone who has). And not even the fear of having done it, and thus irreparably harmed another person, but the fear of getting caught and exposed. The fear of consequences.

Because that is the only thing that men in power have ever been afraid of. Consequences.

People who aren't drunk on power, when confronted with the fact they might have done a terrible thing, examine and self-reflect and soul-search and try to ensure they don't do the horrible thing again. Because they actually fear causing pain to others. People who wish to keep a grasp on their power instead lash out and try to discredit the accusations. Because they don't give a shit about hurting others. They just want to minimize potential consequences by making the victims harder to believe.

All of the articles and tweets and Facebook posts trying to discredit #MeToo? That is their goal. To avoid retribution for what they know they've done, or what they know they don't have a problem with. They want to flip the conversation to scare victims back into silence, so that they don't have to alter their behavior and give up the power they've enjoyed.

Because that's what consequences do. They erode power. And to people who have been steeped in their own power for their whole lives, losing any measure of it frightens them most of all.

This is why you see lament after increasingly ridiculous lament about consent "destroying spontaneity" or "ruining the mood." Because it's not even the person that these men are attracted to. It's the forceful seizure and exertion of power.

Sex is a sport to them. And when the other team lets you win, the game isn't fun anymore. They get aroused by the challenge of beating their opponent into submission. #MeToo is the opponent that will not submit, and who they forgot is at perfect groin-kneeing height.

Winter is coming. And they're scared to fucking death of it.

Your Minority Status Is Not a Get-Out-of-Being-a-Nazi-Free Card

Chelsea Manning is nobody's ally.

She is a trans woman, she's running for Senate as a Democrat, but that does not automatically make her part of the Resistance. She was, in fact, never on our side. And by "our" I mean "the United States, period." Not only is she a convicted traitor, but the entity she fed our cables to, WikiLeaks, is the very same one that later ratfucked the 2016 election.

Chelsea Manning should, by rights, be rotting in Leavenworth until middle age, but Obama is a better man than literally everyone and gave her an early release. Her idea of repayment? Running against a perfectly fine Democratic Senator and cozying up to white supremacists.

While most have rightly dragged her for it, there is an utterly infuriating trend among her supporters to rationalize her behavior in a variety of ways. From actually buying her ridiculous "gathering intel" excuse to making her out to be a victim of alt-right grooming tactics. It's both alarming and sad that the far-left is so enamored with her status as a trans woman that they refuse to call her out for being in league with neo-Nazis.

The two are not mutually exclusive. It's possible to be both part of a marginalized group and a horrible fucking person.

It certainly worked for Ernst Röhm, who managed to be both gay and Hitler's BFF and seemed particularly okay with slaughtering 10,000 gay men in the death camps alongside the Jews and Romani. In fact? It's shockingly common for gay white men to take up the cause of fascism and genocide.

It's the most basic response to a loss of power; the drive to reclaim it in other ways. Often horrible ones. It's like when the kid who gets slapped around by his dad for being "homo" finds out it feels really good to slap around the brown kids at school for being brown. And when you're denied power in every other way, discovering a source of it you can easily exploit is a hell of a drug.

So it's not a surprise at all that Chelsea Manning, who would have grown up steeped in white male privilege before figuring out she was trans, and who ultimately lost that privilege when she decided to betray both her country and her uniform, would seek to regain power any way she could. Being white is all she's really got, so who better to join forces with than Prosobiec and Cernovich?

The LGBT community doesn't have to protect her, nor should it. She has new friends now. And they hate all of you.

The Germans have a word for people like Chelsea. Who joined the Nazi Party not necessarily because they hated Jews, but because they desperately wanted to feel like they had control of something in their lives for once. That word is...

...Nazis.

You Keep Using That Word

In light of the torrent of women finally coming forward with their stories of rape and sexual assault by powerful men -- and being believed --I wanted to take a moment to broach the topic of consent, and why men -- not just heterosexual, as we've seen with Kevin Spacey, but I'm going to focus on straight cis men because let's face it, that's the demo that can't keep their hands and dicks to themselves -- seem to have such a difficult time both recognizing "no" and taking it for an answer.

The problem is that men are socially conditioned to view sex not as a mutual expression of affection between two (or more) people, but as a thing they do to someone else. And perhaps more disgustingly, a "deal" they have to "close." They must overcome the objections of their target and turn that "no" into a "yes." You can see this ridiculous mindset at play in David Wong's Ayn-Randian manifestos on Cracked, particularly this one (which I've torn apart here).

And men are conditioned this way because up until very, very recently, their partners didn't exactly have a say in the matter. Particularly straight men. If you were a woman? As a member of the nobility/aristocracy, you were flat-out assigned a man to have sex with (the husband chosen for you by your father). If you were a peasant, you simply married the first man who asked because you needed his salary. Ergo men never had to worry about being worthy, so much as first. The woman wasn't ever going to turn him down. She wasn't allowed to.

Up until even more recently, sexual assault and rape were in the same category as property crimes. Raping a woman was no different than vandalizing a piece of merchandise. Rapists literally paid a fine to the husband of the victim if she was married. If she wasn't, he could either pay a fine to her father or marry her; you broke it, you bought it.

Hell, just for perspective? Ancient Greece (on which nearly all of Western society is based) had no separate word for "rape."

For men, particularly straight men, sex is viewed through the lens of a sales transaction. He offers strength, protection, and wealth, and he gets sex and children as payment for his services as a husband. His objective is to turn any potential "no" into a "yes."

Thus, to him, sex is something his partner is letting him do. And if they let him do it, whether they want him to or not, that's all that matters. He closed the sale.

On the contrary, when victims -- especially women -- talk about consent, they mean "sex that is wanted, with this particular person" rather than simply letting sex happen out of a sense of obligation or being too under-confident to refuse. And that's a concept that we can't seem to get through men's heads.

Comedienne Margaret Cho outlines the issue perfectly in this post on her site:

But the sex I am talking about having, the kind I didn’t want, is sex I initiated with people I wasn’t attracted to so that I could get finished faster, or so I didn’t have explain whytowherefor I wasn’t into it or into them, or I loved them so much, but the chemistry wasn’t there, and I felt bad for them and so I would leave my body temporarily for them to do what they wanted, like “take what you want, I’ll be over there” and then return at the end for cuddling and the nice warmth of sleeping in a bed with another person.

Women have been conditioned by and large to agree to sex we don't want to have because it's presented to us as our end of the bargain. Something we let men do to us in exchange for him providing financial security and physical protection.

Why is this not consent? Okay, you remember Lumbergh from Office Space? Star of the That Would Be Great meme? Would you say Milton/Peter/Porter/Slydell consented to anything he asked for? Of course not. They did it out of unspoken obligation.

They acquiesced. They relented. They did not, in any way, consent.

Now picture being expected to have sex in the same way you're expected to go to work on Sunday. Specifically, picture being expected to have sex you derive little, if any, pleasure from because your partner does not know or care if you're enjoying yourself. Picture this and you're starting to scratch the surface of the problem with the male definition of "consent" with regard to what it means for women.

The difference between consent and acquiescence can be summed up in one word: desire. "Lie back and think of England" isn't consent. You don't "let" people do things to you out of desire; you do it with them as a willing and enthusiastic participant. Consent is having sex out of desire. Acquiescence is having sex because it's easier than refusing. Particularly when it comes to the power dynamics between women and the powerful men they work for. If they're "letting you do it" because "you're a star", that's not consent. That's a person too afraid of what might happen if they say no.

So if you could take no for an answer and keep your hands and dicks to yourselves unless you're double-damned pinky-swear sure the other person is into you (or wants you to be into them), yeah, that'd be great.

Neon Genesis Evangelion Is the Most Misunderstood Franchise of All Time

The show that launched a thousand flamewars, because pretty much nobody knew what the hell was going on. And a show that everyone agrees was one of the darkest and most nihilistic works of fiction ever made.

Well, almost everyone.

I'm one of those weirdos that saw it as the complete opposite. As one of the most optimistic and positive views of humanity in fiction, minus the usual cheese that comes with the Humans Are Special trope. It was a visceral deconstruction of said trope, stripping away the layers to find out why. I think the reason so many folks consider it negative is because they're so focused on the visuals (which are indeed horrifying) that they ignore what's actually happening and what the characters are discussing.

The short version is that the underlying main plot of the show is to collapse the AT Fields -- the physical manifestation of the psychological wall that separates people's identities from each other, in effect the thing that makes you able to identify as the individual you are -- of everyone on earth and combine all souls into one being (referred to throughout the show as Instrumentality). The goal is that nobody will suffer any longer since they don't have an identity, and therefore no need to establish relationships with other people.

Shinji, the series' protagonist, ultimately rejects this despite his crippling fear of others, and opts to keep his identity. Hence the movie ending with him and Asuka alone on a beach in a post-apocalyptic hellscape with the "sea" in the background. That sea is the collective souls of mankind.

Now, why the unholy fuck would I consider this a positive ending? Even uplifting? Besides me just being weird and disturbed?

The devil is in the details.

Up to this point, Shinji has been through the proverbial wringer. At 4 years old, he watched his mother get absorbed into Evangelion Unit 01 (and opt to stay there, effectively committing suicide, but it's not clear he was ever informed of that). Right after this, his father shipped him off to live with a teacher, and only contacted him nearly a decade later to be Evangelion Unit 01's pilot.

Then came the 13th Angel (Bardiel) battle. It had possessed Unit 03, and when Shinji refused to fight because he knew there was another pilot just like him in there, his father took control of Unit 01 away from him and had him sit in the cockpit fully conscious and aware while it brutally tore apart Unit 03 and nearly killed the other pilot (whom he learned was a friend of his).

Right after this is the battle with Zeruel, the 14th Angel. Shinji is forced to return to piloting Unit 01 after swearing he wouldn't, and in the course of that battle is absorbed into it exactly like his mother was ten years prior. Only he makes the decision to come back.

Right before the events of the movie, he fights the 17th Angel, who had shown up disguised as Kaworu, a fellow pilot. Before learning his true identity, Kaworu was literally the first person in the series to not treat Shinji like an object that exists to fulfill the needs of other people. And in the end, Shinji is forced to kill him. Something he swore in the Bardiel battle that he would rather die than do.

So by the time that the underlying plot of the show comes to fruition, Shinji is at the lowest point any human being could find themselves. More than anyone, he has every reason to go "yup, fine by me, I'm totally cool with not suffering anymore" and taking the ultimate escape from reality that is joining Instrumentality. But he doesn't.

Because as all the philosophical talk in the movie illustrates, having an identity is painful when you fear other people and when you view the world as a cruel, shitty place. Having an identity is pure torture when you hate that identity because you are under the impression that everyone else does.

But it doesn't have to be that way.

When you change your own perspective and stop viewing everything and everyone as hating you and out to hurt you, having your own identity is good. Even pleasurable. Certainly preferable to floating in a sea of nothing and not caring anymore. As Shinji himself puts it:

I feel that there were only hateful things there. So I'm sure it was okay to run away. But there was nothing good in the place I ran to, either. After all, I didn't exist there... which is the same as no one existing.

But that's not all. The real punch comes in the next few lines:

Kaworu: Is it okay for AT Fields to hurt you and others once more? 

Shinji: I don't mind.  But, what are you two within my heart? 

Rei: Hope.  The hope that people might be able to understand one another. 

Kaworu: And the words 'I love you'. 

Shinji: But that's just pretending - a self-intoxicating belief... like a prayer. It can't possibly last forever. Sooner or later I'll be betrayed... And they'll leave me. Still... I want to meet them again, because I believe my feelings at that time were real.

That is the point at which Shinji rejects Instrumentality, and his reasons for doing so. Sure, he'll be hurt sooner or later. But there's happiness there, too, and it's just as real as the pain. And that alone is worth retaining his identity for.

So despite the crucified Eva series in the background, despite the giant decapited Rei head on the horizon, despite everything else...existing is better than not existing. And that giant sea in the background? All of humanity has the chance to make the same choice as Shinji. They can all come back if they want to.

Having walked that line before? This is powerfully positive stuff. Especially in current times when so much is going wrong. When every day seems like the world is sinking into that sea inch by inch, figuratively if not literally. It's going to get ugly, but people can act to set shit right again. Things can get better. But only if we stick around long enough to take action.

That is, at its heart, the message of the entire film and the entire series. As long as you're alive, there is still hope that things can get better because you have the ability to act. As Shinji's mother says, "Anywhere can be heaven as long as you have the will to live. After all, you're alive... and you can find the chance to achieve happiness anywhere."

God's in his Heaven, all's right with the world indeed.

Puerto Rico Isn't Trump's Katrina; It's Worse

"Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."

That line has got to be the single most defining moment of Bush's presidency. The reality-denial of incompetence so over the top it sounded like a Marx Brothers movie if 1,800 people had died making one. Today, barely 12 years later, Hurricane Maria's leveling of Puerto Rico is being compared as a similar defining moment for Trump. But it's not; it's way the fuck worse.

See, the Katrina response was sheer incompetence. Then-President Bush, then-Governor Blanco, and then-FEMA Director Brown had no idea what they were doing. Katrina was the first disaster on that scale that any of them had witnessed. And then they had to figure out how to respond to it. People were outraged. For the first time, the suffering and deaths of hundreds of brown people drew the empathy and attention of white people. And as a result, shit got done. This time, it's worse. Once again, the suffering of an island full of brown folk has drawn the attention of white folk. Once again, there is pressure and outrage. But unlike in 2005, shit ain't getting done.

Because in 2005, Bush's problem was ignorance and incompetence. Trump's problem is indifference.

Shit got done after white people all around the country made a big enough ruckus because for all his faults, Bush still saw the people of Louisiana and Mississippi as fellow citizens and as human beings in need of relief and help:

Trump sees the inhabitants of Puerto Rico as neither American citizens (which they are, and have been for a fucking century) nor as people:

And not just because they're brown. He doesn't view the inhabitants of Houston as people or fellow citizens, either:

Trump...really doesn't view other people as humans. Period.

He is, as Twitter user @HoarseWhisperer has observed, a severe sociopathic narcissist. The short version is that everything he does serves two purposes, and only two: gain positive attention, and deflect shame. He has the mentality of every screaming toddler at Wal-Mart the week before Christmas. And there is nothing that exposes a narcissist of Trump's level like a humanitarian crisis.

When we see pictures from Puerto Rico -- people who have lost everything, people covered in mud, standing in waist-deep floodwater, looking like they haven't slept or eaten in days -- we feel for them. Even those of us who have never been through a major disaster can at least imagine what going without food, water, electricity, and sanitation for weeks and months on end would be like, and therefore we at least attempt to understand how they feel. That's what empathy is. Being able to recognize and understand the emotions of other people.

A sociopathic narcissist is incapable of empathy. It's part of the disorder. They do not feel emotions except on a superficial level, therefore they can't recognize them in others. More than anything, a humanitarian crisis -- a crisis of human suffering -- requires empathy in order to deal with effectively. It requires recognizing the needs of the suffering people, and meeting those needs as quickly and efficiently as possible.

When the Bush Administration failed spectacularly at the start of the Katrina relief effort, it was still able to recognize what went wrong and took steps to fix it. Because for all of his other shortcomings, George W. Bush is still a human being capable of empathy. He is still capable of recognizing the needs and feelings of others and prioritizing them. He was just a complete fucking moron about it. But in the end, he did care about getting it right and helping the people.

Trump, by contrast, is dragging his feet to help Puerto Rico and its citizens because he doesn't give a shit. He has no properties there (anymore), and Puerto Ricans on the island can't vote for him. He has no reason to bother. Even if public opinion were to pressure him, he has no incentive to do more than the bare minimum. And even then, it's just easier to invent some other crisis to distract people with and deflect shame from this absolute clusterfuck.

So when you get a narcissist forced into a situation where empathy is required, and for which they haven't had time to rehearse their act, you get a floundering, incoherent mess like Trump. While I have no doubt whatsoever that he has some form of Alzheimer's, this is not what you're seeing when he talks about Puerto Rico. You are watching a kid get called on in history class to answer a question and he hasn't been paying attention all year.

Trump is a 100% cold-blooded sociopath. A soulless, reptilian predator trying to convince you he's one of you. And his human suit is starting to itch.

White Supremacists Are Scared of Their Own Mediocrity, Part 1

Special Note: I'm well aware that there are mediocre white women who are just as dangerous. I'll get to them in Part 2. I'm concentrating on white men for this part, because the people who marched on Charlottesville and murdered a woman with a car were by and large not women. Men have historically been the face and engine of the movement for a reason.

After the horror in Charlottesville this weekend, I've noticed way too many people -- not gonna mince words, here, it's literally all white people -- expressing shock that this could be happening in 2017. And as a fellow white person, this is the part where if I were from the South, I'd be going "bless your hearts, you sweet summer children." Because it's obvious by your shock that you don't realize that a mediocre white man is the most dangerous creature on earth.

See, you'll never find a white supremacist who is confident, self-assured, and good at what he does. He would not be a white supremacist otherwise. Because white supremacy -- the belief that being white makes you automatically superior -- is logically the position of the man who is such a generic, formless pile of nothing that whiteness and the privilege that comes with it are all he's got to define himself by. Like a sad lump of dried bird shit on the windshield of society.

These are the guys you'll find on 4chan and Reddit bitching that they can't get a job and can't get laid because brown people are being given too much of an unfair leg up and white guys like them are getting deliberately ignored because "libtards ruin errything." The reality, of course, is that guys like them are so utterly, insufferably dull that as the playing field with people of color gets more even and fair -- that is, as whiteness matters less and less -- it becomes obvious that being born with the advantage of white skin is all these milktoasts have going for them. And thus, the only thing they can feel superior about.

These are men who are so painfully, invisibly mediocre that you'd find it impossible to pick any one of them out of a police lineup with any real certainty. They all look the same. They all sound the same. They all use the same buzzwords. Wear the same popped collars. Have the same stupid haircut. And they all offer the same boring, banal, old-hat excuses for why their lives are meaningless trains to absolutely nowhere.

These are the men who have been able to so thoroughly coast through life on being white that they were never pressured to develop any useful skills or foster any unique talents. "White" was all they needed. Life is graded on a curve and as long as they could maintain roughly the same level of average, they didn't need to do anything more. The bare minimum was enough.

But that's the thing about grading curves; all it takes is one person far enough outside the curve to fuck the entire system up.

For people of color who have been conditioned to be twice as good just to achieve the bare minimum that white men have been riding the brake on? Removing or at least diminishing the race component makes their hard work and qualifications stand out in stark relief against the sea of flat, boring, dull, nondescript mediocrity of your average white male.

As far as white supremacists are concerned, brown people who have been working hard all their lives have wrecked the curve. The black kid from the projects who's had to fight tooth and nail to make people see past his skin just got 100%, so now the white guy's 50% is flunking rather than average.

And damned if a lazy, average white guy is going let society tell him he needs to study harder in order to achieve what the black kid has now. Being above black people is his right and proper place as a white guy, and nobody's going to tell him otherwise.

That is where white supremacy comes from. Mediocre white men who have gotten soft and lazy due to being handed everything that non-white people have fought for, now realize they're so in over their heads that it's not even a competition anymore. Their whiteness is not an advantage any longer, and literally everything else about them sucks. When forced to stare their own mediocrity in the face, the white supremacist, being lazy as shit, knows it's just easier to beat up the black kid than to open a book.

And it wasn't just Donald Trump that tapped this well of hatred and resentment and self-loathing. Bernie Sanders went just as hard after these voters. Even going so far as to claim common ground with Trump barely a week into the nation's mourning and reeling after the election. It's no accident at all that many of the deep red states that Sanders took in the Democratic Primary -- particularly West Virginia, Indiana, and Michigan -- went overwhelmingly for Trump. It's also no accident that many of these areas are white supremacist strongholds. Since they didn't get the "Free College" Guy, they went for the "Kick Out All the Illegals" Guy. And this makes perfect sense when you realize what the root of their hatred is: if they can't crack the books, they'll crack the black kid's skull.

They're not economically anxious, and they never have been. Poor? Sure. Poverty is as pervasive in the Rust Belt and Appalachia as it is in the inner cities of Detroit, NYC, and Toledo. The difference between rural white poverty and urban brown poverty is that those in urban brown poverty never had a privileged existence to fall from; rural white poverty is the result of the loss of high-paying jobs to automation, outsourcing, and the changing needs and wants of the market; rural white people used to have it good and now they don't, so white supremacy takes root easily by giving them a convenient scapegoat. They're not economically anxious; they're culturally anxious because the world has increasingly little use for whiteness, God, or guns. The ways they've always been allowed to behave are becoming unacceptable. White supremacy is the spoiled teenage brat throwing a tantrum because his parents took away the PlayStation after he called the neighbors The N Word. Trump and Sanders are like the subversive grandpa who promises to buy them the next model if they reject their parents hard enough.

This is further amplified when you throw women into the mix. Because when you get right down to it, what all this fear of mediocrity goes back to is the inability to attract a mate and make more white babies with her. Why yes, I'm totally saying that the core of white supremacy is men who are too incorrigibly boring to be fuckable, because it's not 1950 anymore and women don't need men's permission to support themselves. Simply having a dick and a paycheck isn't enough to guarantee white men a mate, nevermind a gaggle of women desperate for their attention so they can leave their parents' house by age 25.

There is a direct correlation between white supremacy and the hatred of women, particularly women seen as independent in any way. From r/TheRedPill to GamerGate to r/Incel to /pol/, you'll find plenty of documented overlap between white supremacists and hating women who won't make babies with them. And if that isn't enough for you? Besides poor hygiene and a racist worldview, Steve Bannon, Alexandre Bissonnette, Jeremy Joseph Christian, and countless other white supremacists all have something else in common: a history of violence toward women, or at least violent rhetoric. It's a feature, not a bug; white supremacy aims to elevate white men above all other creatures, and that sure as fuck includes women.

And if you need more recent proof? Heather Heyer, the victim of the violence in Charlottesville, was subject to a vicious screed on the white supremacist website Daily Stormer (which had served as a hub to organize the riot). Because obviously a white woman who isn't busy making white babies has no value to white men who can't get laid in the first place.

Really, white supremacy is a complete misnomer. It's a movement of men who are anything but "supreme"; fragile, cowardly, insecure, lazy, unmotivated nondescript white men who are literally so goddamn worthless that the thought of having to do anything more than the bare minimum is so terrifying, they can only cope with it by waving the traitorous flags and screaming the slogans of history's most spectacular losers.

Especially when they still use mommy's Uber account.

The Affordable Care Act Is Barack Obama and the Democrats' Xanatos Gambit

And it has so far succeeded beyond any of their wildest dreams.

As we've seen since January 20th, while the House of Representatives -- being a highly polarized and deeply partisan shitshow thanks to the gerrymandering apocalypse back in 2010 -- was able to pass a bill that could actually become law, the far more moderate Senate has tried to pass their own version three times, and each time they've crashed and burned spectacularly. And unlike the Senate from 2008-2011, there hasn't been a single filibuster involved (as a budget maneuver, it can't be filibustered, and this was completely intentional). Despite having a majority in both chambers and one of their own in the White House, Republicans can't do this one thing they've been chomping at the bit and salivating to do for the last 8 years. Because rather than being a symbolic gesture they know will never happen, this time it has actual consequences because they have a stooge willing to sign it.

First, in case you don't speak fluent TVTropes terminology, a Xanatos Gambit is a plan that cannot fail, because it fulfills multiple goals simultaneously. Such that no matter how its opponents try to thwart it, one or more of the plan's goals will get furthered. They simply can't all be foiled. It's named for the character of David Xanatos, an antagonist from the Gargoyles TV show from the mid-1990s, because he had a penchant for these types of plans.

The Affordable Care Act has been implemented so far and become such an integral part of the American healthcare system that no matter what the Republicans do, Obama comes out ahead. Because there are only 3 possible outcomes. In 2 of them, Republicans are summarily fucked. In the third, they'll have to concede that the guy they've been trying to fuck over won in the end:

Scenario 1: Republicans Fail to Repeal or Replace the ACA (Status Quo)

This would, of course, mean that they've broken a promise they've been campaigning on for nearly a decade. The hardcore Republican voting base isn't going to accept this quietly. While they won't vote for a Democrat, they're more likely to just stay home and not vote at all out of disillusionment. As we inch closer to the 2018 midterms, this does not bode well for Republicans in vulnerable seats (which, as the special elections this year have proven, may be far more vulnerable than they think).

Scenario 2: Republicans Succeed in Repealing and/or Replacing the ACA

This is frankly the worst of the 3. Because for any bill to get the 51 votes it would need to pass the Senate, it would have to be cruel enough to appease sociopaths like Lee and Cruz, but restrained enough to get the votes of moderates like Murkowski and Capito. If by some miracle that happened -- and if by an even greater miracle, the House managed to pass it -- it would be a bill that would still kick anywhere from 22 million to 32 million people off their insurance. Many of these people live in Republican strongholds: the rural South, the Rust Belt, and the deep red center (Kansas, Oklahoma, South Dakota, etc.).

These folks are going to see their situation on the ground rapidly deteriorate. As rural hospitals shutter without Medicaid. As areas hit hard by the opioid crisis -- areas that overwhelmingly voted for Trump -- suffer even more devastating loss of life due to overdose. As people who didn't even know that they have insurance because of the ACA suddenly find themselves unable to get even the simplest healthcare.

And they're going to blame the people in charge. Republicans. Because there will be nobody else responsible for their hardships. Again, as we inch closer to the 2018 midterms, this is going to become even more of a prominent issue.

Scenario 3: Republicans Amend and Improve the ACA

The most likely scenario, and frankly the only one that won't mean Republicans getting walked to the electoral guillotine next year. If, after failing like a snake trying to play Dance Dance Revolution, they finally decide that maybe it's time to work with Democrats and actually legislate to fix the ACA's flaws instead of pitching out baby, bathwater, bathtub, bathroom, and entire neighborhood, Obama will come out the furthest. Because he'll have forced their hand to build on his signature accomplishment. And history will forever remember that the Affordable Care Act was the work of the nation's first black President, whom a bunch of old racist white guys tried to blow up and found out they couldn't without taking themselves with it.

And the part that would really burn their biscuits?

Not only does Obama win, we all do.

Because even more than black folk in positions of power, that's what Republicans fear most.

The people winning.

Bernie Sanders Is Not Our Fucking Ally

I apologize in advance for the ridiculous amount of cursing in this post. Those who read this blog know I'm not adverse to dropping an F-bomb here and there, but when it comes to the shenanigans of the Bernie camp, I cope with my rage using good ol' fashioned sailor's talk.

Bernie needs to fucking resign as a Senator and take his shriveled old grandpa ass out to a desert fucking island with no wi-fi where he can't hurt anyone else.

The Democratic Party as we know it today has never been the party of the powerful. Black folk, Latinx, women, the disabled, LGBT folk, etc. have been the backbone of the party since the Dixiecrat revolt over the Civil Rights Movement (with the Dixiecrats becoming today's GOP). It has never been about throwing those people under the bus to win over the white working class.

But that's exactly what Bernie Fucking Sanders wants to turn it into.

Bernie Fucking Sanders has galvanized a "revolution" of freeloading angry white dudes to demonize the Democratic Party for demanding they actually do a fair share of the fucking work. Much like your stoned loser friend from college who couch-surfs through everyone he knows while eating their chips and puking on their carpets after a kegger, and then has the audacity to tell them their video game collection sucks. And just like that friend, they pitch a fit when you inform them they've grossly overstayed their welcome.

I put "revolution" in scarequotes up there because freeloading angry white dudes taking a giant steaming smelly dump on the already oppressed for their own benefit isn't a fucking revolution at fucking all; it's the status fucking quo. And Bernie Fucking Sanders is leading the charge.

That's right, kids. He's not a goddamned progressive and he never fucking has been. He doesn't want to go forward. He wants to go back. The only difference between him and Trump is how far back. Sanders wants to turn back the calendar to roughly 1960. Taxes were fairer, but life sucked enough for everyone but cishet able-bodied white males that it was still comfortable to look down on the rest of us. Trump wants to go back to 1860 so he can make slaves carry him around on a tacky golden sedan chair.

And because he's too goddamned lazy to start his own party and do the fucking work required to build it into something viable, he's decided to start a revolt within the Democratic Party.

This is a guy who literally takes a huge stinky shit on every principle he says he stands for. How many working-class people do you know who own three goddamn motherfucking houses? How is it standing up for the little guy to sponsor a bill that dumps nuclear waste from your rich white state on a dirt-poor Latinx community in Texas? How is he "new blood" in politics when he's been serving in Congress ten years longer than Hillary? Unless it's totally fine when he does it, in which case he's a fucking hypocritical bag of dicks who doesn't deserve your vote or your $27.

To make matters worse? This is a guy who, ten days after the election, says he can totally find common ground with Trump. On -- get this! -- "standing up to corporate America."

Let me repeat that: "standing up to corporate America."

Donald. Fucking. Trump.

Bernie Fucking Sanders is not our fucking ally. He's a goddamned motherfucking shit-eating collaborator. And has also probably been a Russian agent this whole time.

And I'll admit, I voted for him in my state's primary. I regret doing so. Because his antics prove every day that he does not give a single paltry constipated shit about anyone but himself. He's been on nobody's side but his own, gaming the system to get what he can out of it before moving on. He's as bad as Trump, if not worse; Trump at least makes no pretenses that he's a demented, narcissistic, self-serving son of a bitch. Sanders sells his followers his false self before he robs them fucking blind when they're not looking.

Therefore, if he wants to take all the freeloading angry white dudes with their heads so far up their own asses they could lick their own prostates out of the Democratic Party? Fucking let him. Let him lead them all into the river like the Pied Piper of Goddamn Hamelin for all I care, because these motherfuckers were never on our side, either.

If you're a "progressive" solely to improve your own station, to the detriment of other people, go join the fucking GOP, because that's where you belong. Get the fuck out of our way and the fuck out of our party, because we ain't got time for whiny, petulant, selfish children. We have fucking work to do.

The Shorter of Two Bullshit Mountains

You would think, by now, that there would be enough evidence of both Trump's corruption and unpopularity that any Republican worth their House seat would be drafting articles of impeachment the minute Comey's firing was announced. So why haven't they?

Here's the situation so far:

- Trump asked Comey to end the investigation into Michael Flynn's Russia ties.

- Trump fed classified intel to Russian diplomats.

- Trump's approval rating has dipped below 40%; his disapproval rating is close to 60% (as of this writing).

- Republican-controlled Congress' approval rating is 20% as of this writing. Down 4 entire points from March.

In a sane world, this would be a screaming neon sign for both impeachment and removal, and to push the Russia investigation full speed ahead, balls-to-the-wall, until the truth comes out. But it's not. Republican officials have either been silent, wishy-washy (saying it's "disturbing" but taking no real action; hi there, John McCain!), or outright defending Trump.

Despite his unpolularity. Despite their unpopularity. It makes no goddamned sense.

The working theory is the usual party-over-country mentality and the desperation to actually legislate now that they have control of everything, because for the last eight years they were too preoccupied with obstructing Obama to do anything else. But that doesn't hold up, either.

The first bill to actually pass the House was the American Health Care Act (AHCA). A bill that almost nobody in the country actually wants (17% approval; that's it). A bill that was so shitty Ryan had to pull it from the floor the first time, and only got it past the House by a hair because somebody made it even worse.

Why? Why, when you're a deeply unpopular Congress, would you stand by a deeply unpopular president just to pass a deeply unpopular bill?

Simple: the Republican Party knows that if the investigation is completed and Trump goes down? They go right down with him.

Let's back up a week.

On May 11, 2017 -- right on the heels of James Comey's firing on May 9 -- the FBI executed a search warrant on the Annapolis office of Strategic Campaign Group, a Republican PAC that failed gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli sued back in 2014 for scamming donors. The raid was directly related to Cuccinelli's lawsuit, but further research brings up some very interesting and very familiar names.

Strategic Campaign Group's senior adviser is Dennis Whitfield, who as it turns out also worked for a firm called BKSH & Associates. A firm founded by...Paul Manafort and Roger Stone. Remember those guys?

They were gone before Whitfield came on board, but considering Paul Manafort and Roger Stone's history of shady shit going back several decades, and BKSH & Associates' history of even shadier shit going back to roughly 2002, the dots and the line are still there.

So we have a consulting firm raided for scamming donors, whose senior adviser used to work for a consulting firm that specialized in influencing foreign elections and whose founder with Russian ties went on to be Trump's campaign manager.

As the saying goes, where there's smoke there's fire. This? This is a tiny crack in the ground over Centralia, PA.

 And Republicans are scared shitless of the still-smoldering coal fire the full investigation will find. Because another interesting thing about BKSH & Associates? One of its founders, Charlie Black, Jr., was a top aide on the failed presidential campaign of none other than everyone's favorite spineless "maverick," John McCain.

This is why Republicans keep standing by Trump, and why they want the Russia scandal to go away. For the same reason Trump hasn't yet released his tax returns: whatever PR nightmare they're facing now is nothing compared to what will happen when the full truth comes out.

Republicans in 1973 turned on Nixon because at the time, they had more to gain by hanging him out to dry. Republicans in 2017 are protecting Trump because they have more to lose if the investigation keeps going.

They'll survive the stench of Trump. They won't survive Russia. And they know it.

Social Issues Are Economic Issues

If there is one thing I'm getting fucking sick of really fucking fast, it's the Straight White Guy lament in defense of Bernie Sanders that the Democratic Party focused too much on "social issues" instead of "economic issues" in the 2016 campaign. And the reason I'm sick of it is because that argument comes from a place of ridiculous tone-deaf privilege.

Issues of race, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity/presentation, disability/illness, and everything else that straight white men consider "social" and therefore unimportant are directly tied to the economy in a number of ways.

Black and Latinx people incarcerated at disproportionately higher rates, more harshly disciplined in school (suspension, expulsion, etc.), and reprimanded for everything from accent to hairstyle all contribute to these populations earning substantially less than white people. It's hard to get a decent job when you were raised by a single mom because your dad pled guilty to something he didn't even do because public defenders are awful and your family's too poor to afford their own lawyer, and nobody will hire your mom for anything other than fast food service because her name is too "ethnic" and she can't afford a hair relaxer treatment every week. This gets even harder when "pled guilty" means "your dad was gunned down in his car by police because he reached for his wallet while black."

Native Americans are also affected by extreme poverty, and not just on reservations. Native descendants face high rates of alcoholism and diabetes, both of which contribute to higher costs of medical care and future disabilities. Native peoples also face the same kind of racism and police brutality that black and Latinx populations do.

Being trans and too terrified to use your preferred bathroom at work means you're more likely to suffer a bladder infection, which means you miss work or get ironically reprimanded for using the bathroom too much on the clock. Trans youth account for nearly half of the homeless youth population, due to being kicked out by parents and guardians. Trans people also face rampant housing and employment discrimination, which is perfectly legal in many states. Trans people also face extremely high rates of sexual assault and murder, particularly trans people of color.

Women not having access to reproductive services are more likely to forego college not just because of pregnancy, but also other medical issues (hormonal birth control treats a wide variety of reproductive disorders like endometriosis and PCOS, which can be physically debilitating). Women unable to access abortion services are more likely to live at or below the poverty line. Women are more likely to quit a job than report sexual assault or harassment, and if they do report it, they're more likely to be fired in retaliation than aided.

It is still legal in 28 states to fire and deny housing to someone for being LGBT, which makes LGBT people a disproportionate share of the homeless population. As a result, a significant number of sex workers are LGBT, and it's not uncommon for LGBT people who aren't sex workers to be suspected of such and harassed by police. Even legally married gay and lesbian couples can have a hard time finding things like joint health insurance. LGBT people with HIV and AIDS also face extremely high costs of healthcare and job discrimination. And LGBT youth face much higher rates of suicide, assault, and murder.

This is why we get so fucking angry when straight white men dismiss our issues as "social" rather than economic. They are economic. They just affect our lives financially instead of theirs. It's us who need to shoulder the higher costs of rent, medical care, incarceration, fines, and everything else because we live in a society that hates the fact we exist.

Social issues and economic issues are forever intertwined. If you think they aren't, it's only because you've never really faced them.

What Star Trek Can Teach Us About the Danger of Ideological Purity

It's not every decade that I get to see firsthand what is meant by a work of fiction being "ahead of its time." Star Trek is certainly no stranger to this; the original series boasts the first interracial kiss on US television, at a time when people were burning down radio stations for playing Janis Ian's "Society's Child." It also featured a Russian character played by an actor of Soviet descent at the height of the Cold War.

But 24 years ago, the third series of the franchise premiered: Deep Space Nine. And over the course of the show, the story would take twists and turns that, re-watching it today in the current political climate, seem oddly...prescient.

I'm not saying Obama was the real-world Benjamin Sisko. But where we are as a nation is right around the end of the show's fifth season. The Cardassians have taken the station. The Dominion is on the move.

While there has been plenty of analysis of the show as a World War II allegory (which it was obviously meant to be), in relation to today's crisis, I think one of the most important points the series makes is that when dealing with existential threats, there is a razor-thin line to walk that will get you through to the other side. Deviate from that line in any way whatsoever? And you'll either end up as the monster you're fighting, or you'll be torn limb from limb by it.

Two sixth season episodes in particular illustrate this point: "Rocks and Shoals" and "In the Pale Moonlight."

"Rocks and Shoals" is an illustration, bit by bit, of how Major Kira -- who survived the series' equivalent of the Holocaust as a child -- slides into a mindset of rationalization and cooperation in order to survive the Cardassian takeover of the station. A kind of Stockholm Syndrome that one of her people's religious leaders, Vedek Yassim, tries over the course of the episode to clue her into. Eventually, Yassim commits a public suicide in protest of the occupation. And it's only after that, that Kira begins to realize that she's being complicit in not only her own oppression, but that of the entire Alpha Quadrant.

"In the Pale Moonlight" involves Sisko and Garak hatching a plan to get the Romulans into the war as allies against The Dominion. The plan involves manufacturing evidence that The Dominion were planning to violate the non-aggression pact with the Romulans. The short version is that while it doesn't go off exactly as planned, it does happen. Albeit with more unnecessary death and manipulation than Sisko originally wished for.

What these two episodes represent are the two fates on either side of that razor-thin line. Giving up all of your scruples in order to survive, as Kira did, or trying to keep your hands clean, as Sisko tried to do.

We have, at the moment, two extreme factions of progressives. The first faction are The Collaborators. People who think they can compromise with Trump's regime in order to escape unscathed, or at least minimally scathed. If you want examples, look no further than this chart. The only Trump cabinet nominee to receive zero votes from Democrats was Betsy DeVos. All others -- including Jeff Sessions for Attorney General and Rick Perry of all people for Secretary of Energy -- have received at least one vote from Democratic senators, many of whom have shown an astonishing willingness to placate the new administration. In particular Joe Manchin (WV) and Heidi Heitkamp (ND), whose No votes combined can be counted on a single set of hands.

And no, not even Bernie Sanders, the self-appointed anti-corruption guru of the Senate, has really stood up to Trump all that much. On the contrary, he even declared Trump would have him as an ally if he "stands up to corporate America" like he promised to do; Sanders then went on to vote Yes (along with the rest of Congress) to confirm Shulkin for the Secretary of Veterans Affairs, despite Shulkin's ties to for-profit healthcare and his not even being a veteran, a first for the position.

But it's not just Sanders. It's the entire activist landscape and everyone in it who advocates "working with" the new administration rather than opposing it and "empathizing with" the people who voted for Trump, even when they'd been some of Trump's staunchest opponents during the campaign. Spineless louts like Jim Wright, Kyle Plantz, Michael Lerner, and Les Leopold -- unsurprisingly, all white men -- who gleefully throw progressive causes under the bus if they have something to gain in this new era.

Capitulating to oppression -- and that includes the "wait and see, give him a chance" kind of capitulation -- is like a bystander telling someone about to be raped "hey, you might enjoy it." It's just as callous, cruel, and morally reprehensible as committing the rape themselves. If you don't feel scared in Trump's America, it's because you have no reason to. And rather than going with the flow and being a Collaborator, it means you, of all people, have even more of an obligation to be part of the Resistance.

For Major Kira, it took witnessing Vedek Yassim's public suicide in the middle of The Promenade to knock that into her head. Dare we even ask what it's going to take for Manchin and Heitkamp?

The other faction is something of an ideological carbon filter. The side that seeks to remove "impurities" within its own movement. You'll recognize this group as anyone who voted for Gary Johnson or Jill Stein or wrote in Harambe or stayed home or literally did anything other than cast a vote for Clinton. People who are still screaming that Bernie would've won (but won't say how). People who are protesting against Democrats not because of how they're voting but who they're funded by. People whose only mission is "shaking up the establishment" and don't really give a rat's ass what happens as a result.

Some have begun to refer to this faction as the "Alt-Left" (as opposed to the "Alt-Right"), but I think that's giving them entirely too much legitimacy. Being made up largely of the same demographic that finds Trump an attractive candidate, I think it's far more appropriate to simply refer to them as populist anarchists. It's even more telling when, faced with direct comparison to white nationalist propaganda outlet Breitbart, Cenk Uygur is more perturbed at being compared to a publication with fewer unique viewers rather than because Breitbart openly promotes bigotry and Nazi ideas. They're not even two sides of the same coin so much as two parts of the same side of the coin; popular anarchy is the smooth and shiny background, while white nationalism is the stark, in-your-face relief.

This faction, like the Tea Party before it, seeks to essentially kick out everyone that doesn't fall into goose-stepping formation with their ideology of political campaigns run on everyone stuffing $20 in an envelope. For one thing, not everyone has that $20 to throw into an envelope. And even if they did? As someone who has had to work an annual fundraising event for the last 4 years, and for an organization that doesn't require anywhere near the kind of penetration that a political office campaign does, you can't get elected without money. It's just not possible. You have to court large donors if you expect to even win the primary, because coordinating advertising, voter registration drives, and the dissemination of info on vital shit like deadlines takes a fuckton of cash.

Bernie Sanders learned this lesson the hard way. A big part of the reason he didn't get the nomination was because he simply did not run his campaign very well, and his numbers in actual primaries (as opposed to caucuses) reflected that. A huge part of campaigning is registration drives, particularly in primaries because they're closed in most states; you have to be registered as a Democrat in order to vote in the Democratic primary (whereas the national election is completely open; it doesn't matter what party affiliation you have as long as you're registered to vote). Sanders did not do enough to get people who were already registered as Independents in closed primary states to change their party affiliation in order to vote for him in time, or to get new voters who supported him registered as Democrats in time to cast their primary ballots. This had nothing whatsoever to do with the DNC; Sanders could've done this regardless of how much the DNC favored Clinton's campaign (rightfully so, being that she is a Democrat, and the DNC actually gave Sanders some very generous accommodation by letting him run on the Democratic ticket without changing his party; they would've been perfectly within their rights to tell him "LOL NOPE"). But he didn't, because he couldn't. Because his campaign simply did not have the money to pull it off, since he snubbed corporate donors.

Sisko's lesson in "In the Pale Moonlight" is that sometimes, you have to strike a deal with the Devil in order prevent the apocalypse. You have to do things that aren't ideologically -- or even morally -- pure. But you have to do them in order to prevent a total catastrophe from happening. It was a lesson that anyone who voted third party and anyone who still insists they were right to do so is deliberately trying not to learn. Or to put it another way, they're ignoring the 109th Ferengi Rule of Acquisition: dignity and an empty sack is worth the sack.

Resistance in the Trump Era is a moral imperative. We cannot compromise. We cannot "work with him." And at the same time, we may have to do things we find ideologically repugnant in order to have any chance at all of avoiding disaster. We fucked up not by "disregarding the economic anxiety of the white working class" but by not uniting against a very obvious threat. We fucked up by not recognizing evil when it was staring us in the face, and sacrificing unity and victory simply because doing something ideologically impure was an inconvenience.

We must learn from that mistake, or pay dearly for it. We have a moral imperative to fix this mess. Now is not the time for an ideological war with our party's establishment. Unify and survive. Resist or perish.

As Vedek Yassim's final words commanded, "Evil must be opposed!"