The news and imagery coming from Portland is horrific. Secret Police, without identification or name badges walking around the streets tear-gassing and sweeping people away to undisclosed locations, without being Mirandized (which is legally required, by the way, in all 50 states - there was a big Supreme Court decision about it a few DECADES ago). But just because you're not seeing it (yet) in other cities doesn't mean it isn't happening.
It just means it isn't yet being filmed.
Welcome to the Fascist States of America. I don't want to live here - I was born and raised in a country very different from this one, and I will do what I can to get us back there as long as I live within the geographic confines of this nation. That said, I want a few things noted:
1) If anyone without proper identification attempts to pick me up and remove me from a city street, a public place, or a private one, I will resist. Forcefully. Lethally, if I must. There is no unmarked force of any kind that I will not resist. I will assume you do not have the power or authorization to detain me - and that qualifies as kidnapping. I will fight that until the very moment I cannot, and I promise you I will draw blood.
2) The same applies if this is something I witness. If I see this happening to anyone else, whether I know them or not, I will defend them with the same force, voice, and ferocity. I won't be filming - I will be fighting.
3) I do not carry a gun. In this setting most of us have the right to carry one but I choose not to. I have my wits, which will hopefully be swift. I have my fists, raised in solidarity with our Black brothers and sisters, as well as any human being whose skin tone isn't the same as mine. I have my back, which I will use to help burden the load. I have my voice, which is loud. I have my cane, which I will use to help me walk and to smack you down.
4) I will do my best not to raise a hand to someone that didn't raise a hand to me first. But a violent reaction must be seen as understandable against a government, or anyone else for that matter, that is intent on seeing violence happen. If I need to use violence, I will use a little as I must. That might be more than you want though.
5) Nazis get punched. I can live with the disconnect between this rule and the previous one. We sent over 100,000 men to their deaths in an effort to wipe Nazis off the face of the Earth, so you don't get to be one. Not today. Not ever.
If you cannot follow these 5 simple rules, your are complicit. You are part of the problem.
That is MY Declaration of Independence from the Fascist States of America.
Signed,
James Christopher Reed
There. Singed in big enough type so that King Donald can read it without his glasses.
Peter Navarro, Trump’s economic adviser, had some thoughts: Comments in bold are my own observations and refutations.
Dr. Anthony Fauci has a good bedside manner with the public, but he has been wrong about everything I have interacted with him on. Except no.
In late January, when I was making the case on behalf of the president to take down the flights from China, Fauci fought against the president’s courageous decision — which might well have saved hundreds of thousands of American lives. Fauci said, “Obviously, you need to take it seriously and do the kind of things the (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) and the Department of Homeland Security is doing. But this is not a major threat to the people of the United States and this is not something that the citizens of the United States right now should be worried about.” In January, this was true. I should also note that flights were halted, and they did nothing to stop the spread of the disease.
When I warned in late January in a memo of a possibly deadly pandemic, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases was telling the news media not to worry.
Fauci reiterated that COVID-19 “isn’t something the American people need to worry about or be frightened about” because, at the time, it was centered in China and the U.S. could screen travelers from that nation. But Fauci also twice described the virus as “an evolving situation,” and said, “Every day, we have to look at it very carefully.”
I should also note at this point that Navarro was in fact saying that the situation was much worse than most people were saying. But you need to take Fauci's comments in context: when he said them flights were already being stopped from China.
When I was working feverishly on behalf of the president in February to help engineer the fastest industrial mobilization of the health care sector in our history, Fauci was still telling the public the China virus was low risk.
In a Feb. 29 interview, Fauci said that “right now at this moment” the risk was “low” and there was “no need” for people “to change anything that you’re doing on a day-by-day basis.” But he added that “this could change,” that people needed to be wary of “community spread,” and that it could develop into a “major outbreak.” Also, stop calling it the "China virus" you racist.
When we were building new mask capacity in record time, Fauci was flip-flopping on the use of masks. Except that we never built up this supposed mask capacity. We ran out. We're running out again.
"We have to admit it, that that mixed message in the beginning, even though it was well meant to allow masks to be available for health workers, that was detrimental in getting the message across," Fauci said in an interview with Mary Louise Kelly of NPR's All Things Considered. "No doubt about it."
The point here is that everyone was send out "mixed messages", including Navarro. Hell, the Surgeon General of the U.S. said masks shouldn't be required on July 15, 2020. TODAY.
And when Fauci was telling the White House Coronavirus Task Force that there was only anecdotal evidence in support of hydroxychloroquine to fight the virus, I confronted him with scientific studies providing evidence of safety and efficacy. A recent Detroit hospital study showed a 50% reduction in the mortality rate when the medicine is used in early treatment. Fauci was right about this. 100% correct. Navarro, Trump, and everyone else who supported this idea was wrong.
Now Fauci says a falling mortality rate doesn’t matter when it is the single most important statistic to help guide the pace of our economic reopening. The lower the mortality rate, the faster and more we can open. Except No.What Navarro is missing the point about and Dr. Fauci isn't the the long-term effect os a disease that 2 Million people who have caught the disease haven't recovered from. While the mortality rate is down, thankfully, for every 1 person who has died there are 20 who are still sick and potentially permanently disabled or will yet die. That is an economic catastrophe. But what do I know? I only handle money for a living.
So when you ask me whether I listen to Dr. Fauci’s advice, my answer is: only with skepticism and caution. That's because you're a fucking idiot.
To every member of the Republican Party, From Donald Trump
all the way down to the smallest little Boogaloo voting for the first time, I
have a question for you. WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?
You want to send children back to school in the middle of a
Pandemic that you seem to even fail to recognize exists!
300,000 thousand TIMES more people have caught COVID-19 than
caught Ebola, and you think that Obama handled his crisis worse than Trump did!
You have called the police on everyone from a man jogging to
a man mistakenly passing a counterfeit bill to a woman walking her dog to a man
building a porch to a man on the phone simply because their skin tone is darker
than yours!
You are claiming that the ravings of a Aderall addicted
radio flunkie are of greater medical use than the Centers for Disease Control.
You are claiming that the wearing of a simple piece of
fabric, which medical professionals have been wearing for over a century in
order to protect people, is the equivalent of being choked to death, that it
impinges upon your freedoms, and that you won’t wear it, won’t wear it, won’t
wear it!
What are you, 6?
You decry the removal of statues that celebrate the
existence of something that didn’t last as long as DISCO.
No one is trying to take away your goddamned freedoms.
They’re trying to keep you alive! If you can’t see that then WHAT THE FUCK IS
WRONG WITH YOU?
Actual plans exist to implement a recovery, from testing to
getting people back to work and school, but because the best ideas come from
the Democratic Party and not from your own succession of morons you won’t do
it.
We have access to masks, social distancing, technology,
vaccines, testing, and people who know how to do it but all of a sudden you’re
fucking AMISH? Well, no – the Amish are wearing masks!
You insist on nicknames for people you disagree with.
Bullies do that. Those and people with a desperate need to remain in control of
their social hierarchies.
Your leader is a racist. He always has been. He called for
the executions of five black men who had been wrongly convicted of rape – AFTER
they were exonerated. He is a misogynist, and has admitted more than once to
being attracted to his daughters and nieces. He is a tax cheat, a man who
blasphemes regularly, and misquotes the bible, the constitution, and doesn’t
know the lyrics to the Star Spangled Banner. Yet you look at his am pious,
humble and patriotic. He is obviously none of these things, so I ask again,
WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU?
And then there’s the man at number two – Mike Pence.A man who can’t be alone in a room with
another woman without his wife present. A man who believes that God will
protect people from COVID-19 as long as they attend church – the bigger the
better.A man who says that CDC
guidelines are unnecessary in order for kids to return to school this fall.
He had NEVER contradicted his boss, even when he is
obviously lying, even though his particular version of religion says that lying
is a sin.He claims not to be a sinner
but he’s lying. He treats Trump like he’s the second coming. A lot of people
do, which mystifies me.
He has gold drapes, a gold watch, gold carpeting, golden
dyed hair, and prefers gold toilets and everything else as well. Come on
Christians, how many more damned clues do you need?
The crimes of the current administration are too numerous to
list. Their lack of interest in governing las lead to the deaths of over
100,000 citizens – and yet you love them more and more each day. You were even okay
with him claiming that a HURRICANE was going to go in a different direction
than it did.
Trump has a philosophy – there must be winners and losers in
everything. He must win. Everyone else must lose. That’s an actual quote – it’s
in “art of the deal’. Yes, I’ve read it. It’s horseshit. Every successful
businessman I’ve ever met – including a couple of billionaires - has done it
differently.
He is WRONG.
America, at least the America we used to have, is about
making everything better, for everyone. Everyone is supposed to win. We have
differing philosophies of how to get that done and that’s FINE. We should
debate these things. But we have to want to do these things. Trump and his
administration, and the Republicans in both houses of Congress do not. They
just want to win. They just want everyone else to lose. They’ve turned this
amazing country into a Prison camp.
Which brings me all the way back to my original question:
WHAT THE EVER LOVING FUCK IS WRONG
WITH YOU PEOPLE?
There is no such thing as Fake News. There is News, and
there are lies. Trump, his handlers, his people, and those in government who
support him are LYING.
It’s America or Trump, people. If you can’t see that, then
what, the fuck, is WRONG, with you?
I know a lot more about trans people than I did a few years ago. A lot of that has been an effort to educate myself and discover what's important and what isn't. I've had to throw out some notions that I've held for decades and re-write my own personal code to simply gain some basic understanding of their wants, fears, hopes and dreams. I won't pretend that it's been easy, but I also won't pretend that it was anyone's problem but my own. There was no one trans to blame for how I had to change - I had to change.
And change I did. Because I cared enough to work at it. I don't think I'm all the way there, but I'd like to think I've made progress. I tell you all this because of a revelation I've had that I honestly wish I could have made many years ago.
If you understand what you're looking for, you can see J.K. Rowling's bias against the trans community right in the fucking books. Remember, she never said Dumbledore was gay until all of the books were published. It made her seem like a hero in retrospect. So retrospect is fair game.
In their final confrontation, Harry deadnames Voldemort. He's the only character in the whole series who does so, and he's the bloody hero of the books. Whatever you think of the book's main villain, he has transformed himself from Tom Riddle into Lord Voldemort. Every character respects this transition - except Harry Potter, and it is Harry who has the voice of the author.
I never would have noticed this a few years ago. But in the course of educating myself I have, from time to time, deadnamed people I know to be trans, and who have taken new names upon themselves. And every time it was like I had sucker-punched them. I didn't mean to, but I had. I've owned up to it every time. There is real trauma that can be caused by using the former name of a person who has transitioned. The problem wasn't the trans person - it was me.
Just as Dumbledore was J.K. Rowling's surrogate "gay", I think that Voldemort was her surrogate "trans". I'm not sure she consciously meant it, but as a writer myself I know how easily personal bias slips into what you do. It's something you must be constantly vigilant about.
It has become clear that Rowling understands nothing about the trans community. But in retrospect, it is also clear that having Harry call Voldemort by his former name is meant as a sign of disrespect to his own transition from mere wizard to villain.
Yes, Harry Potter is written as a teenager and what teenager isn't a jerk? She explores that in some detail and you can't dismiss that. The books are well written, but I have to admit that I will never be able to look at her books the same way again, not because she has changed, but because I have. I look at Orson Scott Card the same way.
This is in fact why I keep books and collect and re-read them. It's not that they have changed but that I have, and they will have a different impact on me now than they would when I first read them. If I ever re-read the Harry Potter books I will notice things in them that I didn't before, and I think I'd enjoy them less than before I knew that J.K. Rowling is a trans-phobic bigot - because I now see Harry in the same light, and he's been written as the hero, and the surrogate trans character as the stock villain.
