Look at the World from a Different Perspective

Everyone you see is your neighbor.

-

The first step in making society better is caring about things that don't impact you directly.

-

"People do not seem to realize that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character."

― Ralph Waldo Emerson

-

"The way we see the world shapes the way we treat it. If a mountain is a deity, not a pile of ore; if a river is one of the veins of the land, not potential irrigation water; if a forest is a sacred grove, not timber; if other species are our biological kin, not resources; or if the planet is our mother, not an opportunity - then we will treat each one with greater respect. That is the challenge, to look at the world from a different perspective."

― David Suzuki

-

"It's only water in a stranger's tears."

Here's the thing about the current president and the people he's brought along with him: They don't view other people (you) as their neighbors ("love your neighbor as yourself"). They don't view them (you) as fellow community members or citizens. They don't view most others (you) as part of their "tribe." They don't think of most people (you) as people, really. Just numbers to manipulate and eliminate. Just categories, often unwanted. Not human or meaningful in the same way they think of themselves.

They don't care if they cause others to suffer.

They don't care about jobs lost or lives upended or personal finances disrupted. Because the people who are experiencing it, from their eyes, don't really matter. Their (your) suffering doesn't matter to them.

Not One of Us - Peter Gabriel

It's only water

In a stranger's tear

Looks are deceptive

But distinctions are clear

A foreign body

And a foreign mind

Never welcome

In the land of the blind

You may look like we do

Talk like we do

But you know how it is

You're not one of us

Not one of us

No you're not one of us

Not one of us

Not one of us

No you're not one of us

There's safety in numbers

When you learn to divide

How can we be in

If there is no outside

All shades of opinion

Feed an open mind

But your values are twisted

Let us help you unwind

You may look like we do

Talk like we do

But you know how it is

You're not one of us

Not one of us

No you're not one of us

You're not one of us

Not one of us

No you're not one of us

I recently made a new Facebook profile "photo"; my first ever with words

Those are just a few things I've posted to social media lately. It might all be moot, because they're in protest of the current president's administration, which is working as fast as it can to destroy our current government departments and institutions. I've also attended a protest at my state's capital, contacted representatives, and done other things to further the resistance. But it's hard in this moment to not feel that they have all the power. So most of this post's contents are related to current affairs that may soon not be relevant. But here are some things that capture this moment.

But, first, a detour through a book I read recently, Before Takeoff by Adi Alsaid. Some thoughts:

I read a lot of books. Because I love reading, yes, but also because I'm a librarian and it's an occupational hazard. And while I always enjoy the books I read on some level, churning through one after another can sometimes begin to feel a bit like a chore, can lead to the act of reading losing a bit of its zest. On one level I know I really liked reading a given book, but on another level I wasn't fully immersed in the pleasure of it the way I could be. And then, sometimes, in the midst of that, a book will come along that will shake me out of that state and remind me fully of the joyful experience reading a good book can be, leaving me with a happy, satisfied glow.

Before Takeoff was one such book for me. An unexpected delight. I found the lighthearted narrative voice charming and loved spending time in its company. It's conversational, personable, and personal. It spends the largest part of its time relating the perspective of James, a smaller but significant portion giving us insight through Michelle's eyes, bounces around into the heads of various other characters, and every so often speaks directly to readers; usually with foreboding warnings of ill to come. Because for all the lightheartedness of the narration, the story it tells includes some real horror and tragedy. Not only darkness, but some is definitely there.

For, ultimately, this is a story about humanity, about human existence in an unpredictable, unexplainable, absurd world. In an amplified, accelerated microcosm. James and Michelle are stuck in an airport waiting for delayed flights to depart, when something kind of weird happens. Then the weirdness escalates. To share specifics would delve into spoilers, so I'll simply say that eventually the airport seems to become its own pocket universe, cut off from the outside world, where the laws of physics, cause-and-effect, and normalcy are broken. The social contract breaks among the airport's occupants, too; the bonds of normalcy and consideration and compassion. People react in different ways, some forming tribes among the anarchy. James and Michelle find each other. Through it all, the narrator provides commentary, insight, and perspective, shedding light on different human reactions and tendencies.

How do you deal with the fact that life is scary and confusing? How do you find meaning and happiness in the midst of it?

It seems everyone is grieving or destroying or fleeing on foot.

-----

"You have to admire life's ability to provide joy amidst heartache. I'm so often blind to that. Of course, that's because of a chemical imbalance in my brain, or whatever deep-seated childhood trauma causes my social anxiety."

-----

He's starting to question what this fear is good for. Absurd or not, there are events in the world that James will simply have to live through. The joy's nestled in among it.

-----

Just zoom in. Shit gets scary when you look at the big picture. But if you zoom in to individual people, I think you're more likely to feel better about the world. Zoom in, and you can see the good.

This book reminds me in many ways of the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. It's surreal and magical realism and romance, with just a bit of social commentary and philosophy thrown in; almost glib in its lighthearted representation of tragedy and horror. It's an odd, inventive, and unique mix that I'm sure doesn't work for everyone.

And yet it, somehow, feels accurate to me; it captures some essence of truth in a way that makes me feel happy. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.

For flavor, a longer bit of the narrative from Before Takeoff:

It is still unclear if there is something nefarious afoot in the Atlanta airport. The air-conditioning is whirring, strong as it ever was. The Wi-Fi signal is functional enough, though every fifteen minutes it forces users to click through and accept the terms and conditions again. In the too-bright white floodlights, the airport hallways look more like a film set, like the last act of an action movie, or the first act of a horror film. James would really rather not be in either. Where are the romcoms, you know?

He's sitting stiffly in his chair, wondering what he should be doing. He wonders what he should be feeling, if his reactions should more closely mirror what others around him are doing. Is panic the move here? He doesn't feel panic, not yet anyway.

The screamers have exhausted themselves, so the airport is much calmer. There seem to be no explosions, no gunfire, nothing that points toward violence or imminent danger. A few people are still running around. Those who look official have not drawn any weapons, and despite the strangeness of the situation, this detail puts James at ease. James has not seen anything like this before, but he knows that if shit is going down, you probably don't have to look far to find a gun.

And I like this description of some unnamed, unseen horror:

The thing from the hallway is back. This time it's less of a feeling, more like something real. It has a shape, though James can't quite say what the shape is. He thinks of it as a creature now, though he has the suspicion that he's miscategorizing it, somehow. That it's not strictly alive, not even strictly singular.

What he sees: Great swaths of darkness. Moving black holes, absorbing light and life. Multiple legs and tentacles, the stuff of childhood horror movies. Bathroom halls at midnight. The dread-inspiring thought that people are generally more bad than good, that humanity is truly intent on destroying itself, and James will be a witness to the moment that it does.

Like in a nightmare, James finds himself unable to run away. His legs don't function; the synapses in his brain are firing orders to run, but the message gets lost along the way. James sees a thing he cannot escape, a cruel embodied truth: tragedy befalls us all. And here it comes for him, his family gone, violence in the air, the world flipped on its head.

Michelle sees something very different. Her grandfather in a hospital robe, shuffling down the hall alongside one of those IV-on-wheels things. He's smiling at her but won't say a word. She lost her chance to tell him anything, she cannot regain the past.

Basically, it seems, the creature--or creatures, or monster, or whatever--is like that things from Harry Potter that shifts according to each person's specific fear. Not that the monster's unoriginality makes anyone feel better. The B gates return to mayhem.

And this last bit, only because it's relative to something at work. On one of my team's communication forums, I've been asking a weekly question for teambuilding. The week I read this book--a few days before I read the passage that follows--I asked, What have you got in your pocket? From Alsaid:

He's in his sixties or seventies, his white mustache the only recognizable feature on his face, the rest hidden by aviator sunglasses and a cowboy hat. He looks like he might be a regular at a dive bar in Tennessee, some old converted inn that now holds bluegrass jam sessions. James has the strange urge to approach the gate and rummage through the guy's pockets, unveil the hidden details of his life, some clue as to why he's in the horde. A leather-bound flask, a cheap Velcro wallet with pictures of a wife, grandkids, himself as a young man on a motorcycle. Dried tobacco flakes mixed in with lint, so old they crumble between his fingers every time he reaches in.

This thought hits James and sends through him a mad desire to know the contents of every single pocket at the airport. He looks over at Michelle, who's right now taking the lid off the bamboo dim sum container and scooping out a soup dumpling with a spoon. "How much stuff do you have in your pockets?"

Michelle chews, pulls her phone out. She hits the button as she does so, checking for notifications. Nothing on the screen but the time and a picture of a setting sun somewhere James has likely never been.

"That's about it," she says, patting her legs. She slides her European Union passport out from her back pocket. Its corners are creased with use and maybe carelessness. It's bigger than any passport James has seen too, the pages thick with ink. "Why do you ask?"

James reaches out to the passport, little head nod to ask if it's cool to look through it. He starts to flip the pages, looking at the stamps and visas. "I just had this thought. It's kinda stupid, fake-deep."

And a more complete version of my asking of the question at work:

What have you got in your pocket?

 

Option A: Tell us about some actual thing you have in your actual pocket. Not just name it, but something about it--why you carry it, its history or emotional weight, what it means to you.

 

Option B: Get a bit fantastical.

• First generate a random number between 1 and 100. You can grab your handy 2d10 percentile dice or use a website like this one: https://rolladie.net/roll-a-d100-die.
• Then take your number and find it on this table: https://dnd5e.wikidot.com/trinkets. (If you don't like your result, roll again or pick an item that speaks to you.
• That is what you have in your pocket. Tell us something about it. Not just name it, but something about it--why you carry it, its history or emotional weight, what it means to you.

 

“That’s why I like stories. They usually wind up revealing more about a person than what they’d tell you about themselves. It’s not that they lie intentionally, but when people describe themselves they’re really describing what they see in a mirror, and most mirrors are too distorted to show us the truth. If you listen hard enough, there’s more truth in fiction than in all the other s*** combined.”

― Shaun David Hutchinson, Feral Youth

I also asked the question before getting the idea to write about the Funtunfunefu Denkyemfunefu symbol I carry in my pocket that became the beginning of the blog's last post, but I shared that as my answer. Here's a selection of some of the other responses:

I have two bobby pins in my pocket. I carry these bobby pins in case I decide to change my hairstyle throughout the day. This gives me options. I get out the door quicker in the morning when I have bobby pins in my pocket, because it means I can adapt as the day goes on. The bobby pins have a very low value and if I lose them, it's okay. No fret.

-----

If there's ever anything in my pocket it's my Aldi quarter. I like Aldi as my grocery store because they pay livable wages to workers and it's the most affordable for customers. I love their quarter/cart system. Often Aldi regulars exchange quarters/carts in the parking lot so you don't have to walk your cart all the way back. It's the only grocery store that has given me a better sense of community in that way. Oh, and I like their bag system: bring your own, or grab an empty stock cardboard box, or buy if needed. #AldiForLife 

-----

When I put on my various jackets once cold weather hits, I usually find walnuts, beads, banged up coins or anything else I picked up in the colder months. I usually try and pick up microtrash on my walks (or sometimes just neat things I find like the walnuts) and somehow they don't ever make it out of my jacket pockets..... 

-----

I almost always have a spare hair tie in my pocket, in case the one I'm wearing breaks.  Also, I almost always have a note or notes (I currently have two) to myself of things I need to remember to do, either today or the next.  At night I empty my pockets and any notes about things I need to remember for the next day go on my bathroom counter so that I'll see them first thing in the morning.  Then those notes usually go back in my pocket until the task is complete.  It sounds really organized, but I'm also a procrastinator, so sometimes those tasks still don't get completed on time, about which I am constantly reminded.

-----

I've always been more likely to wear a talisman/something significant than to carry one in my pocket. My pockets usually have the little things of daily life... hair ties, post-its, tissues, receipts... a piece of candy that hasn't been smashed if I'm lucky.

To that last one I replied: You say that like "the little things of daily life" aren't worthy of mention or a microstory. I'm not sure I agree. (I was thinking more along the lines of "the little things of daily life" until that muse struck me.)

It was a delightful little exercise.

Here's one more item not about current affairs that caught my attention due to my interest in stories and how they shape the brain.

Your Brain Wants a Linear Story

Artists may jumble time for dramatic effect. But your unconscious is always putting the narrative in order.

Because we live our lives chronologically, making sense of big leaps in a narrative sequence entails heftier mental work: Research shows our reaction times and reading pace slow and we have a harder time accessing memories related to events when they are presented to us out of order. . . . 

Our brains use temporal cues—like the time cards in the movie, or words related to the passing of time in a written or spoken story—to reorganize events into chronological order in real time. “I think the fact that we found evidence for this unscrambling on the fly during a complex narrative stimulus shows just how sensitive our brains are to temporal information,” says neuroscientist Emily Finn, a co-author of the study. . . . 

An instant mastery over the chronology of events may serve a greater purpose, Finn and her colleagues reason: Encoding events in the correct order in our memories could be very helpful for understanding the causal relationships between one thing and another. The more you understand about cause and effect, the better you may be at predicting what is yet to come and making sense of the world and your environment, says Finn. . . . 

I find that a fascinating bit of information.

Everyone's feed is currently flooded with news about what the administration is doing along with commentary and thoughts in response. I've tried to be selective in what I share/reshare in the hopes what I do will bee seen and read instead of lost in the flood. Here, in my mind, are some of the key ideas in opposition to what they are doing. Shared without much comment or context; except they all contain ideas and philosophies I hold fundamental.

Civil Servants Are Not America's Enemies

Donald Trump is waging war on the civil service in the name of efficiency. But Washington created the modern civil service to make the government efficient in the first place, ending a patronage system wracked with graft and incompetence. Trump’s so-called reforms will only make it harder for the White House and the Republican Congress to enact their own policy aims, and harder for any president to get things done in the future. . . . 

In many ways, Trump is seeking to return the country to the spoils system that existed in the 19th century. Pioneered by President Andrew Jackson, that system awarded tens of thousands of civil-service jobs to allies and co-partisans of the White House. (The phrase “to the victor belong the spoils” does not originate in ancient Athens or Rome. It was first uttered by New York Senator William L. Marcy in the early 1830s.) This kind of patronage was efficient, Jackson and his supporters argued: “Rotation in office” meant that the civil service aligned with the ideology of the president, and brought fresh workers into the stodgy government.

But having party loyalists manage the Postal Service and firing thousands of people every time the White House changed hands was not a model of efficiency. Postmasters, clerks, and surveyors paid a share of their salary as kickbacks to the party in control of their position. “Solicitation letters were sent by the party to each worker, return envelopes were provided to ensure that payments were made, and compliance was carefully monitored,” the economists Ronald Johnson and Gary Libecap note. Scandals abounded. The collector of the Port of New York embezzled $1 million, not adjusted for inflation, before fleeing for England in 1838.

In 1880, President James Garfield ran on reform, promising in his inaugural address to pass civil-service regulations “for the good of the service” and “for the protection of incumbents against intrigue and wrong.” . . . 

The Pendleton Act of 1883 finally ended the spoils system, requiring government employees to pass an exam and forbidding hiring on the basis of race, politics, religion, or national origin. It led to a 25 percent reduction in staff turnover and increased the qualifications held by bureaucrats. Postal-delivery errors dropped by 22 percent, and the volume of mail delivered by carriers increased as much as 14 percent. . . . 

Today, a thicket of laws prevents the White House from making partisan hiring decisions, and civil servants from engaging in partisan activity. The Government Accountability Office and inspectors general root out incompetence, inefficiency, and waste. . . . 

Every bureaucracy has some bloat. But there are no more civil servants now than there were in the late 1960s, even as the population they serve has grown by two-thirds. . . . Moreover, federal workers are more efficient than private workers; they are less expensive to hire too. . . . 

Other countries show the risks. Viktor Orbán’s attack on Hungary’s civil service has led to the degradation of the country’s water, sanitation, and electric systems, and corruption in the construction industry and real-estate market. In Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro’s purging of public officials made the government less efficient.

In the United States, the strong, nonpartisan civil service reduces costs for taxpayers, with meritocracy and impartiality bolstering the country’s economic growth, one sweeping review found. The system also protects the public from graft and lawlessness. . . . 

Trump is seeking to cow the civil service and politicize it, not reform it. Rather than seeing the country’s 2 million public employees as agents, he sees them as enemies. This is not going to make the government more efficient. It is not going to make America great.

Letters from an American - February 7, 2025

Heather Cox Richardson

 . . . Senator Angus King (I-ME) took his Republican colleagues to task yesterday for their willingness to overlook the Trump administration’s attack on the U.S. Constitution. King took the floor as the Senate was considering the confirmation of Christian Nationalist Russell Vought as director of the Office of Management and Budget. Vought, a key author of Project 2025, believes the powers of the president should be virtually unchecked.

King reminded his colleagues that they had taken an oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic” and noted that the Framers recognized there could be domestic enemies to the Constitution. “Our oath was not to the Republican Party, not to the Democratic Party, not to Joe Biden, not to Donald Trump,” King said, “but…to defend the Constitution.”

“And…right now—literally at this moment—that Constitution is under the most direct and consequential assault in our nation's history,” King said. “An assault not on a particular provision but on the essential structure of the document itself.”

Why do we have a Constitution, King asked. He read the Preamble and said: “There it is. There's the list—ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, ensure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.” But, he pointed out, there is a paradox: the essence of a government is to give it power, but that power can be abused to hurt the very citizens who granted it. “Who will guard the guardians?” King asked.

The Framers were “deep students of history and…human nature. And they had just won a lengthy and brutal war against the abuses inherent in concentrated governmental power,” King said. “The universal principle of human nature they understood was this: power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

How did the Framers answer the question of who will guard the guardians? King explained that they built into our system regular elections to return the control of the government to the people on a regular basis. They also deliberately divided power between the different branches and levels of government.

“This is important,” King said. “The cumbersomeness, the slowness, the clumsiness is built into our system. The framers were so fearful of concentrated power that they designed a system that would be hard to operate. And the heart of it was the separation of power between various parts of the government. The whole idea, the whole idea was that no part of the government, no one person, no one institution had or could ever have a monopoly on power.”

“Why? Because it's dangerous. History and human nature tells us that. This division of power, as annoying and inefficient as it can be,… is an essential feature of the system, not a bug. It's an essential, basic feature of the system, designed to protect our freedoms.”

The system of government “contrasts with the normal structure of a private business, where authority is purposefully concentrated, allowing swift and sometimes arbitrary action. But a private business does not have the army, and the President of the United States is not the CEO of America.”

In the government, “[p]ower is shared, principally between the president and this body, this Congress, both houses…. [T]his herky-jerkiness…this unwieldy structure is the whole idea,... designed to protect us from the…inevitable abuse of an authoritarian state.”

Vought, King said, is “one of the ringleaders of the assault on our Constitution. He believes in a presidency of virtually unlimited powers.” He “espouses the discredited and illegal theory that the president has the power to selectively impound funds appropriated by Congress, thereby rendering the famous power of the purse a nullity.” King said he was “really worried about…the structural implications for our freedom and government of what's happening here…. Project 2025 is nothing less than a blueprint for the shredding of the Constitution and the transition of our country to authoritarian rule. He's the last person who should be put in the job at the heart of the operation of our government.”

“[T]his isn't about politics. This isn't about policy. This isn't about Republican versus Democrat. This is about tampering with the structure of our government, which will ultimately undermine its ability to protect the freedom of our citizens. If our defense of the Constitution is gone, there's nothing left to us.”

King asked his Republican colleagues to “say no to the undermining and destruction of our constitutional system.” “[A]re there no red lines?” he asked them. “Are there no limits?”

King looked at USAID and said: “The Constitution does not give to the President or his designee the power to extinguish a statutorily established agency. I can think of no greater violation of the strictures of the Constitution or usurpation of the power of this body. None. I can think of none. Shouldn't this be a red line?”

Trump’s “executive order freezing funding…selectively, for programs the administration doesn't like or understand” is, King said, “a fundamental violation of the whole idea of the Constitution, the separation of powers.” King said his “office is hearing calls every day, we can hardly handle the volume. This again, to underline, is a frontal assault of our power, your power, the power to decide where public funds should be spent. Isn't this an obvious red line? Isn't this an obvious limit?”

King turned to “the power seemingly assumed by DOGE to burrow into the Treasury's payment system” as well as the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, with “zero oversight.” “Do these people have clearance?” King, who sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee asked. “Are the doors closed? Are they going to leave open doors into these? What are the opportunities for our adversaries to hack into the systems?... Remember, there's no transparency or oversight. Access to social security numbers seem to be in the mix. All the government's personnel files, personal financial data, potentially everyone's tax returns and medical records. That can't be good…. That's data that should be protected with the highest level of security and consideration of Americans' privacy. And we don't know who these people are. We don't know what they're taking out with them. We don't know whether they're walking out with laptops or thumb drives. We don't know whether they're leaving back doors into the system. There is literally no oversight. The government of the United States is not a private company. It is fundamentally at odds with how this system is supposed to work.”

“Shouldn't this be an easy red line?” he asked.

“[W]e're experiencing in real time exactly what the framers most feared. When you clear away the smoke, clear away the DOGE, the executive orders, foreign policy pronouncements, more fundamentally what's happening is the shredding of the constitutional structure itself. And we have a profound responsibility…to stop it.”

King’s appeal to principle and the U.S. Constitution did not convince his Republican colleagues, who confirmed Vought. . . . 

'Reboot' Revealed: Elon Musk's CEO-Dictator Playbook

In 2022, one of Peter Thiel's favorite thinkers envisioned a second Trump Administration in which the federal government would be run by a “CEO” who was not Trump and laid out a playbook for how it might work. Elon Musk is following it.

In 2012, Curtis Yarvin — Peter Thiel’s “house philosopher”—called for something he dubbed RAGE: Retire All Government Employees. The idea: Take over the United States government and gut the federal bureaucracy. Then, replace civil servants with political loyalists who would answer to a CEO-type leader Yarvin likened to a dictator.

“If Americans want to change their government, they’re going to have to get over their dictator phobia,” he said.

Yarvin, a software programmer, framed this as a “reboot” of government.

Elon Musk’s DOGE is just a rebranded version of RAGE. He demands mass resignations, locks career employees out of their offices, threatens to delete entire departments, and seizes total control of sensitive government systems and programs. DOGE = RAGE, masked in the bland language of “efficiency.”

But Musk’s reliance on Yarvin’s playbook runs deeper. . . . 

In an essay dated April 2022, Yarvin updated RAGE . . . 

"Trump himself will not be the brain …He will not be the CEO. He will be the chairman of the board—he will select the CEO (an experienced executive). This process, which obviously has to be televised, will be complete by his inauguration—at which the transition to the next regime will start immediately."

This CEO will bring a new radical new style of leadership to the federal government:

"The CEO he picks will run the executive branch without any interference from the Congress or courts, probably also taking over state and local governments. Most existing important institutions, public and private, will be shut down and replaced with new and efficient systems. Trump will be monitoring this CEO’s performance, again on TV, and can fire him if need be."

Sound familiar? . . . 

Yarvin is not alone in envisioning a massive purge of government. In 2021, J.D. Vance lauded Yarvin's work and called for a government purge . . . Like Yarvin, Vance compared the federal government to a conquered enemy . . . He added that Trump should defy any court orders designed to stop his purge. . . . 

What once seemed like a fringe theory is now being carried out by the corporate powers that have wholly captured our government. . . . 

What surprises me most is how the political press generally fails to inform the public that Musk is taking a systematic approach, one that has been outlined in public forums for years. . . . 

We are witnessing the methodical implementation of a long-planned strategy to transform American democracy into corporate autocracy. The playbook was written in plain sight and is now being followed step by step. Some dismiss the Yarvins of the world as unhinged nuts, but that's the point. These guys, with their bizarre and dangerous ideas, have gotten very far in 2025. Just look at the news.

Yarvin pitched his vision as a fictional or unlikely scenario. Unfortunately, it now appears to be our new reality. The press's failure to connect these dots isn't just a journalistic oversight — it's a critical missed warning about the systematic dismantling of democratic governance. By the time most Americans understand what's happening, the "reboot" – the destruction of government – may already be complete.

The Attack on Trans Rights Won’t End There

The American populism of this century is one of financial elites feigning rebellion while crushing the vulnerable. . . .

The damage wrought by legitimizing this form of discrimination will not be limited to the trans community. Laws and legal rulings that undermine trans rights may soon be used to restrict the rights of other, less marginal groups. Anyone naive enough to think that the government can deny fundamental rights to one group without putting another’s at risk is in for some nasty surprises. That much became clear during oral arguments at the Supreme Court in December over Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors. . . . 

The outcome of this case has much broader implications than it might appear, because if a state can, as Prelogar put it, force people to “look and live like boys and girls,” subject to the government’s definition of what that means, then a lot more people might be affected. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor pointed out during oral argument, for many years, some states prevented women from becoming butchers or lawyers. Women could not have their own credit cards or bank accounts until the 1970s. If it’s not unconstitutional sex discrimination for the government to say that people cannot behave “inconsistent with their sex,” well now you’re really talking about a lot of people—a lot more people than the rather tiny population included in the category of “they/them” that the Trump campaign was hoping you feel disgust and contempt for.

Much depends on the nature of the justices’ ultimate decision and how far-reaching it is. The conservative movement’s mobilization against trans rights, however, is just one step in a wider rolling-back of other antidiscrimination protections. Conservatives have consciously targeted a diminutive, politically powerless segment of the population, trying to strip them of their constitutional rights, and then used those legal precedents to undermine laws that prevent discrimination on the basis of race, religion, sexual orientation, and other characteristics. The trick was making Americans think that only the rights of trans people are on the chopping block, that “they/them” could be persecuted without consequences for “you.” . . . 

Many of the rationales offered by the conservative justices during oral argument echo the reasoning of those opposed to bans on racial discrimination. . . . For example, defenders of Tennessee’s ban have said that it does not discriminate based on sex, because it prohibits gender-affirming care to both boys and girls—a point Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett raised during oral argument. Similar assertions were made in defense of interracial-marriage bans, which prevented both Black and white people from marrying their chosen spouses. . . . 

The point of equal protection is to prevent fundamental rights from being subject to mere popularity contests . . . 

The Trump administration’s early actions make clear that exploiting voters’ fears about trans people was part of a larger plan to undermine antidiscrimination protections for many other people, even as they intend to make the lives of millions of others—including many of Trump’s own supporters—much worse. Among the first actions taken by the administration was the repeal of the Lyndon B. Johnson–era directive ordering federal contractors to avoid discriminating on the basis of race, as well as subsequent orders barring discrimination on the basis of gender. The administration has also frozen all new cases in the civil-rights division of the Justice Department. Trump has also ended all federal-government diversity efforts and intends to fire employees involved in them. The administration’s executive order on DEI also threatens to sue companies for having diversity programs, a threat that will encourage companies to resegregate to avoid being accused of anti-white discrimination. Trump has shut down the White House’s Spanish-language website, ended refugee- and humanitarian-parole programs, and unconstitutionally attempted to nullify birthright citizenship.

Even before Trump took office, Republican-controlled states passed laws that curtail women’s rights to free speech, privacy, and movement on the grounds that those restrictions are necessary to ban abortion—something that, as Justice Samuel Alito took pains to reiterate during oral argument in Skrmetti, neither he nor his colleagues in the conservative movement regard as sex-based discrimination. . . . 

This is shameless bullying, but then, the president is himself a bully of the highest order, and presidents are moral exemplars, for better and worse. It is not necessary for one to approve of gender-affirming care in order to respect people’s right to make their own decisions about what medical care is best for them and their families, or to oppose this kind of outright, ideologically motivated state persecution.

Over the past century, many groups have successfully sought to have their rights recognized, winning, at least on paper, the same rights as white, Christian, heterosexual men. The right-wing project today, which Trumpist justices support, is to reestablish by state force the hierarchies of race, gender, and religion they deem moral and foundational. Whether that’s forcing LGBTQ people back into the closet, compelling women to remain in loveless marriages, or confining Black and Hispanic people to the drudgery of—as Trump once put it—“Black jobs” and “Hispanic jobs” in which they are meant to toil, the purpose of this ideological project is the same: to put the broader mass of people back in their “proper places.” To those who see the world this way, freedom means the freedom of the majority to oppress the minority. Attacking trans people first was simply their plan for getting the American people on board with taking many other freedoms away.

The new talking point in response to this tragedy is that "the best and the brightest" means NOT DEI. Meaning racial minorities, women, those with disabilities, and similar--anyone who is not a white man--cannot by definition meet the standard of "the best and the brightest."

Trump Officials Baselessly Blame DEI in Plane Crash Presser

Other Trump administration officials echoed the president's sentiments about the connection between DEI and the quality of the federal workforce.

• "We can only accept the best and the brightest in positions of safety that impact the lives of our loved ones, our family members," Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said at the press conference after Trump spoke.
• Duffy also promised reforms after Trump's comments. "We are going to take responsibility at the Department of Transportation and the FAA to make sure we have the reforms that have been dictated by President Trump in place to make sure that these mistakes do not happen again and again."
• Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth struck a similar note at the briefing. "The era of DEI is gone at the Defense Department and we need the best and brightest — whether it's in our air traffic control or whether it's in our generals, or whether it's throughout government," he said.
• Vice President JD Vance claimed that over the past decade, hundreds of people had sued the government because they wanted to be air traffic controllers but had been "turned away because of the color of their skin."
• "That policy ends under Donald Trump's leadership, because safety is the first priority of our aviation industry," Vance added.

This is just the tip of the blatant racism and sexism that has begun to emerge.

The NFL is Removing 'End Racism' from Its Super Bowl End Zone

So maybe you've heard: the Super Bowl is this weekend! And you've probably also heard: President Trump will also be there! Oh, and perhaps not coincidentally: The NFL is removing the lettering from the end zone on its football fields that reads "END RACISM"!

The NFL started using the lettering back in 2020, in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd and the nationwide protests that followed. But for many reading between the lines of the NFL's decision to do away with that lettering, they saw this: America's most popular sports league was downplaying its diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts after Trump criticized such initiatives and his administration began to target those programs at federal agencies. Other big, powerful corporations like Target and Meta and Amazon were more substantially rolling back their DEI initiatives. . . . 

Some democracy advocates worry that too many of our civic institutions are softening their postures toward Trump to avoid getting on his bad side, pointing to what the historian Timothy Snyder calls "anticipatory obedience:"

"Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do."

Ezra Klein, the New York Times columnist, writes that Trump's blizzard of executive actions is meant to give the impression that the will of his White House is inevitable. But Klein notes that all the activity belies just how many of the new administration's most high-profile decisions have already been stymied by sloppy rollouts, gotten jammed up by the courts, or faced widespread condemnation by world leaders. The Trump White House is governing by blitz, and as any football fan can tell you, the point of the blitz is to keep you jumpy and looking over your shoulder. But it's worth remembering that you play through a blitz by stepping up, absorbing the pressure you know is coming, and keeping your eyes downfield.

Anticipatory Obedience.

Wonderful term, that. And it's amazing how widely spread it is, by far the majority reaction.

This feels like the end of things as we know it, so I hope I can write a new post in a year or some future date saying it all amounted to nothing.

We'll have to see.