#this kid uses they/them pronouns for joe biden

[electronsprotonscroutons]

friend’s brother just asked me if i’d seen joe biden fall off their bike

[mightyflamethrower]

Democratic strategist and CNN contributor Julie Roginsky said Thursday on CNN’s “Newsroom” that her party cannot speak to “normal people,” stating that it was “not the party of common sense.”

Roginsky said, “You know, I’m going to speak some hard truths to my friends in the Democratic Party. This is not Joe Biden’s fault. It’s not Kamala Harris fault. It’s not Barack Obama’s fault. It is the fault of the Democratic Party in not knowing how to communicate effectively to voters. We are not the party of common sense, which is the message that voters sent to us. For a number of reasons, for a number of reasons, we don’t know how to speak to voters.

When we address Latinos — and language, and language has meaning — we address Latino voters. as Latinx, for instance, because that’s the politically correct thing to do, it makes them think that we don’t even live on the same planet as they do.

When we are too afraid to say that, ‘Hey, college kids, if you’re trashing a campus of Columbia University because you aren’t happy about some sort of policy and you’re taking over a university and you’re trashing it and preventing other students from learning that that is unacceptable.’ But we’re so worried about alienating one or another cohort in our coalition that we don’t know what to say.”

She continued, “When normal people look at that and say, ‘Wait a second, I send my kids to college so they can learn, not so that they can burn buildings and trash lawns,’ right? And so on and so forth. When we put pronouns after names and say she/her, as opposed to saying, you know what, if I call you by the wrong pronoun, call me out, I’m sorry, I won’t do it again,” but stop with the virtue signaling and just speak to people like they’re normal. There’s nothing I’m going to say to Shermichael, that I’m not going to say to you, that I’m not going to say to somebody else. I speak the same language to everybody. But that’s not what Democrats do. We constantly try to parse out different ways of speaking to different cohorts because our focus groups or our polling shows that so-and-so appeals to such and such. That’s not how normal people think. It’s not common sense. And we need to start being the party of common sense again.”

Sounds like a few dems got the message. If you think a man can go home at noon, switch from boxers to panties, and come back to work as a real women most people, especially men, are going to think you are nucking futz. They certainly aren't going to vote for you.

[ultramaga]

Watch "Act Man Doubles Down - Let The L's Rain" on YouTube

Despite racking up 12000 hours in fallout 4, and a pretty good number in skyrim et al, and despite loving science fiction, I have no interest in starfield.

Why?

Well, as soon as the pronouns bullshit starts, you know that the game will be bad. Nobody in the future would call an individual they them because it makes no sense to anyone not woke, and because wokeness, like the hula hoop, is just a fad.

All the kids are suddenly nonbinary. Does that sound natural or fake? If humans really had that as their innate nature, that would have emerged in the past.

Instead, we see a sex based binary, over and over, and acting outside that would get you killed in almost every place and time.

I expect the current trend will vanish and something stupid will replace it in turn.

Remember the animal kin crowd? They vanished. It was no longer fashionable to pretend to secretly be a fox or a wolf outside of kink.

So putting that into science fiction, without an opt out, is as jarring as demand the future citizens care about Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

Now if you want to write a dystopia, fine, make it run by neurotic failures whose only achievement is fucking up Doctor Who. But don't complain if customers then patch that over with a mod that lets them shoot your precious pronoun people.

Nobody likes you. We tolerated you because you ran a con that confused you with genuine gay people, but that's done. All you can do is try to force the State to make us bend the knee.

And as Ireland has shown, humanity is starting to turn on you. We've had enough of the bullshit.

So you might want to start practicing your lies for when this all goes to shit, Leftists.

Repeat after me:

I never really believed any of it. They made me do it. I didnadoo nuffin.

Now write that out a thousand times and you'll be

Prepared for The Future!!

[yellingintothedarkness]

Joseph Malara

WHAT IS A LIBERAL TODAY? They are against fracking and don’t mind YOU paying much more for GAS! As a direct result, all food prices have risen close to 40%! Mortgage rates have gone from 2.2% to 7.1% under Joe Biden! Liberals support (CRT) “Critical Race Theory” to divide us all by race! They are for DEI and therefore don’t hire people based on merit or qualifications but because of quotas! They support and teach certain gender pronouns and want everyone to buy into the delusions of others! They support Godless “drag queen story hour” and countless other “woke” and sexual perversions to children in elementary schools! Liberals are for OPEN BORDERS and want our tax dollars to support the millions of immigrants legal and nonlegal invading America each day! They support the “Green New Scam” which only makes the rich richer and the poor poorer! They say they believe in science, but can't even define what a woman is! Liberals are against school choice! They created their own genders, and have 72 different Godless “genders”. They support gender-changing surgery for kids! They are against LIFE and want to KILL babies in their mother's wombs up to BIRTH, and in Virginia after BIRTH! They don’t realize it's NOT their body, it's another person's body growing in them! They support (Marxism, liberalism, Fascism, Socialism, Progressivism, and Communism). They are for full government control, wanting a one-world currency, and a one-world government, towards a one-world Nation. They even try to imprison their political opponents! They represent the Rich Hollywood, Elites, and the wealthiest low-lives in the world, like George Soros who like the LEFT hates America! They listen to fake news (Leftist) e.g. CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, and MSNBC. They support the Godless LGBTQ+ platform! They allow MEN in WOMEN’S locker rooms, and bathrooms, and even men in women’s SPORTS!! They are OK with gay marriage and turn a blind eye to child pornography. No decent person would support and vote for such a platform! Christians and all those with MORALS vote for the PLATFORM (not the person) closest to GOD’S VALUES and that is NEVER the Democratic (leftist, liberal) platform! Joseph Malara 2024 www.josephmalara.com

[extreme-investor-network]

White House Says It's 'Watching' The Market

Imagine this: you’re President Biden, you’ve been a career politician, your understanding of economics boils down to believing you can price fix oil prices, being on the political influencer dole, funded by China, through deals liaised by your ne'er-do-well son and clinging to the inane concept that over-taxation can solve all the nation’s problems because they can help fund the country’s most incompetent capital allocator: the government. You wake up on any given Monday to find that the stock market has just casually shaved off 5% from everybody in the nation’s retirement accounts. The culprit today? A cryptocurrency lending firm called Celsius has caused additional market volatility on top of the volatility that the Fed is causing as a result of its fight against inflation. “Damnit, Joe. It’s time to act,” you think to yourself, convinced there is some type of government solution to free markets taking 1 day to start to puke back 20 years of pornographic monetary policy. You pull up a chair in the Oval Office and grab a pen and a fresh legal pad, both bearing the seal of the President of the United States of America. Time to get some work done. You scribble down the word ‘Celsius’ on the pad. You stare at it for about 6 minutes. “Celsius,” you say to yourself. Then, you underline it. Starting to get exhausted, you repeat to yourself again, “Celsius”, while trying to remember metric/standard conversions from 7th-grade science class. “Celsius. What in the world do I do with Celsius. Think, Joe. Think.” It then occurs to you that you don’t actually know what Celsius is. You call in one of your younger interns who might know. They correct you for not using their zee/zir gender pronouns correctly and change the subject to climate change. They’re no help. Friggin kids. You’re on your own with this one. Back to the drawing board. In the background, CNBC is showing the stock market crash in real-time. “These people are financial experts,” you think to yourself. “They’ll know what’s going on.” You turn around to the TV and find this: You study this image. The guitar. The fire. What does it all mean? Unable to ascertain an answer from CNBC, you flip the channel to another financial news network. “There’s no bullshit on other networks, they’ll know what to do,” you think to yourself, feeling satisfied. You turn the channel and find this: Before you can try to digest this savvy analyst’s take on inflation or the markets, your press secretary bursts through the door, urging you to give her a statement so she can fend off the media, who has been asking about the market crash all day. “Tell them we’re keeping an eye on the market,” you tell her boldly, proudly content with your answer. But last month we told reporters "That's not something we keep an eye on every day, so I'm not gonna comment on that from here," she reminds you. You motion to her that it’s all OK now. We’ve got our heads wrapped around the problem: rate hikes are the only way to stop inflation but they’ll also crash the market. And after all, you’re writing things down on your legal pad - figuring shit out; Presidential shit - and you nod approvingly to her before pulling down your aviator shades. She leaves the room to inform “the wolves” of your major decision to make a statement. It hits the wires: WHITE HOUSE WATCHING STOCK MARKET CLOSELY: JEAN-PIERRE Ha. Success. That’ll hold those sons of bitches off for a while. Turning back to your legal pad, you think to yourself that we may need a congressional hearing to figure out what in the hell is really going on here. “This is what happens when Putin has influence and when billionaires don’t pay their fair share,” you think to yourself. You meekly manage to generate a subatomic particle worth of an idea: I wonder if Powell can print enough money to just buy stocks, you think to yourself. Would that help inflation? You glance at the clock. 5 hours have gone by. It’s closing time at the Oval Office and tomorrow is another day. Turning the lights off as you walk out of the room, you stop and glance back at an empty Oval Office and the desk where you’ve produced today’s Presidential achievements. You shake your head in disbelief that the nation could have such a low approval rating for you. You exhale. “Celsius,” you mutter to yourself as you walk out. Original Article Here: Read the full article

[anthonybialy]

Book Ban Banned

You're suppressing this column if you don’t read it.  Stop burning volumes that displease you and scroll to the end.  Book bans involve not banning them.  The lack of comprehension only seems like deadpan irony.  Feigning that access to literature is imperiled features a high level of sanctimony even by contemporary standards.  The accusations of missing pages like it’s a Hardy Boys mystery are horrifying if true, which they aren’t.

Explaining the example causes calm.  What’s called a ban these days resembles claiming an employer not offering benefits means they’re unavailable.  Of course, liberals think that’s true, too.

A panic based in lies is surely worth alarm.  I suggest avoiding such fiction even if doing so results in getting lumped in with purported destroyers of words.

I don’t want to exile those who wrongly claim they’re happening.  That’s yet another difference.  Freakout specialists are free to either wholly misunderstand reality or deliberately fib about it.  Having them in the open actually benefits reality, which is quite a lesson.

Alleged defenders of communication don’t grasp how their foes would prefer they announce their daftness as fervently as possible.  Shower argument winners will be wishing their claims were prohibited after they’re mocked relentlessly for such laughable misinterpretations.

The list of unavailable tomes is so extensive that we can’t even list them.  Republican fascists did such a thorough job of removing them from circulation that we can’t even remember the titles.  Citing examples would be an even shorter treatise than one detailing Joe Biden’s accomplishments.

Make a fortune explaining things in terms so simple that even indignant  can grasp them.  A true shutdown of reading material means it can’t be acquired.  It’s like what the perpetually sanctimonious try with Harry Potter.  J.K. Rowling possessed the nerve to note women are always such, which means punching those particular examples into pulp is permitted as an exception.  Children are no longer allowed to enjoy escaping to the wizard world because adults think changing genders is a whim to indulge.

Noticing how biology works will lead to banishment.  Tell liberals a book uses accurate pronouns to get them to approve of shredding it.

The same very non-hypocrites are suddenly into the Constitution.  But their comprehension remains sadly consistent.  A First Amendment violation would involve Congress shutting down your blog.  The same perpetually upset citizens think there’s no right to what they deem hate speech.  The rather subjective term means anything that challenges their notions.

Adults deciding what kids can read is the present self-righteous outrage from those too busy flaunting their own alleged tolerance to think out things.  The truly openminded want government choosing  every other thing.  You’ll never believe who’s suddenly against schools being in absolute charge.  Treating children like they’re communal property devalues the resource.

Editorial decisions are still permitted by law.  Choose what’s worth sharing while you can.  The same approach to discernment about what content is worth sharing led CNN to conclude Don Lemon is past his prime.

Every single call about what passages to include or exclude could be classified as a maneuver against freedom of thought by those who don’t exercise the option.  Removing copies from a curriculum is an argument for a school board meeting as opposed to the portrayal as an invasion by the Fourth Reich.

Shrewdness is now demonized.  You can’t judge anything except noting people don’t need allegedly free cash from Washington to prosper.  All that money sure doesn’t buy much reading material.

Pretending a paperback has been taken because a classroom or library doesn’t feature it is such a fishy notion that even public school students can recognize it.  Tell kids a book is not allowed to get them to read it.  That’s how every whippersnapper was tricked into mucking through The Catcher in the Rye. Use the word “censorship” to refer to discretion in determining what teachers get to force brats to trudge through is a nice way to ensure the latter never understand what words actually mean.

It’s always a good time for school choice.  Liberals should finally understand why.  An educational monopoly has churned out kids who can barely read the books we’re told they’re prevented from holding.  But at least the cost is astronomical.  The same people who say books are banned want the right to choose a school other than the horrid public option confiscated.

You’ve got some nerve thinking not every single media item is appropriate for kids.  Enjoy a fully tolerant era where the greatest moral imperative involves dragging kids to drag show story hour.  Children simply must be exposed to dudes dressed as ladies in order to move to the next grade.

Complete confusion as usual applies to expressing concepts.  Conflating people choosing to not put certain collections of sequenced words within reach of minors while at school with the end of independence to inspire mirth.  You may as well proclaim that we’re prevented from having health care if our stupid and awful government doesn’t issue worthless plans.  Choosing insurance keeps people from having it, at least if you believe tales churned out by hack Democrats.  Coercion is the only way they can fathom anything being made.  

Refusing to read any dissent is ironically popular amongst quite valiant foes of reading interdictions.  Suggest they buy the tomes they want, which horrifies them the most.  Aspiring readers are free to patronize Amazon or used book sales and buy every publication they wish to leave in Little Free Libraries.  I’m sorry using your own money is so pricey.

Opening a book that details the difference between an uptight school board eschewing it and disappearing into the ether would help.  But sentences that contradict a daft story are never perused.  Ironically, preeners would try to have such an edition removed from shelves.  The real policers of texts would call it hate speech paired with misinformation to ruin their good narrative.

Sudden enthusiasts about open forums didn’t care for anyone to Hoxha’s right getting to tweet how useless masks were.  Selective practitioners are comfortable as long as they don’t have to encounter any icky topics like opposition.  Open-mindedness means accepting every notion with which they agree.  Put that in a chapter.

[college-girl199328]

The violence Monday at The Covenant School is the latest to roil the nation. Three 9-year-old students were killed as the head of the grade school, a custodian, and a substitute teacher.

The suspect, Audrey Hale, 28, was a former student at the school. Police said the shooter did not target specific Hale was not on their radar before the attack. Police say Hale was under a doctor's care for an undisclosed emotional disorder.

Police have released videos of the shooting, including edited surveillance footage that shows the driving up to the school, glass doors being shot out shooter ducking through one of their videos, which shows a woman greeting police outside as they arrive at The Covenant School on Monday are all locked down have two kids that we where they are,” she tells the police.

Engelbert replies woman then directs officers to Fellowship Hall and says people inside had just heard gunshots. “Upstairs are a bunch of kids,” she says.

Three officers, including Engelbert, search rooms one by one in the school, and one officer says to climb the stairs to the second floor and enter a lobby area. “Move in,” an officer yells. Then a barrage of gunfire is heard.

Hands away from the gun," an officer yells twice. Then the shooter is shown motionless on the floor detailed map of the school, including potential entry points, and conducting surveillance of the building before carrying out the massacre, authorities said.

Police response times to school shootings are under greater scrutiny after the elementary school massacre in Uvalde before law enforcement stormed the classroom. In Nashville, police 14 minutes passed from the initial call about a shooter in the school to when the suspect was killed, but they have not said how long it took them to arrive.

Surveillance video of The Covenant School grounds released by police shows a time stamp of just before 10:11 a.m. when shot out by the shooter. Police said they received a call about a shooter at 10:13 a.m. but arrived, and the edited bodycam footage didn’t include time stamps. A police spokesperson didn’t immediately respond to an email Tuesday asking when whether any version of the video stamps.

Police have given unclear information on Hale's gender. For hours Monday, police identified the shooter as a woman. At a late afternoon press conference, the police chief said Hale was transgender. After the news conference, police spokesperson Don Aaron declined to elaborate on how Hale was identified.

In an email Tuesday, police spokesperson Kristin Mumford said Hale “was assigned female at birth. Hale did use male pronouns on a social media profile.”

The victims were children Evelyn Dieckhaus, Hallie Scruggs, and William Kinney, all age 9. The adults were Cynthia Peak, 61, Katherine Koonce, 60, and Mike Hill, 61.

The website of The Covenant School, a Presbyterian school founded in 2001, lists Katherine Koonce as the head of the school profile says she has led the school since July 2016 as a substitute teacher, and Hill was a custodian, according to investigators.

Metropolitan Nashville Police Chief John Drake did not say what drove Hale but said in an interview with NBC News that investigators believe the shooter had “some resentment for having to go to that school.”

Drake provided chilling examples of the shooter’s elaborate planning for the targeted attack, the latest in a series of mass shootings in a country that has grown increasingly unnerved by schools.

“We have a manifesto, we have some writings that we’re going over that pertain to this date, the actual incident,” he told reporters. “We have a map of how this going to take place.”

Authorities said Hale was armed with two “assault-style” weapons as a handgun. At least two of them were believed to have been obtained legally in the Nashville area, according to the chief. Police said a search of Hale’s home shotgun, a second shotgun, and other unspecified evidence.

President Joe Biden said he had spoken to the Nashville chief of police, the mayor, and senators in Tennessee. He pleaded with Congress to pass stronger gun safety laws, including a ban on assault weapons.

Congress has to act, Biden said. The majority of the American people think having assault weapons is an idea. Founded as a ministry of Covenant Presbyterian Church, The Covenant School is in the affluent Green Hills neighborhood just south of downtown Nashville that is home to the famous Bluebird Cafe, beloved by musicians and songwriters.

The school has about 200 students from preschool through sixth grade and roughly 50 staff members. Before Monday’s violence in Nashville at K-12 schools since 2006 were killed within 24 hours, according to a database maintained by The Associated Press and USA Today in partnership with Northeastern University. In all of them, the shooters were males.

The database does not include school shootings in which fewer than four people were killed, which have become far more common in recent years. Just last week alone, for example, school shootings happened in Denver and the Dallas area within two days of each other.

At The Covenant School, officers began clearing the first story when they heard gunshots on the second level, Aaron said. Police later said the shooter fired at arriving officers from a second-story window.

Police identified Engelbert, a four-year member of the force, and Collazo, a nine-year member, as the officers who fatally shot Hale. The surveillance video released Monday shows the shooter’s car driving up to the school from multiple angles, including one in which children can be seen playing on swings in the background. Next, an interior view shows the glass doors to the school being shot out and the shooter ducking through one of the shattered doors.

More footage from inside shows the shooter walking through a school corridor holding a gun with a long barrel and a room labeled “church office,” then coming back out. In the final part of the footage, the shooter can be seen walking down another long corridor with the gun drawn. The shooter is not seen interacting with anyone else on the video, which has no sound.

Aaron said there were no police officers present or assigned to the school at the time of the shooting because it is a church-run school.

[batboyblog]

Governors 2022: You'd Better Vote!

A few days ago I made and blazed a post on important US Senate races but also coming up on November 8th there are equally (if not more) important races for Governor across the country. Since the Supreme Court overruled Roe V Wade its thrown abortion rights to the states. Who you vote for in this election will determine what abortion rights look like in your state, will they be protected? or will abortion be banned? up to the voters this election. Democratic Governors in red states have served as the thin blue line protecting the right to choice, vetoing radical anti-abortion laws and refusing to enforce antiquated 19th century anti-abortion laws.

Republican Governors however have declared open season on trans students in sports the families of trans children health care for trans kids trans healthcare for poor adults drag queens LGBT books the use of pronouns any conversation of race in school we can go on but it's clear that Republican state governments in 2022 have declared war on Queer people and Queer life, Trans people in particular and trans children most of all.

Finally many of the Republican candidates in 2022 are election deniers, they do not believe Joe Biden legally won the 2020 election and have made it clear that if they're in charge come 2024 they won't allow their states votes to be counted for any one but Donald Trump. How we vote in 2022 decides if we have a free and fair democratic election for President in 2024. So PLEASE look at this close Governor's elections, if you live in these states VOTE VOTE VOTE. But more than vote, volunteer your time, even if you don't live in this states you can call or text voters for a campaign. If you have even one dollar to spare for these campaigns give it to the candidate you like best. A lot of them also have merch stores you can buy stuff if you'd rather.

Arizona

Katie Hobbs (flip)

Arizona Security of State Katie Hobbs is running to replace term-limited Republican Governor Doug Ducey. As Security of State in charge of Arizona's elections Hobbs was in the center of the 2020 "stop the steal" conspiracy theory. In the face of death threats, doxxing of her home address and children's phone numbers, and armed protests in front of her home Hobbs did her job and made sure all of Arizona's votes were counted. Before becoming Security of State Hobbs was a social worker, a State Senator and Leader of the State Senate's Democrats. In the State House she helped push through medicaid expansion making Arizona one of the few Republican controlled states to do so. Republicans have nominated former news caster, Kari Lake for governor. Lake rose to prominence by being a vocal supporter of election conspiracy theories. Lake has called for Hobbs to be jailed for her role in the election as Arizona Security of State. She called for the Arizona election results to be decertified even after Biden took office, and for Trump to be re-instated as President. She declared she would not have certified the 2020 election result if she'd been governor at the time, bring what she'd do in 2024 as governor into question. Lake also called abortion "ultimate sin" and wants it banned in all cases, she wants to ban trans people from using the bathroom that conforms with their gender rather than assigned sex at birth, she declared she wouldn't follow/enforce federal gun laws, she wants to use Arizona state resources to deport undocumented people without federal government involvement, and to use Arizona tax payer dollars to finish Trump's wall. Also Lake has been vocal about Covid-19 conspiracies, supporting fake treatments, being against vaccine or mask mandates and being proudly not vaccinated herself. Lake would ban abortion, deport people illegally, victimize trans people, and can't be trusted with elections or public health, Katie Hobbs is 100% pro-choice, has already protected our democracy and isn't a bully, the choice is clear.

VOTE VOLUNTEER DONATE SHOP

Florida

Charlie Crist (flip)

Congressman and former Governor Charlie Crist is running to unseat one term Republican Governor Ron DeSantis. Crist served as Governor of Florida as a Republican from 2007 till 2011. When Crist decided to run for the US Senate in 2010 as a Republican. However hardcore Republicans were outraged at him for his support of environmental policies, his appointing of a black Justice to the state Supreme Court, his expressing a willingness to give President Obama "a shot", and his support of Obama's 2009 Recovery Act. Republicans backed Marco Rubio. Crist ran any ways as an Independent but due to vote splitting Rubio won with 48% of the vote. Crist endorsed Obama's re-election in 2012 and became a Democrat. He ran for Governor as a Democrat in 2014 and lost by 1%. In 2016 Crist ran for Congress becoming the first Democrat to represent St. Petersburg Florida in 62 years. While in Congress Crist has supported bills to legalize Marijuana, and introduced a bill to make it illegal to fire or not hire federal employees for using cannabis. Crist has also supported a federal assault weapons ban and other gun control measures. Crist has centered standing up for LGBT rights and Abortion rights as main issues in his 2022 campaign for Governor. Current Republican Governor Ron DeSantis is running for a second term after a narrow, 0.4% win in 2018. DeSantis has made an all out assault on the rights of LGBT people and reproductive rights the center of his re-election campaign. On June 1st 2021 DeSantis signed a law banning trans girls from participating and competing in middle-school and high-school girls' and college women's sports. He supported and signed the Florida "Don't Say Gay" bill banning any conversion of LGBT issues in younger grades. The Don't Say Gay bill has inspired a wave of banning LGBT related books from school and public libraries around America. DeSantis' Department of Health is in the process of banning transitioning, both medical AND social transitioning for minors in the state. DeSantis' Department of Health has already banned Florida Medicaid from covering medical transition/trans health care in the state. DeSantis is also 100% against abortion and is currently fighting in court to ban it totally in the state. He also took the extraordinary step of firing the elected Democratic State Attorney for Tampa for saying he would not enforce not yet passed laws against trans medical treatment for minors, as well as abortion. Florida in 2022 is the front line of LGBT rights and trans rights most of all. If DeSantis wins he'll try to ride bullying queer people, queer kids, to the White House. If you're queer, if you have any LGBT loved ones, if you care about LGBT rights, dig deep give Charlie Crist a dollar, if you're in Florida please do whatever you can to stop DeSantis.

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Georgia

Stacey Abrams (flip)

Former Georgia State House Minority Leader and voting rights activist Stacey Abrams is running to unseat one term Republican Governor Brian Kemp. A rematch of their painfully close 2018 election face off in which it is widely believed Kemp used his then office of Security of State to weight the odds against Abrams. Kemp closed over 200 polling places in poor and minority areas thought to be strong for Abrams causing longer lines and longer trips to a polling place for her voters. He also purged over 600K voters from the voting rolls and slowed down processing of new voter registration. After her painful 2018 defeat Abrams launched Fair Fight Action. Fair Fight works to register people to vote, to fight unfair voting laws in court, and to boost turn out. It's understood Abrams tireless organizing in Georgia was key to Joe Biden's narrow 2020 win in the state and as well as the Senate run-off wins of Senators Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock that gave Democrats control of the Senate. Expanding Medicaid is one of Abrams top goals for her governorship as Georgia is one of the last states to have not expanded coverage. If elected Abrams will not only be Georgia's first black governor, she'll be the first black woman governor in America. Since taking office Kemp has kept up his voter suppressing ways, signing laws that limit absentee voting, giving the Republican controlled legislature the right to overrule and replace local elected elections officials, and making it a crime to give food and even water to people waiting in line to vote. Kemp also banned mask mandates during Covid even banning local governments in Georgia from enacting them. He lifted the stay at home order in early 2020 against the advice of the CDC and again overruling Democratic mayors in his state. The result was Georgia having some of the worst Covid numbers of 2020. Georgia doesn't need more election suppression, support Abrams.

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Kansas

Laura Kelly (re-elect)

Governor Laura Kelly was elected in an upset win in 2018 and is running for her second term in office. Before 2018 Kansas suffered 8 years under Republican Governor Sam Brownback and the "Kansas experiment". Under Governor Brownback taxes on the wealthy and corporations were slashed in some of the biggest tax cuts in American history. The result was an implosion of the state budget and deep cuts in all services and the near collapse of Kansas' education system. Governor Kelly campaigned to reverse the effects of the "Kansas experiment" and drew wide support even from Republicans alarmed by the effects of Republican tax policy. In office Governor Kelly worked to push through Medicaid expansion through the Republican controlled legislature. Thanks to Kelly over 100,000 Kansans got health coverage through Medicaid. Kelly has managed to fully fund Kansas' schools and balance Kansas' budget. Her first official act in office was to sign an order protecting LGBT state workers from discrimination, something Governor Brownback had eliminated in 2015. Governor Kelly was a leading figure in the campaign to protect abortion rights in Kansas through the ballot referendum and she opposes any new restrictions on abortion. Republicans have nominated Kansas' Attorney General Derek Schmidt to try to unseat Governor Kelly. Schmidt has been Kansas' Attorney General since 2011. During the Obama Administration Schmidt sued the Obama EPA to try to block regulation of oil and gas companies, green house gases, and to block Obama's clean power plan. Schmidt sued the Obama Administration to try to overturn Obamacare, and also DACA. Schmidt even took part in an official Kansas government panel which heard "evidence" that President Obama was not an American citizen and shouldn't be allowed on the ballot in Kansas in 2012. In 2020 Schmidt joined other Republican AGs to sue to try to overturn the results of the Presidential election. Since Biden has taken office Schmidt has sued the Biden Administration over its climate change policies. Governor Kelly has been a common sense problem solver and the line of protection for LGBT people and abortion rights in Kansas, Kansas needs a second term of her, not another Republican.

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Maine

Janet Mills (re-elect)

Governor Janet Mills was elected in 2018 and is running for her second term in office. Mills is the first woman governor in Maine and was also the first woman Attorney General of the state. On her first day in office Mills signed Medicaid expansion into law. The Medicaid expansion had been passed by citizen vote on a ballot measure but vetoed by the Republican governor. This brought health coverage to 90,000 low income Mainers. Mills has pushed for aggressive climate action putting forward a plan to make the state carbon-neutral by 2045. In 2022 the Maine climate council reported the state had over shot its goals. Mills stand on climate change lead to her being invited to address the United Nations on the topic in 2019. A life long feminist, a co-founder of the Maine Women's Lobby Mills has pledged to veto any restriction on abortion and voiced support for changing the state's constitution to protect abortion rights. Mills also declared she would work to make sure it was safe for people from outside of Maine to come to the state seeking an abortion that might be illegal in their home state. Republicans have nominated former Governor Paul LePage to try to unseat Mills. LePage was governor from 2011 to 2019 winning two elections with split voting. LePage earned national attention for his regularly inflammatory and often racist comments such as declaring "New York Drug Dealers" were coming to Maine to sell drugs and "impregnate a young, white girl before they leave" and "black people come up the highway and they kill Mainers". When a Democratic state rep called him a racist LePage called him in the middle of the night and left a voice message in which he called the state rep a "little son of a bitch" and a "cocksucker" repeatedly, later LePage challenged the rep to a dual. When Maine voters passed ballot measures to expand Medicaid and legalize marijuana LePage vetoed the bills that would implement the will of the voters. He also vetoed a bill that would have banned conversion "therapy" for Minors, Governor Mills signed the bill a year later. LePage cut and restricted welfare in Maine resulting in the state leading the nation in food insecure children by 2018. Maine need a climate change world leader as governor not a racist.

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Nevada

Steve Sisolak (re-elect)

Governor Steve Sisolak was first elected in 2018 and is running for his second term in office. Since taking office Sisolak has focused on climate change and protecting Nevada's fragile ecosystem. He appointed the first climate czar for the Governor's office in the history of the state. Under his leadership Nevada has become a world leader in solar power. Governor Sisolak set a goal of 50% of Nevada's power from renewables by 2030 and the state is on track to meet those goals. Sisolak stood up for Nevada's election integrity in the face of 2020 election conspiracies that heavily focused on the state. Since Roe V Wade was overturned Sisolak has spoken out in support of abortion rights. Sisolak worked to repel the state's anti-abortion law before Roe was struck down thus protecting abortion rights in the state now. Republicans have nominated Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo to try to unseat Governor Sisolak. Lombardo is against most if not all gun control measures. He worked to eliminate Clark County's (Las Vegas) gun registry even after the 2017 mass shooting, the deadliest in American history with 57 deaths. Lombardo also supports people being able to 3D print their own "ghost guns". Lombardo wants to get rid of Nevada's long standing system of universal mail in ballots and make it harder for people to vote. Lombardo bluntly declares himself "pro-life". Nevada can keep moving forward and be a climate leader or go backward and make it harder to vote.

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Pennsylvania

Josh Shapiro (hold)

Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro is running to replace term-limited Democratic Governor Tom Wolf. Shapiro has been Attorney General since 2017. During his term in office Shapiro was a consistent opponent of the Trump administration. Shapiro sued the Trump administration over it's travel ban and also sued the Trump administration over its plan to allow employers to not cover birth control in their health insurance plans. Shapiro pushed the federal government to ban the blue prints for 3D printed guns. He supported the legalization of marijuana in 2019, but despite support from Governor Wolf and other leading Democrats is still being blocked by Republicans in the state legislature. Shapiro conducted a extensive investigation into child sex abuse in the Catholic Church in Pennsylvania. Shapiro's report uncovered over 1,000 cases of sexual abuse by over 300 priests and an extensive cover up by Church leadership. Republicans Nominated state Senator Doug Mastriano to face off with Shapiro in November. Mastriano is seen as a leading figure on the Christian Nationalist right who has worrying ties to far-right organizations and terrorist groups. Mastriano is known to have organized bus rides for Trump supporters to come to DC on January 6th. Mastriano and his wife were shown in video has being present when barricade around the US Capitol was breached and they can be seen passing beyond the barricade. It is unclear if Mastriano himself entered the Capitol building during the riot. Mastriano has refused to cooperate with the Congressional investigation into January 6th or with the FBI criminal investigation. Mastriano's campaigned paid to have Gab, the racist far-right alternative to Twitter, make it so all new Gab users automatically fallowed Mastriano's account. Gab CEO Andrew Torba declared that electing Mastriano was his number one goal for the 2022 election. Torba also declared he had a personal policy that he didn't "conduct interviews with reporters who aren't Christian" and that he knew "Doug has a very similar media strategy where he does not do interviews with these people." Attorney General Shapiro is Jewish. It appears that members of Mastriano's security detail were also members of the far-right extremist militia group the Oath Keepers. Mastriano supporters at a public event he attended carried flags for another far-right militia, the Three Percenters. Both groups were involved in the January 6th rioting. Mastriano is a dangerous far-right anti-democracy candidate who was involved in the January 6th riot and hangs out with right wing terrorist groups, don't let him in office.

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Texas

Beto O'Rourke (flip)

Former Congressman Beto O'Rourke is running to unseat 2 term Republican Governor Greg Abbott. O'Rourke represented El Paso Texas in Congress from 2013 till 2019. O'Rourke won his first election to Congress in an upset primary win. His campaign centered on his support for LGBT rights and drug liberalization two issues that would remain major themes for O'Rourke in future campaigns. While in Congress O'Rourke was a social supporter of LGBT rights, abortion rights, and gun control, taking part in a sit in with Congressman John Lewis inside the House chamber to try to force the then Republican controlled house to vote on gun control. In 2018 O'Rourke left the house to run for the US Senate in an effort to unseat Senator Ted Cruz. Many thought O'Rourke's campaign was a hopeless long shot but in the end it was a photo finish with Cruz 50.9% to O'Rourke's 48.3%. While he didn't win O'Rourke netted more votes then any Democrat in Texas history and energized long hopeless Texas Democrats. O'Rourke has run an aggressive no holds barred campaign, centering upholding LGBT rights, abortion rights, and even directly confronting Governor Abbott to his face over the failed response to the Uvalde shooting. Gregg Abbott has been governor of Texas since 2015. Abbott's reaction to mass shooting events in 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2022 has been to uniformly reject tighter gun laws and call for prayer. Abbott was quick to endorse a false narrative of police heroism in the aftermath of the Uvalde shooting in line with his "back the blue" ideology. After the 2021 ice storm left most of Texas without power in the record cold Abbott still refuses to consider integrating the state's power grid into one of the two national grids for ideological reasons. Abbott has been aggressively anti-abortion his whole career. Texas' aggressive anti-abortion bill is what lead to the Supreme Court case overturning Roe. Under the law not only is abortion illegal it empowers random citizens to sue those who get or those who preform an abortion. Abbott has also targeted the trans community. in 2022 Abbott ordered the state child welfare agency to treat gender affirming treatment of trans children as child abuse and investigate parents of trans children, which is happening now. Greg Abbott thinks he can bully trans kids and ultra ban abortion his way to re-election, Texas can prove it doesn't want a bully and wants someone to keep the lights on this winter.

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Wisconsin

Tony Evers (re-elect)

Governor Tony Evers was first elected in 2018 and is running for his second term in office. Before becoming governor Evers was Wisconsin's statewide Superintendent. In his role as head of schools in the state Evers focused on expanding mental health excess for students. He regularly clashed with Republican Governor Scott Walker, who he beat in the 2018 election, over the school system's budget. Since becoming Governor Evers has championed Wisconsin's school passing the first budget increase in years, moving the state from 18th to 8th in the nation, and overseeing the first increase in spending on special ed in decades. Evers has also focused on rebuilding and repairing Wisconsin's crumbling roads and bridges after years of Republican neglect. One of Evers first actions as Governor was to withdraw Wisconsin from a Republican lead law suit against Obamacare. Evers supports expanding Medicaid in the state but has been blocked so far by a Republican legislature. When the Supreme Court overturned Roe Governor Evers joined Wisconsin's Attorney General in suing to try to stop the state's antiquated 1849 anti-abortion law from coming into effect. Evers has stated if the law does come into effect he will pardon any doctor convicted under it. Republicans have nominated perennial failed candidate and businessman Tim Michels to try to unseat Governor Evers. Michels has declared on abortion "The 1849 law is an exact mirror of my position, and my position is an exact mirror of the 1849 law,". Michels stated he believes marriage is "between one man and one woman". Michels also supports plans to make voting harder in Wisconsin and would not commit to certifying the 2024 Presidential election results if Trump doesn't win the state. Wisconsin can pick a common sense Democrat who will protect the right to choose and our elections, or a candidate that wants to use 19th century laws against peoples bodies and won't protect our elections, choice is clear.

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Thank you SO much for reading all this! To keep an already very long post to a readable length I had to make some choices about which races to cover, so please check out Gretchen Whitmer (Michigan), Tim Walz (Minnesota), Michelle Lujan Grisham (New Mexico) and Tina Kotek (Oregon) They need your support and your votes as well.

If you don't live in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, Wisconsin or New Hampshire, North Carolina, and Ohio (Senate list) Please look up your state/local Democratic Party I GUARANTEE there is an important winnable election going on in your state right now that needs your attention, your vote for sure, but also your volunteer hours, and your money if you got ANY to spare even a dollar is worth giving to a winnable race and a good candidate.

Trust me when I say if you feel hopeless, upset, frustrated, feel like you're going crazy, volunteering, going out for a lovely walk knocking on doors and talking to real people is the best best best therapy there is, every time I feel 1,000 better and I'm NOT a social butterfly.

If you care about LGBT rights, you care about trans people, this is the election to vote and get involved, Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott both think abusing trans people, particularly trans children, is their road to re-election and if they win it'll only spread and get much much worse. If you're Queer, or you care about LGBT people vote hard, and talk to everyone, have that hard awkward conversation with a family member about what voting Republican really means, talk till they understand guys. This is also true on Abortion Republicans everywhere are running on extreme total bans, we're talking pregnant teenage, pregnant 10 year old, rape and abuse victims being forced to carry their rapist baby to term when they're physically too young to give birth even close to safely.

finally thank you to @dduane one of my favorite childhood authors (I fangirled hard) and everyone else for helping my Senate post go viral, I hope this one does as well

VOTE NOVEMBER 8TH!

[transgenderteensurvivalguide]

“Elliot Page doesn’t remember exactly how long he had been asking.

But he does remember the acute feeling of triumph when, around age 9, he was finally allowed to cut his hair short. “I felt like a boy,” Page says. “I wanted to be a boy. I would ask my mom if I could be someday.” Growing up in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Page visualized himself as a boy in imaginary games, freed from the discomfort of how other people saw him: as a girl. After the haircut, strangers finally started perceiving him the way he saw himself, and it felt both right and exciting.

The joy was short-lived. Months later, Page got his first break, landing a part as a daughter in a Canadian mining family in the TV movie Pit Pony. He wore a wig for the film, and when Pit Pony became a TV show, he grew his hair out again. “I became a professional actor at the age of 10,” Page says. And pursuing that passion came with a difficult compromise. “Of course I had to look a certain way.”

We are speaking in late February. It is the first interview Page, 34, has given since disclosing in December that he is transgender, in a heartfelt letter posted to Instagram, and he is crying before I have even uttered a question. “Sorry, I’m going to be emotional, but that’s cool, right?” he says, smiling through his tears.

It’s hard for him to talk about the days that led up to that disclosure. When I ask how he was feeling, he looks away, his neck exposed by a new short haircut. After a pause, he presses his hand to his heart and closes his eyes. “This feeling of true excitement and deep gratitude to have made it to this point in my life,” he says, “mixed with a lot of fear and anxiety.”

It’s not hard to understand why a trans person would be dealing with conflicting feelings in this moment. Increased social acceptance has led to more young people describing themselves as trans—1.8% of Gen Z compared with 0.2% of boomers, according to a recent Gallup poll—yet this has fueled conservatives who are stoking fears about a “transgender craze.” President Joe Biden has restored the right of transgender military members to serve openly, and in Hollywood, trans people have never had more meaningful time onscreen. Meanwhile, J.K. Rowling is leveraging her cultural capital to oppose transgender equality in the name of feminism, and lawmakers are arguing in the halls of Congress over the validity of gender identities. “Sex has become a political football in the culture wars,” says Chase Strangio, deputy director for transgender justice at the ACLU.

(Full article with photos continued under the “read more”)

And so Page—who charmed America as a precocious pregnant teenager in Juno, constructed dreamscapes in Inception and now stars in Netflix’s hit superhero show The Umbrella Academy, the third season of which he’s filming in Toronto—expected that his news would be met with both applause and vitriol. “What I was anticipating was a lot of support and love and a massive amount of hatred and transphobia,” says Page. “That’s essentially what happened.” What he did not anticipate was just how big this story would be. Page’s announcement, which made him one of the most famous out trans people in the world, started trending on Twitter in more than 20 countries. He gained more than 400,000 new followers on Instagram on that day alone. Thousands of articles were published. Likes and shares reached the millions. Right-wing podcasters readied their rhetoric about “women in men’s locker rooms.” Casting directors reached out to Page’s manager saying it would be an honor to cast Page in their next big movie.

So, it was a lot. Over the course of two conversations, Page will say that understanding himself in all the specifics remains a work in progress. Fathoming one’s gender, an identity innate and performed, personal and social, fixed and evolving, is complicated enough without being under a spotlight that never seems to turn off. But having arrived at a critical juncture, Page feels a deep sense of responsibility to share his truth. “Extremely influential people are spreading these myths and damaging rhetoric—every day you’re seeing our existence debated,” Page says. “Transgender people are so very real.”

That role in Pit Pony led to other productions and eventually, when Page was 16, to a film called Mouth to Mouth. Playing a young anarchist, Page had a chance to cut his hair again. This time, he shaved it off completely. The kids at his high school teased him, but in photos he has posted from that time on social media he looks at ease. Page’s head was still shaved when he mailed in an audition tape for the 2005 thriller Hard Candy. The people in charge of casting asked him to audition again in a wig. Soon, the hair was back.

Page’s tour de force performance in Hard Candy led, two years later, to Juno, a low-budget indie film that brought Page Oscar, BAFTA and Golden Globe nominations and sudden megafame. The actor, then 21, struggled with the stresses of that ascension. The endless primping, red carpets and magazine spreads were all agonizing reminders of the disconnect between how the world saw Page and who he knew himself to be. “I just never recognized myself,” Page says. “For a long time I could not even look at a photo of myself.” It was difficult to watch the movies too, especially ones in which he played more feminine roles.

Page loved making movies, but he also felt alienated by Hollywood and its standards. Alia Shawkat, a close friend and co-star in 2009’s Whip It,describes all the attention from Juno as scarring. “He had a really hard time with the press and expectations,” Shawkat says. “‘Put this on! And look this way! And this is sexy!’”

By the time he appeared in blockbusters like X-Men: The Last Stand and Inception, Page was suffering from depression, anxiety and panic attacks. He didn’t know, he says, “how to explain to people that even though [I was] an actor, just putting on a T-shirt cut for a woman would make me so unwell.” Shawkat recalls Page’s struggles with clothes. “I’d be like, ‘Hey, look at all these nice outfits you’re getting,’ and he would say, ‘It’s not me. It feels like a costume,’” she says. Page tried to convince himself that he was fine, that someone who was fortunate enough to have made it shouldn’t have complaints. But he felt exhausted by the work required to “just exist,” and thought more than once about quitting acting.

In 2014, Page came out as gay, despite feeling for years that “being out was impossible” given his career. (Gender identity and sexual orientation are, of course, distinct, but one queer identity can coexist with another.) In an emotional speech at a Human Rights Campaign conference, Page talked about being part of an industry “that places crushing standards” on actors and viewers alike. “There are pervasive stereotypes about masculinity and femininity that define how we’re all supposed to act, dress and speak,” Page went on. “And they serve no one.”

The actor started wearing suits on the red carpet. He found love, marrying choreographer Emma Portner in 2018. He asserted more agency in his career, producing his own films with LGBTQ leads like Freeheld and My Days of Mercy. And he made a masculine wardrobe a condition of taking roles. Yet the daily discord was becoming unbearable. “The difference in how I felt before coming out as gay to after was massive,” says Page. “But did the discomfort in my body ever go away? No, no, no, no.”

In part, it was the isolation forced by the pandemic that brought to a head Page’s wrestling with gender. (Page and Portner separated last summer, and the two divorced in early 2021. “We’ve remained close friends,” Page says.) “I had a lot of time on my own to really focus on things that I think, in so many ways, unconsciously, I was avoiding,” he says. He was inspired by trailblazing trans icons like Janet Mock and Laverne Cox, who found success in Hollywood while living authentically. Trans writers helped him understand his feelings; Page saw himself reflected in P. Carl’s memoir Becoming a Man. Eventually “shame and discomfort” gave way to revelation. “I was finally able to embrace being transgender,” Page says, “and letting myself fully become who I am.”

This led to a series of decisions. One was asking the world to call him by a different name, Elliot, which he says he’s always liked. Page has a tattoo that says E.P. PHONE HOME, a reference to a movie about a young boy with that name. “I loved E.T. when I was a kid and always wanted to look like the boys in the movies, right?” he says. The other decision was to use different pronouns—for the record, both he/him and they/them are fine. (When I ask if he has a preference on pronouns for the purposes of this story, Page says, “He/him is great.”)

A day before we first speak, Page will talk to his mom about this interview and she will tell him, “I’m just so proud of my son.” He grows emotional relating this and tries to explain that his mom, the daughter of a minister, who was born in the 1950s, was always trying to do what she thought was best for her child, even if that meant encouraging young Page to act like a girl. “She wants me to be who I am and supports me fully,” Page says. “It is a testament to how people really change.”

Another decision was to get top surgery. Page volunteers this information early in our conversation; at the time he posted his disclosure on Instagram, he was recovering in Toronto. Like many trans people, Page emphasizes being trans isn’t all about surgery. For some people, it’s unnecessary. For others, it’s unaffordable. For the wider world, the media’s focus on it has sensationalized transgender bodies, inviting invasive and inappropriate questions. But Page describes surgery as something that, for him, has made it possible to finally recognize himself when he looks in the mirror, providing catharsis he’s been waiting for since the “total hell” of puberty. “It has completely transformed my life,” he says. So much of his energy was spent on being uncomfortable in his body, he says. Now he has that energy back.

For the transgender community at large, visibility does not automatically lead to acceptance. Around the globe, transgender people deal disproportionately with violence and discrimination. Anti-trans hate crimes are on the rise in the U.K. along with increasingly transphobic rhetoric in newspapers and tabloids. In the U.S., in addition to the perennial challenges trans people face with issues like poverty and homelessness, a flurry of bills in state legislatures would make it a crime to provide transition-related medical care to trans youth. And crass old jokes are still in circulation. When Biden lifted the ban on open service for transgender troops, Saturday Night Live’s Michael Che did a bit on Weekend Update about the policy being called “don’t ask, don’t tuck.”

Page says coming out as trans was “selfish” on one level: “It’s for me. I want to live and be who I am.” But he also felt a moral imperative to do so, given the times. Human identity is complicated and mysterious, but politics insists on fitting everything into boxes. In today’s culture wars, simplistic beliefs about gender—e.g., chromosomes = destiny—are so widespread and so deep-seated that many people who hold those beliefs don’t feel compelled to consider whether they might be incomplete or prejudiced. On Feb. 24, after a passionate debate on legislation that would ban discrimination against LGBTQ people, Representative Marie Newman, an Illinois Democrat, proudly displayed the pride flag in support of her daughter, who is trans. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia Republican, responded by hanging a poster outside her office that read: There are TWO genders: MALE & FEMALE.

The next day Dr. Rachel Levine, who stands to become the first openly transgender federal official confirmed by the Senate, endured a tirade from Senator Rand Paul about “genital mutilation” during her confirmation hearing. My second conversation with Page happens shortly after this. He brings it up almost immediately, and seems both heartbroken and determined. He wants to emphasize that top surgery, for him, was “not only life-changing but lifesaving.” He implores people to educate themselves about trans lives, to learn how crucial medical care can be, to understand that lack of access to it is one of the many reasons that an estimated 41% of transgender people have attempted suicide, according to one survey.

Page has been in the political trenches for a while, having leaned into progressive activism after coming out as queer in 2014. For two seasons, he and best friend Ian Daniel filmed Gaycation, a Viceland series that explored LGBTQ culture around the world and, at one point, showed Page grilling Senator Ted Cruz at the Iowa State Fair about discrimination against queer people. In 2019, Page made a documentary called There’s Something in the Water, which explores environmental hardships experienced by communities of color in Nova Scotia, with $350,000 of his own money. That activism extends to his own industry: in 2017, he published a Facebook post that, among other things, accused director Brett Ratner of forcibly outing him as gay on the set of an X-Men movie. (A representative for Ratner did not respond to a request for comment.)

As a trans person who is white, wealthy and famous, Page has a unique kind of privilege, and with it an opportunity to advocate for those with less. According to the U.S. Trans Survey, a large-scale report from 2015, transgender people of color are more likely to experience unemployment, harassment by police and refusals of medical care. Nearly half of all Black respondents reported being denied equal treatment, verbally harassed and/or physically attacked in the past year. Trans people as a group fare much worse on such stats than the general population. “My privilege has allowed me to have resources to get through and to be where I am today,” Page says, “and of course I want to use that privilege and platform to help in the ways I can.”

Since his disclosure, Page has been mostly quiet on social media. One exception has been to tweet on behalf of the ACLU, which is in the midst of fighting anti-trans bills and laws around the country, including those that ban transgender girls and women from participating in sports. Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves says he will sign such a bill in the name of “protect[ing] young girls.” Page played competitive soccer and vividly recalls the agony of being told he would have to play on the girls’ team once he aged out of mixed-gender squads. After an appeal, Page was allowed to play with the boys for an additional year. Today, several bills list genitalia as a requirement for deciding who plays on which team. “I would have been in that position as a kid,” Page says. “It’s horrific.”

All this advocacy is unlikely to make life easier. “You can’t enter into certain spaces as a public trans person,” says the ACLU’s Strangio, “without being prepared to spend some percentage of your life being threatened and harassed.” Yet, while he seems overwhelmed at times, Page is also eager. Many of the political attacks on trans people—whether it is a mandate that bathroom use be determined by birth sex, a blanket ban on medical interventions for trans kids or the suggestion that trans men are simply wayward women beguiled by male privilege—carry the same subtext: that trans people are mistaken about who they are. “We know who we are,” Page says. “People cling to these firm ideas [about gender] because it makes people feel safe. But if we could just celebrate all the wonderful complexities of people, the world would be such a better place.”

Even if Page weren’t vocal, his public presence would communicate something powerful. That is in part because of what Paisley Currah, a professor of political science at Brooklyn College, calls “visibility gaps.” Historically, trans women have been more visible, in culture and in Hollywood, than trans men. There are many explanations: Our culture is obsessed with femininity. Men’s bodies are less policed and scrutinized. Patriarchal people tend to get more emotional about who is considered to be in the same category as their daughters. “And a lot of trans men don’t stand out as trans,” says Currah, who is a trans man himself. “I think we’ve taken up less of the public’s attention because masculinity is sort of the norm.”

During our interviews, Page will repeatedly refer to himself as a “transgender guy.” He also calls himself nonbinary and queer, but for him, transmasculinity is at the center of the conversation right now. “It’s a complicated journey,” he says, “and an ongoing process.”

While the visibility gap means that trans men have been spared some of the hate endured by trans women, it has also meant that people like Page have had fewer models. “There were no examples,” Page says of growing up in Halifax in the 1990s. There are many queer people who have felt “that how they feel deep inside isn’t a real thing because they never saw it reflected back to them,” says Tiq Milan, an activist, author and transgender man. Page offers a reflection: “They can see that and say, ‘You know what, that’s who I am too,’” Milan says. When there aren’t examples, he says, “people make monsters of us.”

For decades, that was something Hollywood did. As detailed in the 2020 Netflix documentary Disclosure, transgender people have been portrayed onscreen as villainous and deceitful, tragic subplots or the butt of jokes. In a sign of just how far the industry has come—spurred on by productions like Pose and trailblazers like Mock—Netflix offered to change the credits on The Umbrella Academy the same day that its star posted his statement on social media. Now when an episode ends, the first words viewers see are “Elliot Page.”

Today, there are many out trans and nonbinary actors, directors and producers. Storylines involving trans people are more common, more respectful. Sometimes that aspect of identity is even incidental, rather than the crux of a morality tale. And yet Hollywood can still seem a frightening place for LGBTQ people to come out. “It’s an industry that says, ‘Don’t do that,’” says director Silas Howard, who got his break on Amazon’s show Transparent, which made efforts to hire transgender crew members. “I wouldn’t have been hired if they didn’t have a trans initiative,” Howard says. “I’m always aware of that.”

So what will it mean for Page’s career? While Page has appeared in many projects, he also faced challenges landing female leads because he didn’t fit Hollywood’s narrow mold. Since Page’s Instagram post, his team is seeing more activity than they have in years. Many of the offers coming in—to direct, to produce, to act—are trans-related, but there are also some “dude roles.”

Downtime in quarantine helped Page accept his gender identity. “I was finally able to embrace being transgender,” he says.

Page was attracted to the role of Vanya in The Umbrella Academy because—in the first season, released in 2019—Vanya is crushed by self-loathing, believing herself to be the only ordinary sibling in an extraordinary family. The character can barely summon the courage to move through the world. “I related to how much Vanya was closed off,” Page says. Now on set filming the third season, co-workers have seen a change in the actor. “It seems like there’s a tremendous weight off his shoulders, a feeling of comfort,” says showrunner Steve Blackman. “There’s a lightness, a lot more smiling.” For Page, returning to set has been validating, if awkward at times. Yes, people accidentally use the wrong pronouns—“It’s going to be an adjustment,” Page says—but co-workers also see and acknowledge him.

The debate over whether cisgender people, who have repeatedly collected awards for playing trans characters, should continue to do so has largely been settled. However, trans actors have rarely been considered for cisgender parts. Whatever challenges might lie ahead, Page seems exuberant about playing a new spectrum of roles. “I’m really excited to act, now that I’m fully who I am, in this body,” Page says. “No matter the challenges and difficult moments of this, nothing amounts to getting to feel how I feel now.”

This includes having short hair again. During our interview, Page keeps rearranging strands on his forehead. It took a long time for him to return to the barber’s chair and ask to cut it short, but he got there. And how did that haircut feel?

Page tears up again, then smiles. “I just could not have enjoyed it more,” he says.”

[noandpickles]

Just read an article from the washington examiner about a young trans boy being "secretly transitioned" by his school (i.e., they used his name and pronouns but didn't out him to his parents). It's based on one interview with one transphobic parent, and after reading it, I suspect that even that interview was made up out of whole cloth.

For one thing, the article is trying to argue the whole town was overrun by the "trans social contagion," but it doesn't even mention what town that is, which makes it impossible to fact check. It's apparently a town in Alaska with a dozen ftm students at the local middle school, where the school administrators and counselors are all aggressively trans-affirming. While I don't think that's impossible, I also think it's exactly the conservative nightmare scenario a fear mongering journalist would make up to scare parents into voting for republicans. (The article included a very direct reference to Joe Biden's attempts to protect trans kids lol.)

Normally I wouldn't go on a whole rant about something like this, but this is the second article I've seen this week about schools "secretly transitioning" students. (Again, that literally just means using their name/pronouns at school without outing them to their parents.) This seems to be the new conservative buzzword to make people afraid of trans people, the government, and public schools. It makes uninformed parents imagine that their kids are going to be given HRT or undergo fucking surgery without their parents' knowledge if they aren't careful about keeping their schools as transphobic as possible (or homeschool their kids).

So just to be clear, "secretly transitioning" kids at school is just a scary word for the exact thing schools SHOULD DO, so even if that fake-looking article is based on a true story, it hasn't even alleged anything that would be a problem.

[whitehotharlots]

Previewing the 2024 Democrat Primary

Within a couple weeks of his being sworn in, just about every person on earth will wish Joe Biden was no longer president. Sure, the few surviving John B. Anderson voters will be thrilled to see 4 years of crushing austerity and half-assed attempts at Keynesian stimulus. But most people will begin dreaming about a brighter future.

Good news! The 2024 Democratic primary field is going to contain dozens of options. Bad news! They are all going to be disgusting piles of shit. 

The “top tier”

While it’s too early to do any handicapping, these are the candidates the media will treat as having the most realistic chances of securing the nomination. 

Kamala Harris

Kamala did not win a single primary delegate in 2020. This is because she dropped out before the first primary, and that was because no one likes her. She has no base beyond a few thousand of twitter’s most violent psychos. Her disingenuousness approaches John Edwards levels: any halfway incredulous person can see immediately beyond her bullshit. She has no principles whatsoever, and while that may be par for the course for Democrats, she lacks even the basic politician’s ability to intuit anything that might, hypothetically, constitute a principle. 

Even better: she is an awful public speaker. She sounds like how a talking dog would speak if he were just caught stealing people food off the kitchen table. She communicates in weird grunts and faux sassy squeaks, which is how she imagines real black women sound like, but something about her is unable to sell the bit. She begins her sentences in halfhearted AAVE, stops and panics halfway through as she realizes that maybe this sounds fake and offensive, and then reminds herself oh wait, no, this is okay since I’m black. This doesn’t happen once or twice per speech. This is how every single sentence sounds. 

Kamala is like Nancy Pelosi in that no sketch show will ever impersonate her correctly, because anything that came close to authenticity would be considered far too cruel. This might benefit her in the primaries, as she exists in the minds of Democrats as someone and something she absolutely is not in reality. Nominating her would be like allowing your child’s imaginary friend to attempt to drive you to the store. 

Andrew Cuomo

Easily one of the 50 worst people alive, Cuomo has a solid chance because Democrats, same as Republicans, are unable to differentiate between electability and self-serving ruthlessness. Cuomo used the deadliest public health crisis in American history as a pretext for cutting Medicaid and firing 5,000 MTA workers, and his approval rating increased. New York Dems are little piggies who love eating shit. If we assume that the political media will continue their habit of refusing to discuss the legislative history of right wing Democrats, Cuomo might well cruise to the nomination and then lose to literally any human being the GOP nominates by an historic margin. 

Joe Biden

The party loves him because he is a right wing racist. “Progressives” tolerate him because black primary voters over 40 supported him, and their opinion is supposedly a magic window into god’s truth. Everyone else can tell he is manifestly senile. I don’t put it above the DNC to pick a candidate who is in horrible health, dying, or even dead--whatever the financial sector wants, they’ll get. But I would be shocked if his approval rating is above 39% by mid-2023, and by that point deep fake technology will be advanced enough they’ll put out a very lifelike video in which the Max Headroom version of Joe explains he’s proud of his accomplishments--that budget’s almost balanced already--but, man, I gotta abd--I gotta abdica--, uhh, I gotta, I, uhh, I gotta move down, man. 

Wild Cards

These candidates would have all have a chance if they ran, but they could all much more easily retire to Little Saint James off of kickbacks they’ve gotten from Citibank and I.G. Farben. 

Rahm Emanuel

Rahm is going to receive some hugely influential post in the Biden administration. Let’s say he becomes Secretary of Education. His signature achievement will be replacing all elementary school teachers with Amazon’s Alexa, which saved the taxpayers so much money we were able to quadruple the number of armed police officers we put into high schools. This will give him several thousand positive profiles on network news programs and the near-universal support of the Silicon Valley vampires who will own 99% of the country by the time Biden’s term ends. They will use their fancy mind control devices to convince geriatic primary voters that Rahm’s the one who will bring Decency back to the white house. His candidacy will be the paragon of wokeness, as expressing concern toward the fact that he covered up the police murder of a black guy will get you called a racist. 

Rahm has a bonus in that Jewish men are now Schrodeniger’s PoC. When they are decent human beings, they are basic, cis white men who are stealing attention from disabled trans candidates of color. When they love austerity and apartheid, they become the most vulnerable people of color on earth and criticizing them in any way is genocide. No one will be able to mention a single thing Rahm has ever done or said without opening themselves to accusations of antisemitism, and that gives him a strong edge against the rest of the field. The good news is that an Emmanuel candidacy would result in over 50% of black voters choosing the GOP candidate--which, I guess that’s not really good but it would certainly be funny. 

Gavin Newsom

Newsom is every bit as feckless as Cuomo, but he doesn’t put off the same “bad guy in an early Steven Segal movie” vibes. He will mention climate change 50 times per speech and no one will bother to mention how he keeps signing fracking contracts even though his state is now on fire 11 months of the year. If anything, this will be spun into an argument about how he’s actually the candidate best suited to handle all the water refugees gathering on the southern border. Look for his plan to curb emissions by 10% by the year 2150 to get high marks from Sierra Club nerds. He’s also a celebate librarian’s idea of what constitutes a handsome man, so he’ll have some support from the type of women who claim to hate all men. 

Larry Summers

I mean, why not? Larry, like most members of the Obama administration, has politics that are eerily similar to those of Jordan Peterson. In normal circumstances, this makes a person a dangerous fascist who should not be platformed. But if that person has a D next to their name this makes them a realistic pragmatist who has what it takes to bring suburban bankers into our tent. If current trends in Woke Phrenology continue apace, Larry’s belief that women are inherently bad at STEM will be liberal orthodoxy by 2023, and his dedication to the Laffer Curve could see him rake in massive donations. Seriously, I’m not kidding: cultural liberalism is now fully dedicated to identity essentialism and balanced budgets. Larry is their ideal candidate. If he were black and/or a woman, I’d put him in the very top tier. 

Jay Inslee

Unlike Newsom, Inslee’s attempt to crown himself the King of Global Warming won’t be immediately derailed, since his state is only on fire because of protestors. This, however, poses a different problem. He’s going to be a good test case for the Democrat’s uneasy peace with the ever increasing share of the electorate who become catatonic upon hearing a pronoun. On the one hand, you need to take their votes for granted. On the other hand, they’re not like black people or regular gays: most voters actively, consciously despise wokies, and associating yourself with them will ruin a campaign even in deep blue areas. There’s still gonna be riots in a year. Biden’s gonna announce the sale of all our nation’s potable water to the good folks at Nestle and some trans freak named Sasha-Malia DeBalzac is going to use that as an opportunity to sell their new pamphlet about how it’s fascist to not burn down small businesses. No matter what Inslee does in response, it’ll end his career. 

AOC

I’m not one of those “AOC is a secret conservative” weirdos, but I am aware enough of basic reality to know she has zero chance of coming close to the nomination. The right and the center both regard her as a literal demon. The party is already blaming her for the fact that a handful of faceless Reagan acolytes failed to flip their suburban districts even though they ran on sensible pragmatic proposals like euthanizing the homeless. The recriminations will only get more unhinged when the Dems eat shit in the 2022 midterms. She will be a Russian, she will be white male, she will be a communist, she will be a homophobe: any insult or conspiracy theory you can name, MSNBC will spend hours discussing. Her house seat challenger will receive a record amount of support from the DNC in 2024 and it’ll be all she can do to remain in congress.

Larry Hogan

Don’t be dissuaded by the fact that he’s a Republican. Larry is the DNC’s ideal candidate: a physically repulsive conservative who owes his entire career to appealing to the most spiteful desires of suburban white people. He’s an open racist in a material sense--if you’re old-school enough to think racism is a matter of beliefs and actions, rather than the presence of cultural signifiers--but his is the beloved “never Trump” style of racism that Dems covet. He’s also a Proven Leader who thinks the role of government should be to finance the construction of investment property and give police the resources they need to run successful drug trafficking operations. Few people embody the Democrat worldview more than Larry. 

The Losers Bracket

These people will have at least a small chance due solely to the fact that the Democrats love losing. They have lost in the past, and in the Democrat Mind that makes them especially qualified.

Joe Kennedy

The man looks like a mushroom-human hybrid from a JRPG. Trump proved that physical hideousness need not doom a presidential bid, but a candidate still needs some kind of charm or oratorical abilities or, god forbid, a decent platform. Joe aggressively lacks all of these things. A vanity campaign would be a good way to raise money and perhaps secure an MSNBC gig, so Joe might still run. 

Mayor Pete 

I am 100% convinced that Pete’s 2020 run was a CIA plot meant to prevent working class Americans from ever having a chance of living decent lives. I am also 100% aware that Democrats are dumb enough to enthusiastically support a CIA plot meant to prevent working class Americans from ever having a chance of living decent lives. If we have some sort of military or terror disaster between now and 2023 the Dems are sure to want a TROOP, and wait wait wait you’re telling me this one is a gay troop? Holy hell there’s no way that could lose!

Stacy Abrams

Never underestimate the power of white guilt. She lost the gubernatorial race to Gomer Pyle’s grandson, and her spiritual guidance of the Dems saw the party lose black voters in Georgia in 2020. Nonetheless, she is regarded as a magic font of fierceness within the DNC. She might stand a chance if she can establish herself as the most conservative non-white candidate in the field, but there’s going to be stiff competition for that honor.

Elizabeth Warren

Liz is probably angry that the party so shamelessly sold her out even after she was a good little girl and sabatoged Bernie’s campaign for them--yet another example of high ranking US government officials reneging on their promises to the Native American community. Smdh. The fact that this woman hasn’t been bankrupted a dozen times over by various Wallet Inspectors genuinely astounds me. So Liz is probably going to run again, and her campaign will be even sadder the second time around. 

It might surprise you to hear this if you don’t work at a college or NGO, but Liz diehards actually do exist. She’ll get even less support this time because there will be no viable leftist in the field for her to spoil, but she’ll still hang in long enough to make sure the very worst possible candidate beats out the second worst possible candidate. Maybe she’ll fabricate a rape accusation against Sherrod Brown. Maybe she’ll spend her entire allotted debate time doing a land acknowledgment. With Liz, anything is possible--so long as it ends in failure. 

Amy Klobuchar 

Amy was the most bloodthirsty of the 2020 also rans. She will double down on the unpopular failures of the Biden administration, explaining that if you weren’t such a selfish idiot you’d love the higher social security retirement age and oh my god are so such a moron you think you shouldn’t go bankrupt to get a COVID vaccine? There’s a non-unsubstantial segment of the Democratic base that’s self-hating enough to find this appealing, but it won’t be enough to make her viable. 

Martha Coakley

She lost Ted Kennedy’s senate seat to a retarded man who was pretending to be even more retarded than he actually was. Then she lost a gubernatorial race to a guy who openly promised Massachusetts voters that he would punish them for electing him. Her record of failure is unparalleled, making her perhaps the ideal Democrat standard bearer for the twenty twenties. 

[the-daily-tizzy]

It's a War

By David Horowitz

Originally published at Frontpagemag.com

By now it should be obvious - even to conservatives - that we are in a war. It is a conflict that began nearly fifty years ago when the street revolutionaries of the Sixties joined the Democrat Party. Their immediate goal was to help the Communist enemy win the war in Vietnam, but they stayed to expand their influence in the Democrat Party and create the radical force that confronts us today. The war that today’s Democrats are engaged in reflects the values and methods of those radicals. It is a war against us - against individual freedom, against America’s constitutional order, and against the capitalist engine of our prosperity.

Democrat radicals know what they want and where they are going. As a result, they are tactically and organizationally years ahead of patriotic Americans who are only beginning to realize they are in a war. The Democrats’ plan to steal the 2020 election was hatched many years ago when Democrats launched their first attacks on Voter I.D.s, and then every effort to secure the integrity of the electoral system. Those attacks metastasized into an all-out assault on Election Day itself with early- and late-voting grace periods, and a flood of 92 million mail-in ballots, hundreds of thousands of which were delivered in the middle of the night to be counted behind the backs of Republican observers after Election Day had passed.

The result of these efforts is that Election Day no longer really exists as a day when the votes are cast and counted. This is a fact that offers generous opportunities for the election saboteurs to do their work. Those saboteurs’ opportunities were greatly enhanced this year with the installation in battle ground states of voting machines specifically designed to calculate how many votes were required to steal an election and then to switch ballots already cast and deliver them to the chosen party. Mail-in ballots were indispensable to the realization of this plan.

I will not dwell at length on the years it took the Republican Party, and American patriots, to recognize what the Democrat Party had become or the threat it posed to our country as an enemy within. Suffice it to say that Republicans can still be heard referring to Democrats as “liberals” when it is obvious even to them that there is nothing liberal about their principles or methods. They are vindictive bigots who are actively destroying the First Amendment in our universities, on the Internet and in our once but no longer free press. Suffice it to note that while Democrats accuse Republicans including the President of being racists and traitors, the response of Republican leaders is this: “Oh, the Democrats are just playing politics.”

This is not “playing” people. It is war. They are trying to kill us politically, and we need to respond accordingly, to fight fire with fire. Today’s Democrat Party is a party of character assassins and racists. Republicans know this but are reluctant to say it. That is how a pathological liar and corrupt political whore like Joe Biden can accuse the choice of 73 million Americans of being a white supremacist and also murdering 220,000 corona virus patients. That’s why Biden and his gunslingers can do so with no consequences – without so much as a wrist slap – from “moderates” and independents, who know better. The Democrats’ ability to intimidate well-meaning Americans is that great.

Is this too blanket a condemnation? 

Where, then, is the Democrat who was outraged by the four-year Russia collusion hoax and the failed coup and impeachment attempts – all of which accused the president, without a shred of evidence, of treason? 

Where was the Democrat who dissented from the public lynching of an exemplary public servant, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, over an incident that never happened 37 years ago at a time when he was a high school kid? 

Where is the Democrat who has condemned the violent street criminals of Antifa and Black Lives Matter who got away with conducting the most destructive civic insurrection in American history, orchestrating mayhem and disrespect for the law that led to the murders of scores of people who happen to have been mainly black?

What follows is a basic vocabulary for understanding the political war that has engulfed us. 

When it is used by enough Americans who love their country, it will cancel the surreal universe that Democrats’ lies have imposed on us, and the war will be on its way to being won.

Democrats are not democrats; they are totalitarians. 

They have declared war on the First Amendment, the Second Amendment, the Electoral College, the Senate, the Supreme Court, the election system, and the idea of civil order. 

They have called for the Republican President of the United States to be de-platformed and jailed. 

Their obvious goal is a one-party state that criminalizes dissent. 

To them, support for such basic necessities as borders and law enforcement are racist. 

If you oppose their efforts to legalize infanticide, they will condemn you as enemies of women, and if you make videos of their confessions to selling body parts of murdered infants, they will - like Kamala Harris - throw you in jail.

Progressives are not progressive; they are reactionaries. 

They are out to abolish liberal value systems and create a status hierarchy where race, gender, and sexual orientation define and confine you to an unalterable place in their new social order. 

If you are white or male or heterosexual or religious – Justice Kavanaugh was all four - you are guilty before the fact.

But if you are a member of a designated (but increasingly imaginary) “victim” group you are innocent even when the facts show you are guilty - like the reprehensible female who lied to Congress in a calculated attempt to destroy Kavanaugh’s life and career. 

If you are a member of a “victim” group you have an unlimited license to persecute others. 

Thus, the LGBTQ lobby is currently behind a nation-wide crusade to strip Christians of their First Amendment rights and criminalize their religion. They use their victim status to leverage their hate of people who don’t embrace their agendas, and deploy it to crush them – and only Republicans seem to care.

Identity politics is a pure form of racism, yet Trump is the only Republican I’m aware of who has had the political spine to call a Democrat a racist. 

Identity “wokism” is a totalitarian politics because it encompasses every aspect of life, down to the pronouns one is ordered to use. 

The progressive police state will leave no space free.

Racists and aspiring totalitarians are what Democrats have become. 

The only moral principle they are guided by is the old Bolshevik saw, “the ends justify the means.” 

They will say anything however false and condone anything, however criminal, which advances their goal of maximum power.

Since race is the principal weapon wielded by Democrats, this is most evident in their claim that there is “systemic racism” in America, which needs to be rooted out even if it means destroying the very foundations of law and order. 

When two Republican canvassers refused to certify the election result in Detroit – a city once the richest in America but now mainly black and poor thanks to fifty-nine years of misrule by Democrats – they were accused of “systemic racism.” This charge and the accompanying threats by the Democrat mob were so intimidating the two withdrew their objections. 

But if there was in fact election fraud in Detroit, to object to it is not by any stretch of the imagination “systemic racism.” To believe otherwise is to believe that black people, due to their skin color, are incapable of committing election fraud. 

How racist is that?

“Systemic racism” is an assertion made reflexively by Democrats that is never accompanied by evidence. 

For good reason. 

Systemic racism has been outlawed in America since the Civil Rights Act of 1964. 

If there were actual instances of systemic racism in 2020, there would be lawsuits – plenty of them. 

Even making the racist assumption, which the Identity Politics crowd does make, that all white people are white supremacists by dint of their skin color, there are tens of thousands of black lawyers, prosecutors, district attorneys, attorneys general, and elected officials who would be filing lawsuits over a practice that is illegal. 

You never hear of massive lawsuits over systemic racism, because “systemic racism” is a myth. 

The myth lives because it is an indispensable weapon wielded by Democrats to advance their anti-democratic agendas and quests for power.

But the only reason Democrats are able to do this so successfully – even going so far as to justify the arson, looting and general destruction in more than 600 American cities this summer – is because Republicans, and conservatives generally, are too cowardly to confront them. 

This war will continue until patriotic Americans summon the courage to call Democrats the racists, liars, character assassins and aspiring totalitarians that they actually are. 

And to do so in so many words. 

Blowback works.

David Horowitz is the author of The Enemy Within: How A Totalitarian Movement is Destroying America

⚠️Re-blog at your own risk...while you still can...

[ladyhistorypod]

Episode 14: Thanksgiving Special

Sources:

Susan La Flesche

The History Reader

PBS: New Perspectives on the West

Hampton University

Hampton Archives

Nebraska Studies

Further Reading/Watching: PBS American Masters, Smithsonian Magazine

Sacagawea

Brooklyn Museum

National Museum of the American Indian Blog

Native Mascots And Other Misguided Beliefs (NMAI)

National Women’s History Museum

Nat Geo Kids

Ted Ed

Further Reading: Smithsonian American Women: Remarkable Objects and Stories of Strength, Ingenuity, and Vision from the National Collection, I Am Sacagawea, Sacajawea of the Shoshone

Zitkala-Sa

Utah Women’s History

Women and the American Story

Akta Lakota Museum and Cultural Center

National Parks Service

Further Reading: Women in America, Extra and Ordinary: Zitkala-Sa (Smithsonian Libraries)

Click below for the transcript of this episode!

Haley: So how old are your guys’ parents, and did you ever growing up like regard them as like the old parents?

Alana: My… so my… Here's what's really fucking me up these days, is that Joe Biden graduated from the University of Delaware the same year my dad was born. So my dad was born in June of 1965 and Joe Biden graduated University of Delaware probably like May of 1965. So that's what's making me uncomfortable these days.

Lexi: You know when my mom graduated from the University of Delaware?

Alana: When?

Lexi: The nineties. (Laughing)

Alana: So my parents, they’re like kind of old. My mom was born in 1963, but my mom is also the third of four children.

Haley: Because my mom was born in ‘69 and my dad ‘67. And Robert’s parents… I don't know exactly when they were born but I know it's in the cluster of my parents. But my mom and dad were always regarded as like the younger parents. And it came up today because my sister's boyfriend's parents have always been regarded– my mom's like oh they’re older because my sister's boyfriend, Stephen, is the youngest of four. So my mom and dad got married three days after my mom graduated from college, but they waited seven years. Like they owned a freakin’ Subway and went backpacking in Europe before having me. Like they lived their life, if you will, and then they had kids. But all my friends, like growing up, all their parents are like five to ten years older than my parents.

Lexi: So my parents got married at twenty three.

Alana: Also ridiculous.

Lexi: They were born in 1972. No shade giving my mom’s age out, but honestly she's super young. We get mistaken for sisters no matter where we go, especially if we’re with my grandmother. They tell her she has two lovely daughters. I don't know if that's an insult to me or a compliment to my mother… 

Haley: A compliment to your mother.

Alana: It’s definitely a compliment to your mother.

Lexi: My mother was invited to frat parties when she visited me in college several times.

Haley: No, your mother is smokin’ hot. Like my mother–

Lexi: She was the marching band MILF. Do you know the song Stacy's Mom?

Alana: Of course I know Stacy's Mom.

Lexi: The marching band, when we played it would sing Lexi’s mom.

Alana, singing: Lexi’s mom has got it goin’ on.

[INTRO MUSIC]

Alana: Hello and welcome to Lady History; the good, the bad, and the ugly ladies you missed in history class. by whipping sort of as always is Lexi Lexi what are you thankful for.

Lexi: I am thankful for you guys.

Alana: That’s gross. I am also joined(ish) by Haley. Haley, are you a white meat or dark meat kinda gal?

Haley: I really like– I guess like the– like a turkey leg? That’s dark meat. That’s my jam. I'm also not necessarily a turkey person.

Alana: And I'm Alana and I'm team captain of the cranberry sauce defense squad.

[Turkeys gobbling]

Alana: I don't think there is a good word for the people who were in the Americas before white people came to the Americas.

Lexi: There is not a good single word.

Haley: I also think that it's not us as non those people… 

Alana: That's the thing. And that was the conversation that we had–

Haley: And I hate that I said “those people” because it shouldn’t be “those people” but like

but like for my grad school, we have a whole section of like repatriation, NAGPRA, all that lovely good stuff in our law class. And with our history and theory class there's always like this– kinda wanna call it a symposium?– We asked the question, and I think it was my professor who posed it, because she's like I have to talk about it and I'm a Jewish white woman. I know people like have their preference on Jewish people versus Jews and I want to be able to teach the correct thing. And everyone in the room said Native Peoples just because so many different tribes or groups don't consider themselves American. So that’s what I use. And I like that the like phrase and I’m probably– someone else probably saying this but I’m gonna make it up for myself right now; just go with what you know until you're proven wrong. Because like that's what I know and like for now.

Alana: But that's the thing that we were talking about not on the podcast, elsewhere, about how like I've never heard an actual Latinx person use the phrase Latinx.

Haley: I do not consider myself–

Alana: Except for on One Day at a Time actually.

Lexi: I feel like I always go with if I need to call someone something I'm going to ask them–

Haley: Yes.

Lexi: –What they identify as, and if I don't know them well enough to have that conversation maybe I shouldn't be speaking for them in any way… Or not speaking for them, but I shouldn't be like representing them. But it's really complicated when we talk about history because a lot of the words we use didn't exist then. Like Ida B. Wells considered herself Negro, and we wouldn't… we wouldn't probably use that word now.

Haley: Well like with pronouns. We don’t assume–

Alana: Exactly.

Haley: –pronouns. So like… Because I feel very weird when people like assume like my race or ethnicity. And I identify that… I identify with being Persian or Cuban more so than being a female if that makes sense.

Lexi: Right.

Haley: I've never… it's not like I'm non– like non binary. I identify as female but I've never been like a FEMALE.

Speaker 3: I feel like with gender it's so– so easy to once you decide to do it just start using they as a default when you're not sure what someone's preference is, and there's not that for race or ethnicity. There’s not like a default word where you can say a word and not be offensive. Like, okay. It's like the thing with the Washington Redskins which is now the Washington Football Team. There were a lot–

Alana: Which is what my cousin always called it. Was always calling it the Washington Football Team.

Lexi: Actually apparently they picked that because a lot of people did just call it that. But also it's not even in Washington DC so it frustrates the crap out of me. But apparently like a bunch of people were up in arms about it that were Native peoples but then a bunch of Native peoples were like nah it's chill. And so it's like you can't say that all these people agree on something.

Haley: Yeah.

Alana: Yeah.

Haley: That's where we go back to like–

Lexi: There isn't a single hive mind of all of these people you’re trying to represent. Everyone has these own little different versions. And so, you know, what I've been told by a lot of people is like narrow it down. Like for example if you're Omaha, you’re Omaha. If you’re Hoganashone you’re Hoganashone. Because that's how they like refer to themselves.

Haley: Yeah. Yes. And I’ve heard this too. Like– I’m gonna say this. I was on Tik Tok.

(Alana and Lexi laughing)

Lexi: Honestly cultural Tik Tok is very fun. Like culture-based Tik Tok.

Haley: I’ve landed myself on what was called by this group of Tik Tok– this flavor of Tik Tok– Native and Indigenous Tik Tok.

Lexi: Yeah I've seen that.

Haley: But I noticed that for the Tik Tok-ers who are in Canada would use Indigenous.

Alana: I will never tell someone of one group that something is not anti that group because I don't want gentiles to tell me what is and what is not antisemitic, I don't want men to tell me what is and is not misogynistic, I don't want… what's my other identity? Oh, I'm queer. I don't want straight people to tell me what is and is not homophobic–

Haley: “What's my other identity?”

Alana: “What’s my other identity?”

Lexi: “I can’t remember. I’ve got so many.”

Alana: What’s my other one? I’m like marginalized in three different ways and I don’t remember what the third one is.

Archival Audio: For our clinics are all specialized. Wednesday afternoons, for instance, we only see expectant mothers. But each one is a different problem, because each one is a different person. They feel they're special, too, and always seem amazed when they discover they have something in common with the other women, but that’s natural. After all, we all think of our health problems as personal problems.

Lexi: Today I'm going to tell you the story of Susan La Flesche, the first Native American to receive a medical degree. And as we discussed, we’re not sure exact on the terms people prefer. Susan lived a long time ago and regarded herself as Native American, that’s why I'm using that term, but I understand that some people may not use that term to refer to themselves. But she identified as that, so that's what I'm calling her. So yes, she was the first Native American to receive a medical degree. Susan was an Omaha woman. Her father Iron Eyes, or Chief Joseph La Flesche, the last Omaha chief selected by traditional tribal methods, and he was the son of a Frenchman and an Omaha woman so he was half French, half Omaha. And as a chief he believed the only way to save his people was to mix elements of their culture with Western culture and for his people to get an education. And it was these beliefs that shaped Susan's future. Her mother was One Woman, or Mary La Flesche, and Susan was born on the Omaha reservation in Nebraska in 1865. As a child Susan, witnessed a Native woman die because the local white doctor would not provide her care. This event sparked Susan’s interest in becoming a medical professional, with the goal of helping Native people. She attended a school on the reservation until she was fourteen and then she went to the Elizabeth Institute for Young Ladies in New Jersey. Can you imagine being fourteen years old and traveling from Nebraska to New Jersey on a train by yourself? That’s crazy. That’s absolutely crazy.

Alana: Goals. I wanna do it. I love trains. I love trains. I wanna do it.

Lexi: So I think she must have been really brave, because it just that's… that's pretty amazing. A long trip for a little girl.

Alana: Especially as like first of all it being a young woman which is already dangerous, no matter what, and she's also from this like marginalized community.

Lexi: Yes.

Alana: That it's like double dangerous, quadruple dangerous because she was fourteen.

Lexi: Yeah. It's crazy. It's crazy. Must’ve been really really brave. And really wanted to go to the school I guess. So she went there for three years and at seventeen Susan returned home and she taught at the Mission School on the Omaha reservation. At the school, she worked with Alice Fletcher, who was a white woman who was an ethnologist who studied and recorded American Indian culture. And she came to live and work with the Omaha because of her passion for archaeology so she wanted to study living people to better understand the past, which has been–

Alana: Ethnographic archaeology.

Lexi: Yeah it's a thing that a lot of archaeologists like to do. When Fletcher fell ill, Susan helped her recover, and after seeing Susan’s skills and passions for medicine and health care, Fletcher urged Susan to travel east and pursue a degree in medicine. Susan enrolled in the Hampton Institute, which was a school in Virginia that was built after the Civil War to educate formerly enslaved people and had since become a hub for educating Black Americans and American Indians. When Susan was attending Hampton, a woman named Dr. Martha Waldron was working as a teacher and the resident physician at the school. Martha was a graduate of the Women's Medical College of Pennsylvania and suggested that Susan pursue further education there. Alice Fletcher, who had encouraged Susan to study medicine, assisted Susan by helping her apply for scholarships from the US Office of Indian Affairs and the Women's National Indian Association. In 1889, after two years in a three year program, Susan graduated top of her class from medical school. She spent one year doing an internship, which was similar to a modern day medical residency program in Philadelphia and then she returned home. At home, she became the primary care provider for about twelve hundred people, working at the reservation’s boarding school. In 1894, she married Henry Picotte, a Sioux man who had previously been traveling and working in Wild West shows. And they kept it all in the family with Susan's sister Marguerite deciding to marry Harry's brother Charles. So… that’s… that’s fun! After getting married, Henry and Susan had two sons and Susan opened a private practice which served both non white and white patients in her community. When Henry fell ill, Susan personally nursed him, all while working full time and caring for their two sons. At the age of forty, Susan became partially deaf, but kept working. In addition to being a doctor, Susan ran a children's library, worked as a Sunday school teacher, founded a quilting club, translated legal papers, and advocated for prohibition. In 1913, she opened a reservation hospital serving Omaha and Winnebago tribes. It was the first private hospital on a reservation anywhere in the country. Today, the building is a museum dedicated to tribal history and telling the story of Susan. In 1915, at just fifty years old, Susan passed away. Susan was important to her people because as aspects of their culture were taken away from them, she was able to draw a balance between traditional medicine and the practices that she learned at Western medical school. This worked because many of her people were still unsure about Western medicine, so by mixing their traditional healing practices with Western practices, she was able to develop a culturally specific plan of treatment. Her people grew to trust her and she began to be regarded as a modern medicine woman. She is a great example of why cultural representation is important and can impact public health. I also highly suggest watching the PBS video that I linked on the tumblr in the further watching. It’s super well made and it tells a really wonderful version of her story in a lot more detail than we're able to cover on our show and it has really good tie-ins to modern needs of communities like Susan's and interviews some modern female doctors and their communities which is really cool. That’s it. Short one.

Haley: I like– I like that story a lot.

Alana: I like that story too.

Lexi: Yeah there's not a lot about her like… 

Alana: Right.

Lexi: People don't record shit, so it’s mostly just her accomplishments, unfortunately.

(Audio from Night at The Museum)

Haley: So my story is about– drum roll please– the retelling of the story of Sacagawea. And for all of you who might be screaming my name right now, saying Hey I'm not pronouncing her name correctly, hold the phone we’ll get there. I first need to do my universal apologies for pronouncing any words, even historically American English words, incorrectly because we all know me; words aren't the greatest for my speech mouth. And to start us off, I'm switching over to the like I said that actual pronunciation– Saka-Gawea. And it's Sacagawea because in my research there's not a soft G in the Hidatsa language, which translates to bird woman. So side note, there are a bunch of different spellings, but if we're going based on the true like translation– Sa-Ka-Ga is bird, and it's spelled with a G. So Sacagawea is Sacajawea but just like–

Lexi: Can I just say, that's way prettier than Sacajawea.

Haley: Yeah because like for some Sacagawea it's like you have the G, or you have S. A. K. A. K. A. W. E. A, or instead of the G. it’s a J. But there's no hard – or, there's no soft Gs it's only hard Gs. And as a person who has a really hard time pronouncing things from reading because of the dyslexia spectrum that we know to love, it's gonna– it's gonna be balls to the walls bananas.

Alana: It's like… Was it the first Night at the Museum movie or the second Night at the Museum movie where she was like a character?

Lexi: The first.

Alana: The first one. And then the museum like–

Lexi, whispering: And then she fell in love with Theodore Roosevelt

Alana: Oh yeah, and then she fell in love with Theodore Roosevelt which was so… oh NO.

Haley: I’m glad you brought that up because I cut that part out.

Lexi: That’s a whole can of worms.

Alana: But like there's that whole thing about them pronouncing it wrong but it's always Sacaga-wee-ah or Sacaga-way-a, and I’m like both of you are wrong.

Haley: Glad you brought up Night at the Museum because I had a whole tangent on that but then I was like roll back Haley your notes are already long to begin with.

Alana: You cannot expect me to not bring up Night at the Museum if it is even tangentially relevant.

Lexi: I love them, I hate them. It's an incredible thing.

Haley: Yeah.

Alana: Rami Malek!

Haley: Yes he was–

Alana: My first love!

Haley: Back to the notes. So for our listeners out of the United States, you may have heard of Sacagawea, of course with the Lewis and Clark exploring the west. However, I'm sorry– not sorry– to say that there's a solid chance that what you learned was completely incorrect and I'm looking at you United States education system. All of y’all education system just– the poop garbage, dumpster fire, whatever you would like to say. But let me pause for a second and explain a little bit why that story is kind of messed up because not only do we have like a white savior complex with like Lewis and Clark, we also just have a lot of sexism. Like sexism is painted in semen here. Like all over the board. No menstrual blood whatsoever to like brighten up this dreary painting of shit. Alana’s face right now is… holy crap what is she saying.

Alana: It's just a little bit like– Lexi what's the word that I'm looking for that is like… the sentiment behind it is that not all men have semen that not all women menstruate. Do you know I mean? That's my thing with–

Lexi: There's a single word? There's a single word for that? 

Alana: There’s like a word for something… like reducing it to… whatever.

Haley: Yes.

Alana: And transphobia isn't quite right.

Speaker 1: That’s exactly why I use the phrase all semen in here. Because it's totally like heterosexual men explaining–

Alana: Cis heterosexual men.

Haley: Yes.

Lexi: The cis white boys?

Haley: Yes.

Alana: The cis white boys.

Haley: The cis white boys. However, it's a reason why the paintbrush is a phallic symbol, that’s all I’m gonna say. And while I will probably not tell the most accurate story, it's gonna be a hell of a lot better than what we've been given to because… I'm gonna be up front. There's so much more research I could have done and that's with all our stories. Like I think I put like three hours at least into like average for each story, sometimes more. I put in a lot more for this one. While Sacagawea was a Native people who symbolized peace and cooperation as she like navigated Lewis and Clark– with you know, the baby strapped on her back that like famous trope we have– through the west and like the Pacific… to get to the Pacific Ocean. There's a lot more to that story. First, because their crew was a crew of forty plus people; it wasn't just like the three of them moseying along like a hundred percent of the time, but we'll get to that. And even before then, I don't know about you guys but I never heard of like her growing up or her as an actual Native person. It was always “she’s with Lewis and Clark. Like she with the white people now,” never her life story as a whole, just this one small part, but I learned about Lewis and Clark's whole life story. And boy Howdy am I gonna talk about how she saved all their collective buttholes. So, while this story is both Native people’s legend and journals from the Lewis and Clark that we keep talking about. And we know that oral tradition it still history. So there are holes obviously with this timeline, but we know that she was born, or we think she was born in the Shoshone tribe in Idaho and was kidnapped at age twelve, possibly age ten. What I didn't know though is that when she was kidnapped– I knew she was kidnapped, but this is bad, I didn't actually know who kidnapped her, and it was a neighboring tribe. I believe it was the Hidatsa tribe? It was noted as a rival tribe. And from there she was sold into slavery and forced to marry Toussaint Charbonneau– C. H. A. R. B. O. N. N. E. A. U., we’ll go with that– a French Canadian fur trapper who had other quote Shoshane “wives.” So this wasn't… this wasn't great. Like it wasn't great to begin with, but we're just like still riding that train of yes you're not gonna tell a bunch of elementary school kids this story but let's not paint the picture and happy childhood. And in 1804, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark recruited no other than– I'm gonna call him TC, TC because I can't pronounce either of his names and I'm gonna keep fumbling on it– to be their wilderness guide. The geography of it was that the country almost doubled in size, but the history of it was the Louisiana Purchase was acquired by France.

Lexi: Acquired from France.

Haley: Yes. They were already on their expedition by the time they met up with TC and Sacagaweas. Sacagawea, who was sixteen and pregnant at the time, accompanied the men, and she was the only female of this shitshow of a shindig. And by shitshow of a shindig, this was like forty something other men with Lewis and Clark– like they had a whole rodeo. And we see this a lot that if people went on an expedition it wasn't just that group of people but they brought like their cooks, their wives, their children, people to like bring their food, i.e. like livestock because we didn't have fridges and such. So that like was not surprising to me. What was surprising was like that's a valuable teaching point, was just like to teach kids how did people move from place to place. And this is at the point where Clark notes that she was the most valuable member of their group, because although T. C. was like hired to give them like geography, he was like a noted French Canadian and a fur trapper, but noted as like he was not good at like navigating compared to Sacagawea and like the other Native peoples in the area. It was obvious and even Lewis and Clark were like “oh, she better” which she was. And she spoke both Shoshone and Hidatsa, and so she was like the interpreter for the white men, like literally. And that's the part like they got correct– and they being like the education system– that point was correct. She was interpreter, and shout out to the Brooklyn Museum for literally giving me the quote “interpreter for the group of white men”. Even the Brooklyn Museum’s not playing around. And obviously these white men weren't liked amongst the other Native peoples tribes, but when they saw a woman who wasn't considered to be a warrior– and that's like the key point– it wasn't just that they had a Native person with them. it was that she had a child with her, she spoke their language, and like didn't give off any alarm bells. Because also like there's that misconception that all Native peoples were friendly to each other. There are different like rivalries amongst tribes. That was just pure luck for them that that worked out. And so of course Lewis and Clark wanted to make their main man TC because his fur trapping knowledge and like how he knew the geography. And like I said that was… sure, he did some stuff. But Sacagawea basically said hold my beer, and she clearly knew where she was supposed to go. She clearly knew also just like the weather patterns, where to find food, and multiple occasions when they were like the Yellowstone area and it's really cold at night… we're in the parts where it's just snowing and dark for many many many parts of the winter. And she would like be able to not only like find but like somewhat grow or just like keep food in a way that like they would be able to sustain themselves with eating. So it was like a group effort by everyone. It wasn't just like Lewis and Clark being like “we got this, we’re gonna do it, we're gonna get to the Pacific Ocean in the middle of the winter.” Fast forward a bit– and there are a bunch of other stories of her being a complete badass, like diving into water when their canoe tips over and saving like all the important stuff; food, even like Lewis and Clark's journals.But we have to move forward, sadly, to the end of her expedition and just give her a well rounded story like I said. I wanted to hear this as a kid. And while the expedition ended in 1806, she kind of still knew Lewis and Clark. And let me do a side note here she did not receive payment for this expedition. Because like, yeah. That sounds like the right thing to do, I say with all my sarcastic cells in my body. There are a lot of them, by the way, so we're all doing a chorus of sarcastic singing. And three years later in 1809– another side note this is where at least my history kind of definitely has different stories, there's no concrete this is what happened…  There wasn't Snapchat recording everything, I guess. Clark invited Sacagawea and her family to live in Saint Louis and he also later adopted her son Jean Baptiste, and he called him Pompy, and a baby girl Lisette. And it's noted that she separated from T. C. who was abusive, but after this point like our timeline, we call dates in history, we know very little. And again, with this debated topic, her death is in that category. So records from Fort Manuel where like she lived there at a time, she supposedly died in December 1812 from typhus. And going off what Native peoples’ oral histories because again, oral histories are histories, she lived on the Shoshone lands in Wyoming until 1884. And regardless, Sacagawea clearly became somewhat of a legend with her own story being told by writers, filmmakers, historians in a time where women especially Native and/or Indigenous women, were absolutely thought of as weak, not helpful, and sometimes even dangerous. So you might be asking yourself, “Haley, where do I find other resources?” Obviously check out our show notes, they are quite lovely, and honestly children's books. The most recent ones were kind of on point. They're all about like– especially now in 2020. And then specifically in the show notes look at the Brooklyn Museum and the National Women's History Museum. And that is my story.

Alana: Hey National Women’s History Museum, do you want to give me an internship?

Haley, singing: Manifestation.

(Archival Violin Music)

Alana: Zitkala-Sa was born February 22, 1876, that makes her a Pisces. She's technically an Aquarius/Pisces cusp. And Zitkala-Sa means red bird in the Sioux language. She was born on the Yankton Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Her mother was Sioux and her father was white. Her father abandoned the family and initially when I see white father, Indigenous mother… that is alarm bells in my head, but she did have an older brother, so less alarm bells. Quieter alarm bells. And just as an FYI, a blanket statement, we had the discussion that we're not really sure if we should say Native or Indigenous so I kind of use both, mixing it up. If you know someone who has an opinion let us know and we’ll use that going forward. I think that's kind of a good general statement for this podcast; is correct us if we're wrong and we'll change our ways. Because that’s how you–

Haley: Correct us with kindness.

Alana: Oh, yeah. Correct us with kindness. Be nice.

Haley: We have feelings.

Alana: We can’t handle it. Don't be mean to me. At the age of eight, so 1884 she left the reservation when Quaker missionaries came to recruit for their– massive air quotes– school and it was only a school if by school you mean forced assimilation centers, but we'll get to that a little bit later. It was literally called the White’s Indiana Manual Labor Institute, and the U. S. is still racist, I'm not saying that it’s not racist, but at least we're not racist enough to let something with a name like that slide. I feel like… baby steps, little progress. Zitkala-Sa’s mother didn't want her to go because her brother had come back from a school and she didn't like it but Zitkala-Sa begged and begged because for kids who had never left the reservation, it seemed like a magical place and it sounded so cool. Her mother did eventually acquiesce because there were no schools on the reservation and she really wanted Zitkala to have an education. But she later wrote that the second she got on the train to Indiana she regretted fighting so hard for it. She was forced to cut her hair and pray like a Quaker, which she hated. Pray like a Christian is like…  that's intergenerational trauma in my heart. She actually hid from the people who were working at the school and they had to tie her to a kitchen chair and cut her hair. I don't know if it was actually a kitchen chair, I just wanted to make a Leonard Cohen reference. Hey Alana, are you Jewish? Yes. But she really did enjoy learning how to read and write and to play the piano and the violin. She was given the name Gertrude Simmons, which is a footnote that will only come up at the very end of the story. In 1887, she returned to her mother's home but she felt like she didn't belong there. And this was a common theme among children who had been sent to these– massive air quotes– schools because they felt like they didn't really belong to their Indigenous culture but they also weren't really like the white Americans. In 1895, she enrolled at Earlham College for a teacher training program and then transferred to the New England conservatory to continue studying violin. In 1900, she became a music teacher at the Carlisle Indian School but left because it reminded her of her traumatic experiences at a similar school. She basically came to the realization, she was just like “oh shit, they are designed to take our culture from us.” She was like “I couldn’t be part of that anymore.” In 1901, she published Old Indian Legends, which was a compilation of all of her previous writings and culminated in a lifelong project of translating Sioux traditions into English, because this is a quote from her from the beginning of the book, “America in the last few centuries has acquired a second tongue,” which is so shady. And I love it. “Acquired a second tongue” is just like. Mm. So also in 1901 she went back to South Dakota and took a job at the United States Bureau of Indian Affairs, which I will refer to going forward as the B. I. A., where she met Captain Raymond Bonnin, who was also a Sioux, but I couldn't find what his like Sioux name was, since he was also full Sioux, but probably not Raymond. But then they did have a son and name him Raymond so I’m not sure.I don't know. They were transferred to Utah, where Zitkala-Sa taught again, but not at a white school, at a reservation school where the children lived at home and she found that like to be a balance. In 1910, she met William Hansen who was a music professor at Brigham Young University, and in 1913 they completed The Sun Dance Opera which was about a Sioux ritual that the federal government had banned, which I think is… What a workaround. What a way to beat the system. She viewed music as a way to bridge the cultures that she was a part of and it did, and that culminated in The Sun Dance Opera. She joined the Society of American Indians, which is a group that lobbied for citizenship for Indigenous people and cultural preservation because nuance. Which is a thing that I am feeling recently. Just nuance. Tattoo it on my forehead, shout it from the rooftops. Nuance. She became the secretary of the Society of American Indians and started interacting directly with the B. I. A. where her husband worked. She was very critical and vocal of their policies because they wanted her to pray like a Christian which– (frustration noises). The intergenerational trauma, she just– she do be jumping out. And her husband was fired. Was it because of her criticism of the B. I. A? Maybe? Who’s to say? I can't say, but maybe. But they moved to Washington DC, where she started giving lectures about cultural identity and continued her work with the Society of American Indians. She even was briefly the editor of American Indian magazine. In 1924 she became active in the General Federation of Women's Clubs, which was like a women's rights group but make it intentionally diverse. It was grassroots campaigns to support women of all backgrounds, and we simply have no choice but to stan.

Lexi: Intersectional feminism.

Alana: Intersectional feminism. We love it, we love to see it, we love to see intersectional feminism like in the twentieth century, before it was cool, if you will. She started a universal Indigenous movement that led to the passage of the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act which, as the name implies, gave Indigenous people citizenship but not necessarily the right to vote because that was still up to the states. In 1926, she co founded with her husband the National Council of American Indians to continue lobbying for the rights of Indigenous people. She died January 26, 1938 at the age of not quite sixty two and is buried in Arlington Cemetery with her husband. Her gravestone reads Gertrude Simmons and then Zitkala-Sa which makes me feel a little bit weird but at least it's on there. I don't know if she like had a choice what went on there but I think it's cool that it's on there. And she was the first Indigenous woman to write her own autobiography without the help of an editor or translator because she was just good at English. She was also very anti use of peyote, which is really interesting because she was like alcoholism on the reservations is a huge problem and so we need to like do something about our ingesting of substances. It’s like all these things are about nuance which is something that I'm again I'm feeling so so much about nuance. It's something that I've been working on in therapy for like three years. That's not true, for two years. That I'm just like we can have two things that coexist– that like it would be in everybody's best interest to be an American citizen, but that doesn't necessarily mean that all of these Native people have to abandon their rituals and their culture. It’s that whole melting pot thing which is such a like when you think about a kind of a weird image… put people in a melting pot. Anyway. That’s a fun note to end on. That’s all I have to say.

Lexi: I just want to add that I think I've mentioned this before on the podcast but I worked on a project at the Smithsonian Libraries called Women in America: Extra and Ordinary. I'm the one who suggested this lady because I thought Alana would like learning about this lady, and I just want to kind of talk about a little bit why I put her in the project. The thing that I love about her is that the Portrait Gallery has pictures of her that were taken when she was quite young. I believe in her twenties.

Alana: They’re gorgeous.

Lexi: And they're beautiful because they're so like real. Like–

Alana: I think my favorite one is– now that I've mentioned it Lexi, you probably have to use it in the graphic– but it's her having grown her hair back out with her violin.

Lexi: Yes.

Alana: And it's just like how it's like… Once you know the background of that, it's like this is how she combined these two cultures by like really enjoying playing the violin and also having her long traditional hair.

Lexi: She’s just so like… It's like she could be your friend. Like she’s just a real person. And so like, I don't know. They’re good pictures. Go look at her pictures.

Alana: Go to the show notes, look at the pictures, they’re great pictures.

Lexi: And– Okay, I think– Okay, this is the root of it. I think when you see pictures of Native peoples from that time, so many times it's like they're wearing like outfits that aren't even correct for their culture and they were forced to pose in like ridiculous like customized versions of their own culture. Like I've seen ones where people who weren’t Plains Indians were put in Plains Indians’ attire for pictures. But like she's just hanging out and I really like that. I just love her. So much.

Alana: She’s so cool.

Lexi: And her name means red bird.

Alana: And her name means red bird, and Lexi loves birds. Lexi loves birds.

(Turkeys gobbling)

Lexi: You can find this podcast on Twitter and Instagram at LadyHistoryPod. Our show notes and a transcript of this episode will be on ladyhistorypod dot tumblr dot com. If you like the show, leave us a review, or tell your friends, and if you don't like the show, keep it to yourself.

Alana: Our logo is by Alexia Ibarra, you can find her on Twitter and Instagram at LexiBDraws. Our theme music is by me, GarageBand, and Amelia Earhart. Lexi is doing the editing. You will not see us, and we will not see you, but you will hear us, next time on Lady History.

[OUTRO MUSIC]

Haley: Next week on Lady History, we're balling with some boss bitches. Get your bags of money ready, because we’re making it rain.

Lexi: Okay. All right.

Haley: Good night!

Alana: I gotta crawl out of my closet.

Lexi: Good night!

Alana: Good night I'll talk to you tomorrow!

Lexi: Bye bye.

[cybertron-daily]

Hi! It's me, Pax, from @something-a-little-different! This blog is for Transformers head-canons, information, timeline-ing, universe meshing, squealing over adorable bots, sharing art work/writing, and discourse. Polite discourse, please.

All submitted artwork must be signed by the creator, have the amount of time it took, and preferably what you used to make said artwork. If you are submitting an artwork on behalf of another artist, contact them first. All writing works submitted must have where else it was posted, when it was posted on other sites, the original author, the word count, the chapter number, rating, and general warnings. If I find out you submitted something without consent from the original author, I curse you out, block, and report you.

On another note, if you don't know me, hi! I'm Pax, I use they/them pronouns, but I'm genderfluid! I'm in Gen Z, support BLM and ACAB, have voted for Joe Biden, and believe that Trump is a fucking dictator who treats people kind of like how the Cybertronian government treated the lower part of the caste system they lived in, which guess what, Megatron was in! So buckle up kids, I have a lot of opinions I want to state really, REALLY loudly!

[trailsandturbulations]

Why I voted for Trump again

A few months ago I received an email from Ola, a friend in Poland whom I have known for over 40 years, informing me that she is officially breaking up with me forever because she had found out that I support Trump. “I don’t understand how you can!” she wrote. Had she asked, “I can’t understand why,” she would have left a gate for dialogue and potential understanding at least slightly open. But “how can you!” disqualified my morality and thus my right to defend my political stance. There was no point in replying, so I removed Ola from my list of friends, as was her wish, forever.

Ola was not the only one among my friends and acquaintances who have kicked me out of polite society. After all, declaring myself openly as a Trump supporter revealed my racism, xenophobia, transphobia, white supremacy, parochialism, ignorance, lack of understanding of my own best interests, my utmost stupidity. Perhaps also my religious fundamentalism, bigotry, over-attachment to firearms, as well as hostility towards political correctness, globalism, science, and alternative sources of energy. If I knew myself as well as some of those friends of mine appear to know me, I, too, would sever all social contacts with myself.

Fortunately, I know myself from a different perspective. I also know Trump and his followers from the angles that the media such as CNN or the Polish Gazeta Wyborcza prefer not to explore.

My demographic profile, my professional career, and my charity activities indicate that I rightly belong on the side of the Democratic Party. I’m a woman with a graduate degree, a house in a suburb, a new car of a good make and model, and annual income that puts me squarely within the upper-middle class range. In addition, I’m an immigrant married to a refugee who is a Person of Color. I’m a retired college professor who volunteers with foster children and with refugees and immigrants, those legal and those not quite so, who need free English lessons. I give money to environmental organizations such as the Nature Conservancy. The only magazine with a regular subscription in our home is Science News.

It would thus seem incomparably easier for me to fit myself ideologically into the group to which I already demographically and culturally belong. It would cost me nothing. The tax-rate raise for the rich, who apparently don’t pay their fair share, promised by the Democratic Party, would not apply to me since I never achieved that level of affluence. Supporting the Democrats would not detract from my social standing. Quite the opposite: I would avoid conflicts with “my kind of people” and could, like them, look down at those ideologically challenged. Ola would still be my friend. My kids would “like” my social media posts instead of hiding their accounts from my view lest I leave a politically incorrect comment under their posts. 

So why did I find myself on the wretched side? Maybe because I’d rather not be on the side of accusatory hate that would command me to break off contacts with a friend in another country for supporting a political candidate who has nothing to do with my life. Or the red-hot hate that makes a person put on a black mask, pick up a baton, and beat unconscious a diminutive, gay Asian journalist for writing from the wrong perspective. Or the bigoted hate that attempts to cancel out of existence anyone who holds the incorrect values. The dangerous hate that brings to mind genocides like the Holocaust and Rwanda. The hate that prides itself on tolerance and believes that love conquers all.

My husband and I used to be Democrats. We both voted for Obama. Alas, the eight years of Obama’s presidency brought us only deep disappointments in all fields of government activity. Race and class divisions deepened, trust in the government diminished, corruption increased, the wave of hope that had brought Obama to the top of political popularity receded. Early in 2016 I knew I wouldn’t vote for Hillary Clinton, but I didn’t expect that I would end up voting for Trump. I did so without enthusiasm, with a smidgen of shame, choosing the lesser of two evils. Four years later, this November, I voted for Trump with full conviction, and if he chooses to run again in 2024 I’m fairly certain that I will vote for him again.

Despite unrelenting demonization, harassment, sneer, false accusations, and plots (amply documented) to deprive him of the presidency, some of which had started before he took office, and above all, contempt with which Trump and his followers had been treated by the liberal elites, the support of the regular people for their unorthodox leader not only held, but grew by millions. In the November 2020 elections, Trump received nearly 72,7 million votes: close to 10 million more than in 2016, and 3 million more than Obama at the peak of his popularity in 2008.

Contempt is one of the key factors that motivate chunks of the traditional electorate of the Democratic Party to switch camps. Hillary Clinton’s undiplomatic “basket of deplorables” comment cost her lots of precious votes, if not the presidency itself. The ridicule that Trump received for saying that he loves “the poorly educated” pitched the Democrats against those diploma-less, hardworking Americans, who then decided to support the man who was not embarrassed to stand by them. Alas, those lessons appeared wasted on Joe Biden, who didn’t hesitate to call Trump’s supporters “chumps” and “ugly folks.” Biden may have won the presidency–perhaps honestly, perhaps through massive fraud–perhaps we will never know. However, the “blue wave” predicted by the polls did not materialize.

Low- and medium-income, undereducated, working Americans have pride and do not allow themselves to be insulted. Pride is one of the few luxuries they can afford, especially in hard times. They recognize Trump as one of their own, who fights for their wellbeing. Trump is not a politician; he’s a street fighter who will not turn the other cheek, but will hit back twice as hard. He has no filters, only a strong tendency towards exaggeration, a loose treatment of facts, and a disregard for details. Like many other Trump supporters, I’m thoroughly annoyed by his antics, and put off by his crude comments and his total lack of diplomacy; because of that, I don’t follow his tweets and have never “liked” his Facebook page. I don’t approve of all his moves. However, I appreciate that he calls a spade a spade, and that he talks directly to the people, not to the cameras, media, or other politicians. And time after time, Trump’s outlandish statements ridiculed by his enemies and treated with skepticism by his followers somehow turn out to be true. Trump approaches all his tasks with boundless energy and the force of a Soviet tank. In his famous rallies, he invariably uses the pronoun “we”–in stark contrast to Obama, whose favorite pronoun was “I”. Trump renders to Cesar what is Cesar’s, giving ample credit to local politicians and activists as well as regular folks who have distinguished themselves in the process of making America great again.

Trump’s enemy is the Swamp: corrupt government agencies (including the FBI and CIA), the media, the "Big Tech" that rules the internet (the likes od Google, Yahoo, or Facebook), the entertainment industry, and institutions of higher education, that latter overzealous in propagating the ideologies of Marxism, theories of gender identity, and the critical race theory, according to which each member of the society is assigned to one of two groups: the oppressed and the oppressors. Trump has promised to drain the Swamp and restore dignity to average, much denigrated Americans.

Trump is the first president in the history of our collective memory to live up, at least in large part, to all the promises he had made to his supporters. "Promises Made, Promises Kept": Reduced corporate tax rates allowed bringing industrial plants from overseas, primarily from China, back to the States. The driving force of the economy was amplified by new international trade agreements coupled with relaxing a host of domestic regulations. Activity returned to the coal mines of Pennsylvania and West Virginia, fracking production of oil and gas heated up, closed oil pipelines reopened, and suddenly we reclaimed our energy independence from the Middle East, for the first time since 1957.  All these measures improved the labor market and caused the unemployment rate to drop to a historically low level of 3.7% in 2019 (i.e. just before the pandemic). Black and Latin unemployment has fallen to its lowest rates in the country's history.

In the Middle East, Trump dealt quickly and effectively with the Islamic Caliphate, moved the US Embassy from Tel-Aviv to Jerusalem, and has already mediated three peace agreements between Israel and Islamic countries. As a pragmatist who doesn’t believe in spending our money to make other countries happy against their will, Trump is withdrawing American troops from Afghanistan. Because it's not our war.

Our war is the one on our southern border, through which thousands of illegal immigrants, emboldened by friendly policies in the Democrat-run cities, have crossed with impunity. A steady stream of undocumented migrants not only from Latin America, but from all over the world, poured into our country in numbers exceeding a hundred thousand a month; not only work seekers, but also gang members, smugglers of fentanyl and young girls destined for prostitution, as well as individuals with criminal record, some previously deported back to their home countries. The wall, or rather the border fence, the agreement with Mexico, and changes to the procedures for granting political asylum have reduced the chances of criminal elements crossing our border without consequences. (Regarding children separated from their parents: the photos of children in cages circulating on the Internet date back to Obama's second term, when trainloads of children from Latin America were sent out alone, under the supervision of paid "coyotes", and let loose at our border crossings. The 500-plus children separated from adults, who were not necessarily their parents, during the Trump presidency, are remaining in the protective custody of the American government because their biological parents refuse to take them back, hoping to reunite with them on their next attempt to cross the border.)

It is impossible to enumerate all of Trump's achievements here because the list is too long. The gains for the country and the society are not advertised in the media because they contradict the narrative of the cultural elites who are no longer concerned with achieving the American Dream that Trump had promised to restore because they or their parents have already reached it. Recently, I got a phone call from a Polish friend who, together with her husband, fled from the Polish socialist poverty, from a squalid one-room rental with mold-covered walls, with no chance for a better future. They did hard manual labor for many years, cleaning smelly motels and lifting bricks on construction sites during the day, studying English and earning professional certifications at night. Krystian, their grown-up son, for whose studies they paid thirty thousand dollars a year with their capitalist savings and loans, announced right before the elections that he was going to vote for Biden because only socialism would guarantee equality for all Americans. “You Boomers don’t get it,” he dismissed the reactions of his shocked parents who had spent half their lives in socialism. I nodded with understanding because my own kids, when told that I voted for Trump in 2016, first growled at me, and then restricted my freedom of family speech to non-political topics.

As I write these words, I occasionally look out of the window, where Alejandro, Krystian's peer and also a son of immigrants, is laying out the boards of our new deck. It snowed last night and the morning is frosty, but the construction work does not stop because of the weather if there are paying customers. Alejandro, in a quilted coat and a hat pulled over his ears, keeps rubbing his freezing hands, but continues working. Alejandro did not go to college because he has to earn a living and help his family; besides, he didn’t do well enough in his Mexican ghetto school. He did not vote in 2016, but last week he joined the growing number of “Latinos for Trump” voters. Alejandro believes Trump's policies will help him achieve the American Dream. Krystian, on the other hand, is already used to living in comfort, and can therefore afford himself the luxury of theorizing about socialism.

"If Trump loses, we're totally screwed," says James, co-owner of a small, somewhat struggling company that employs Alejandro. If James's business goes under, Alejandro will lose his job. "All the small-business entrepreneurs and their employees in Reno are for Trump," says James. Robert, our electrician, independently confirms James' words. "We’d never had it so good before Trump," he adds. "We fear that our prosperity will end if the Democrats win.”

While the Democratic Party chose the so-called "identity politics" that divides people into groups according to race-and gender-based demographic indicators, Trump's politics began to unite people of average economic status–those whose income is not guaranteed, whose material comfort is not stable, but depends on fluctuations of the economy. The rich can afford to support the Democrats because they don't have to fear economic downturns; the rich can also afford the luxury of isolating themselves from the pandemic because they generally have a choice of earning money from home, and getting whatever they need delivered to their doors by peons like Alejandro. Those living on welfare have nothing to fear, either, especially if Democrats come into power. It’s the working people whose livelihoods are at stake if the economy flounders.

Two weeks before the elections, my husband David and I offered our services as canvassing volunteers, going door-to-door and reminding residents to vote. An appropriate phone app showed us party affiliations of households in the neighborhoods we canvassed: Republican houses were marked in red, and Democratic houses, in blue. The posher the neighborhood, the bluer the maps appeared. “Gated communities” turned out to be predominantly blue; as Republican volunteers, we were not even allowed beyond the gate. The generational division was also apparent: in many conservative homes, the parents complained that their adult children had changed their political affiliation in college or right after they graduated. "Universities have completely brainwashed them. Now we regret paying their tuition,"  they expressed exactly the same sentiment I’d heard from Krystian’s mother.

Our canvassing activity didn’t afford us any insight into the political views of racial minorities in our area as the suburbs of Reno are inhabited mainly by whites, with an occasional Asian or Latino family. However, on the national scale, the support for Trump among the racial minorities has increased significantly: 26% of minority voters chose Trump this time around. Among the Blacks, Trump secured the votes of 18% of men (by comparison, only 5% of Black men voted for a Republican candidate in 2008) and 8% of women (compared to 4% in 2016). 35% of the Latinos, such as Alejandro, cast their votes for Trump. Trump was even more successful with the indigenous populations: 59% of the Native Hawaiians and 52% of the continental Native Americans voted for him; perhaps they had never got the message that he’s a racist. Among the non-race based minority groups, Trump received electoral support from 28% of the LGBT community–so much for the claims of his homophobia. (The above calculations are based on exit polls). The Blacks and Latinos who cross over to Trump’s camp want to be treated as regular Americans, not as persecuted minorities and victims of “systemic” racism, courted every four years by the Democrats as dependable election fodder. “What do you have to lose?” Trump called out to them during his 2016 campaign. The People of Color began looking around and noticing that, in reality, they won’t be losing anything by abandoning the Democratic Party.

Neither the dilemmas of the People of Color who feel they’re being used by the Democrats, nor the uncertainty of James’s business future and Alejandro’s job situation would necessarily motivate me to vote for Trump. As the Polish expression goes, those are not my monkeys. I could easily and comfortably stand with Krystian, who has a double major in business and political science and counts on a good job for some corporation, in a fully air-conditioned office, with an income several times higher than Alejandro’s. I have earned my place among the elites, whose members would surely stop insulting me at every turn if I carried my club membership card. My children, not much older than Krystian, have also chosen the political and social comfort of the elites. Had I chosen to vote for Biden, I could have had redeemed myself from my fall for Trump four years ago, and maybe would regain the full member rights in my own family. Oh well.

It is nevertheless my concern for children that motivates me the most to support Trump. Not my own children, but other people’s. Not those from elite families, like my grandchildren, attending private schools or top public ones in gated community catchment areas, but those from families struggling to survive in poor neighborhoods or ethnic ghettos, attending schools which are intellectual deserts. Having worked with, or for, underprivileged children for most of my professional life, I know such schools only too well.

One of the prominent items on Trump’s political and social agenda is school choice: the right of families to send their children to schools best suited to their needs, interests, and abilities. The US is the only one among highly developed countries in which children are tied to their neighborhood schools like feudal peasants to land. There is a marked difference in the quality of schools in rich and poor areas: not only in the physical structures and equipment, but also in the breadth and depth of curricular offerings and the standards of instruction. Needless to say, graduates of excellent schools achieve higher test scores and better chances of admission to top universities than those from the schools in the ghettos; in some of the latter, not a single student achieves the lowest required threshold of academic performance (e.g., thirteen Baltimore City high schools achieved zero proficiency in mathematics; Baltimore has been a bastion of the Democratic Party since the 1960s).

Access to good schools is important to Americans. The quality of its public schools affects a neighborhood’s property values and apartment rent rates. People on limited incomes cannot afford to move, but they have no right to send their children to schools offering better educational perspectives. Thus the children of the less affluent are sentenced not only to years of academic mediocrity, but also to the influence and effects of drugs and crime in their school environments, perpetuating the patterns of failure and poverty.

The Trump administration has been battling the Democratic opposition to allow the money designated for the education of a child to follow each student to a school of his/her choice. All the highly developed countries, in which children and adolescents achieve high levels of academic performance, allow school choice; in some countries, school choice is a constitutional right. Only equal access to the same educational opportunities can erase the glaring economic imbalances by creating paths to prosperity and social equality for the future generations of Americans.

The Democratic Party and its ardent supporters, the teachers’ unions, are fiercely opposing all political and administrative efforts to guarantee the right to school choice for all citizens. The multi-million dollar financial contributions from the teachers’ unions to the Democratic Party’s Political Action Committees are to ensure that no school choice proposal will never be approved by the Congress. One has to wonder why the liberal elites so vehemently deny poor children access to good education; why they don’t consider those children as deserving of the same opportunities as their own offspring. Two words come to mind: control and contempt. Because the Swamp sucks you in.

And that’s why I voted for Trump.

[whatnotmemes]

--------------------------------Chris Fleming ‘Car Rants’ Sentence Starters some may be nsfw or triggering. change pronouns as needed.

Adventure Dad “It is such a turn off to see a family have scheduled fun.” “Witnessing an adventure family in the throes of an outdoor activity makes me want to put myself in a pelican’s mouth and tell him ‘Just drive.’” “The smile of a father with three sons- all of whom snowboard- is so confrontational, it reads as indecent exposure.” “Connecticut is like the high-schooler wrestling with whether or not he can pull off a baseball cap.” “You know that kind of ‘I’m gonna go through a shoplifting phase and get away with it’ shade of blonde.” “You’re looking at me like a greeter at the Apple store.”

The Majesty of Homophobes (& Makeup Tutorials) “The thing I’ve always admired about townie homophobes is how effortlessly they hold a beer can.” “This is the kind of body you look at and you’re like ‘he’d probably be okay in space without a space suit.’” “I almost envy that beer can- to be held like that.” “That’s the next Pixar movie right there. The story of one homophobe with the cards stacked against him on a journey to prove that he is just as backwards thinking and emotionally repressed as his crew.” “She’s one of those girls who looks like she might be lip gloss disguised as a person.” “I happen to have really big pores. As you can see, I have two really big pores here at the bottom of my nose.” “They call me Popcorn _____; I don’t know why. I know why. I eat all the popcorn.” “What I love about this eyeshadow is it says ‘the only song I’ve ever heard is Pour Some Sugar On Me and I’m not sure where Seattle is.’” “This is a great blush if you’re serious about robbing a TGI Fridays.”

What To Do If Your Boyfriend Proposes on Christmas Eve “This may seem harsh, but he needs to be treated like the night lizard that he is.” “It’s a partnership. You think Ben snuck up on Jerry one day with a waffle cone and took a knee?” “For a guy who thinks that musicals are ‘kinda gay,’ you’re behaving a lot like the kind of guy that Rogers and Hammerstein would dream up while sixty-nining on a piano.” “Nothing gives me the heebies and the jeebies like when the boyfriend consults the parents before he consults her.” “Unless you rode out of your mother’s uterus on a BMX bike, popping a wheelie, there is no excuse to be named Zach.” “Quiche is just pizza that went to private school.” “The Boston Globe should be written in size 72 comic sans. You get more information by reading the cover of Cat Fancy.”

Theater Kids “Theater kids keep to themselves for most of the year- giving each other back rubs in black box theaters or three-way kissing at cast parties in Chinese buffets- but every so often, when Broadway goes Hollywood, they will descend upon Regal Cinemas like locusts in jazz flats.” “If you ever see a theater girl in a sling, just know that it was a Frozen soundtrack related fender bender.” “It’s like Minotaur; you don’t wanna make it mad but you certainly don’t wanna turn it on.” “Enlisting your facebook friends to help you choose your headshots is on the same moral level as taking people and keeping them prisoner in your house for fifteen years.”

Jimmy Buffett “Everyone thinks the biggest threat to America right now is ISIS, North Korea, global warming. Nope, it’s Jimmy Buffett.” “On the eve of your fiftieth birthday, Jimmy Buffett slides down your chimney and tries to convince you to throw in the towel.” “Let’s get fat tonight. Shit out your dreams in a TGI Friday’s.” “Get in a fistfight with your son at an Applebee’s. When the waitress breaks it up, plant one on her cheek and complain about the president.” “Quit your day job and help me throw chicken nuggets at my neighbor’s fruity son.” “Every day is a vacation when you are a huge fuck up.” “I used to have dreams and hopes and ambitions, and now look at me. I’m at a poolside bar and I couldn’t name a book if I had to.”

D Batteries “Anything that requires D batteries needs to get over itself.” “Here is a list of things that would make sense to power using a D battery: a mini cooper, a small plane, Bjork, a Carnival cruise ship, a fucking lighthouse, Disneyworld.” “I would have bought neither and saved the money for a cruise where I can get close enough to suck on the coral reef and tell a platypus my secrets.” “I need to you to make it near a popsicle because I want that summertime vibe because I miss summer and I miss my girls.” “Everyone talks about how great the working conditions are at Google but no one will go into specifics. What does that mean? One word: Pokemon. They’ve bred Pokemon.” “Wait until Diglett realizes he doesn’t have a mouth. Then you’re gonna have to call up Laura Dern and Dennis Nedry ‘cause you’re gonna be in a whole world of bullshit.”

Halloween Candy Countdown “What kind of a prude eats a Crunch bar? You might as well just eat toast.” “Charleston Chews should be sold at Home Depot in the lumber section.” “This is a candy that predates women’s suffrage and it tastes like it.” “I feel like Area 51 is just 3 Muskateers headquarters and it’s where they keep their filling.”

Blocking Your Ears in Public “I’m talking about the kind of guy you’d see at a Home Depot kneeling down in the lumber section, just praying that his son’s not bi.” “She is in the eighth ring of Dante’s Inferno where you have to jack off a Minotaur while eating a jalapeno.” “I firmly believe that president Michelle Obama and first lady Joe Biden should send them to Epcot center to live and die on the teacup ride.” “You can’t name yourself The Edge, especially when you look like a shut in trying to muster up the courage to go to a little league game.”

Baby Got Back brings out the worst in people “Does everyone think that they’re the only person who knows all the lyrics to Baby Got Back?” “Look, I’m happy that you know all the lyrics but please don’t scream them into my cheeks.” “The pride and rage that these people are feeling; it’s a real cole slaw of emotions.” “I’m just alone on the dance floor. I’m in the middle of what, to a non-English speaker must look like a prison riot.” “Everyone’s looking at me like I’m at an Eyes Wide Shut party uninvited.”

Purple Cauliflower “Barney’s stuck under the veggies and only his pubes are showing." “We gotta get Barney out of here! Let’s not make Baby Bop a widow tonight!” “We’re gonna have to make Grimace breed with a cauliflower.” “This is not a veggie. This is an STI that Tinky Winky picked up in a jacuzzi.”

NYU “Oh my god, NYU? Lena Dunham’s crabs went there.” “If only we could find a way, as a nation, to harness the power of the erections that NYU students have about going to NYU.” “NYU is just girls in fedoras trying to get addicted to cigarettes.” “Whenever anyone gets to the end of those Buzzfeed quizzes, their laptop camera should just miraculously turn on, forcing them to confront that haunting, pasty image of themselves.” “Why do I look like an owl prostitute?” “I am thrilled to announce that I have a five year unpaid internship changing Marina Abramovic’s diaper.”

Bread Bowl “Panera is just McDonald’s that studied abroad in France and came back wearing a beret and cigarette jeans, thinking it’s the shit because it got fingered by a mime.” “Was nobody gonna tell me that a bread bowl is just a Trojan horse for soup?” “Who owns Panera? Ashton Kunis?” “I need to see an angry movie. I need to watch Hercules, I’m so mad right now.” “Somebody call Wayne Brady ‘cause I’m gonna die tonight! I don’t know why I brought Wayne Brady into it but I did.” “Ben Folds’ music is just him screaming people’s names, banging his elbows against a baby grand.” “I love to get post traumatic stress during my lunch.” “Somebody send me into space because I can’t be a part of this world anymore. It’s getting too embarrassing.” “If I wanted to be publicly humiliated, I would stand outside Macy’s and announce that my husband doesn’t have a happy trail but that my daughter does.”