Please remember what Stephen Miller wants to do. He is a white supremacy Nazi with Jewish heritage. His own family immigrated here. But I am sure they will be safe from the purge as was Melania and her parents. Remember he was behind the separation of children from their parents who cross the border. The parents were deported while the children were given to Christian adoption agencies to sell. Many have never been found. He was behind the lawsuits that wanted any and all DEI programs stopped in the collages and private business claim it displaced white men for every job given to a woman or brown / black person. Remember he wants to end both birthright citizenship and deport people born to undocumented people even though they are US citizen. Remember that during tRump’s first term many non-white people were deported even though they were citizens and had a hard fight getting back into the US. It is back to carry your papers if you are not white and even then it is going to be hard for many. Hugs.
Stephen Miller speaks before Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Lititz, Pa., Sunday, Nov. 3, 2024. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)
President-elect Donald Trump is naming longtime adviser Stephen Miller, an immigration hard-liner, to be the deputy chief of policy in his new administration.
Confirming the appointment, Vice President-elect JD Vance posted a message of congratulations on Monday to Miller on X and said, “This is another fantastic pick by the president.” The announcement was first reported by CNN.
Miller is one of Trump’s longest-serving aides, dating back to his first campaign for the White House. He was a senior adviser in Trump’s first term and has been a central figure in many of his policy decisions, particularly on immigration, including Trump’s move to separate thousands of immigrant families as a deterrence program in 2018.
Miller has also helped craft many of Trump’s hard-line speeches, and was often the public face of those policies during Trump’s first term in office and during his campaigns.
Since leaving the White House, Miller has served as the president of America First Legal, an organization of former Trump advisers fashioned as a conservative version of the American Civil Liberties Union, challenging the Biden administration, media companies, universities and others over issues such as freedom of speech and religion and national security.
He was also a frequent presence during Trump’s campaign this year, traveling aboard his plane and often speaking ahead of Trump during the pre-shows at his rallies.
Miller drew large cheers at Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden during the race’s final stretch, telling the crowd that, “your salvation is at hand,” after what he cast as “decades of abuse that has been heaped upon the good people of this nation — their jobs stolen looted and from them and shipped to Mexico, Asia and foreign countries. The lives of their loves ones ripped away from then by illegal aliens, criminal gangs and thugs who don’t belong in this country.”
“We stand here today at a crossroads,” he went on, casting the election as “a choice between betrayal and renewal, between self-destruction and salvation, between the failure of America or the triumph of America.”
Because it is not a Cabinet position, the appointment does not need Senate confirmation. ___ Associated Press writer Jill Colvin contributed to this report.
if we all click our heels together three times, everything will be okay Read on Substack (Language NSFW, as always with Jeff Tiedrich’s writing)
the worthless scribblers of the corporate-controlled media utterly failed us during the 2024 campaign season.
New York Times executive editor Joe Kahn came right out and said it: defending democracy is a ‘partisan act,’ and we won’t do it — and, fuck us all, the press kept their word, and didn’t do it. they enthusiastically put their fingers on the scale for Donny Convict.
arguably, the media’s worst transgression was the sanewashing — the cleaning-up of Donny’s incomprehensible blitherings, to hide his obvious cognitive disintegration and make him sound coherent.
a minutes-long disjointed word-salad about how tariffs on Chinese goods were going to lower the cost of childcare became “a major economic speech.”
Donny’s inability to keep his increasingly-demented mind on the topic at hand — his crazypants pinballing from they’re eating the dawgs to Hannibal Lecter wants to have you for dinner to would you rather be eaten by a shark or electrocuted — was explained away by Donny as his brilliant “weave.”
[Wishcasting is] the act of interpreting information or a situation in a way that casts it as favorable or desired, despite the fact that there is no evidence for such a conclusion; a wishful forecast.
sure enough, the media has now gone into overdrive, churning out piece after piece in which they promise us that if we all click our heels together three times, everything will be okay.
not twelve hours after the election had been called for Donny, the Times wasted no time in assuring us that the election of a vindictive fascist is an amazing opportunity for vindictive fascism not to happen.
what kind of magical, everybody-gets-a-pony thinking is this? just fucking stop it.
did Ezra Klein and Ross Douthat both experience some kind of recent head trauma that has caused them to forget the years 2017 through 2020? Donny’s first presidency was a dumpster fire of corruption, mismanagement and mass death — but somehow now, given a second chance to fuck shit up worse, Donny’s going to bring us an “American renewal”?
anything’s possible, right? overnight, Donny Convict could magically become a wise and fair statesman — also, technicolor pigs could fly out of my ass.
oh my god, the media never stops imagining that Donny is going to somehow become presidential. during his first term — over and over — every time Donny stopped short of taking out his dick and pissing on the floor, the press would fall all the fuck over itself in a mad dash to proclaim him presidential.
spoiler alert: Donny never became presidential. not from the the first time he threw a ketchup-hurling tantrum in the White House, to the moment he absconded back to his Florida golf motel, taking with him boxes of stolen classified documents.
the premise here is that if we’re respectful to Donny — if we fucking kowtow to him, and stop opposing him — he’ll be nice to us in return. he’ll become — dare I say it? — presidential.
Stop indulging the fantasy that outrage, social stigma, language policing, a special counsel, the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, or impeachment will disappear him. And stop talking as if normal political opposition is capitulation.
Everyone should normalize Trump. If he does something good, praise him. Trump is remarkably susceptible to flattery.
okay, I will grant that Newsweek may be half right. Lisa Murkowski seems to genuinely loathe Donny, and we can probably count on her to vote against the worst of his fuckery — but Susan Collins? the credulous naïf who assured us over and over again that Donny had learned his lesson, and would never transgress again?
now, let’s bask under some rays of hope from people who aren’t just blindly wishcasting, but are actually offering reasoned arguments.
in the middle of a fairly clear-eyed assessment of the Trumpian horrors to come, the Guardian gives us this:
Elaine Kamarck, a former official in the Bill Clinton administration, said: “For him to expand presidential power, Congress has to give up power and they’re not in the mood to do that. They’ve never done that. There are plenty of institutionalists in Congress.”
Kamarck also expressed faith in the federal courts, noting that judges appointed by Trump only constitute 11% of the total placed on the bench by former presidents. A Trump dictatorship is “not going to happen,” she added. “Now, there might be things that the president wants to do that people don’t like that the Republican Congress goes along with him on but that’s politics. That’s not a dictatorship.”
Paradoxically, however, Trump’s reckless venality is a reason for hope. Trump has the soul of a fascist but the mind of a disordered child. He will likely be surrounded by terrible but incompetent people. All of them can be beaten: in court, in Congress, in statehouses around the nation, and in the public arena. America is a federal republic, and the states—at least those in the union that will still care about democracy—have ways to protect their citizens from a rogue president. Nothing is inevitable, and democracy will not fall overnight.
Americans cannot vote themselves into a dictatorship any more than you as an individual can sell yourself into slavery. The restraints of the Constitution protect the American people from the unscrupulous designs of whatever lawless people might take the reins of their government, and that does not change simply because Trump believes that those restraints need not be respected by him. The Constitution does not allow a president to be a “dictator on day one,” or on any other day. The presidency will give Trump and his cronies the power to do many awful things. But that power does not make them moral or correct.
I sure hope to fuck they’re right.
This is going to be my closing message for the foreseeable future:
practice self-care. do what you need to do to keep sane. if that means disengaging with my daily posts for a while, I get it. this community of ours will still be here when you return.
to all the people who have signed on in the days since the election, welcome aboard. settle in as we all try to deal with the shitfuckery that’s ahead of us.
we are all in this together, and we are all here for each other.
November 11, 1942 The U.S. Congress approved lowering the draft age to 18 and raising the upper limit to 37 less than a year after having declared war on Japan, Germany and Italy. In September 1940, Congress, by wide margins in both houses, had passed the Burke-Wadsworth Act, the first peacetime draft (though war raged in Europe and Asia, the U.S. was not yet directly involved) imposed in the history of the United States. The good war and those who refused to fight it
November 11, 1972 The U.S. Army turned over its massive military base at Long Binh to the South Vietnamese army, symbolizing the end of direct U.S. military involvement in the Vietnam War. The last American forces, however, did not leave until 1974. U.S. military leaving the Long Binh base
November 9-10, 1938 Nazis looted and burned synagogues and Jewish-owned stores and homes, and beat and murdered Jewish men, women, and children across Germany and Austria. Known as Kristallnacht, it was a night of organized violence against Jews marking the beginning of the Holocaust with the killing of 91 and the deportation of 30,000 to concentration camps. The German word translates to “the Night of Broken Glass,” so called because of the vast number of broken windows in Jewish shops, 5 million marks worth ($1,250,000). Read more
November 9, 1965 At the first draft-card burning [see November 6, 1965], a heckler shouted that they should burn themselves, not their draft cards. Three days later Roger LaPorte, a student of religion and a Catholic Worker volunteer, poured gasoline on himself and struck a match to it in front of the United Nations headquarters in New York. Police managed to douse the flames. Roger LaPorte On his way to the hospital he said, “I’m a Catholic Worker. I’m against war, all wars. I did this as a religious action.” He died 33 hours later. Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker movement and a speaker on the 15th, wrote that she believed that LaPorte knew it was wrong to take his own life. But she explained his desire to end the Vietnam War; in the previous few days, six massive air strikes had made it the deadliest week since the war began. Read more
November 9, 1984 U.S. peace activists sailed a shrimp boat into the Port of Corinto to confront U.S. warships threatening Nicaragua. The U.S. had mined the harbor in violation of international law, and had invaded Nicaragua through this port in 1896 and 1910.
November 9, 1989 For the first time since World War II, free travel between East and West Germany was allowed. The Berlin Wall, built to stop the exodus from the Communist-controlled East in 1961, was opened in response to nonviolent popular action.
November 9, 2002 Somewhere between 450,000 and a million Europeans in Florence, Italy, peacefully protested the threatened U.S. invasion of Iraq. Florence, Italy 11.9.2002 The inaugural meeting of the European Social Forum had just concluded there.It was a regional part of the framework established at the World Social Forum which had met in Porto Alegre, Brazil, first in 2001. Read more about this protest The Forum is a citizens’ movement exploring alternatives to globalization and the inhumane consequences of the changing world order. They focus on sustainable development, social and economic justice. Those who were part of the Forum come from a broad range of civil society, including: pacifists; environmentalists; those in nonprofit, volunteer and non-governmental organizations; representatives of religious and lay groups; those in the anti-globalization and anti-capitalist movements; and, for the first time in Florence (Firenze), significant involvement of the labor movement, notably the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC), and trade unions or national confederations from nine European countries, including Russia.
Also, a question. On Kids Baking Championship, one of the items required is a chocolate-dipped item. One young baker decided to use butterscotch instead of chocolate. They tempered it, they dipped their item, and presented it. When asked about it, since it wasn’t chocolate, they stated that their technique was the same, and the item was dipped; also, that the butterscotch right there among the chocolate in the same area of the pantry.
So. While chocolate is not butterscotch and vice-versa, does this item count as a chocolate-dipped item? Discuss in comments.
Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson for November 08, 2024
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga. speaks during the first day of the Republican National Convention.
Fresh off of her Election Night victory, anti-LGBTQ+ Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) has expressed excitement that she, President-elect Donald Trump, and their MAGA cohorts will no longer tolerate “turning our kids trans.”
“I am so excited!” Greene said from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Election Night party to convicted former Trump advisor Steve Bannon on the Real Americas Voice network. “America will no longer tolerate this communist regime, ripping our border wide open, turning our kids trans, and promoting abortion as reproductive rights. The American people are fed up with a weaponized government. President Trump is going back to the White House!”
She said that “Big Pharma” is lying to people about gender-affirming care.
She also claimed that Republicans will have to “continue to fight for election integrity…. because the Democrats will steal elections if they’re given the opportunity.” She and Trump have baselessly claimed that Trump only lost the 2020 election due to an unprecedented nationwide conspiracy of voter fraud that only occurred in the states that Trump lost.
She also said that Trump will pardon the insurrectionists who were jailed for the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, “end the climate change scam,” and “go after the people” who persecuted Trump and his supporters, including former U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Matthew Graves, U.S. Rep. Bennie Gordon Thompson (D-MS), and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA). Trump has referred to Pelosi as a “sick, crazy b**ch” and “an enemy from within.”
In July, Greene spoke at a press conference heralding the start of Bannon’s four-month sentence in the Danbury Federal Correctional Institution today for defying a congressional subpoena investigating his assistance in inciting the January 6, 2021 Capitol riots.
Greene has previously said that an airplane never hit the Pentagon during the September 11 terrorist attacks, claimed that all school shootings are fake, said that California wildfires were started by a Jewish-owned space laser, and accused former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton of slicing off a child’s face and wearing it.
Trump has promised to ban gender-affirming care for minors nationwide and prohibit federal agencies from “promot[ing] the concept of sex and gender transition at any age.” He has pledged to deny federal funding to schools that push “radical gender ideology, and other inappropriate … sexual or political content on our children.” He has also promised to repeal Biden-era protections for LGBTQ+ students “on Day One.”
Trump insulted Bannon when he was convicted of a crime
On the last day of Trump’s presidency, he pardoned Bannon who served as chief executive officer of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Bannon also served as White House chief strategist and senior counselor to Trump from January 2017 until August 18, 2017, when Trump fired him.
In August 2020, Bannon was indicted by a federal grand jury for allegedly spending $1 million of a $25 million GoFundMe campaign to help Trump construct a U.S.-Mexico border wall. Bannon pleaded not guilty and was set to face trial in May 2021 before Trump pardoned him.
Trump initially said the Mexican government would pay for the wall — they never did, and Trump only built 458 total miles of barriers, PolitiFact reported.
In January 2018, Trump and Bannon’s relationship soured after Bannon was quoted in Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House as calling the president’s daughter Ivanka Trump “dumb as a brick” and calling Trump “a crooked business guy” and a “scumbag.”
In response, Trump said in a statement, “Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my Presidency. When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind,” adding, “Steve had very little to do with our historic victory.” Trump later referred to Bannon as “Sloppy Steve” on Twitter (now X) and claimed that Bannon “cried when he got fired and begged for his job.”
Project 2025, assuming it still needs to be explained at this point, is an infamous proposed manifesto for the ultra-conservative faction of the Republican Party and, many believe, Donald Trump’s second term.
And with many LGBTQ+ Americans waking up on 6 November to the bleak and shocking reality of a second Trump presidency, it feels like a particularly good time to unpick what the document could signify for queer peoples’ rights in the US over the next four years.
Unsurprisingly, while Project 2025 promises to “take down the ‘Deep State’ and return the government to the people”, it also threatens to shred the rights and advancements of the LGBTQ+ community in the US.
The handbook’s authors claim that one of the biggest problems facing the US today is the “toxic normalization of transgenderism with drag queens and pornography invading school libraries.”
Project 2025 goes on to say that “transgender ideology” is one form of “pornography” linked to the “sexualization of children”. In total, “gender” is mentioned 111 times, and “LGBT” or “LGBTQ” 18 times, in the handbook.
LGBTQ+ rights would all but disappear if Project 2025 came to fruition. (Getty)
Viewed as a sort of right-wing wish-list, Project 2025 pledges to strip away anti-discrimination policies, making it easier to target and discriminate against LGBTQ+ people.
Published by the hard-line right-wing Heritage Foundation, the document calls for the removal of terms such as “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” from federal rules and legislation, and the revoking of regulations prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation, gender identity, transgender status and sex characteristics.
Project 2025 set out plans to restrict the application of the Supreme Court’s decision in Bostock vs. Clayton County, which extended workplace protections against sex discrimination to LGBTQ+ employees.
In addition, it plans to restrict access to healthcare for transgender people, something it refers to as a form of “child abuse”. Its authors also want to see trans healthcare no longer being covered by insurance schemes Medicare and Medicaid, and an end to anti-discrimination rules based on gender identity and sexual orientation.
In addition, there are plans to reverse policies allowing transgender people to serve in the military, a ban that was initially brought in under the Trump administration but reversed by president Joe Biden. If enacted, Project 2025 would expel transgender servicemen and women as well as those living with HIV.
Donald Trump has tried to distance himself from the hard-line right-wing document. (Getty)
The State Department’s LGBTQ+ equality initiatives in Africa would also be axed. In other words, there would be no effort to stop draconian anti-queer laws being passed in countries such as Uganda.
In terms of education, the conservative blueprint is even more staunchly anti-LGBTQ+. It calls for a ban on students using names or pronouns that don’t match the sex on their birth certificate, and no school employee would be “forced” to use a pupil’s chosen pronouns.
It document outlines ideas to remove LGBTQ+-inclusive curriculums and policies from schools, claiming that “critical race theory and gender ideology” are “poisoning and indoctrinating children with leftist ideologies”. Instead, families “comprised of a married mother, father and their children” would be prioritized.
Despite many of its authors being one-time Trump administration advisors, the former president claims to know “nothing about Project 2025” or who is behind it, saying: “I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.”
And two of his campaign advisors insisted: “President Trump’s campaign has been very clear that Project 2025 had nothing to do with the campaign, did not speak for the campaign, and should not be associated with the campaign in any way.”
A spokesperson for Project 2025 has even told CNN that it “does not speak for any candidate or campaign.”
However, Democrats have continued to point to links between the 922-page document and Trump. As he’s now won the election, will Trump finally admit to having any involvement with Project 2025? Only time will tell.
Florence, Italy 11.9.2002
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga. speaks during the first day of the Republican National Convention.
Scottie's Playtime 