Fascism Watch for 29 November 2023

[solarbird]

Let’s lead with the latest Twitter / X explosion, because Elon’s really running out of ideas:

WaPo have – finally – had enough, and are suspending advertising on Musk Twitter after Musk tweeted his endorsement of the batshit-insane “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory. Not just once, either.If you don’t remember, Pizzagate is the made-up bullshit that lead to one Q-Anon loon breaking into a pizza restaurant demanding to be shown the basement that its building physically did not have. He fired his gun a bunch too but nobody died.

How many people here know what skibidi toilet is? The Daily Beast keeps posting articles on Musk’s latest evil, and they’re headed by black-background pictures of Elon that are really … exploitable. For skibidi purposes, I mean. And I keep using them to make things like this:

They’ve dropped a couple of exploitables and if they keep going I’m gonna end up animating it xD

Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson is trying to engineer the extension of mass domestic surveillance into the defence authorisation bill, because of course he is. The odds are apparently considered low, but, well, c’mon. He’s who he is: a Republican, an authoritarian, albeit of the evangelical fundamentalist sort who thinks he’s been ordained by god, and just as firmly in Trump’s fascist camp as the rest of his movement.

Even if they really do fully understand that he’s “such a whack job.”

Relatedly, lawyer Teri Kanefield goes into great depth on the issues with trying to keep Trump off the ballot via the 14th Amendment. The letter of the law is not as clear-cut as one might hope, and the judge who ruled “yes he committed insurrection, no he’s not removed from the ballot” is much cleverer than you might think.

Also on legal matters, lawyer Marc Elias writes about reasons to be hopeful for democracy in 2024. Marc and his firm have been winning a lot of election cases, just so you know.

Nazi flags and a Schutzstaffel history book were among the items found in the home of the Ohio Walmart shooter who earlier this month wounded four people before killing himself, records show, writes MSNBC still declining to call the mass shooter a Nazi, despite all his Nazi shit.

The New Republic reports: The Red State Brain Drain Isn’t Coming. It’s Happening Right Now. “As conservative states wage total culture war, college-educated workers—physicians, teachers, professors, and more—are packing their bags.” They focus a lot on doctors in one family, which is good, since focusing on tech isn’t necessarily a great idea right now, holy shit.

DeJoy is still fucking up the post office. In case you were wondering.

In a bit of good news, Philadelphia Becomes Sanctuary City for Gender-Affirming Care. I mean, it’s terrible that sanctuary cities are needed, but I’ll take what I can get.

Back in October, Wisconsin Republicans passed several anti-trans bills along party lines (update on the 17th, passing the Senate). Democratic Governor Evans pledged to veto them and while they rigged the districts so voraciously that they can’t be thrown out of power, the Republicans still don’t have quite enough votes to override the governor’s veto.

Saskatchewan, by contrast, did enshrine a “parental rights” anti-trans-youth bill into law, in special session, having been called back by the Premier to do so. They’re fully aware it violates the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which is why they also passed a Not Withstanding order, setting it aside in this case. (It’s a Canada thing.)

A Fox News headline, and the translation from that headline to reality. If you don’t want to click through, here you go:

Fox News: Transgender female runner who beat 14,000 women at London Marathon offers to give medal back

Reality: Transgender female runner who placed 6,159th at London Marathon offers to give participation medal back.

Finally, in Fuck The New York Times news, Assigned reports on a new study showing that the bone-density panic raised by the New York Times on behalf of anti-trans activists last year was basically… not much of a thing. And not at all a thing in trans men, who were the focus of the panic.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.