- Military veterans say the trans ban is logistical nonsense;
- How Musk and Vance stood up for a self-avowed racist;
- How Trump and his administration are intentionally on the wrong side of history, favoring “competent white men”;
- How philosopher Richard Rorty anticipated a renewed era of public cruelty;
- How Republicans love spending cuts, just not in their own states;
- Another view from Canada: “It’s been nice knowing you.”
Slate, Timothy Soseki Kudo, Lindsey Melki, and Kenneth Zavada, 12 Feb 2025: We Served in the Military. Trump Has No Idea How Much Damage He’s Just Done to It., subtitled “The trans ban isn’t just immoral. It’s logistical nonsense.”
However, as military veterans, we know that this [Trump’s] order will accomplish exactly the opposite. When it’s 5 degrees out and expected to drop, and it’s you and your battle buddy’s turn on night watch to share a sleeping bag in the snow-covered mudhole the two of you have spent the past 12 hours digging, the last thing on anyone’s mind is gender or sex. In those moments, all that matters is a person’s character and the mutual trust that comes from living and training together until you’re certain you have each other’s back.
Trump, recall, had bone splints.
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“Under the new standards, diversity is taboo, and racism is not.”
NY Times, Michelle Goldberg, 10 Feb 2025 (but in today’s print paper): Why Musk and Vance Went to Bat for a Self-Described Racist
If you want to understand the nature of our new regime, compare the fates of two federal employees who recently found themselves at least temporarily unable to keep doing their jobs. One is a West Point graduate, an Army veteran and a former prosecutor who was asked by political appointees in the first Trump administration to join a diversity committee. The other is a 25-year-old self-described racist. You can probably guess which of them Vice President JD Vance intervened to help out.
And
It is clearly absurd for Vance to insist that Elez is at once a “kid” who should be forgiven for things he wrote last year and a man who deserves a major role restructuring the federal government. But his argument isn’t supposed to make sense; Vance is asserting his freedom from the need to justify the administration’s actions according to pre-existing standards. Under the new standards, diversity is taboo, and racism is not. This stark reversal of values is a signature of the Trump restoration.
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DEI means many things to many people.
NY Times, Jamelle Bouie, 12 Feb 2025: Trump Is on the Wrong Side of History by Design
A good summary of many actions over the past three weeks.
At the National Security Agency, it has meant an effort to purge all N.S.A. websites and internal networks of banned words such as diversity, diverse, inclusive, racism and racial identity. Over at the Department of Defense, led by Pete Hegseth, a former Fox News host, it has meant the end of official recognition of Black History Month, the disbanding of affinity groups at service academies and a move to curb military outreach to Black professionals in engineering and the sciences. Diversity, Hegseth says, is “not our strength.” At the National Institutes of Health, displays honoring women and scientists of color have been removed, and at the National Science Foundation, program officers have reportedly been directed to reject grant applications that mention anything related to diversity, equity, inclusion or accessibility.
There’s more. In addition to purging the Department of Justice of anything that smacks of D.E.I., Attorney General Pam Bondi has instructed the agency to target private-sector diversity programs for potential “criminal investigation.” A company that wants to increase its proportion of female employees or place more Black Americans in corporate leadership may find itself in the cross hairs of the federal government.
For a long time, civil rights rules *banned* certain kinds of (what might be called negative, or exclusive) discrimination. Now, Bondi wants to ban, even in private industry, any kind of (positive, inclusive) discrimination. She cites that Darren Beattie guy.
“Competent white men must be in charge” is as close to a rallying cry as I can imagine for the Trump administration, although, of course, it strains credulity to say that either Trump or his subordinates count as competent.
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More about that self-described racist, Elez, one of Elon’s boys.
Vox, Zack Beauchamp, 12 Feb 2025: An eerie prophecy of Trump’s second term — from 1998, subtitled “Philosopher Richard Rorty predicted that someone like Trump might bring back public cruelty.”
Yet forgiveness requires contrition, and there’s no evidence Elez has any. He has not publicly apologized or even repudiated his ugly comments. In Trump’s America, you can engage in this kind of publicly performed cruelty without any real consequence.
This, for some, is actually the point of voting for Trump. New York’s Brock Colyar attended a swanky Trump party where one attendee said he voted for Trump because, in Colyar’s paraphrase, “he wanted the freedom to say ‘f**got’ and ‘r****ded.’” An anonymous “top banker” recently told the Financial Times that they felt “liberated” after Trump’s win because “we can say ‘r***rd’ and ‘p***y’ without the fear of getting canceled.”
The new ethos of cruelty reminded me of a passage in the philosopher Richard Rorty’s 1998 book Achieving Our Country. Warning of the rise of a right-wing American strongman in the not-too-distant future, Rorty predicted that such a political shift would also herald an alarming new cultural era:
One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. The words ‘n****r’ and ‘k*ke’ will once again be heard in the workplace. All the sadism which the academic Left has tried to make unacceptable to its students will come flooding back. All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.
And here we are.
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We could have predicted this.
NY Times, 12 Feb 2025: Republicans Love Trump’s Spending Cuts. Just Not in Their States., subtitled “Even as they praise the president’s unilateral actions to slash federal spending, G.O.P. lawmakers have quietly moved to seek carve outs or exemptions for their own constituents.”
Spending cuts for thee, not for me.
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Another view from Canada.
Vancouver Sun, Pete McMartin, 3 Feb 2025, via Chris McKitterick on Facebook: Pete McMartin, Opinion: “Farewell to my American friends. It’s over”
Goodbye, America.
It’s been nice knowing you.
Goodbye New York, and your Jewish delicatessens with corned beef sandwiches stacked as high as your skyline.
Goodbye Detroit, my boyhood neighbour, and so long to Tiger Stadium, the Detroit Institute of Arts and Motown.
Goodbye Bellingham, Seattle and Portland — how I’ll miss my Cascadian cousins with our shared Pacific sensibilities. And while I’m at it, goodbye to the cheap gas and shoreline cottages of Point Roberts, America’s appendix dangling just below the border not a mile from me.
What was once so close has never been so far.Goodbye Stag Leap’s Pinot Noir, Maker’s Mark bourbon, and Hebrew National hotdogs. My tastebuds mourn.
Goodbye to the cowards on both sides of the border who have demonstrated that whatever fidelity to democratic ideals they profess to have extends only so far as their self-interest. They should get a real job, say, in a chain gang.
Goodbye to anyone, again on both sides of the border, who bends the knee to Trump, rather than standing up to him, as any self-respecting person would and should, and telling him to piss off.
Goodbye to a culture that demands we bend the knee.
…
Most painful of all, goodbye to my American friends, some of whom I have known all my life, and some of whom I’ve collected along the way. I can cross your border but no longer wish to: Your Narcissist-in-Chief has decreed that my countrymen and I have the choice of becoming destitute, vassals or enemies. I’m choosing the latter
Meanwhile, your silence and the silence of all Americans in response to this aggression leaves me disheartened. That silence speaks volumes. I — we — have heard you loud and clear how little our friendship as a country means to you.
…
Goodbye to what I envied as the country that prided itself on encouraging unparalleled innovation in science, art and business. Any good that remains of it has been overshadowed by rapacity, cheap commercialism and egotism.
Goodbye to that ever-present sense of inferiority I once had when considering the relationship between Canada and America. What doubt I had of our own greatness is gone, and in its place is a certitude that Canada is superior to the U.S. in all the ways that matter. I look across the border now and see a violent, burgeoning autocracy now ever on the edge of civil war, and a population that is either cheering on this new brutalism or quaking in fear from it.
…
So, goodbye America, it’s been nice knowing you, but I don’t know you anymore. I’ve reached that point in our relationship where any admiration I have had for you has been replaced by a new, angry resolve, which is: I won’t consort with the enemy.
MAGA Americans won’t care.
