Why Trump Supporters Still Support Him

The fact is, they think they're immune from the actions taken by the Trump regime. They think the hyenas aren't going to eat their faces.

Think about what that means. 

It means they're fine if these things happen to us. If my kid is arrested or assaulted for doing something like pissing in the wrong bathroom, that is fine with them. If my kid's professor or friend or neighbor is deported because they're Hispanic or Muslim, that's fine with them. If you or your spouse or your friend gets fired for being "woke," that's fine too. 

That's what they want to happen. 

If your neighbor or you, for that matter, if you're arrested because you supported the wrong person in the latest election, or if your business collapses because people can't afford to buy things, that's great! If your disabled child can't get the help they need because Trump's regime cut funding to your public school, as far as they're concerned, that's wonderful. If your kid dies because you can't afford the health care they need, hey, shouldn't have been born poor or "weak," should they?

When it happens to them, you might ask, will they be sorry? Well, they'll be sorry for themselves. But they're still going to say fuck you, because you had it coming. 

Supreme Court Takes Mifepristone Case

In the year 2000, the FDA approved mifepristone as a safe and effective drug. Mifepristone is a abortion pill typically used for medical abortions or to complete partial miscarriages in the first trimester of pregnancy. 

Last year, anti-abortion crusaders sued to have the drug removed from the market, saying the FDA had acted too quickly. Mind you, this is a drug that has been used all over the world since the 1990s, and which has undergone multiple clinical trials, all showing it is safe to use, with side effects occurring in less than one percent of patients.

Now the Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case. The petitioner for the medication (which is on the WHO's list of essential medications) have also asked the Court to decide whether the anti-abortion crusaders have standing to sue.

“You can’t just bring random lawsuits in court. You actually have to have been harmed by something,” said Greer Donley, an associate law professor at the University of Pittsburgh Law School. “That’s really what standing analysis is all about, to try to figure out if if the people who bring the lawsuit actually have a stake in the case.” Numerous legal experts have questioned whether the challengers in this case have properly demonstrated that they have been harmed by mifepristone’s continued legality.

The anti-abortion crowd are not being harmed by this medication, which none of them have taken (or at least none of them will admit to have taken). No, what is being harmed is their ability to force other people to do as they are told -- told, that is, by these anti-abortion fanatics. 

What is being harmed is their ability to control the lives of other people. 

They believe they should be given the power to control the lives of those they consider inferior -- women, the poor, the working class, LGBTQ people. Not being allowed to control the bodies of those groups is the harm being done to them. And that -- not zygotes or fetuses -- is their real concern. If women and the working class and poor people and LGBTQ people are allowed to control their own bodies, they might begin to think they can control their own lives. They might even think they should have civil rights and equal protection under the law. 

This is also why they're infuriated by trans people. If people are men or women because they say they're men or woman, well, how will these people know which people are by nature inferior and subject to control? 

This is why they get more furious about trans women than they do about trans men (although they also hate trans men, don't worry). Trans women violate their belief about how the world works. Trans women both are and are not an inferior gender -- if they're women, they should be controlled; if they're men, they should do the controlling. But to control a trans woman -- how can they do that? 

Traditionally they have controlled women through rape, the threat of rape; forced pregnancy and the threat of forced pregnancy; and violence. They can't force trans women into pregnancy, and while they can threaten rape, that's another conflict for this group, since they don't want to admit rape exists. 

They can, of course, still use violence and the threat of violence, which they do. And they can and do use the legal system as a form of violence -- to control trans women (and trans men) by that method. Hence all the fucking laws being put in place over the past few years.

I've avoided using the word "conservative" to talk about these people. They aren't conservatives. They're reactionaries and fascists. They don't want to conserve. They want to control, and they are perfectly happy to strip away the civil rights of others as well as to drive this country back to the nineteenth century if that is what it takes to allow them to control those they consider property.

Covid-19 Denialists

In case you haven't been on Twitter (wise choice), the new bullshit being pushed by MAGA Americans is that people aren't really dying from Covid-19.

See, they're dying from cancer.

Or from heart attacks.

And then the devious lying Democrats (all over the planet, apparently) are pretending that people died of the virus, because (obviously) they're all "deranged" and will do anything to keep Trump from being elected.

Can you imagine the ego of a man who thinks a global pandemic is being staged to take him down?

Can you imagine the massive willful ignorance of people who believe (pretend to believe, I suspect) this nonsense?

Can you believe that if a cancer patient gets shot they still call it a shooting death? Fair n balanced Brit cannot. https://t.co/Uw1ZTVQDaw

— A.R. Moxon (@JuliusGoat) April 8, 2020

Trump the Incompetent

I remember being both appalled and deeply upset when Trump won the election.

This wasn't because I "hated" Trump, or "hated" conservatives.

It wasn't because I was "deranged."

It's because I knew -- like millions of other Americans knew -- that Trump was incompetent, that he knew nothing about how to run a government, and that if any sort of crisis came along, he would fuck it up.

And here we are.

How are the MAGA-Americans handling this? Or those who have been brainwashed by Fox News?

Denial and conspiracy theories. Nonsense and lies. Also, absolute bullshit.

Business as usual, in other words.

It wouldn't matter -- they're fools and idiots, and we could ignore them -- except we're all in this boat together.

1) Dude I occasionally chat with when walking dogs started on "doctors would close the country for two years" and "it's just old people dying, we're overreacting" and I told him to go fuck himself at top volume in a public park, so maybe I'm not as cool about this as I thought.

— John Rogers (@jonrog1) April 3, 2020

Making America GREAT

God help us:

Boy howdy this was a conversation. pic.twitter.com/45V02Tp2n7

— Robert Evans (The Only Robert Evans) (@IwriteOK) January 20, 2020

Wascally Wabbits

So I was having this discussion with a buddy of mine about this commercial which has populated the childhood of American children for the past 60 years:

The catch-line is always "Trix are for kids!"

So my friend and I were talking about the weirdness of this commercial, which relies on children frustrating the desires of another, and mocking and tormenting another, into order to fulfill their own desire -- and their own desires for something both unnecessary and unhealthy, let's not forget. An early commercial makes this even more explicit:

The discussion sparked a memory of how, when I was a young media-saturated toddler delagar, shopping with my parents on Sunday morning at Schwegmann's

I'd always pester my father for Trix, just as the TV had told me I should. "I want Trix!" I would say. "Can we get Trix?"

"Trix are for kids," he would say cheerily, walking on past.

Far from annoying me, this would puzzle me. "But I am a kid," I would say, as if this were some information he was lacking.

"Trix are for kids," he would repeat, continuing on down the aisle.

"But Daddy," I would say, running after him, "But Daddy, I am a kid! So can I have some?"

"Trix are for kids!"

I was just convinced, when I was five years old, he was simply missing the facts. Like if I could get him to understand the data -- that I was a kid -- he would smack himself in the head and say, Oh, right! do a 180 in the aisle and buy me the cereal.

It occurs to me now that this is the fundamental error we are making when we try to hold a reasoned debate with MAGA Americans. We think they are just missing the facts. We think if we just supply them with the data, they will say, oh, right! Now I see, do a 180, and begin acting like decent human beings.

But they aren't missing the data. Like my father, they are perfectly aware of the facts. They know that climate change is real. They know that the USA has kids in cages. They know that Trump is looting the country, and that he changed the tax laws to put more money in the pockets of the 1%. They know that Trump is gutting the EPA to allow corporations to make more money, while destroying our water, air, wetlands, and our national parks. They know socialized medicine is the only system that works. They know antifa is not a terrorist organization, and that Proud Boys is. They know that police violence is a problem.

They know all this. We can repeat this information all we like, we can present all the evidence we want, under the delusion they're just missing the facts, and that if we give it to them, they'll say, oh right, and do a 180.

But that's not going to happen, because they don't care about evidence. They care about power and about wealth. They care about hegemony.  They care about their privilege, and keeping that privilege. If they have to mock and torment people to keep it, well, they'll do that. If they have to exploit people to keep it, they'll do that too. If they have to destroy the planet, well, they're Good Christians, aren't they? They know this is not the only world.

In conclusion: Vote every single member of the GOP out in 2020.

About Those Milkshakes...

So "Conservatives" have been playing this milkshake lie for all it's worth.

The conspiracy theory is evolving. Someone is absolutely going to be killed for holding a milkshake pic.twitter.com/OaNtSWSk0E

— Theynessee Pete (@Tennessee_Pete) July 2, 2019

(See more here:

https://twitter.com/Tennessee_Pete/status/1146028991121375232)

In case you aren't in the loop, what happened was Andy Ngo. that font of propaganda, pretended he'd been hit with a milkshake -- which as we know is the worst thing that can happen to a fascist these days -- and then someone else, probably another MAGA American, claimed Antifa members (you can't actually be a "member" of antifa, but never mind) were mixing cement into the milkshakes.

Then it became "quick-drying" cement.

Now it's quick-drying cement and battery acid.

None of this is true (see this article, but you have to go waaay down to find the paragraph where they admit it never happened), but as we are learning, if you're a "conservative" these days, you don't care what's true. You don't care if what you're telling people is not just a lie, but a silly lie.

You only care whether or not what you're saying justifies your bigotry, your hatred, and your ignorance.

See this thread for more: Thread starts here

(Scare quotes around conservative throughout because -- of course -- these aren't actually conservatives. They're reactionary fascists. Not to mention vile heaps of trash.)

Right-Wing Screeching

This story was very hot on the reactionary Right-Wing blogs about two weeks ago -- I assume it got big play on Fox News, that's usually why the entire Conservative Blogosphere goes apeshit at once.

Here's what happened: a young woman who had been sexually assaulted asked to be euthanized. (Euthanasia is legal in the Netherlands, as well it should be. But it is reserved for hopeless cases -- for instance, people dying of liver cancer, which is a horribly painful way to die.) The young woman's request was denied, because her case wasn't hopeless, and she was far too young, and because treatment options existed which she hadn't exhausted yet.

The young woman subsequently starved herself to death. No euthanasia was involved, although her parents did make the decision to stop force-feeding her, after several months. (If you know anything about force-feeding, you know it's a form of torture.)

Fox News reported that the girl had been euthanized, because of course they did. And then everyone who watches Fox News began screeching about the case. Rod Dreher wept big hot crocodile tears over it. Those GODLESS SECULAR people over there in the SOCIALIST Netherlands are SO EEEVIL, our world is DOOMEd and so on, for about 15 paragraphs.

Worse, the Conservative Attack Squad, besides screaming about this on Twitter and elsewhere nonstop, then went after the poor child's parents.

Did any of them bother to check the sources and see what actually happened? You know they didn't. If they were capable of checking sources and evaluating evidence, they wouldn't be watching Fox News.

The Right-Wing Noise Machine

It's sad watching people who used to be fairly rational creatures having their judgment and their ability to reason destroyed as they get sucked into the toxic swamp of Fox News, the National Review, and all the other reactionary media sources.

It's telling, also, just who gets sucked in like this -- it's almost always those whose critical skills are under-developed and those who lack empathy.

They can't tell fact from fantasy because they've never tried to do that, for whatever reason; and they feel that lack of empathy like a wound, so that they'll do anything to justify it. Reactionary media lets them do this. It gives them an excuse to hate, and an excuse to stay ignorant.

I know I should feel sorry for such people, but as long as their ignorance and bizarre fantasies create danger for so many truly innocent people -- including my kid -- I just can't find it in me.

LOL

So for a brief moment this morning MAGA Americans were losing their damn minds because a couple of politicians said that those killed in Sri Lanka yesterday were "Easter worshipers."

"How much do they hate Christians?" one demanded. "They can't even say our name!"

"Yeah! We don't worship EASTER. Say it RIGHT: we're Christian worshipers."

I asked if by that he meant that they worshiped Christians, and he blocked me.

Such delicate flowers, these fellas.

What is the University?

Or, I guess, why is the university? That's what I'm really thinking about here.

Is it to provide a ticket to a job? That's how it's often sold, as if the university is some sort of elaborate vending machine. Get this degree, get a well-paying job.

To be clear, I'm not opposed to people getting good jobs with decent pay. And certainly one reason I've encouraged my kid to get a degree is that he'll be more employable with one than without one.

But is that why we educate people? So that they can have jobs? Is that why universities exist?

Because if that is what a university is for, then the MAGA Americans and Evangelical parents who send their kids to my school are right. They don't need to study silly subjects like literature and humanities and Spanish. We shouldn't even be a university. We should be a trade school. You should send your kid to school to learn nursing, or welding, or automotive repair, or how to repair motherboards, or accounting -- whatever skillset their future job will require -- stamp their certificate, and put them in the workplace.

Let me be clear. There is nothing wrong with schools like that.

My father went to a school like that. He got an excellent job as a chemical engineer, worked for NASA on the moon landings and the shuttle program, and then later became a vice president for an oil company. He did very well financially.

Are schools like that universities?

They really aren't. Do we want all of our schools to be those schools?

That's something we need to decide. And I'm not talking about losing skillsets. If we just need, for instance, to teach people geology, or how to speak Spanish, there are much better ways to teach that than in a university.

I'm talking about the liberal arts education, which is why we built the university, back in 1100 AD (a bit earlier in some places, a bit later in others). Liberal was the key word then, and in order to make someone liberal -- able to be a free man -- we taught him the seven arts: grammar, logic, rhetoric, math, geometry, music, and astronomy.

Over the time, we've changed the arts part of the liberal arts; but we still have this idea. We still have a notion that there is a certain curriculum (a course, a route) people need to take if they are to be able to think and reason like free human beings.

What is that curriculum, that route?

(1) You've got to learn to reason -- that is, you've got to know how to build an argument based on logic, without fallacies; you've got to know the difference between a good source and a bad source, and how to select evidence to support your argument accordingly. You've got to be willing to make decisions based on what this evidence shows you.

(2) You've got to learn how science works -- what constitutes proof, what a theory is, how we "know" something as opposed to how we simply think we know something, what the scientific method is, what data is and isn't, how science reacts when the evidence changes. You've got to be able to read and understand scientific papers. You've got to be able to make decisions based on what scientific evidence says.

(3) You've got to know how to read literature and how to look at art and how to listen to music. You have to know what literature, art, and music are. You have to understand why this matter.

(4) You must know math, enough to be scientifically and economically literate.

(5) You must be able to communicate, both in speech and in writing, lucidly and effectively, about all of these things. You must be able to persuade, with logic and evidence, but also with pathos.

(6) You must know history -- what has happened, why it happened. Also, you must know philosophy, psychology, and economics. Without these, history cannot possibly be understood.

(7) You must know at least two languages other than your own well enough to read and speak fluently.

That's a liberal arts education, and that's the basics. 

And that's what is being steadily stripped away from our universities, in a quest to make them "competitive."

Competitive with what? Well, with the trade-school type universities, for one; but mostly here 'competitive' means 'affordable.'

It's no secret that a university education has become unaffordable for all but the obscenely wealthy. My kid's education is costing, with room and board, just under $20,000 a year. He has a small scholarship, and because he went to an in-state school, we get a tuition rebate. He doesn't have a car, he lives on grits and apples, and he has a roommate. That is simply how much it costs.

In our case, the kid's grandparents started a college fund, which is paying most of the cost. (I buy groceries sometimes, and I bought the kid's laptop.) But many, many students end up working full-time, as well as taking out massive loans.

So you can see why there's a big push to pare down the curriculum -- to make it easier for students to complete it more quickly and more easily.

More quickly, so as to need fewer semesters in college and thus fewer loans.

More easily, because someone working full-time has no time to study.

This is all understandable.

What do we lose, though, when we turn the university into a trade school? When we pare away three hours of required history here, six hours of required humanities there, the political science requirement, the upper-level science requirement...

We graduate engineers who can build a bridge -- which is good! We need bridges! -- but who can't tell a good source from a bad source when they click on an internet link.

We graduate dental hygienists who are lovely people and wonderful at cleaning teeth, which again is a skill we need, but who will vote against a bill to put fluoride in our drinking water because they can't reading a scientific paper and evaluate its claims, so they listen to what their friends on FB say about it.

We graduate marketing majors who never took a history or a political science class, much less a philosophy class, so when a politician tells them immigrants are 'animals,' why, they see nothing alarming in such speech.

We create a country filled with people watching Fox News and reading absolutely nonsense (see Rod Dreher) who honestly can't tell that what they're reading is propaganda -- who can't tell facts from bullshit, and don't even want to try.

When my kid was little, his teachers asked him what church we went to. (This is a standard question in the South, as all y'all from the South know.) He came home and asked me. Amusing myself, I told him to tell his teacher we go to the church of books.

"Oh," the teacher said when the kid repeated this. "Are y'all Mormons?"

Oh my God.

But my point was, I do go to the church of books. My faith is this: I believe that education is our only hope. It's the only thing that has ever done any good, the only thing made this world any better. 

Not always. Not every time.

But it's the one thing that does work.

Only if we do it right, though. And here in the USA, especially lately, we're doing every damn thing we can to make sure we do it exactly wrong.

Cold Hard Truth

Fact-checking Trump's many, many lies is pointless.

MAGA Americans -- and those who get their "news" from the National Review, or Fox News, or similar sources -- could not possibly care less that Trump is lying. They do not care about evidence, they do not care about reliable sources, they do not care what is objectively true or objective false. They care about hearing things that reinforce their smug and delusional worldview.

And the rest of us already know that if Trump is talking, he is lying.

The best move any serious news outlet could make would be to ignore Trump as much as possible, while covering the serious contenders for the 2020 election.

More Trigger Warning

Y'all, I'm pretty sure J.A. is a Sad Puppy. Either that, or she's Sad-Puppy-Adjacent. Not only is she pushing most of their alt.facts, in today's section, she uses a term I've never seen anyone else use: CTRL-Left.

Also, it would certainly explain why this book is so laughably bad. Most Sad Puppies can't write for toffee.

Chapters 15-20

If you cut out the political rants and repetition, you could get everything that happens in these chapters into about two paragraphs.

Our Bad Guy, Matthias, holds a Bad Guy meeting at his house. We find out why the Bad Guys have started about six fights with Jake so far -- because he's so dangerous that they want him off campus (or dead) before they pull their job.

How did they know he was so dangerous? I mean, before he started beating all of them up? I guess because he's a conservative patriotic American. That's essentially what Matthias says when one of Team Bad Guy suggests Jake might not be the only one on campus able and willing to thwart their Evil Plan.

"[The Left are] not violent. They abhor violence. Just ask them, they’ll tell you. Oh, they can form a mob quickly enough, if anybody offends them and violates their safe spaces, but….they won’t do anything." 

This is like Schrodinger's Immigrant (lazy and on welfare, and also he takes your job), only it's Schrodinger's Progressive. Giant spoiled babies who ALSO are total Nazis, planning to put good God-fearing Patriotic Americans in death camps.

Jake goes to a shooting range and shoots more guns. He has a fight with a 12 year old over whether his gun is big enough. (Oh my God.)

Jake thinks of quitting school, but how would he ever see Dr. Burke again if he did that?

I know J.A. told us Jake had a phone, but apparently he doesn't. I mean, he obviously doesn't realize that in the 21st century you can call people up and ask them out. Or, you know, text them.

Anyway, he goes on another date with Dr. Burke. They eat steak and make out. We find out Jake has a superpower -- he never gets lost, even when he's driving to some place where he's never been. It's just a inborn talent, that's how he is. But he's such a good guy that he lets Dr. Burke give him directions anyway.

He has yet another fight with a progressive snowflake, and makes this one cry too. That's his specialty. He beats up progressives and makes them cry. It's hilarious.

His fight with the snowflake (who calls him a Nazi) gets put on YouTube, and everyone believes he's a Nazi bigot now except one black guy, Pierce. He's in the book so we can see that J.A. isn't a racist and neither is Jake, despite some racist things he says to Pierce right away.

But Pierce isn't a sensitive snowflake, so he just laughs. Ha ha. Racism is a hilarious. Also later we find out that Pierce's father is the Real Racist. (Black people are the real bigots!)

This is an attitude toward non-white-people I have seen over and over again from conservatives who insist they aren't racist. It's not that they hate or dislike black people. Why, they have black friends! They hire black people! How can they be racist?

But when you talk to them, they will invariably let you know that these black people are different -- not like those other black people. These black people are Good Ones.

I think I've told this story here before, but once when I was in graduate school in Fayetteville, Arkansas, a white woman sat down next to me in a bar -- a total stranger, someone I had never seen -- and informed me drunkenly that she wasn't racist. "I'm not racist," she said, "but there are black people, and then there are n****rs. Know what I mean? You know what I mean!"

After he beats up the snowflake and realizes Pierce is one of the Good Ones, Jake remembers the small-l-liberals he had known in the army, 'Classical Liberals,' who unlike these snowflakes weren't evil, just wrong. Then he remembers something funny.

The Cntrl-Left, Jake thought with a smile, remembering a term someone on the Internet had come up with to mock the lockstep progressives and their obsession with the so-called Alt-Right. Because if there was any group in modern American society that truly wanted to control everyone and everything, it was the Left . . . 

The so-called Alt-Right.

Let's just skip ahead some.

In Chapter 18, the novel finally begins. Matthias and Team Bad Guy kill six or seven groundskeepers, apparently so they can steal their coveralls. This makes no sense, given that -- as we find out -- Matthias has been working on the grounds crew for months. Is there a reason he didn't just steal some coveralls? Or, I don't know, buy some? They're not that expensive.

ALSO: The grounds crew, at least on my university, does not wear a uniform. I'd be surprised if they wore a uniform anywhere. Why would they?

But we've already established that J.A. has never been on a college campus. She's also pretty bad at plotting criminal activity. I think this scene is in the book so she can point out that Banning Guns on Campus Doesn't Work, since the Bad Guys don't follow the rules. One of the grounds crew, who is also a progressive snowflake student (wait, I thought progressives were all spoiled rich kids?) protests when Matthias pulls his handgun:

“[You] need to put that gun away. You shouldn’t even have a gun here on campus. You know they’re prohibited. Hell, we put up the signs that say they’re prohibited!” 

Don't worry, this snowflake gets his. That'll teach him to go around without an AK-47.

I'm not sure why conservatives keep replaying this fantasy and ones like it, as if they're the only ones who can figure out that criminals don't obey the law.

(1) It's not the criminals we're worried about. It's regular people, who will keep their guns in the dorm rooms or carry them in their backpacks or whatever. Jake is of course a perfect gun owner, so he would never leave his weapon unsecured (except we see him doing just that) or carry it about loose in a jacket pocket (he does this too), so there's no chance in this little Fantasy World of some drunk 18 year old picking up a gun and shooting some other drunk 18 year old. And there's no chance of some hot-headed freshman getting in a fight over politics and yanking out his gun. That doesn't happen, in this Fantasy Conservatives land. In the real world, yeah, it happens all the time. And the more guns lying about loose, the more it happens.

(2) The NO GUNS ALLOWED sign functions like all rules and laws function. Laws don't stop criminals from committing crimes. They give us something we can do once the criminals have. Right now, guns are allowed on our campus. So if our Campus Police see a student with a gun, there is literally nothing they can do. A couple years ago, they could investigate, arrest the guy, get him and his gun off campus. Now? Now they just have to wait and see whether this is a Good Guy with a Gun, or maybe a guy who plans to murder 20 or 30 people.

I don't believe conservatives don't know this. They just ignore it, because -- like Jake -- they need their guns to feel safe. I mean, progressives are terribly scary, giant snowflakes that we are. Who knows what we might do if Jake didn't have his gun? Maybe we would call him a name and cry at him.

Blah, blah, blah. Pierce goes to the library. Oh, and Jake and Dr. Burke are headed there too -- for a study date. For some reason, they can't study in Dr. Burke's office. It's not because she's afraid of being alone with him, either. He does warn her that being his girlfriend might be bad for her career, but he doesn't mean it's because she's sleeping with a student.

Nope.

It's because she's sleeping with a conservative.

(Me: "OH MY GOD.")

Anyway, Pierce goes to meet his study group, ruminating as he does, and we learn that Pierce Did Research and found out the Real Voter Fraud comes from the Left and the Real Voter Suppression comes from Black Lives Matter and OH MY GOD. (None of this is true, obviously. The BLM thing is probably from a popular FB post shared on the right, showing what was allegedly Black Panthers outside a polling place. Upon  investigation, these turned out to be men escorting people to the polls. But they were black men, so ipso facto this is Voter Intimidation, since -- obviously -- any black man is scary to your white conservative.)

Pierce's study group is made up of Straw Liberals, including a girl with pink hair and a Islamic man, Fareed, who is plotting violent treason against the USA. Pierce isn't fooled by Fareed:

When the day came, if Fareed had his way, a soft little blob like Clark would be slaughtered with the rest of the infidels. Jenny, for sure, and maybe even Margery, would be raped to death for the glory of Allah.

Margery probably won't be raped to death, see, because she's fat, and as we all know, men only rape hot women. ("OH MY GOD.")

ANYWAY.

In Chapter 20, there is an extended scene in which one of the Campus police officers nearly assaults a working-class (white) man on campus to make a delivery. We see the officer do everything we've become accustomed to seeing real police offers do to black men and children on video, but afterwards, J.A. makes it clear that this fascist police officer is actually a Progressive, which is why he acts this way. (Oh my god.)

Bonus mention of Saul Alinsky. Of course.

For those keeping score at home: We're over 40% of the way through the book, according to my Kindle, and the plot is barely started.

Here, by the way, is a photo that was shared on my FB by a MAGA American (one that I am sad to admit is my cousin).

"The Only LGBT I Support"

All lives matter indeed.

Reading William Johnstone's Trigger Warnings

So over at Camestros Felapton's blog, a comment was made on the post discussing the Dragon Awards, suggesting that the Sad Puppies would be likely to nominate books like the 'YA' novel Trigger Warnings, by William Johnstone.

The novel is available for free on my Amazon Kindle, so I thought I'd give all y'all a treat and do a read of it.

I'm not sure how far into it I'm going to last though. This book isn't actually by William Johnstone, who apparently wrote some nice Westerns before he died. (Westerns are one of the few genres I don't read much, though I can recommend a couple of them if anyone is interested.) It's by his niece, J. A. Johnstone. And holy hell is it terrible.

Chapters One through Four

Our hero, Jake Rivers, is hanging out in his dorm room -- a single, apparently -- with the windows open, sighing with annoyance over some terrible book he's reading. I assume he's being forced to read it for class. Maybe we'll find out more about this book later, because right now Jake hears a woman "cry out." Not cry out for help, mind you. The snowflake women at this liberal arts college would never think of asking for help, even when someone is beating them up.

Jake goes down to see if he can help, because that's the kind of guy he is. As he passes through the lobby of his dorm, he hears a group of students talking about such topics as privilege and microaggressions. Jake, while unimpressed, notes that he has no friends on this campus.

Outside, he stops a man (in a man bun) from slapping his girlfriend around, by slapping manbun guy around, basically. The battered girlfriend, instead of being grateful, shrieks at him for perpetuating Toxic Masculinity (yes, this is how J. A. Johnstone thinks this scene would go) and then all the kids from the lobby come out and also start shrieking at poor Jake. The battered girlfriend attacks Jake, "hissing and spitting."

You know how bitches be.

THEN Jake gets attacked by a bunch of students in black hoods who stream out of the bushes, wielding pipes and bicycle chains, screaming at him for being a fascist. When Jake beats up all ten or fifteen of them, the students from the lobby also start yelling that he's a fascist. Also a Nazi.

Oh, also one of the students in a black hood is a woman, and when Jake knocks her down, she starts screaming rape.

Women, amirite?

Jake has several solemn thoughts about other people in black hoods he has known, like the ones he fought in Iraq, who he watched (why did he just watch? Given he's such a bad-ass) "spouting Arabic" while they "sawed the head off" a Western journalist with a big knife. Also newsreels he remembers (because he was born in 1933) of men in black uniforms goosestepping off to

on their way to wipe out anyone who didn’t think exactly the same way they did. They had disarmed the citizenry, taken over all the newspapers and radio and colleges and univ- ersities and made it a crime punishable by death to say or even think anything they disagreed with . . . 

You know. Like those Leftists in America today. Get it? Get it?

Jake ends up in the office of the Campus Chief of Police, who is on his side, but what can he do, he says, what with today's media? He shows Jake a story, no doubt from Rachel Maddow, with the headline FAR RIGHT EXTREMIST ATTACKS COLLEGE STUDENTS.

Jake says he's not far-right. Okay, bub.

Then we get a flashback: Jake's first months on campus. We find out he is a decorated war hero. We find out he finished his undergraduate degree almost entirely before he was even a high school senior. Then he got in trouble, for doing boys-will-be-boys stuff, and ended up having to join the army, where he finished his undergraduate degree.

Now his grandfather wants him to get his masters degree. Apparently his grandfather is a billionaire, and owns most of this liberal arts college outside of Austin, "the finest academic institution in the country," as Granddad says, while shooting guns with Jake. (Jake is of course a better shot than even Granddad, because of course he is.) So Jake should go there.

Jake's daddy is a rich lawyer, and Jake hates him, for reasons I guess will be made clearer later.

But let's jump back a bit. Jake is here on campus to get his master's degree. But he's living in a dorm with undergraduates. And even though his masters is in Biology, he is compelled to take classes in English and political science and gender studies. These are all ridiculous classes, like "Feminist Critique of Christianity" and "LGBTQIAPKTales: A Seminar" and "The Toxic American Political Axis: Republicans, Nazis, and Fascists."

Okay. So first off, no masters student will be living in a dorm. And if one is living in a dorm, they'll be the RA, not just another student. And no masters student in biology is going to have classes like these on their curriculum.

That is not how the academy works.

Also, these course titles. Sweet Jesus. Someone has apparently never sat her ass down in a college classroom ever, never mind "the finest" college in the nation.

Which explains why this book is so silly -- someone spent her childhood being homeschooled, I suspect, or sent to one of those ACE 'schools,' and has mistaken MAGA American propaganda for reality.

Jake visits his adviser, a white guy who identifies as a black guy, and is lectured to about speech codes and told that this college doesn't usually take veterans, because a 'military background' doesn't prepare a student for the rigorous curriculum and stringent personal behavior standards required here.

Yeah, see, as someone who is an actual adviser, though not a strawman adviser, this ain't how it works, bucko. Universities love veterans. One, because for the most part they have been prepared for the rigors of the academic system. (As one of my best students, a Marine, said, university life is a snap after the Core.)

And second, veterans benefits. Not only do these benefits pay their tuition, they pay for all sorts of other things as well. No defaults, either -- also, fewer of them fail to graduate. Universities love students like this.

But this doesn't fit with J.A. Johnstone's propaganda. Of course Leftists hate veterans -- after all, didn't we spit on all those returning Vietnam soldiers? -- and so of course universities, which contain nothing but lunatic leftists, hate veterans too.

Besides giving Jake an eight page speech code which (among other things) forbids any mention of the First or Second Amendment (since mentioning these are microagressions), his adviser also gives him a thick booklet containing the university's rules for sexual conduct.

“This sets out the proper steps that are required to be taken before any sort of sexual contact to ensure that all such contacts are consensual,” [The adviser explains.] 

“No means no, eh?”  

“Exactly.” 

“So yes means yes.” 

“No, yes also means no because of our heteropatriarchal, phallocentric culture.” 

There's more very hilarious comments about LGBTA students, and then Jake explains why he's living on campus -- because he wants the "full college experience." This is odd, given he has previously he'd made it clear he was here to get his degree, not to "experience" things. Also, he doesn't really seem the sort to want to "experience" new things. Also, why is his adviser advising him about housing issues? That's not what we do.

But obviously he needs to be in a dorm for plot reasons, and someone must have pointed out to J.A. that graduate students don't live in dorms, so she wedged this mini-scene in here.

And that takes us to the end of chapter four. More later, if I can stand it.