It’s a given that kooks are everywhere. And there’s evidence that people who believe in one conspiracy theory are also more likely to believe in several — a phenomenon informally known as “crank magnetism.” If a secret cabal of very powerful globalists brought down the World Trade Center, faked the Sandy Hook massacre, and almost put Hillary Clinton in power, it only makes sense that they’re also hiding the truth about the moon landings, homeopathy, vaccines, and the indisputable fact that global warming is a hoax. So it should come as no surprise that when Andrew Anglin, Head Aryan In Charge at white supremacy website Daily Stormer, posted a video making fun of flat-earth “theorists” the other day, a remarkably large portion of his readers were very, very angry and upset, because after all only an idiot would believe the Jewish/Masonic/Illuminati lie that Earth is a sphere. If you don’t want your browser polluted by the direct link to the Daily Stormer forum, Wonkette pal David Futrelle has a sampling of the best stupidity over at We Hunted the Mammoth. For once, we almost feel a little bad for a Nazi for having to deal with wackaloons who are crazier than his usual run of wackaloons. Almost.

Of course, what with the Daily Stormer site being a vile hive of scum and villainy where the height of sophisticated humor is taking “JosephGoebbels” as your username, it’s hard to tell whether some comments are from earnest flat-earthers or whether they’re just kidding in a Nazi kind of way, like this one from “whitemanshame,” who explains “Fun fact, all the moon mission astronauts were satanic freemasons.” Other net-Nazis seem quite earnest indeed, like “Excalibur,” who dares other readers to show him the curvature of the Earth:

here is a challenge for all the non believers, somebody give me a picture of the earth that is not CGI

just one

Go ahead: post a picture showing the curvature of the earth, and he’ll declare it a fake. Your argument is invalid.

Then there’s “Whiteliberty,” who approaches the topic with LOGIC and FACTS:

Science is the acquisition of knowledge capable of being reproduced.

You can’t reproduce Big Bang. It’s not science.

With flat earth, there are multiple lines of evidence that point in the same direction.

Many globe claims have been power of suggestion, reliance on authority, and black box frauds. As a thesis, flat earth is stronger in 2017 than 2007.

You can’t land on a lightning bolt. You can’t land on the “sun” or “stars” or “planets,” if they are electromagnetic plasma formations. We don’t normally deal with plasma, or understand its properties, or understand the connection between plasma and consciousness, in terms of the concept, field.

Newton’s Third Law prohibits acceleration in space. You need a medium to move: floor, water, atmosphere. Space is not a medium. This would explain why NASA had to lie and fake a moon mission.

Just to be clear: No, Newton’s third law doesn’t require a medium in order to move. Things move a lot better when they don’t have to deal with drag, like in space. Or so the CGI animations make it seem. But we liked the “sun” and “stars” and “planets”: one of those things is not like the others!

All of this sounds a heck of a lot like Rebecca’s neighbor in Los Angeles who just had a lot of questions about the Jews, like why is it that they managed to make Hitler so mad that he wanted to kill them all? If you have not read that piece, you need to go read it and learn a lot of science facts about the Jews, who also run Google and NASA so they can put cloud cover over the North Pole to hide the hole that goes through the crust and the ice to the hollow earth where the aliens live. Maybe Rebecca’s neighbor was there on the Daily Stormer message board! He might have been “3rdRicht,” who has been giving all this a lot of thought:

I only started looking into what Flat Earth theories within the last month.

1 interesting point is at night, it is cooler in the Moonlight than it is in the shade.

Makes ya wonder, doesn’t it? Then there’s “SouthernFascist,” who isn’t quite convinced, but he certainly is open-minded about the matter, because if you believe anything THEY tell you, you might be a dupe. How’s this for an example of crank magnetism in action?

Why not? They lie about the holocaust, they lie about the bible, they lie about every single war, they constantly change history, the pretend to be part of the European diaspora, they lie about the control their banks have, they shovel race mixing propaganda down our throats, so if any of this flat earth stiff has any merit at all, it wouldn’t be a surprise if the jews were lying about that too.

In all honesty i do believe the moon landings are fake. I don’t think we can even get to the moon, nasa even admitted we cant get past the van allen belt due to radiation, so i am 100% convinced the moon landings were faked, at least the first one.

The greatest two-fer on Earth or Moon would be Buzz Aldrin punching a Nazi.

And yet he persisted:

As for flat earth, some stuff i have found is pretty interesting, there is a few things out there that have made me a bit skeptical, but until i see some concrete proof, one way or another, and not some “cgi” earth picture i don’t really care if we live on the back of a turtle, just so long as we can take back our world, whatever shape it may be.

Fortunately, cosmology doesn’t worry him too much, since it has far less effect on his life than all that race-mixing. It’s good to see someone who can figure out their priorities! Same goes for “MrBig,” who wonders why anyone even cares about such abstract knowledge anyway:

The Earth can be any shape you want it to be.

The White Genocide is still occurring.

Our race will be just as extinct no matter what the shape is.

Then there are the rationalist, science-based Nazis who find all these flat-earthers an embarrassment to the good reputation of white nationalism, like “StormCommando,” who lays out the logic and explains it just doesn’t make any sense that all of known science would be a Jewish plot, which is just silly:

What are all the thousands of photos of stars, galaxies and planets and why would they go to such extreme lengths to create such a dumb conspiracy? And why would they invent all of these apparently totally fictional satellites and go into great detail about their workings, specifications, and spend time making these elaborate and unnecessary ‘props’ in lab environments? Again, utterly stupid idea.

He could have stopped there, but of course he had to go on: you know what IS a Jewish plot? Not the shape of the world, but part of its recent history:

I can buy holocaust revisionism because that’s a conceivable lie. It’s about distorting the facts of something which already happened. But even the scale of that is enormous. And yet even so, it’s very easy with a little examination to disprove the holohoax.

So there you go. LOGIC, fuckers. Besides, as “StormCommando” pointed out elsewhere, believing in a flat earth dishonors the Nazi rocket scientists, who surely would have talked about a flat, not a round, planet if there were anything to it. Don’t you go insulting the greatest Aryan scientists of all time!

Eventually, Anglin closed the comments and posted an angry follow-up telling his readers that if anyone so much as mentions Flat Earthism again, they’ll be banned, because “Seriously though, this type of thing is just… I mean, use some common sense, guys.”

How will anyone listen to these guys about the natural genetic inferiority of the lower races if you go talking about this flat earth stuff, after all? It just ain’t scientific, while insisting the Holocaust never happened is borne out by all the evidence.

Yr Wonkette is supported by reader donations, and we’d be left flat if it weren’t for you. Please throw some money at us via the “Donate” linky below! No checks by airmail, however. They may fall off the edge and never arrive.

[Daily Stormer via We Hunted the Mammoth]

Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, who would like all Americans to send their children to the school of their choice as long as it makes a buck for someone, has been invited to give the commencement speech this year at Bethune-Cookman University, a historically black university in Daytona Beach, Florida. Yes, really. The invitation is almost certain to make history — in 50 years, it will be recognized as a brilliantly contrarian maneuver, remembered as an astonishing public relations disaster, or quietly airbrushed out of any still-extant paper copies of the yearbook and referred to cryptically as “the 2017 event.”

In an announcement that must perfectly capture the mood of students and faculty alike, the university explained how all this happened:

Much like Dr. Bethune, Founder of Bethune-Cookman University, Secretary DeVos deems the importance of opportunity and hope for students to receive an exceptional education experience. Her mission to empower parents and students resonates with the history and legacy of Dr. Bethune. B-CU President, Dr. Edison O. Jackson expressed, “Bethune-Cookman University is a school built on the legacy and the transformation of students. Dr. Bethune’s love for students started with five little girls and grew to over 250 students during her time as university president.” “The legacy of Dr. Bethune is that she was not constrained by political ideology, but worked across all parties to support B-CU,” he explained.

Yr Wonkette has been unable to determine whether the campus health clinic was immediately flooded with students and faculty members seeking treatment of pounding headaches.

As you no doubt recall, DeVos closed out Black History Month with a bizarre February 27 press release praising historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) for the awesome job they did of providing school choice during the Jim Crow era, which rather missed the point that they were founded not out of a commitment to providing “more options” for education, but because there were literally no other opportunities for most black people to get a college education. The release didn’t mention segregation at all, instead suggesting that somehow African-Americans excluded from higher education were only an untapped market segment the HBCUs wisely decided to serve:

They saw that the system wasn’t working, that there was an absence of opportunity, so they took it upon themselves to provide the solution.

It was all about providing “options,” just like DeVos wants to do!

Graduates of Bethune-Cookman took to the Tweeters to express their puzzlement at the apparent alternate universe by which their alma mater appeared to have been consumed:

A Change.org petition posted Monday after the announcement, calling for a reconsideration of the invitation, had by late afternoon surpassed its 4500-signature goal. Instead of calling for DeVos to be turned away altogether, the petition asked that a new commencement speaker be invited and that, in the name of “engagement and open communication,” Secretary DeVos instead be invited to some non-ceremonial event where the campus community could “welcome her to the table and have meaningful dialogue about stronger policies, the White House HBCU Initiative, and the importance and contributions of HBCUs.”

Fortunately, the university fixed everything with a Tweet explaining they’d never meant to say DeVos and the school’s founder were exactly alike:

For one thing, Mary McLeod Bethune, who according to the school’s “About” page, “opened the Daytona Literary and Industrial Training School for Negro Girls with $1.50, faith in God and five little girls,” probably never spent millions of dollars lobbying to undermine public schools, or similar amounts in campaign donations to get herself appointed to a cabinet post. So we’d guess there’s a heck of a lot of bridges — over really wide gaps — that Secretary DeVos’s visit will have the chance to build.

Also it is your open thread.

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[HuffPo / Bethune-Cookman University]

We’re going to suggest an official motto for the Trump Administration: “That Probably Could Have Gone Better.” It just seems to fit so many situations, like the healthcare bill dying twice before pissing everyone off, Trump’s First Military Fuckup, the Great Big Syria Revenge Bombing, the Obama Wire Tapp, pleasing Democrats by firing James Comey for being mean to Hillary Clinton… you get the idea. At least when Education Secretary Betsy DeVos went to Daytona Beach, Florida, on Wednesday to deliver a commencement speech at historically black university Bethune-Cookman U, it didn’t result in any loss of life or constitutional crisis. But still, That Probably Could Have Gone Better.

Students and alumni of Bethune-Cookman had protested the decision to invite DeVos from the moment it was announced, and this week delivered several different petitions with a total of some 60,000 signatures calling on the administration to withdraw the invitation, so it should surprise no one that when DeVos began to speak, may among the graduating class stood and turned their backs to her in protest. Why were the young folks so angry and rude? It wasn’t simply that DeVos had made that astonishingly clueless statement celebrating historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) as bastions of providing “more options” to students under segregation, as if Jim Crow were merely a matter of unfortunate market incentives. That heaping pile of dumbth — which DeVos sort of acknowledged was off-key — was plenty to start with, but students and alumni at the ceremony also said they objected to DeVos’s policy commitments, mostly her devotion to dismantling public schools in the name of “choice”:

Several said they believed she would make it harder for them and other students to get financial aid or to pay back their college loans. Some stressed they had attended traditional public schools, which they feared would be undermined by DeVos’ promotion of charter schools and vouchers.

“I just feel like she cannot relate,” said Jasmine Smith, a 21-year-old incoming junior from Fort Lauderdale.

Brent Franklin, who traveled from Los Angeles to attend his daughter’s graduation, said DeVos “knows nothing about HBCUs and how they were founded.”

The students were also plenty angry at the university’s president, Edison O. Jackson, who had invited DeVos in the first place, and whose response to the protests struck many as condescending. The boos started before DeVos even began speaking, when Jackson introduced Trump Official Black Person Omarosa Manigault, who has a White House job because she was on “The Apprentice” and is appropriately deferential to Mr. Trump, sir. Students booed Omarosa, and Jackson took the mic to say, “You don’t know her. You don’t know her story” — which coincidentally is what Kid Zoom used to say when I insisted he pick up his socks.

Then it was time to give DeVos an honorary degree, and while some faculty on the dais applauded, the students booed; once she began speaking, backs were turned, boos got louder, and one student was escorted out after giving a Black Power salute.

DeVos certainly tried to say all the right things about civility and respectful dialogue, and at one point addressed a specific issue students had raised, saying the Trump administration has proposed restoring funding for year-round Pell Grants (as opposed to grants only disbursed during the academic year). She even tried to position herself as the students’ advocate, saying “I am at the table fighting on your behalf, and on behalf of all students across this great nation,” a claim that was met with loud skepticism, particularly after Donald Trump last week said he thought special funding for HBCUs might be unconstitutional, a position he later backtracked on, promising in a statement his “unwavering support” for the institutions.

At one point during DeVos’s speech, Jackson — a gentleman who appears to be constructed entirely of movie cliches about clueless academic bureaucrats — admonished the students that if they didn’t sit down and behave right now their diplomas would be mailed to them and they wouldn’t walk across the stage to receive them, and how would they like that, hmmm? HMMMM? (We have embellished only slightly.)

Earlier in the day, DeVos did have a sit-down with a dozen student leaders, who seemed pleased that she’d come to listen to their concerns; former student body president Jacari Harris was awfully happy about the meeting:

“She’s awesome. I’m so glad she’s here,” Harris said. “She’s very transparent. She has a listening ear. We told her about some of the issues we are facing, about students who are single parents or come from single-parent families, even students who are homeless, and she agreed that we need to find a way to address all of this. She knows the need. It was a great dialogue.”

In her speech, DeVos returned several times to the theme of listening carefully to those we disagree with and hearing them out, in the name of dialogue and growth and compromise, which sounds simply wonderful and which may actually describe the operating principles a Trump administration in some wonderful alternate universe.

In a statement Wednesday night, DeVos also said all the right things, including a nice line about the students who went all First Amendment at her:

“One of the hallmarks of higher education, and of democracy, is the ability to converse with and learn from those with whom we disagree,” DeVos said. “I have respect for all those who attended [the commencement], including those who demonstrated their disagreement with me.”

That sounds great! If only we had any confidence it meant anything at all under this president. Had Trump himself been there, can anyone doubt he’d have yelled “Get ’em out of here” at the students and reminisced about the good old days when protesters would be taken out on a stretcher?

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[Politico / Atlantic / WaPo]

I’m white. Really white. Raised on Lawrence Welk in the Rocky Mountains white. My white-person cred includes my unabashed love for Bruce Springsteen and the fact that if I eat anything spicier than a sharp Cheddar I crumble into dust and blow away. That is how white I am. Which is why I have trekked to the secret cave and lit the sacred candles and after half an hour or so of moving giant mirrors around I have lit the Merle Haggard symbol and if you look up you will see it in the sky. If you are a very young white person maybe you didn’t get the handbook yet, and so you will not know that when you see Merle Haggard’s ghostly visage above you that means that you must without delay get to your nearest Olive Garden for the White People Meeting.

I have prepared my remarks for publication so that nobody can say they missed the memo. Here is the rough draft, with full remarks to be published afterwards.

***

Good evening and welcome to this, the most sacred of white-people rituals, where we vote on the rules. We have not had a rules convention in quite some time, and I call this one against the backdrop of a dire emergency. There are a few points we need to cover this evening, and I’ll start off the conversations. Same rules as always: show of hands and your options when voting will be “yes,” “no,” “I need more information” and “let’s hold a seance to ask Caligula.”

There is a seemingly small concern that we need to address before it becomes a thing. It’s the rhyming. We’re still doing “white” and “right” and “might” and in the meantime have you heard the vocabulary coming out of your average minor hit on Soundcloud? It wasn’t hard to be the best at words when we were the only ones allowed to know most of them, and if you refer back to the minutes of that meeting we had when the slaves were freed this was something we talked about – to maintain any sense of our own superiority we were going to have to get more creatively verbose. We have failed to do that.

In fact, we’re giving up language to everyone else. We can’t even invent new insults anymore; we’re relying on the shit our great-great-great-grandpappies made up and I have to say, it’s embarrassing. Actually it’s why I called the meeting: Bill Maher is one thing, we all know that there’s an age at which one’s mental acuity begins to break down and they can’t be expected to write creative jokes or bon mots anymore and we just sort of collectively wait for them to die because otherwise we’d have to talk to them and as you know, due to the White People For Peace Accord of 1974, we let the Olds drift into obscurity when they lose their edge rather than making a fuss, to avoid internal strife.

But this guy in Flint, I think we need to address officially and as a bloc. If you’ve not heard about him, he says that the reason Flint doesn’t have clean water is that black people don’t pay their bills, though he didn’t say “black people” and he didn’t allow himself to be hobbled by stupid things like “facts” and “what actually happened there.” He’s resigned for the indiscretion of being caught on tape saying all this stuff but I think we need to discuss seriously the fact that this kind of stupidity is increasing of late.

Seriously, guys, we’ve talked about this, and we know what we would do if it were us, and the fact that nobody’s done it is an entirely incomprehensible miracle. The reason that Flint doesn’t have clean water is because the same pricks that missed the ’87 meeting were too busy speculating in overpriced housing to think about basic utilities. Which means it’s us. We’re the reason Flint doesn’t have clean water.

I know the ’87 Treaties are divisive because half the voting bloc skipped the meeting in favor of that coke party, but a quick reminder: we did promise black people that we wouldn’t use the n-word anymore. Here are the reasons why:

1. We decided not to be that lazy.
2. We are white people. We are not “cool.” We look ridiculous trying.
3. In the wide world of insults, “gibbering cockwomble” is more fun to say

And here’s what we negotiated in return:

1. EVERYTHING.

So I’d now like to open the floor for discussion on two separate motions:

First, we have a motion to create a new White-Person Category as a punitive measure. Membership in the new category of So Lame Even White People Won’t Fuck You will be automatically conferred on any man over the age of 25 who uses a racial slur in casual conversation. Category members will be relegated to their own tables at every white-people function, and any woman seen associating with them will be themselves added to the category. This way we can preserve the sacred right of free association while also having a handy way to make clear who’s lost the right to be listened to on racial matters.

Second, we have a motion to punch Richard Spencer in the face, so whichever Olive Garden has him in it, please vote amongst yourselves and let us know whether we need to drive over there ourselves or whether you’ll handle it.

We will now break out into discussion groups. There is watered-down fruit punch and a plate of pecan sandies at every table. Please keep in mind that the conference on the question of Donald Trump has been pushed off for two weeks because we’re having trouble finding enough EMTs for the final grudge match, which we expect will have at least as many casualties as the Abraham Lincoln Approval Conference did.

[WaPo]

In a move sure to be popular with lots of people who believe minorities have all the advantages, the Department of Justice is apparently switching around resources in its civil rights division to tackle one of America’s greatest injustices: affirmative action programs that supposedly discriminate against white students. The New York Times got its hands on an internal DOJ document that

seeks current lawyers interested in working for a new project on “investigations and possible litigation related to intentional race-based discrimination in college and university admissions.”

That ought to be a at least some relief to Trump supporters, who know for a fact that if any black kid is in college, it was at the cost of some more-qualified white kid. No telling whether it will be enough for those who are also convinced all black people go to college for free. The project will investigate and bring lawsuits against schools suspected of doing too much to encourage diversity, since white folks have it so hard.

Now, the DOJ actually has an office that handles claims of discrimination in education, the Educational Opportunities Section, but this new initiative is so important it can’t be trusted to career Justice Department civil servants, so it’s being run out of the front office of the civil rights division, by political appointees who can be trusted to agree with Republican priorities. And just who are the victims of discrimination this bold step into 1961 Alabama is intended to help?

The document does not explicitly identify whom the Justice Department considers at risk of discrimination because of affirmative action admissions policies. But the phrasing it uses, “intentional race-based discrimination,” cuts to the heart of programs designed to bring more minority students to university campuses.

Oh, OK, so that’s a bit of rightwing code there. That would explain why all the dogs in the neighborhood started howling when we opened the story on our computer. What it really means is that the civil rights division will be shifting away from silly wastes of effort like protecting voting rights and will be a source of succor for mediocre white students who think a brown person got “their” spot in a selective university.

In one of our favorite bits of question-dodging, a DOJ spokesperson told the Times that John Gore, the acting head of the civil rights division, wouldn’t be available for an interview about the new program because the department “does not discuss personnel matters, so we’ll decline comment.” Hey, it was a question about a document asking department lawyers to apply for jobs, so obviously, that’s a personnel matter, not a policy matter.

Just last year, the Supreme Court held that a University of Texas at Austin affirmative action program was constitutional because it only considered race as one of many factors in selecting for a diverse student body. The school had been sued by a mediocre white girl who was very sad that several minority students with slightly lower scores on a “personal achievement index” were admitted instead of her, although that index also resulted in 42 white applicants whose scores were at or below her level also being admitted, and 168 minority students whose scores were equal or higher than hers being denied, just like her. But race was included among all the factors, so obviously she was a victim, she just knew it.

Now the Justice Department can get out there and do some Justice on the behalf of marginally qualified white kids everywhere. The move was welcomed by the usual suspects, like Roger Clegg, a former official in the civil rights division under Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, and now the head of a conservative group calling itself the Center for Equal Opportunity. Clegg was over the moon, calling the Trump DOJ project “long overdue,” because America has so many of Those People now (fine — he said “diverse,” but you know how he meant it):

The civil rights laws were deliberately written to protect everyone from discrimination, and it is frequently the case that not only are whites discriminated against now, but frequently Asian-Americans are as well

Reagan and Bush, of course, started the tradition of Republican presidents using civil rights laws to make life easier for the oppressed white majority in America, which in those old-fashioned days was actually considered rather controversial.

This is just the latest DOJ swing to the right; under Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III (barf), the department has already said it would no longer pursue a case against Texas’s voter-ID law, since discrimination isn’t real. Sessions also announced he would review whether racist police departments would really have to reform under consent decrees, because what if a cop somewhere was prevented from shooting a black motorist who really needed shooting? Then last week, the DOJ jumped into an employment discrimination case to argue that the 1964 Civil Rights Act’s ban on sex discrimination doesn’t apply to gay people, possibly because there were no gay people in 1964.

In other words, it’s business as usual for the civil rights division under a Republican president, hooray. Now when is Sessions going to fix it so nobody can print business signs in Spanish or make decent hardworking Americans press “1” for English, huh?

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[NYT / Ashley Ford on Twitter / Image from YouTube]

The Justice Department’s internal job posting seeking lawyers to help crack down on affirmative action programs that perpetrate “intentional race-based discrimination” has really resonated with the usual anti-affirmative action wingnuts, and may be just the thing to help Jeff Sessions win allies as Donald Trump has nosed around the possibility of firing him. Of course, Sessions may be safe for now, since new chief of staff John Kelly called him this weekend to assure him he can keep his job for now. However, just in case that was John Barron pretending to be John Kelly, Sessions may still want to keep a couple of cardboard boxes in his office, you know, if he needs to suddenly pack up his desk.

Of course, if Sessions going after affirmative action makes Trump more popular with his base (which is as base as they come), Trump may end up taking credit for the move, because he has the best ideas.

The DOJ’s move is being seen by some as a bit of easy red meat that can be thrown to keep the base satisfied:

“This touches a lot of issues and talks right to the folks who look at college admissions and believe slots for their kids are being taken, whether it’s by illegal immigrants or by other groups,” said Brett O’Donnell, a veteran Republican consultant. “It strikes to the heart of how they feel college is increasingly unaffordable and sometimes impossible to get into.”

Mind you, this assumes there even is any DOJ effort to take on affirmative action — Justice Department spokesperson Sarah Isgur Flores said in a statement that the Fake News Media had blown the job announcement completely out of proportion:

Press reports regarding the personnel posting in the Civil Rights Division have been inaccurate. The posting sought volunteers to investigate one administrative complaint filed by a coalition of 64 Asian American associations in May 2015 that the prior Administration left unresolved. The complaint alleges racial discrimination against Asian Americans in a university’s admissions policy and practices.

See? Just one case, and how could a single case ever set some kind of legal precedent, huh? Flores also denied the DOJ had “received or issued any directive, memorandum, initiative, or policy related to university admissions in general” and insisted the department is committed to “protecting all Americans from all forms of illegal race-based discrimination” — which on the right is a nice way of saying any admissions policy that attempts to promote diversity.

WaPo, however, said that the job announcement happened because of the refusal of “career staffers who specialize in education” to work on the case, “out of concerns it was contrary to the division’s long-standing approach to civil rights in education.” So if the career civil servants won’t touch it, let the political hires take it on, because Republicans just love a good civil rights case that helps undermine affirmative action.

Heaven knows Linda Chavez, Ronald Reagan’s head of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and now head of the right-leaning Center for Equal Opportunity, is pretty happy to see the DOJ taking what she called a “long-standing conservative approach” to affirmative action:

“It isn’t just white students who are excluded,” Chavez said. “Probably the biggest group of people who are affected by this are Asian students. But, it also isn’t a service to the students who get admitted under those different qualifications because many of them struggle.”

It really isn’t fair to make middling minority students carry the burdens of working hard in college when mediocre white students could do just as average academically, but at least have their other social advantages land them a good job with a gentleman’s C. It worked for George W. Bush and Rick Perry, after all.

WaPo notes that anxiety over affirmative action is a bigly motivator for Trump supporters:

A Washington Post-ABC News poll last year showed 44 percent of registered voters who supported Trump saw “whites losing out because of preferences for blacks and Hispanics” as a bigger problem than minorities “losing out.”

Beyond the respectable segments of the Republican right, those of the unhinged racist variety are delighted by the move. Old racist failure David Duke was heartened to see the Trump administration taking on “(((affirmative action)))” — the parentheses indicate it’s a Jewish plot — saying affirmative action has an inherently “anti-white nature” and hoping “this could be the start of something big.” At Duke’s official website, another headline (for the same story) announced, “Prez Trump Declares War on Ant-White Racial Discrimination – Zios are Enraged!” At the white nationalist site “Occidental Dissent,” the news was met with some satisfaction, even while acknowledging that the Trump administration isn’t getting racist red-pilled fast enough for their taste:

While the Alt-Right and Alt-South have leveled numerous justified criticisms against the Trump Administration we can be assured that moves like this on behalf of White people would not be taking place if Donald Trump had lost the 2016 presidential election. If Hillary Climton [sic] or a cuckservative had won the might of the DOJ would have been firmly against our interests and out to destroy what is left of White America.

Just about the only real problem with the leak of the DOJ memo, as far as maximizing wingnut support for the administration, was that Trump stepped on the news with his own push for a going-nowhere immigration bill. The Internet Flying Monkey Brigade really got going when Trump White House adviser Stephen Miller bravely trashed the poem on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, which many racists consider nothing more than graffiti.

Then again, maybe the sudden emphasis on immigration was tactical — we wouldn’t want Jeff Sessions stealing all the wingnut racist attention for himself, after all.

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[WaPo]

Donald J. Trump was inaugurated on Friday, January 20, 2017. That there is a fact. He didn’t have as big a crowd as Barack Obama did for his first inauguration ceremony in 2008. He really did not. So of course, it stands to reason that in Sean Spicer’s first briefing as White House press secretary, the evening of January 21, Spicer came out and lied, lied, lied to the world about how Trump’s inauguration had “the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, PERIOD.” Remember what that looked like? Spicer, we mean. We all know exactly what the two aerial shots of the national mall looked like. Here’s Spicey inaugurating his own career as a White House liar:

He was so young and fresh-faced then.

Of course, Spicer wasn’t new to being a professional liar; he’d already distinguished himself as one for the Republican National Committee right after the 2016 convention, when he explained that Melania Trump couldn’t possibly have borrowed any lines from Michelle Obama’s convention speech, even though Trump Organization staffer Meredith McIver later took the blame for doing just that. But before she did, he went on several TV shows and with a perfectly straight face insisted the word-for-word borrowings were purely coincidental, because people talk about making dreams a reality all the time — and he quoted Twilight Sparkle from My Little Pony to prove it.

Yes, all politicians lie, and all presidential press secretaries spin. And in the case of Donald Trump, the one thing virtually all Americans agree on is that his relationship to the truth is far from monogamous. We knew he was incapable of telling the truth long ago. Politifact gave its 2015 “Lie of the Year” to the blanket category “Donald Trump’s campaign misstatements.” Even so, seeing the machinery of the federal government swinging into Lie Mode was breathtaking and disturbing. After Spicer’s deranged performance that Saturday night, Trump adviser and spokesmarionette Kellyanne Conway went on “Meet the Press” the very next day and set that stage for the rest of the year, in a performance that can only be described as so fucking bizarre that even Chuck Todd was poleaxed:

CONWAY: Don’t be so overly dramatic about it, Chuck. … You’re saying it’s a falsehood. … Sean Spicer, our press secretary, gave alternative facts to that. But the point remains–

TODD: Wait a minute– Alternative facts? Alternative facts? Four of the five facts he uttered, the one thing he got right was Zeke Miller. Four of the five facts he uttered were just not true. Look, alternative facts are not facts. They’re falsehoods.

Fortunately, Conway was far too polite to get into the gutter with the briefly bespined Todd, so she changed the subject and pointed out that if he was going to laugh at her, well then doesn’t that just sum up how much contempt the press has for Trump, and for the AMERICAN PEOPLE who chose him to be president? How sad for him.

We wouldn’t presume to list all of the administration’s forays into alternative fact land, if only because the New York Times already has a very informative list of Donald Trump’s overt lies (not including mere “falsehoods” or shadings of the truth) between his inauguration and November 11. The Washington Post, not to be outdone, has put together a database of 1628 “falsehoods and misleading claims” by Trump since the inauguration. It’s even searchable by category! Surprising: the most frequently repeated one is not about Russia! It’s the claim that “Obamacare is dead” — which he repeated 60 times.

So rather than attempt even a top 10 list, we’re going to make a little use of our dumb degree in rhetoric and try to compile a taxonomy of Trump administration lies, a spotter’s guide for when you see them in the wild.

The I Am a Great Man Lie

Probably Trump’s favorite kind of lie, where he exaggerates just for the sake of proving to the world what an important guy he is, as if holding one of the most powerful offices in the world didn’t already make that point. He didn’t just win that office, he won it by a landslide. Here, look at the electoral map. The biggest electoral majority in history. OK, for a Republican. OK, fine, for a Republican who’d never run for anything or been in any public leadership role. He had the biggest inaugural crowd ever. He signed the biggest tax cut in history. We’re deporting gang members by the thousands. And Donald Trump knows more about the tax code than the best CPA. And don’t you ever forget that he’s done more in his first year than any other president in history.

Oh, yes, and Trump would have won the popular vote, too, once you subtract the 5 million illegal immigrant votes nobody has ever documented. Which only makes sense, since they’re undocumented immigrants.

Look at this wonderful thing I achieved (that I didn’t have anything to do with)

Trump takes credit for stuff he had no real influence on, but he just knows it happened because of him. Even before taking office, he took credit for automakers building cars in American factories that they hadn’t planned on moving to Mexico. He falsely claimed that NATO — which has been fighting terrorism since the ’80s — had done nothing to fight terrorism, then when NATO created a new intelligence office, congratulated himself for goading NATO into doing what it had been planning to do anyway. He also took credit for increased defense spending by NATO members — following an agreement made in 2014. Trump took credit for cost reductions in the F-35 fighter jet program that were achieved well before he took office.

And every day when the mailman goes away, Donald Trump knows it’s because he barked and scratched at the kitchen door.

The pointless self-congratulatory lie

This is a subset of his other bragging, where Trump just plain lies about minor shit to puff himself up in ways that nobody in their right mind would even care about, like his claim during the campaign that he’d shared a green room with Vladimir Putin when they were both on “60 Minutes” — except the interviews were taped months apart on different continents. Or his insistence that there were “lines that go back six blocks” for one of his appearances, while cameras showed no line at all outside — not even six people.

Everyone agrees with this thing that only I believe

The granddaddy of them all in this category is Politifact’s Lie of the Year for 2017, Trump’s insistence that Russia never interfered in the 2016 election and the whole story was made up by sore-loser Democrats — who have, surprisingly, also admitted that they know his campaign didn’t collude with Russia. Only a few malcontents in the media — plus some very bad people in the FBI — think there’s anything to it.

Along similar lines, nobody’s interested in Trump’s taxes except reporters, the media all know Charlottesville had very fine people on both sides (and only the Nazis had a permit), and Donald Trump is a great fan of the Bible.

Shades of grey are only for white people

Nazi marches include some very fine people, and were mostly about preserving Confederate statues anyway. Football players protesting police killings hate America because they disrespect our beautiful national anthem and our beautiful flag. Trump didn’t want to condemn anyone for Charlottesville until he had all the facts (and then condemned “both sides”). But if he thinks something is terrorism, he’s quick to condemn radical Islam (the only kind there is) and insist it’s time to toughen the travel ban. Chicago is full of violent thugs, but the Las Vegas and Texas massacres were perpetrated by lone nuts who had mental problems (no we will not expand mental health treatment). Counter-terrorism programs will now focus solely on Islamic terrorism; anti-government or white supremacist terror is no longer anything to take seriously, despite the higher number of incidents.

We already answered that

This is a favorite of both Trump and his press flacks, and has been a mainstay of avoiding questions in the month since Trump tweeted that he had to fire Mike Flynn for lying to the FBI. So when did Trump know Flynn had lied? Sarah Huckabee Sanders never answered that one, telling reporters they’d have to ask Trump’s lawyer, John Dowd, who of course would say nothing. When asked again in the following days, Sanders insisted she’d given the only answer she was going to: Go ask Dowd (who continued not to answer). Then when reporters asked Trump himself about it, he got very, very annoyed at having to field that question again, for heaven’s sake: “What else is there? You know the answer. How many times has that question been asked?” The scary thing is, maybe he does think he’s answered it (No. Here, he’s lying, not senile).

See also Sarah Sanders on accusations of sexual harassment/abuse/assault: The voters answered that by electing him. Obviously, he won, so that’s been answered. And we’ve already said all we’ll say about those lying women, who are liars. If they were telling the truth, America wouldn’t have elected Trump, after all.

Hillary did it

A perennial favorite, and the other central chunk of Trump’s lies about Russia. Not only is Russia’s election interference a complete fiction, that fiction was all made up by Democrats because Hillary Clinton lost. You want to talk collusion, just look at how Hillary sold America’s uranium to Russia. Everyone in the FBI and the Mueller investigation is in the tank for Hillary, who also made up the Dossier. And what about her emails?

Obama did it

Barack Obama did Wire Tapps to Trump Tower, which never happened, but it sure was scandalous. Obamacare caused millions to lose the insurance they liked (more like a million, tops, and mostly it was junk insurance that didn’t cover much of anything — the kind Trump wants to bring back). Obama released dangerous terrorists from Gitmo that George Bush actually released. Obama opened the borders. Obama’s EPA regulated puddles as if they were lakes. Obama created or allowed the creation of ISIS, whose roots go back to 2004. Obama gave $150 billions dollars to Iran (or unfroze some of Iran’s assets). And of course, Obama never called the families of soldiers killed in our several wars, so all those photos of him standing with families receiving caskets at Dover AFB are photoshopped.

There’s also the significant subgenre where things that were terrible and fake under Obama, like the unemployment rate, economic growth, or the stock market, are now proof of what a fantastic job Donald Trump is doing. The unemployment stats were fake during the campaign, but now they’re reliable. The stock market was doing OK under Obama, but it was only a bubble, ready to burst at any moment. Now, though, it will never stop going up, no sir. In Trump’s mind, he inherited an economy that was in the doldrums, but now, with virtually the same trends continuing, it’s roaring back to vitality, which is why corporate America needed a huge tax cut to get out of the doldrums.

The Truth Is Still Out There

Yr Wonkette is still fairly certain there’s an objective reality that can be nailed down, even if it’s not welcome at the White House. Trump and his 30-something percent share of diehard supporters may live in an alternate reality, and even have an entire cable network to help tell them how to think, but polls keep showing a majority of Americans think he’s an untrustworthy liar who acts recklessly. (Even his supporters doubt he’ll build that wall, but they’re OK with that as long as he keeps up the deportations.) And the more Trump lies, the more the reality-based community calls him out on it — and yells at mainstream media sources that don’t challenge him on the rare occasions when he does a long interview, as we saw when the New York Times let him ramble. News readership and viewership is up — but no, that doesn’t mean the media will endorse Trump in 2020 because he’s good for ratings. Large majorities of Americans want Robert Mueller’s investigation to continue, so we can get the facts. And for all the lies coming from Trump and Republicans, the tax cut bill and the attempt to kill Obamacare sparked massive resistance.

You might even say Trump has spurred a growth market for reality.

Yr Wonkette loves some reality-based satire, and you love us. Give us money and we’ll give you truth, plus dick jokes.

How is Donald Trump honoring Martin Luther King Day 2018? By doing exactly what he did Saturday and Sunday: Going golfing. In his Friday proclamation for MLK Day, Trump signed the thing put in front of him, which called on Americans to honor King “with acts of civic work and community service.” And since Donald Trump will be nowhere near a microphone while he’s golfing, we guess that may count as a public benefit, so good for him.

Even the anodyne video Trump read for Twitter gives little hint of what Martin Luther King was all about — he had a dream, and he was for equality, and he wanted people to be judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character, a sentiment we appreciate, since we can say with no doubt that Donald Trump’s character is racist and rapey, so we’re happy to evaluate him on those grounds. We all share MLK’s dream, at least in the vaguest sense, as long as Republicans can find enough wiggle room to insist that King dreamed of a world with no affirmative action, no nasty divisive rhetoric about black lives mattering, with strict limits on who can vote, and above all, the freedom to yell at black single moms for raising their gigantic sons to be thugs.

While Trump toiled away at making sure all God’s children have to duck whenever he hits a drive, King’s nephew Isaac Newton Farris Jr. was at the White House undercutting Trump by talking like that other guy who used to live there:

“It’s not a day to hang out in the park or pull out the barbecue grill,” he said. “It’s a day to do something to help someone else, and that can be as simple as delivering someone’s trash or picking up the newspaper for that elderly person who can’t get to the end of the driveway.”

Or by nailing a 12-foot putt on a really tricky lie. We all serve, in our way.

Trump also served the memory of Martin Luther King by reassuring reporters Sunday,

“Nah, I’m not a racist,” he said. “I’m the least racist person you have ever interviewed, that I can tell you.”

Probably even less racist than Martin Luther King, in fact, since King was always talking about black people all the time, where Trump thinks people on both sides of racist violence can be excellent. Who’s more open minded NOW, fake news media?

In addition, Donald Trump enlisted the help of two Republican senators who’d been at his Thursday meeting where he talked about Haiti, El Salvador, and African nations as being “shithole countries” to deny he’d used that word at all. Tom Cotton and David Perdue both insisted on Sunday shows that Trump hadn’t said the word, and that Dick Durbin was just a big old untrustworthy liar, because he’s a Democrat and all Democrats lie — it’s just part of their character, and did Martin Luther King ever dream of not judging people on their party affiliation HE DID NOT. Lindsey Graham was also there and confirmed Trump had said it, but let’s not get all tangled up in details, shall we?

In any case, today we honor Martin Luther KIng Jr., who’s doing a great job and getting more and more recognition for it, as long as you don’t get too specific about his opinions on white supremacy, economics, poverty, war, what the meaning of “equality” is, or really, much of anything, Amen.

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[WaPo / Politico]

Dennis Prager, the current human host of Phil Donahue’s hair from 1980 and a man who once insisted that no more than five children in all of Los Angeles might actually suffer from hunger, published a thinky piece at National Review on the topic of Happiness, and why conservatives and liberals experience basic human emotions differently. Here is how it starts: “Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.” Actually, that is how Slaughterhouse-Five starts. It’s really good. Go order it and read or re-read it because it’s worth reading, and Dennis Prager is not. But we’ll show you Dennis Prager’s thinky thunky wordfumblings anyway:

One of the most important differences between the Right and the Left — one that greatly helps to explain their differences — is the difference between unhappy liberals and unhappy conservatives.

Unhappy conservatives generally believe they are unhappy because life is inherently difficult and tragic, and because they have made some unwise decisions in life.

But unhappy liberals generally believe they are unhappy because they have been persecuted.

We think he may have been going for a grand Tolstoyan observation like that thing about happy and unhappy families, which was also a load of codswallop but was at least quite memorable.

Mind you, this is a guy who thinks California’s droughts result from pagan nature-worshipers who make everyone suffer on behalf of endangered fishies, that free speech is imperiled by firing racist basketball team owners, and that naked people endanger the very qualities that elevate humans above mere animals. So he knows what it means to be oppressed, but apparently he wasn’t really unhappy all those times.

Anyway, he’s pretty sure that the more feminist a woman is, the more convinced of her oppression she is, and so she can never be happy, because “believing one is oppressed makes happiness all but impossible.” Further, black people who thing racism is even a problem anymore, or that America still has some kind of legacy of racism, have surely fooled themselves into being angry and unhappy all the time, unlike black conservatives, who are downright jolly!

If you have ever spent time with black conservatives, one of the first things you will notice is that they have a much happier disposition than left-wing blacks. I receive many calls to my radio show from black listeners. I almost always know immediately whether they are on the right or the left solely by their tone of voice. The cheerful black caller is almost always a conservative.

Yes, and Prager is also simply delighted at their charming habit of stepping off the curb and casting down their eyes when he is on the public side-walk. Since Yr Wonkette is a perpetually aggrieved liberal, we suppose we are obliged to point out to Prager that any caller to a political talk radio show is more likely to be cheery if they agree with the host, and perhaps less so if they disagree. Unless of course it’s a Thirty-Years Hate like the Rush Limbaugh program, where everyone is angry all the time.

You see, Prager explains, there really is nothing to the Left except anger:

The Left cultivates unhappiness by cultivating anger. It does this for the same reason wine-growers cultivate grapes: No grapes, no wine; no anger, no Left (and no Democratic party). And angry people are not happy people.

If only people could just look around and see how just and wonderful America is, where we really have no problems outside of all those unhappy Leftists complaining all the time! Say, it must be time for another personal anecdote, which is Prager’s preferred form of data:

Last week in Atlanta, I spoke for about 40 minutes to six randomly chosen black students from a local black college (for the upcoming film No Safe Spaces that Adam Carolla and I are making). [Ed note: This fucking thing] Each one said he is oppressed. When I told them I didn’t think blacks in America are oppressed, I sensed that they had never actually been told that by anyone. It was akin to telling physics students that gravity doesn’t exist. And when I added that I don’t think women are oppressed either, they were equally shocked.

Huh! We would first observe that GRAVITY DOES EXIST, YOU FUCKING MAROON. And so does systematic white supremacy, unless of course you shut your eyes and insist real loud it does not, which makes your fantasy come true. We bet when Prager told them white privilege also does not exist, they invited him to follow them when they went shopping at an upscale department store. Sadly, he had a plane to catch.

No black child could possibly grow up happy if parents and teachers keep telling them America is racist. To prove this, Prager notes that his very own father wrote his college thesis on Anti-Semitism, but never ever let it get him down, because AMERICA:

In other words, my father fully acknowledged the existence of anti-Semitism in the United States. Yet he raised my brother and me in an America-loving home and told us that he believed American Jews are the luckiest Jews in history — because they are American.

I therefore never knew what it was like to walk around thinking most of the people I met hated me. That alone contributed to my happiness.

See? If it happens to Dennis Prager, it is truth. Leftists simply hate America too much to acknowledge it.

Also, leftists don’t know what it means to be grateful — not a one of them! — so they are incapable of being happy or appreciating all the good America has wrought, so they spend all their time dissing the best country in the world.

Don’t you go trying to tell Prager you love America like Al Franken does, either, you liar:

We love America just as much as they do. But in a different way. You see, they love America like a 4-year-old loves his mommy. Liberals love America like grown-ups. To a 4-year-old, everything Mommy does is wonderful and anyone who criticizes Mommy is bad. Grown-up love means actually understanding what you love, taking the good with the bad and helping your loved one grow.

That’s just the sort of snotty thing Prager expects from an ungrateful malcontent like you. And don’t go thinking you’re happy, or that working for progressive causes brings you joy, or that joining with other lefties to work for justice is fulfilling, because you’re not, it doesn’t, and it can’t be. You’re just miserable, and he knows it. And don’t you dare say that Saint Molly Ivins had more joy in her left ulna than Dennis Prager, because just look at what a cheery fellow he is. Also, there are absolutely no figures on the American right whose entire careers depend on the continual production of white grievance angerporn. They’re just angry for America.

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[National Review]

Disgraced former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who’s running for the US Senate seat Jeff Flake is giving up, promised a group of fans at the Western Conservative Conference in Phoenix last weekend that once he’s a member of the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body, he’ll finally be able to address one of the most burning issues of our age: Barack Obama’s phony birth certificate. And yes, he got applause for it. Look how coyly he brings up the subject in this snippet from a video originally posted to the rightwing Tru Conservative TV YouTube channel:

Arpaio reconstructed for the small crowd that glorious time when he introduced Donald Trump at a Phoenix rally in 2015, pointing out that he and the Great Man shared three things: the same birthday, the same (lawless) dedication to cracking down on Messicans (though Arpaio said “illegal immigration” because he has to be all statesmanlike and shit), and — of course — a deep and abiding belief that Barack Obama is a foreigner from Muslimland. And like Trump, Arpaio plays at not naming exactly what he means, at least for a few seconds, since some people might miss it:

Of course, I talked about another thing that made a little news. I don’t talk about it anymore — until I become the US senator. [applause] The Tea Party got me hooked in something that’s followed me around for five years. But it has something to do with a document. [laughter] If I ask you guys — I’m a nothing now, but if I was still the sheriff I could ask for your birth certificate. [bigger LAUGHTER, because that shit’s funny!]

So I’m kind of dropping that right now, but I’m going to tell you something: 100 percent we proved that’s a fake document. One hundred [applause].

He then muttered some stuff about how he didn’t just mean computer stuff, but actual SCIENCE, and he had to go to ITALY to “get expert advice,” after which he trailed off into claiming he’d also invented the phrase “the Silent Majority,” which will be a hell of a surprise to Pat Buchanan, who took credit for getting Richard Nixon excited about the phrase (which was also used by George Meany in 1967, and before that, Warren G. Harding in 1920). Not that we’d begrudge Arpaio for wanting to identify with Nixon — given the chance, he’d surely like to secretly bomb Cambodia too.

His audience seemed very appreciative of Arpaio’s promise to finally nail down Barack Obama’s birth certificate once he has real power, which makes perfect sense for the current crop of wingnuts. It’s not enough, he seems to be saying, to simply reverse as many of Obama’s policies as possible. The hardcore rightwing loonies genuinely dream of the great day when they can declare Obama’s two terms in office null and void, finally removing him from history altogether. Only then will they have their country back — a country that never, ever had a black president.

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[RightWingWatch]