Speaking of Elon

His car company is arguing in it's fine for the N-word being thrown around the workplace.

I guess you can take the psychopath out of Apartheid, but you cannot take Apartheid out of the psychopath.

Whatever special kind of brain worms have established themselves in Elon Musk’s noggin appear to be spreading throughout his companies.

In the midst of a state trial on behalf of over 6,000 Black workers at Tesla’s flagship factory in Fremont, California, attorneys for Musk’s electric vehicle argued that it’s acceptable to use the n-word in certain situations, insisting that it’s a “term of respect and endearment” in the Black community.

Sure, it’s true that many Black people have reclaimed the word. But the lawsuit is about non-Black Tesla employees and managers abusing Black workers — including allegedly hurling the slur at them in ways that don’t sound like anything resembling gestures of “respect and endearment.”

On top of that, the first witness called to the stand testified to the court that senior counsel for Tesla had tried to mislead him days before the trial, by claiming to represent the state, rather than the EV company, Electrek reported. Prosecutors allege four more potential witnesses were approached by Tesla’s lawyers prior to the case, who have since fallen “off our [the states attorneys’] radar” following possible deals, threats, or persuasion by the company’s counsel.

The jaw dropping gaffes emerged the first day of a major bench trial being prosecuted by the state of California, over an alleged pattern of rampant racism and negligence in Tesla’s massive production facility. Previously, Electrek reported that Black Tesla workers at the facility were subjected to racial prejudice by way of wage discrimination, segregation, and racial slurs.

Why Elon Musk has achieved success is beyond me.

Vote Blue No Matter Who My Ass

The Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) has decided to abandon the very competitive race in Michigan, because the wrong sort of candidate won.

The people who gave us Senators like Krysten Sinema have decided that having a real progressive in the Senate with an Arab name is a bridge too far.

Abdul El-Sayed’s victory in Michigan’s Democratic primary has complicated Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s plans to help Democrats retake the Senate in November, tying his party’s fortunes to a candidate some Democrats in Michigan say they cannot support — even if it means costing Democrats the Senate majority. 

Michigan is crucial for Democrats. The party’s path to a Senate majority relies on holding the state and all of its other current seats, as well as flipping four Republican-held seats — including at least two seats in states that Donald Trump won by double-digit margins in 2024. If El-Sayed loses in Michigan, which Trump carried by less than two points in 2024, Democrats would need to flip a fifth Republican seat in deep-red territory. 

Schumer backed Rep. Haley Stevens over El-Sayed in the primary, saying he thought she had a better chance of winning in November. The New York Democrat endorsed El-Sayed after the primary, and the two men have spoken about working together to hold the seat — but they have pronounced differences about Israel.

………

El-Sayed’s challenges run deep enough that three Democratic donors in Michigan are hosting a fundraiser for his Republican opponent, former congressman Mike Rogers, on Tuesday evening, according to an invitation obtained by The Washington Post. One of them, Brian Hermelin, wrote in an email to potential donors last week that El-Sayed’s rhetoric on Israel and toward Jews meant he could not support him.

………

The race has put Schumer in a tough position. On one hand, he has called out those on the left who are “too complacent or forgiving about those who exhibit antisemitism within their ranks.” On the other, he often describes Democrats as having a big-tent party, capacious enough to include Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pennsylvania) — an ardent defender of Israel — as well as the country’s critics. 

El-Sayed’s public criticism of Schumer — whom he suggested during the primary that he did not want to see remain as the Democratic leader in the Senate — has not made it easier. “If you’re Chuck Schumer, I’m pretty damn dangerous,” El-Sayed said last month.

That fundraising?  It would not have happened without the tacit approval of Schumer.

The whole, "Vote Blue no matter who," thing?  F%$# that.

I'm not suggesting voting Republican if you have another Synema or her ilk running, I voted Republican once and felt dirty afterword, ⃰  but you can always go with the couch, aka JD Vance's girlfriend, instead of the ballot booth. 

The Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) needs to be aggressively educated about the importance of actually listening to the base.

^*I voted for Bill Weld as Massachusetts Governor in 1990, because his Democratic opponent John Silber was literally insane.

Stupid Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) Tricks

Amy Acton is the Democratic Party nominee for Governor in Ohio.

She is also an anti-LGBTQ bigot, having referred to trans girls as boys and making a ban on TG athletes central to her campaign. 

In an attempt at damage control, her campaign scheduled a meeting with LGBTQ advocates.

Sounds like a good move, only Acton did not attend the meeting and excluded trans people from the meeting.

She sounds like a perfect candidate for the consultants busy sucking the marrow out of the Democratic Party. 

Amy Acton, Ohio Democratic Candidate for Governor, has seen her relationship with the state’s LGBTQ+ community go from bad to catastrophic. Weeks after Acton endorsed a transgender sports ban and called transgender girls “boys,” the fallout has been intense: the Ohio Democratic Party forced its own Progressive and Pride caucuses to delete their criticism and a meeting the campaign promised would begin repairing the damage instead further inflamed tensions. Inside sources who have gone public now say the “listening session” was a debacle. Acton did not show up, her campaign manager barred Arienne Childrey—Vice Chair of the party’s Pride Caucus, a transgender candidate for the Ohio House, and Ohio’s first openly trans city council member—from even entering the Zoom call. When another advocate demanded to know why Childrey was barred, she was ejected. The Chair of the Progressive Caucus, Kim McCarthy, was locked in the waiting room during the entire “listening session.” And in the end, the campaign ultimately refused to apologize for calling trans girls “boys,” refused to retract Acton’s support for a transgender sports ban, and ended the meeting with no plans for what come next.

………

According to notes obtained from a source who attended the meeting, the session opened with a blow: Dwayne Steward of Equality Ohio, reading what appeared to be a prepared statement, announced the organization was rescinding Acton’s “A” rating on its LGBTQ+ candidate scorecard. “This is not about punishment, but partnership,” Steward said. “Harm has been done. Attacking trans people isn’t just wrong, it is a losing strategy.” From there, the meeting devolved. Multiple attendees demanded to know why Childrey had been barred from an event about the LGBTQ+ community. Campaign manager Philip Stein responded only that the meeting was “mostly a space we want to listen to the folks that we picked here.” When pressed on why the event had been titled a “conversation” rather than a one-way listening session, Stein conceded that running this kind of meeting was “not his area of expertise” and that he could “only apologize for the way that the event was titled.” 

………

The political math of Acton's position doesn't add up. Republicans aren't going to reward her for baseline levels of transphobia—Ramaswamy will run ads against her on any number of transgender issues regardless. What Acton’s anti-trans turn does is depress turnout among Ohio’s LGBTQ+ voters and allies in a race separated by less than a single percentage point. And the campaign's response to that reality has been, at every turn, to punish the people telling her so. The demand of LGBTQ+ Ohioans still stands unanswered. Until it is met, Acton has given Ohio's LGBTQ+ community every reason to believe she would govern exactly the way her campaign has conducted itself—with the people she claims to represent locked in the waiting room. 

To quote (not) Tallyrand, this is worse than a crime, it is a mistake. 

I Love This

It's an all too common story, Nigel Farage conceals a multi-million Pound payoff gift from a crypto billionaire friend, and when Parliament starts looking into it, he resigns and announces that he will run for again in the by-election to replace himself.

The established political parties see this as a transparent political stunt, and so will not be putting forward a candidate to stand for election.

There is a candidate running against him, Count Binface, a perennial parody candidate whose platform includes, among other things, "Moving the hand dryer in the men's toilet at Uxbridge's Crown and Treaty pub to a more sensible position."

While it is almost certain that, for the first time ever, Count Binface will get his deposit back. the UK requires a £500.00 deposit to be refunded if the candidate gets more than 5% of the vote, to stand for election.

It also makes a mockery of the racist charlatan Farage. 

What had been an opportunity for self-aggrandizement is now a battle that he can only lose, because there is no way that he cannot underperform in the elction. 

Count Binface had been looking forward to a relaxing journey back to his home planet of Sigma IX when Nigel Farage dropped a political bombshell on Tuesday.

Instead, Britain’s hottest new political property said he was left with no choice but to perform a swift intergalactic handbrake turn when news broke that Farage had resigned as MP for Clacton, triggering the possibility of a byelection in the English coastal constituency he has represented since 2024.

Farage, the leader of the rightwing populist Reform UK party, has been accused of using the poll to shake off a deepening scandal over financial gifts he has received. But the plan appears to have backfired after his main rivals announced they would boycott the byelection. The Clacton byelection is now likely to be a two-man race between the Reform leader and Binface.

“I didn’t know old Farage was going to self detonate … did I?” said Binface, a veteran of British elections, where the parody candidate is something of a mainstay.The 5,900-year-old leader of the Recyclons is the creation of Jon Harvey, a comedian from Lewisham in south-east London, who has run against former prime ministers including Rishi Sunak and Boris Johnson, as well as Theresa May in his previous incarnation as Lord Buckethead.

………

He said that he had been inundated over the past 48 hours with emails and messages from Binface activists offering to knock on doors and deliver leaflets on his behalf in what could yet emerge as an electoral shock on a par with when Hartlepool United’s mascot, H’Angus the Monkey, was elected as mayor of the northern English town. 

Demanding the Right to Murder Black Men

At the state convention Minnesota Republicans held a moment of silence for Derek Chauvan, who murdered George Floyd.

They are offended that white cops are not allowed to murder black men whenever they want.

The Minnesota Republican party’s decision to hold a moment of silence for Derek Chauvin, the former police officer convicted of murdering George Floyd, has angered the state’s attorney general – who was the lead prosecutor in the case.

Keith Ellison, a Democrat, said Saturday’s gesture at the state Republicans’ annual convention in Duluth was “an act of profound cruelty” to Floyd’s family and “disrespectful” to Minnesota’s law enforcement personnel.

“This decision dishonors the memory of George Floyd and wounds his loved ones all over again,” Ellison said in a statement.

Alluding to how the murder had happened six years earlier almost exactly, Ellison added: “To honor the man convicted of murdering George Floyd – days after the very anniversary of that terrible day – is an act of profound cruelty to the Floyd family and to every Minnesotan who believes in accountability under law.

These are really truly awful people.

A Feature, Not a Bug

Much like when the criminal enterprise formerly known as Facebook™ used micro-targeting of its employment advertisements to exclude minorities, the news that AI algorithms reject minority job applicants at hire rates seems to me to be more of a deliberate choice than an accident.

AI algorithms exhibit racial bias in job candidate screening, and they discriminate more frequently against those applying for multiple jobs at different companies, according to Stanford-led researchers.

The boffins evaluated algorithmic hiring decisions across multiple employers that use the same hiring vendor. The resulting algorithmic monoculture, they say, is problematic.

The vendor in this instance was talent platform pymetrics, acquired by Harver in 2022. Harver did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Nothing to see here, move along. 

Trial Lawyers for the Win

Have you heard the one about people who told the truth about bigot Charlie Kirk winning lawsuits against the employers who fired them?

Well, you have now.

Big props to Drew Pittock and BrieAnna J. Frank of USA Today for sussing out something I’d been curious about for months. You may recall that, in the aftermath of the murder of Charlie Kirk, and in the teeth of gale-force wing-nut keening, some people posted some of Kirk’s own words as a kind of corrective. Some other people posted admittedly tasteless reactions as well. Fearing the vengeance of the cult, major institutions, including government agencies and universities, fired these social-media miscreants. Many of those people turned around and sued the institutions in question. And, with discussion of reparation payments all the rage these days, it’s fit that we point out that some of the victims of cowardice and mob rule are cashing out in a big way.

Settlements totaling more than $1.5 million have been reached so far with people who lost their jobs over social media posts that were critical of prominent conservative activist Charlie Kirk in the wake of his assassination.

The free-speech cases in Florida, Tennessee, and Indiana highlight a growing debate surrounding the First Amendment, political discourse and social media. It’s “not surprising to see this flurry of settlements,” Aaron Terr, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s director of public advocacy, told USA Today. “I think the size and frequency of these settlements shows that violating the First Amendment is expensive.” ... USA Today reported a little more than two weeks after Kirk was killed, at least 50 people had lost their jobs in the education sector alone. A Reuters investigation also found that 600 people were fired across the private sector for posts they shared about Kirk.

Vice President J Divan Vance, who has demonstrated the democratic soul of an ambitious Stasi recruit, led the mob. He told people to inform on their colleagues who did not memorialize the deceased at a proper volume. Now that everything’s calmed down, the bill is coming due for what happened to people like a Tennessee cop named Larry Bushart.

Mess with the bull, you get the horns.

Peak Elon

A judge has ruled that the DOGE was stupid and bigoted when it revoked thousands of grants.

Short version: They looked for words which implied non-white, non-mail, and non-Christian using AI, and when this turned up a positive result, they canceled it with no further review. 

The Department of Government Efficiency’s cancellation of over $100 million in grants was unconstitutional, according to a ruling on Thursday. In the 143-page decision, US District Judge Colleen McMahon cites DOGE’s process for eliminating grants, which involved using ChatGPT to determine if something is related to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).

The ruling, which stems from a 2025 lawsuit filed by humanities groups, says “it could not be more obvious that DOGE used the mere presence of particular, protected characteristics to disqualify grants from continued funding” from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Judge McMahon cites several instances in which DOGE appeared to use ChatGPT to scan and eliminate grants using their relation to characteristics like race, national origin, religion, and sexuality.

Here's a thought:  The statute of limitations for the over-broad and frequently misused RICO statutes is 4 years.

If the 2028 election goes the Dem's way, they would have about 4 mohths to file charges, take them into custody, and ship them to Gitmo. 

Today in the Presumption of Regularity

Once again Federal Judge Judge James Boasberg has ruled against the Trump DoJ.

In this case, he has ruled that the Trump administration's demands for records from pro-trans organizations was retaliation for protected speech.

Basically, he's calling the government lying sacks of sh%$.

Last night, Chief Judge James E. Boasberg of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia granted preliminary injunctions in two parallel cases—Endocrine Society v. FTC and World Professional Association for Transgender Health v. FTC—enjoining the Federal Trade Commission from enforcing civil investigative demands against the two leading medical organizations on transgender health. The judge ruled in both cases that the FTC likely violated the organizations' First Amendment rights and engaged in unlawful retaliation against them for their protected speech supporting gender-affirming care. Boasberg further found that the Trump administration and the FTC had pursued the organizations based on "extensive evidence of animus" and "wafer-thin justifications" for their demands. For now, the private communications, internal deliberations, and member information of these two organizations are protected from the Trump administration's escalating campaign of government censorship and retaliation against the medical institutions that support transgender people.

"On this preliminary record, with extensive evidence of animus and wafer-thin justifications lacking evidentiary support, [the Court] finds that WPATH is likely to demonstrate a causal link between its protected speech and the FTC's issuance of the CID,” said the judge in the WPATH ruling. In the parallel Endocrine Society ruling issued the same day, the judge went likewise found similar violations: "The Court finds the same systemic targeting of proponents of medical treatment for gender incongruence at work here. The Society is the latest casualty in some Executive Branch agencies' bid to investigate hospitals, medical providers, and charitable organizations that support transgender health. The CID's focus on academic and medical speech, combined with the FTC's paucity of logic or evidence pointing to a genuine investigation, confirms the conclusion that the CID was likely issued for a retaliatory purpose."

The cases center on Civil Investigative Demands—administrative subpoenas the FTC issued to both organizations in January 2026, demanding sweeping and unprecedented access to their internal operations. The FTC ordered the organizations to turn over decades of internal communications about their clinical guidelines on gender dysphoria, every educational and advocacy material, every financial record, and the names of every member who had ever helped develop claims about gender-affirming care—potentially thousands of people. The CID to WPATH alarmingly reached back to 1979, the year WPATH was founded. The CIDs are part of a sprawling Trump administration campaign to suppress speech about transgender people and crush the institutions that provide it: the Kennedy Declaration, which drove more than 40 hospital systems to shutter their trans youth programs before a federal judge vacated it as unlawful last month; CMS proposed rules that would bar Medicare and Medicaid-receiving hospitals from providing such care entirely; and DOJ subpoenas to hospitals across the country, which federal judges have repeatedly quashed as "smokescreens" for retaliation. The FTC's CIDs were the latest weapon in that campaign.

We really need Nuremberg style tribunals when this is all done. 

Headline of the Day

John Roberts Is George Wallace With A Harvard Law Degree

Crooks and Liars

It's pretty on point, and remarkably accurate.

The core of John Roberts' entire career can be summed up with the phrase, "N*****s should not vote." 

………

But the Court didn’t destroy the Civil Rights Act in a day. It was part of a lifelong mission by John Roberts to do so.

Starting as early as 1981, as a 26-year-old lawyer just three years out of Harvard Law School, Roberts began his campaign to undermine the Civil Rights Act. He got himself a job as Special Assistant to Ronald Reagan’s Attorney General William French Smith. Congress was about to amend the Civil Rights Act to provide that state laws would be illegal if they had a racially discriminatory effect, without having to prove that they had a racially discriminatory intent—something almost impossible to prove.

Roberts zealously took on the assignment coming up with arguments against the Amendment. Roberts wrote over 25 memos opposing the Amendment. In one, he argued that the Civil Rights Act was “the most intrusive interference imaginable by federal courts into state and local processes.”

 This is his life's mission.

Maybe It's Just a Jewish thing

But when fascists demand a list of all the Jews in an educational institution, it makes me uneasy.

I know that this could just be dismissed as just another attempt by the anti-Semite in the White House to use antisemitism as a political cudgel against his opponents, but they said exactly the same thing about that unpleasant little man with the funny mustache.

The Trump administration was within its rights to demand that the University of Pennsylvania turn over information about Jews on campus as part of a federal investigation into discrimination at the school, a federal judge decided Tuesday.

The government’s investigation had united Penn leaders with Jewish students and faculty members as they opposed the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s subpoena. Many on campus drew parallels between the government’s approach and methods deployed in Nazi Germany.

But the Trump administration has said that its request was typical for discrimination investigations to seek potential victims and witnesses, and Judge Gerald J. Pappert of Philadelphia’s Federal District Court agreed on Tuesday. He gave Penn until May 1 to comply with the administration’s subpoena, though the ruling appeared unlikely to quell the debates around how the administration has pressured top American universities. 

So, they are remaking the movie, only they have recast Reinhard Tristan Eugen Heydrich with Stephen Miller. 

Lovely. 

Headline of the Day

Elon Musk Loves White People. Here’s Why That’s a Problem

—USA Today, in an OP/ED calling out the white supremacist proclivities of the Apartheid Era Emerald Heir Pedo Guy™

Elon Musk a racist?  Say it ain't so.  Don't you know that there were never were any racists in his native land of South Africa.

Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and a guy whose social media platform most companies still use, is a BIG fan of White people. I mean … you could say he thinks White people are super. Maybe even “supreme.”

It's almost as if he supports some kind of ... White supreme-acy. Or something like that.

Responding to an X user who posted, “The Irish will become a minority in Ireland because Irish men are afraid of being called racist and upsetting people from the 3rd world,” Musk wrote on Feb. 11: “Such men are pathetic traitors.”

How subtle.

Yeah, imagine that.

The guy who told black workers at the Tesla plant to chill out about being called n****r is a racist?

Hoocoodanode? 

Headline of the Day

Monopoly With A Heaping Side Of Extra Racism 

—Karl Bode, on how the Trump administration is requiring racist policies as a condition of merger approval.

Making America Jim Crow again. 

One of the Trump administration's core policies is to not just approve giant and terrible mergers, but to make racism and sexism a condition companies must meet if they want regulatory approval.

The latest case in point: the Trump FCC rubber stamped yet another major merger in the telecom industry this week. This time the FCC approved the merger of Cox and Charter, two already massive cable companies, creating the biggest cable company in the nation. Just the sort of "populism" everybody asked for!

This kind of consolidation is always harmful to the public interest. U.S. telecom already sees muted competition at the hands of regional monopolies, resulting in high prices, spotty access, and generally terrible customer service.

………

That last bit, "no DEI discrimination," is a requirement by the companies that they eliminate already fairly pathetic company programs simply acknowledging that systemic racism and sexism exist. 

This is just awful.

In Related News, Water is Wet

The headline at Rolling Stone, "Miami Group Chat for Young Conservatives Riddled With Racism," says it all.

I am profoundly unsurprised. 

Today in Gay Bashing

Trump administration officials pulled down the Gay Pride Flag from the Stonewall National Monument, since (of course) we cannot have any LGBTQ symbolism at the birthplace of the gay liberation movement.

Orwell and Kafka are spinning in their graves right now.

Some local officials are pledging to restore the Stonewall National Monument’s large Pride flag after a Trump administration directive this week removed it from the only national park site dedicated to LGBTQ+ history.

Manhattan Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal shared a photo of the bare flagpole at the West Village park on social media Monday evening, along with a screenshot of the U.S. Department of the Interior memo to the National Park Service that led to its removal.

The federal directive states that in most cases, the National Park Service can only fly the U.S. flag, the Department of the Interior flag and the Prisoners of War flag in the public spaces it maintains. The policy makes limited exemptions, such as when a flag would “provide historical context” to a site, or when a site is co-managed with another entity “that may fly that state’s or city’s relevant flag.” But the parks service said in a statement that “changes to flag displays are made to ensure consistency with that guidance.”

In an interview on WNYC’s "Morning Edition," Hoylman-Sigal said protests are being organized for Tuesday, with plans to fly the flag again as soon as Thursday.

I'd also suggest that it might be a good idea for the local LGBTQ community to organize s 24 hour watch on the flag pole to ensure that anyone trying to take down the flag is confronted. 

 

Of Course He Is

Have you heard the one about the conservative influencer who got impregnated by Elon Musk, who largely ignored the kid?

Well, she had a change of heart and apologized for her previous anti-trans statements, so the Apartheid Era Emerald Heir Pedo Guy™ is trying to take her child away from her.

He really is a vile and petty man.

Ashley St. Clair is having a very bad month.

The conservative influencer built her brand on anti-trans rhetoric and owning the libs. Now she’s locked in a custody battle with Elon Musk, the father of her one-year-old son Romulus. Musk, who according to St. Clair’s court filings has seen the child just a handful of times since his birth, announced on X Monday that he would be “filing for full custody today, given her statements implying she might transition a one-year-old boy.”

St. Clair said no such thing. What she actually said, in response to a user asking her to address her past transphobia, was this: “I feel immense guilt for my role. And even more guilt that things I have said in the past may have caused my son’s sister more pain.”

………

Elon Musk is seeking full custody of a child he’s allegedly seen three times, based on the false claim that the child’s mother wants to “transition” a one-year-old.

This is the same Elon Musk who refused to publicly acknowledge he was Romulus’s father after the child was born in September 2024. St. Clair kept the pregnancy and birth secret for five months, only going public in February 2025 because tabloids were about to break the story anyway. According to the Wall Street Journal, Musk offered her $15 million plus $100,000 per month in child support if she would sign an NDA and never reveal his paternity. She turned it down, telling Musk’s fixer Jared Birchall, “I don’t want my son to feel like he’s a secret.”

Musk responded by slashing her support. When St. Clair’s attorney accused him of “financially retaliating against his own child,” Musk posted on X that he’d given her $2.5 million and was sending $500,000 a year, adding that he didn’t “know for sure” if the child was even his. St. Clair fired back that Musk had “refused” to take a paternity test, writing, “Elon, we asked you to confirm paternity through a test before our child (who you named) was even born.”

So to recap: Musk named the kid, wouldn’t acknowledge him publicly, tried to buy St. Clair’s silence, cut her support when she wouldn’t comply, pretended he wasn’t sure the baby was his, and is now seeking full custody because she apologized to trans people.

He runs a platform that generated child sexual abuse material using the mother’s image, then punished her for complaining about it. He’s the world’s richest man, and he’s using his wealth and his platform to destroy a woman whose crime is expressing empathy for his estranged daughter.

This is the guy who thinks he should be making decisions about a toddler’s welfare.

This asshole should have been drowned at birth.

Today in the Halls of Ivy

The Harvard Salient, the right wing publication at the university, was just shut down for rampant bigotry.

We are talking racism, antisemitism, and Hitler fanbois:

When the Harvard Salient’s board of directors suspended the conservative student magazine in late October, they accused its student members of publishing “reprehensible” material and claimed they had received “deeply disturbing and credible complaints about the broader culture of the organization.”

Then, for more than a month, the board was silent.

But a series of documents obtained by The Crimson reveal what members of the Salient’s governing body were concerned about: variations of a racial slur used casually in a group chat of members; an unpublished issue featuring a call for mass executions; and draft versions of a September article, written by David F.X. Army ’28, that included two images of swastikas and a Nazi slogan in the subtitle.

After its publication, Army’s piece drew fire for a line — “Germany belongs to the Germans, France to the French, Britain to the British, America to the Americans” — that mirrored a phrase used by Adolf Hitler in a 1939 speech. The magazine’s editor-in-chief, Richard Y. Rodgers ’28, eventually issued a statement standing behind the piece and saying any invocation of Nazi language was unintentional.

But draft versions of the article suggest that, at the very least, members of the Salient were aware that the article’s contents invoked Nazi ideology.

The files, shared with The Crimson by two members of the Salient, include the editing history of two published articles along with screenshots and video recordings from an internal Signal thread used by the publication’s leaders and active members. In those messages, some Salient writers defend quoting Hitler, criticize extending voting rights to women, and use the n-word, replacing some letters with emojis.

The documents also include a copy of the Salient’s unreleased October edition, which was pulled by the publication’s board of directors before it could be distributed on campus. Articles in the unreleased issue include a call for the United States to “begin the implementation of the death penalty at a grand scale” and a defense of the Spanish Inquisition.

Many of the materials reviewed by The Crimson were shared with the Salient’s board of directors in October, prompting the board to announce the suspension of the magazine’s operations on Oct. 26. 

It's fascists all the way down.

Headline of the Day

Why Elon Musk Needs Dungeons & Dragons to Be Racist

—The Atlantic on why Elon Musk completely lost his sh%$ on the current owner of D&D releasing a book that admitted that the early stuff was just a bit racist.

Elon Musk does not object to being called a racist, he objects to people being offended by racism.

The fall of Constantinople wiped the last living Roman civilization from the Earth. The city’s refugees fled west, helping spark the Renaissance; its legacy shaped the religious traditions of millions and the modern map of Europe and the Middle East. The fall also inspired a book, which inspired a game, which inspired the world’s richest man to lash out because his favorite role-playing game wasn’t as racist and sexist as it used to be.

Last November, on X, the billionaire tycoon Elon Musk told the toy company Hasbro to “burn in hell.” Hasbro owns the company Wizards of the Coast, which produces the game Dungeons & Dragons. Wizards had just released a book on the making of the game that was critical of some of its creators’ old material. “Nobody, and I mean nobody, gets to trash” the “geniuses who created Dungeons & Dragons,” Musk wrote. The book acknowledged that some earlier iterations of the game relied on racist and sexist stereotypes and included “a virtual catalog of insensitive and derogatory language.” After a designer at Wizards said that the company’s priority now was responding to “progressives and underrepresented groups who justly took offense” at those stereotypes, and not to “the ire of the grognards”—a reference to early fans such as Musk—Musk asked, “How much is Hasbro?,” suggesting that he might buy the company to impose his vision on it, as he’d done with Twitter.

………

D&D wouldn’t exist without J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, fantasy’s seminal 20th-century text, published in 1937. When Tolkien’s German publisher, to comply with Nazi racial laws, tried to determine whether the author was Jewish, Tolkien was outraged. A draft of his response reads: “If I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people.” He expressed his disgust to his British publisher: “I have many Jewish friends, and should regret giving any colour to the notion that I subscribed to the wholly pernicious and unscientific race-doctrine.”

Unfortunately, a “pernicious and unscientific race-doctrine” permeated the era in which The Hobbit, and the Lord of the Rings series that followed it, were written, an era in which many Westerners believed that “races” shared particular natures, characteristics, and capabilities. That genetic determinism seeped into the books. Although uncountable readers were inspired by the tales of its diminutive heroes defying stereotypes to save the world, some drew other conclusions. The books, and the ideas embedded in them, would go on to have a magnetic appeal to the political forces Tolkien had rejected.

Today, we can see their influence on right-wing populists in business and politics all over the world.The billionaire Peter Thiel named his software company, Palantir, after the crystal ball in The Lord of the Rings, while his AI company, Anduril, is named for the sword of the human hero Aragorn. Joe Lonsdale, an investor in Anduril and Palantir, founded a crypto-focused bank called Erebor, after the dwarfs’ mountain fortress. Vice President J. D. Vance named his venture-capital firm Narya, after Gandalf’s magic ring. Giorgia Meloni, the far-right prime minister of Italy, and defender of “Italianity” against what she sees as the dilution of immigration, is a Tolkien obsessive who sees in hobbits, dwarfs, and elves the “value of specificity.” When Peter Jackson’s Oscar-winning adaptation of the Lord of the Rings trilogy came out in the 2000s, conservative writers embraced the films as a metaphor for George W. Bush’s war in Iraq.

………

If your identity was built around being a fan of a marginal pastime, de-geekification meant that suddenly, you weren’t as special anymore. Comic books, video games, fantasy and science fiction, role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons—they were all getting more popular, and trying to appeal to new audiences. Not everyone was happy with the changes that effort inspired.

Those who objected could be divided into two categories: people who found the simpler and more flexible game to be bland; and people who didn’t like the game getting “woke.” This is a slippery term, but it often boils down to things not being quite as racist or sexist as they used to be.

Racists don''t just want to be racism to be accepted, they demand that society continues to promulgate racism.

Another Win for the US Military

It looks like the Department of Defense is planning to kick boy scouts to the curb, because they are too, "Woke."

To quote not-Talleyrand, "This is worse than a crime, it is a mistake." 

The century-old partnership between the U.S. military and Scouting could be coming to an end.

U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is planning for the military to sever all ties with Scouting America, saying the group once known as the Boy Scouts is no longer a meritocracy and has become an organization designed to "attack boy-friendly spaces," according to documents reviewed by NPR.

In a draft memo to Congress, which sources shared with NPR but which has not yet been sent, Hegseth criticizes Scouting for being "genderless" and for promoting diversity, equity and inclusion.

The military has provided support to the Scouts for more than 100 years, assistance that was formalized in 1937. But in one memo, Hegseth says, "The organization once endorsed by President Theodore Roosevelt no longer supports the future of American boys."

The proposal calls for the Pentagon to no longer provide medical and logistical aid to the National Jamboree, which brings in as many as 20,000 scouts to a remote site in West Virginia. It also states that the military will no longer allow Scout troops to meet at military installations in the U.S. and abroad, where many bases have active Scout programs.

I assume that Scouting America will try to teach their kids a lesson from this, because learning from misfortune is one of the things that they do.

My guess as to the lesson, "Don't let alcohol abuse rot your mind." 

Clearly, Trump is Good for the Jews

In response to pressure from the Trump administration the US Coast Guard has announced that displaying nooses and swastikas will no longer be considered hate symbols.

Nothing says, "I'm not antisemitic," like being a Nazi:

The U.S. Coast Guard will no longer classify the swastika — an emblem of fascism and white supremacy inextricably linked to the murder of millions of Jews and the deaths of more than 400,000 U.S. troops who died fighting in World War II — as a hate symbol, according to a new policy that takes effect next month.

Instead, the Coast Guard will classify the Nazi-era insignia as “potentially divisive” under its new guidelines. The policy, set to take effect Dec. 15, similarly downgrades the classification of nooses and the Confederate flag, though display of the latter remains banned, according to documents reviewed by The Washington Post.

Certain historical displays or artwork where the Confederate flag is a minor element are still permissible, according to the policy.

Though the Coast Guard is not part of the Defense Department, the service has been reworking its policies to align with the Trump administration’s changing tolerances for hazing and harassment within the U.S. military. In September, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth directed a review and overhaul of those policies, calling the military’s existing standards “overly broad” and saying they jeopardize troops’ combat readiness.

Objectively pro-Nazi.

……… 

A Coast Guard official who had seen the new wording called the policy changes chilling.

“We don’t deserve the trust of the nation if we’re unclear about the divisiveness of swastikas,” the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of fear of reprisal. 

Gee, you think? 

Rather unsurprisingly, after the Washington Post reported this story, the Coast Guard reversed their reversal of policy in less than 24 hours.

Exposure to the light of day killed the policy change.

To quote P.C. Hodgell, "That Which Can Be Destroyed By the Truth, Should Be."