But We Don't Want the Irish

Why yes, I am quoting the Mel Brooks film Blazing Saddles, because one can juxtapose the genius absurdity of that film with the evil absurdity of the Ron DeSantis regime in Florida.

Case in point, the Florida legislature passed and Desantis' signed a law that forbids localities from hosting, "Certain programming and activities designed or implemented with reference to ethnicity, sexual orientation, or gender identity."

This law Delray Beach to cancel its St. Patrick's Day parade, because Irish is an ethnicity, and hence the parade is "Woke" under Florida law.

A Florida mayor is working to salvage his city’s St Patrick’s Day parade after it was canceled to comply with a new Republican law banning municipalities from hosting events deemed to promote diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI).

The state’s hard right governor Ron DeSantis signed the law in April that takes effect on 1 January, prompting the city of Delray Beach, near Fort Lauderdale, to announce it was scrapping next year’s popular Irish celebration that regularly attracts tens of thousands of visitors, and also its Pride event.

Restrictions imposed by the new state law, the city said in a statement, “include certain programming and activities designed or implemented with reference to ethnicity, sexual orientation, or gender identity”.

Delray officials determined they were “legally prohibited from organizing, funding, or promoting these events in 2027”.

The decision to axe the St Patrick’s and Pride events angered residents and local business owners who faced missing out on what are traditionally among their most lucrative weekends of the year.

The Florida Republican Party is a bunch of, "Rustlers, cut throats, murderers, bounty hunters, desperados, mugs, pugs, thugs, nitwits, halfwits, dimwits, vipers, snipers, con men, Indian agents, Mexican bandits, muggers, buggerers, bushwhackers, hornswogglers, horse thieves, bull dykes, train robbers, bank robbers, ass-kickers, sh%$-kickers and Methodists."

House Republicans Vote to Make Sexual Abuse Protector Their Leader

Yeah, the House Minority Leader will be Jim Jordan, who has been credibly alleged with turning a blind eye to widespread abuse from a sports doctor while he was coaching at Ohio State University.

I'm beginning to think that ties to sexual abuse are a requirement for leadership positions in the Republican party.

Good to See Newspapers to Run Headlines Like This

Unfortunately, the paper running the headline, "Stephen Miller, reactionary ideologue and white supremacist, promoted head of Trump administration," is Le Monde English, not a US newspaper.

If a newspaper cannot be bothered to describe Stephen Miller (יִמַּח שְׁמו) for what he is, I cannot be bothered to subscribe or not block your f%$#ing advertisements.'

A majority of Americans punished Donald Trump during the midterms for his strategic choices and authoritarian exercise of power. In response, the American president chose to double down and promote his most extreme and most loyal adviser on Friday, November 6: Stephen Miller. The White House's reactionary ideologue will replace Susie Wiles as chief of staff.

"Stephen has been with me from the beginning," Trump told the press. "He gets it; very good politically. He’ll do a great job. Great manager." However, the president did not give any real explanation. "Sometimes you change," he simply said. The change in question is a headlong rush, a retreat into the inner circle of loyalists without qualms, ready to do anything for their leader. It shows just how much Trump sees the final two years of his term as the fortification of a bunker against the attacks of a Democratic-controlled Congress and the continuation of a unilateral presidency, without consultation.

At least one person was pleased with the appointment: Steve Bannon, who served as Trump's special adviser during his first term and has been an indefatigable promoter of national populism. Speaking to Le Monde, he said that Trump's decision was a "f%$# you to the Republican establishment and to democratic socialists." He described Miller as an uncompromising MAGA ideologue.

(%$# mine) 

H/t Mike the Mad Biologist.

Being Replaced by Something More Bizarrely Inexplicable

In this case, it is the replacement of Susie Wiles by Stephen Miller (יִמַּח שְׁמו) as Trump's Chief of Staff.

Well, I can say with certitude that Trump has selected the worst possible person to manage the White House.

We Don't Just Hate Comcast

We also hate T-Mobile. (And the rest of the telcos/mobile providers)

T-Mobile has agreed to improve the home internet service it provides to low-income New Yorkers after the New York Attorney General’s office found it drastically capped speeds for participants in a state-mandated affordable service program, and made the plans difficult to find.

The Affordable Broadband Act mandates home internet providers offer high-speed broadband plans at reduced costs to qualifying households. The service can cost no more than $15 per month for download speeds of 25 Mbps, or $20 per month for speeds of at least 200 Mbps. It’s open to households that receive government benefits including Medicaid, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits and Home Energy Assistance Program benefits.

Just 15 households statewide were enrolled in T-Mobile’s Affordable Broadband Act plans, a spokesperson for Attorney General Letitia James said. Her office said the company coded its website so that information about the plans wouldn't appear in search engine results, despite the law's requirement that internet service providers make an effort to promote their affordable broadband plans.

James said customers in the program saw their speeds reduced more than 97%, to just 650 kilobits per second, after using 50 gigabytes of data in a month — a limit her office estimated a typical user would hit after four days of service.

Having essential services run by contemptible greed-heads is not working out well.

Headline of the Day

Defund Musk!

—Robert Reich, explaining how the biggest welfare queen in history should not be allowed to feed at the taxpayer trough.

Works for me. 

Any Bets On This List?

Magistrate Judge Thomas Hixson has ordered the criminal enterprise formerly known as Facebook™ to tell him who was involved in ordering the torrenting of pirated works in order to train their AI.

If I had a guess, my guess would be that their name rhymes with Lark Buckerberg.

Meta will have to name the people who greenlit its torrenting of pirated books. A federal magistrate judge has ordered the company to identify everyone who approved sourcing books from LibGen and Anna’s Archive. This goes beyond the employees who ran the downloads and includes whoever decided whether to seed the books to others. 

Last month, Magistrate Judge Thomas Hixson ordered Meta to hand over the command histories of the servers it used to torrent pirated books.

………

The server logs could reveal what happened on Meta’s machines. However, publisher Entrepreneur Media also wants to know who approved the torrenting activity.

Entrepreneur Media, which publishes Entrepreneur magazine, filed one of the related lawsuits where it accuses Meta of contributing to piracy by uploading (seeding) works to third parties, similar to the authors’ contributory infringement claim.

To find out more, the publisher asked Meta to identify everyone who “made, authorized, or approved” the decisions to obtain the shadow library datasets, and to do so via BitTorrent.

Meta’s answers named several people who are believed to have been involved in data-related decisions. However, Meta said it couldn’t identify anyone who “formally” made or approved decisions to acquire or use books for its first two Llama models. Those decisions were often the result of team consensus, Meta argued.

When it came to the torrenting itself, Meta pointed to the employees who ran the downloads, describing their choices as technical decisions.

………

Meta added that the acquisition of data from Anna’s Archive went through an internal legal review in early 2024, which involved its in-house lawyers. 

That bit about, "Technical Decisions, "is bullsh%$.  It does not go through legal unless someone senior approving this whole scheme.

While seeing Mark Zuckerberg frog-marched out of his office in handcuffs over something as prosaic as this would be a bit disappointing, they got Al Capone for tax evasion.

There is precedent. 

Headline of the Day

Bolsonaro Escape Jet Tied to Alleged Cocaine Trafficker

—Payday Report

To quote Zathras, "At least there is symmetry."

Trump, of course, has welcomed him with open arms.

Why Yes, This IS Completely Mental

Trump is now threatening to ban Norwegian immigrants because of his butt-hurt over not getting the Nobel Peace Prize.

Ignoring the obvious, the Nobel Committee is a private charity, the fact that Donald Trump has kidnapped a world leader, assassinated another world leader, and started and is losing a war with Iran, would seem to mitigate against Trump getting the award.

He has the FIFA Peace Prize.  Isn't that enough? 

World's Smallest Violin

Comcast has a sad because, with the increased availability of competitors in the broadband market, what is arguably the most loathed company in America is losing customers.

Merciful heavens!  It appears that these companies are charging prices that are too low.

Comcast reportedly plans significant job cuts in its cable division as the firm continues to lose residential broadband and TV customers. Comcast lost 144,000 residential broadband customers in Q3 2026, up from a 91,000-customer loss in the same quarter a year ago, the company said in its earnings report today.

Comcast historically capitalized on a lack of competition for high-speed wired broadband. But now it faces stronger competition from fixed wireless providers and from fiber providers in parts of its cable territory.

“Fixed wireless remains aggressive and continues to take share, while fiber construction remains elevated, with pockets of irrational pricing and promotional activity,” Comcast co-CEO Mike Cavanagh said today in an earnings call.

Comcast CFO Jason Armstrong said “irrational pricing” from fiber operators includes $30 to $40 monthly broadband offers “in specific markets in the third quarter.” He said $30 to $40 pricing is irrational because deploying fiber costs $1,500 or more per home, and is “getting more expensive with construction costs up as you get into more suburban and rural areas.”

The first, and most obvious, point here is that Comcast co-CEO Mike Cavanagh and Comcast CFO Jason Armstrong are contemptible greed-heads who should have been drowned at birth by their parents.

The second point is that Comcast clearly does not have a handle on the actual installation costs for fiber. 

………

After the latest quarterly drop, Comcast has 28.3 million residential broadband customers in the US. Comcast said it has a plan to turn things around.

“We’ve embarked on the most significant operating and cost transformation in our company’s history, with an opportunity we believe will ultimately amount to billions of dollars over time,” Cavanagh said. The organizational changes will result in a “significant charge” of over $1 billion to be applied in the fourth quarter earnings report, Armstrong said.

It appears likely that job cuts will affect Comcast’s famously frustrating customer service division, replacing some number of humans with AI agents that already handle some customer interactions. “As personal AI agents reshape how consumers discover, purchase, and manage services, we’re positioning Comcast to capitalize on that shift,” Armstrong said.

When a company says that adopting AI to improve their customer service they are lying.

In order for to even remotely approach viability, their existing customer service would have to be so horrifically bad that ……… Oh, right Comcast.

For them, AI might actually be an improvement. 

If You Believe This ………

……… I have a bridge for sale in Brooklyn.

The idea that it was just an AI hallucination that caused the suspension of the, "No Kings," Instagram account just as the protests were kicking off by the criminal enterprise formerly known as Facebook™ does not pass the smell test.

Meta Platforms Inc. said an automated security system mistakenly suspended the Instagram account of the No Kings Coalition at the height of a nationwide series of demonstrations.

The technology company offered an apology and a more detailed explanation for the disruption, which came during the group's early-voting push ahead of the Nov. 3 midterm elections.

Instagram's engineering team found that the accounts' "reading" activity triggered the security system. A tool from Anthropic PBC's Claude was accessing profiles, posts and hashtags at roughly four times the normal rate in intense bursts Saturday, Andy Stone, Meta's vice president of communications wrote in a social media post Sunday.

"These abrupt, high-volume, sequential requests in a short period resembled automated bot traffic rather than an ordinary human browsing our systems," Stone said.

Given that Meta has been actively suppressing pro-DaSilva accounts in Brazil ahead of the upcoming runoff election. I'm gonna call bull sh%$ on this excuse.

 

Stay Classy, My Friend

Matt Gaetz has doxxed women suing him for allegedly sexually trafficking them.

Well, we've always known that he was a douche bag. (No offense to actual douche bags)

Two women have filed a federal civil lawsuit accusing former Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz and two others of participating in an alleged sex trafficking scheme involving young women, drugs and traveling across state lines.

The allegations are the latest chapter in Gaetz’s high-profile sex scandal that ultimately derailed his nomination by President Trump as U.S. Attorney General and also led him to resign from Congress in 2024. His departure came as a bi-partisian House Ethics Committee was in the final stages of an investigation into his alleged misconduct.

………

Later in the day, Gaetz posted a photo on X in an effort to dox the Jane Does in the lawsuit. Under a photo of three bikini-clad young women, whose backs are shown, Gaetz wrote: “Jane Doe Strikes Again! Two adult women sued me today alleging they were sex trafficked to the Bahamas. I’m shocked nobody responded to their repeated cries for help, posted to instagram.”

The post includes the name of a woman, but Gaetz earlier admitted to a Herald reporter that he wasn’t sure the photo was of any of the Jane Does in the lawsuit.

The 33-page complaint, filed Monday in the Middle District of Florida, details how the former Congressman used two of his friends, now-convicted ex-Seminole County tax collector Joel Greenberg, and former Florida GOP House member Christopher Dorworth, to coordinate the recruitment of young women whom they supplied with drugs in order to facilitate sexual encounters, according to the lawsuit. The incidents occurred from 2017 to January 2019.

(emphasis mine)

He really is a deeply toxic piece of sh%$.

Support Your Local Police

The good folks at Techdirt have a good summary about how conspire to conceal their use of various spy tech.

Among other things, this is a violation of the Brady disclosures required by law, and as such this should be treated as a felony criminal conspiracy, at least in a perfect world.

Law enforcement agencies across the country are increasingly relying on spying technologies—automated license plate readers (ALPR), cell-site simulators, and facial recognition, to name a few–causing an outcry in many communities where people are rightly concerned about the threat to civil rights and civil liberties these tools present.

Some authorities are responding to these concerns by trying to hide what they’re doing. Police departments are telling officers not to mention ALPRs when stopping vehicles and concealing their use of ALPRs to avoid citizens’ public records requests. Concealing the use of unpopular spying tools isn’t anything particularly new for law enforcement—cops have been doing it for years—but it’s just as wrong now as it was 20 years ago.

These practices prevent the public from knowing about and questioning how agencies are spending taxpayer dollars on spying technologies and holding them accountable. This is especially troubling when many towns are signing contracts with Flock and other ALPR vendors with little to no public oversight. The practice also violates disclosure obligations, allows cops and prosecutors to hide their tactics from judges, and cheats defendants from being able to challenge the use of evidence gathered by spy tech from being used against them.

404 Media recently revealed that in its usage policy for Flock ALPR cameras, one county in Iowa tells police to keep them a secret when detaining people: “DO NOT MENTION ALPR USAGE TO THE OCCUPANTS OF THE VEHICLE,” the policy document reads. “DO NOT MENTION ALPR USAGE IN YOUR REPORT OR COMPLAINT UNLESS ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY.” If writing a report about an incident, police are told to say they used “county resources” in making a stop instead of acknowledging use of ALPRs.

In Houston, police officers are likewise instructed to “be as vague as permissible” about why they are using Flock because the searches they run on Flock’s surveillance system could be obtained via public records requests.

The cops are crooks.

If you are on a jury, and a cop says that they used, "County resources," vote to acquit. 

Jury nullification is legal, though strongly discouraged, and it should be used here. 

Not a Surprise

It appears that DHS ignored restrictions placed by the issuing judge on the search warrant issued against Congresswoman Ilhan Omar.

This is not a surprise.  The Trump administration in general, and DHS in particular, are to following the law what Ebola is to French kissing.

Lawyers for Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota) on Friday accused federal authorities of ignoring key restrictions that a judge placed on the search of the lawmaker’s D.C. residence this week and demanded the immediate return of all property seized from the home. 

In a letter sent to Justice Department prosecutors, attorneys Amy Jeffress and Joshua Matz condemned the investigation into Omar’s immigration history as a politically motivated attack on one of President Donald Trump’s chief critics, saying it “violates Representative Omar’s constitutional rights and threatens the separation of powers.”

They also alleged that investigators did not follow specific instructions that a U.S. magistrate judge imposed on how the search should be carried out as they descended upon Omar’s residence in Northeast Washington on Monday, according to a copy of their letter obtained by The Washington Post.

Among the restrictions the attorneys said agents did not follow were provisions requiring investigators to provide Omar’s lawyers with a copy of the warrant and to contact the House Office of General Counsel before carrying out the search. That would have given Omar the chance to consult with congressional attorneys on any legislative work product that might have been exempt from federal seizure, her lawyers said. 

The Post has reported that Homeland Security Investigations, the investigative arm of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, is investigating whether Omar, 44, or members of her family may have lied on decades-old immigration paperwork to secure legal status and eventually U.S. citizenship.

I'm pretty sure that the Trump admin wants to denaturalize her, which is beyond the pale in terms of the norms of behavior, but they also ignored black letter Constitutional law, and a judge's instructions, with regard to the, "Speech and debate clause," which gives complete immunity to lawmakers' actions with regard to their constitutional duties.

………

In their letter Friday, Omar’s attorneys said the warrant required federal prosecutors to advise the congresswoman of those “speech and debate” protections and ask her to waive them. The lawyers maintained that did not happen and that agents executing the search prevented Omar from contacting legal counsel for more than an hour after the search had begun.

As much as Trump might want it to be, legislating while black is not a crime. 

It's TACO Day

Trump has canceled the livestream of Nidal Hasan's execution following (completely predictable) widespread and worldwide condemnation of this bit of mindless cruelty.

Evil and stupid.

President Trump on Thursday canceled the Pentagon’s planned livestream of the execution of the Army officer who was convicted in the 2009 Fort Hood mass shooting.

Pentagon officials said last week that the execution of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, who killed 13 people and wounded 32 others at Fort Hood, Texas, would be broadcast via livestream, a decision Mr. Trump initially said he supported.

But in private, Mr. Trump quickly began to deliberate with his advisers amid widespread criticism of the decision, and learned after the announcement that Mr. Hasan is paralyzed, according to several people familiar with his thinking. The president’s main concern was whether broadcasting the execution would deter other mass shootings, according to a White House official who was granted anonymity to discuss his thinking.

Here is a message to the editors of the New York Times, stop sane-washing Donald Trump and the Trump administration like you did in the last paragraph.

They are people for whom publicly displayed cruelty is a source of pleasure, nothing more.

………

Mr. Trump added that only immediate families of Mr. Hasan’s victims could watch the execution in person.

The president and his advisers remain adamant that Mr. Hasan deserves to be executed, but the president’s decision to change course constituted a rare retreat in the face of enormous public pushback. The criticism came from Democrats, Republicans, military officials and faith leaders who maintained that broadcasting the execution would turn it into a barbaric source of entertainment that violated core democratic principles.

"Rare retreat?"  Not rare at all.

TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out) is a f%$#ing meme.  He reverses himself all the time.

Now you are attempting to imply steadfastness from the man with a back-bone akin to that of a Common Bloodworm. 

The "Civilized" World

So it looks like Donald Trump and SecDef Pete Hegseth want to livestream the execution of Nidal Hasan by firing squad.

Honestly, the level of depravity here is beyond anything I could have imagined.

President Trump loves a public spectacle. After 14 years on reality television, he has brought one show after another to his presidency — a military parade down Pennsylvania Avenue, the biggest fireworks display ever, even a cage match on the White House’s South Lawn.

Now his administration is planning another unprecedented public exhibition, but one with a macabre twist: livestreaming a firing squad execution.

For the first time, Americans would be invited to watch on their cellphones, laptops and other screens as a convicted murderer is put to death. Never before has an official execution been broadcast live in the United States, turning what in theory is supposed to be the solemn application of justice into an event for an audience of potentially millions.

Under the plan announced this week, those who click online on Dec. 3 would see Nidal Malik Hasan, who gunned down 13 fellow Army soldiers and injured 32 others at Fort Hood in Texas in 2009, shot by rifle-bearing soldiers at the same base on the same day of the week at the same time of day that he opened fire. No limits on who would be allowed to watch were described, even though an Army manual restricts witnesses to an execution.

………

The idea seemed to shock even some of his colleagues in the administration. Vice President JD Vance cast doubt that it would be livestreamed, telling reporters that “I don’t know that that’s going to happen” and adding that he would not watch if it does. But Mr. Trump said he signed off on it. “Did I approve?” he said. “Absolutely I did.”

………

Even some supporters of capital punishment flinched at the idea of livestreaming Mr. Hasan’s execution, calling it medieval and barbaric. “Hasan should face the death penalty, but making his execution public and streaming it? Beyond disgusting,” said Senator Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina. “Public executions are what oppressive dictatorships like Iran and Afghanistan do. It should not be happening in America.”

When Tom f%$#ing Tillis is taking the moral high ground, something is profoundly wrong. 

Pedophile Hypocrite Dies at 84

Dennis "Denny" Hastert. 

I imagine that he is sitting next to Jim Bakker at the current orientation and training session in Hell.

Remember When Flock Promised That It Would Not Add Facial Recognition?

Not so much.

A third party firm is offering facial recognition from Flock data.

I have no doubt that they are paying a kick-back to Flock for access to their data.

As Flock continues to be the center of a nationwide conversation about automatic license plate reading cameras, the company has said that it doesn’t, and won’t, do facial recognition: “We will not add facial recognition to our devices,” Flock CEO Garrett Langley said in a recent video. But other, third-party companies are telling cops that they are willing to add facial recognition to data gathered by Flock cameras in order to “close that gap.”

A company called VIDIZMO is advertising the capability to export footage from FlockOS to its own platforms that do facial recognition, behavior prediction, and racial and gender analysis on live camera feeds. VIDIZMO is a several decades-old video analysis and database company that has started offering facial recognition technology to cops within the last six months. In a May email to Johnson City, Tennessee, deputy police chief Michael Adams, a salesperson from VIDIZMO wrote that the company’s product could do facial recognition on both Flock and Axon data in “one searchable platform.”

“Flock Safety generates plate reads and clips continuously. Your investigators use that data on active cases. But that Flock data does not connect automatically to your Axon evidence system,” the salesperson wrote. “VIDIZMO Intelligence Hub closes that gap. It brings Flock Safety data, Axon body worn camera footage, and any other evidence source into one searchable platform. Investigators search across all of it simultaneously — by face, vehicle, or object in seconds.” The email was obtained using a public records request by DeFlock Johnson City and was shared with 404 Media. The Johnson City PD told 404 Media in a statement that it did not take a call with the company.

Gee, Flock lied.  What a surprise? 

Not Good

It appears that Donald Trump and some of his more unhinged supporters are considering meddling with the upcoming election with a martial law declaration. 

Of all the outside advisers urging President Trump to seize control of federal elections this fall, the attorney Peter Ticktin can claim the deepest ties; the two men went to military school together as teenagers. In 2022, Ticktin helped Trump sue Hillary Clinton. This year, he pushed Trump to secure a pardon for Tina Peters, a former Colorado clerk convicted of charges related to tampering with election equipment.

Which is why it might be worth listening when Ticktin says that Trump could do something soon to take over elections. “He’s the only one that I know for sure has the understanding of the severity of it,” Ticktin told us this month before taking the stage at an election-skeptic conference in Las Vegas. The way Ticktin sees it, there are three possible outcomes this fall. The first—a smooth election—won’t happen in his view because, he claims without evidence, Democrats already cheated in the primaries. The second is that Trump takes action before the election to prevent cheating. The last option is that Trump tries to declare martial law on or around November 3. “Either martial law, or step aside,” he told us about Trump’s choices in the last scenario. When we asked about the prospect of riots if Trump tries to overturn the election results, Ticktin said he was not concerned. “Believe me, our armed forces are a lot bigger than they are,” he said.

………

To head off a crisis, Trump’s White House and Cabinet advisers have been working for months to move Trump’s focus away from baseless theories of election fraud peddled by people like Ticktin, Root, and Peters. At the same time, they have authorized as-yet-unsuccessful efforts to uncover actual evidence that would make the conspiracies more credible: Trump’s advisers gathered once-classified documents that he could share on genuine foreign efforts to influence elections, set up a prime-time address where he again falsely suggested that the 2020 election was stolen, authorized the seizure of Georgia election records, and reviewed voting equipment used in Puerto Rico. None of these efforts has revealed the type of large-scale fraud that Trump has alleged, though they have allowed the president to keep the idea of election theft in the news. Meanwhile, Trump has failed to persuade Senate Republicans to pass legislation, called the SAVE America Act, that would restrict mail-in voting and impose new voter-ID and citizenship checks on ballot access, and the Supreme Court has rejected his effort to restrict voting by mail.

………

But the prospect of Trump deciding to act on the demands of his most fervent election-denying supporters has remained a constant threat, one that even Trump’s inner circle admits remains possible. Such measures are broadly opposed by Republican leaders on Capitol Hill and within Trump’s own administration, not least because they’re considered bad politics. Polling commissioned by Republicans earlier this year found that if the SAVE America Act passed, it was likely to increase Democratic enthusiasm and suppress Republican turnout, particularly in red states, such as Florida, that have long embraced mail-in voting, according to a person who has reviewed the numbers.

We need to make sure that local and state authorities are prepared for this.

We also personally need to be prepared to push back against this personally. 

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.