The Kids Are Alright Except For The Ones Who Are Not Alright! Tabs, Fri., June 20, 2025

Morning news roundup! And things to read!

Tabs gif by your friend Martini Glambassador!

Since we all had the day off yesterday (except me, obviously and forever), it might be a little late before we get you your usual 9 a.m. post. Settle in with some tabs!

From 2018, this military historian guy says if we want to regime-change Iran, we’re gonna have to bring back the draft. I’m sure the Trump boys will be lining up to visit a recruitment center their podiatrist. (USA Today) Nobody is talking to Hegseth? Well, good! (Latin Times)

ICE — scratch that, CBP, who apparently are also out masked and in civvies now — wanted to go to Dodger Stadium to do ??? The Dodgers told them to get the fuck out. (CNN)

A 400 percent increase in assaults on (masked) ICE goons? You will be shocked to hear that no. (Washington Post)

The kids are protesting ICE in Roblox! Unfortunately, this is because the kids are cosplaying ICE in Roblox. (Teen Vogue)

LDS newspaper ashamed of Mike Lee. (Politico)

Trump’s white supremacist “lone wolf” foot soldiers. (Garrett Graff)

The story on the shooting (that killed a beloved father/Project Runway fashion designer) at the Salt Lake City No Kings was all wrong, top to bottom, including in Tabs. The kid with the gun never shot at anybody, a military vet “peacekeeper” did. I’m sorry the kid is being charged with murder, AND I think it’s fucking bad idea jeans to carry a fucking rifle at a protest. (And also stop with the armed “peacekeepers,” Jesus.) (The Handbasket)

Our Liz on the Reagan judge who ruled Trump’s “anti-DEI” contract cuts are “just racism.” (Public Notice)

Well, hmmm. “But even setting that aside, [Justice Amy Coney] Barrett says that ‘private’ discrimination against trangender people is not enough to make them a suspect class, because what matters is a history of ‘de jure’ discrimination—legalese for discrimination of the official, formal sort.” But … the case is literally about de jure discrimination, by the government, under the law? Confused Tucker Carlson golden retriever face? (Balls and Strikes)

The New York Times is publishing more anti-trans fuckery after getting the Supreme Court ruling it wanted.

Other articles lean heavily on selective European reviews used to justify restricting transgender healthcare, ignoring that several countries—France, Germany, Sweden, and Austria—have recently reaffirmed the importance of such care in newer guidelines. A Republican-commissioned review in Utah similarly found the care to be critical for transgender youth, yet goes unmentioned. One piece frames the Supreme Court decision as a backlash to a movement “consumed by theories of sex and gender that most voters didn’t grasp or support,” subtly legitimizing a rollback of rights as a reasonable voter reaction. In all, at least half a dozen articles have been published by the Times in the 24 hours following the ruling—ink still drying—spreading misinformation, shaming transgender people, and giving prominent space to voices that seek to strip us of our rights.

(Erin in the Morning)

Big Bullshit Bill will use Medicaid funding to build WALL. (Mother Jones) Because Texas has defunded WALL after building eight percent of it. (Texas Tribune)

But don’t worry, they want to put 250 million acres of public land in the West up for sale to the highest bidder buddy. (Wilderness)

X/Twitter is now all ads for child sex abuse material, all the time. For freedom probably. (NBC News)

Oh James Frey is acting as if he was “canceled” for thought crime, instead of rightfully for perpetrating writing like this, as critiqued within.

On the other hand, a goal of autofiction, which often attends closely to small details, is to cultivate exquisite awareness in the reader. And it’s true that, while reading “Next to Heaven,” I sometimes thought I could feel individual cells in my body trying to die. This happened, for instance, when a character referred to his penis as a “yogurt cannon” and again when a character called herself a “piece of white creamy sexual chocolate.”

Shit, can we uncancel him so we can cancel him again for this?

There’s tremendous misogyny in “Next to Heaven.” At one point, Katy, the girlfriend of the town’s hot hockey coach, is blackmailed, drugged, and violently raped (by a man elsewhere depicted as “kind and generous and helpful and supportive”) and we know the weeks afterward are bad for her because Frey keeps reiterating that she has “stopped working out.”

(New Yorker)

Young women like “I’m good” at having to wipe men’s emotional butts for them. (Buzzfeed)

A day late, but enjoy some WOW Juneteenth historical photos, from Texas Highways! And Texas’s Ms. Opal Lee, in a history lesson sure to be banned in Florida. (SER at The Play Typer Guy)

EVAN POPS IN! What do sickos like Ambassador Mike Huckabee really believe about Israel? Seems pertinent to find out right now! Come by my Friday place and read, subscribe and find out! [The Moral High Ground]

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