Yes, LA! But Here's a LIGHTNING ROUNDUP Of OTHER SH*T STILL GOING ON!
Big lightning! Round lightning! Lotsa shit! Scary shit! Still going on!
While the nation’s eyes have largely been glued to the ongoing clusterfash in Los Angeles this week, with occasional nervous glances toward the other side of the country where Donald Trump will graciously allow the Army to celebrate its birthday with him, The News has continued to happen in other areas, too!
So whilst we huddle under the bathroom shelves behind the wastebasket in dread of the next burst of thunder or flashbangs, let’s peek at some of what else has insisted on happening anyway.
Shh! Don’t Mention The Violence!
First up, tangential to the situation in Los Angeles, one of our favorite thinkers about things, Rebecca Solnit (we all read her book together during the pandemic, dickety-five years ago, remember?) found herself banned from FascesBook this week.
Solnit apparently incurred the Wrath of the Algorithm High Atop the Thing because she wrote this excellent essay about violence in the context of the protests in LA, which were largely nonviolent, and in response to very clear violence done by the government. Solnit distinguishes between property violence and violence done to people and other living things, and also argues that she believes nonviolent resistance
is in the big picture and the long term the most effective strategy, but that doesn't mean it must be polite, placid, or please our opponents, not least because nothing ever will and they'll lie and distort no matter what.
Not that nuance matters; just the frequency of the word “violence” in the essay (39 appearances including headline) no doubt triggered an automatic ban. Can’t have violence, however it’s mentioned! Happily, however, people made a lot of noise about it, and that may have reached the right robot ears or whatever, and now Solnit’s Facebook is back. You should sign up for her newsletter, is what you should do. [Meditations in an Emergency]
Fullbright Board Resigns Over Trumpfuckery
All 12 members of the board of the Fulbright scholarship organization resigned Wednesday to protest the Trump administration’s political interference in the program, according to people who knew what was going on, including Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-New Hampshire). Good for her for going on the record.
The board members walked out in response to the State Department’s cancelling almost 200 Fulbright scholarships to US researchers and faculty members after they had already been awarded by the board, The New York Times reports.
The board approved those scholars over the winter after a yearlong selection process, and the State Department was supposed to send acceptance letters by April, the people said. But instead, the board learned that the office of public diplomacy at the agency had begun sending rejection letters to the scholars based mainly on their research topics, they said.
In addition, the department is reviewing the applications of about 1,200 scholars from other countries who have already been approved by the board to come to the United States, the people said. Those foreign scholars were also supposed to receive acceptance letters around April.
But wait! There’s more! Not only is this an escalation of the administration’s rightwing meddling in higher education, there’s also a very dirty set of fingerprints on the decision. It came from the State Department’s public diplomacy office, which is headed by Darren Beattie, the eugenics-loving scumbag who was shitcanned from a speechwriting job in the first Trump administration in 2018 because he’d spoken at a White Power Rangers group. He’s also tweeted a lot of racist shit quite recently like, “Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work. Unfortunately, our entire national ideology is predicated on coddling the feelings of women and minorities, and demoralizing competent white men.” That was from October 2024, but wasn’t a problem since it sounds like the first draft of a Trump executive order.
The administration gave the Times a statement pointing out that all the board members had been appointed by Joe Biden, and explained that “it’s ridiculous to believe that these members would continue to have final say over the application process, especially when it comes to determining academic suitability and alignment with President Trump’s executive orders.” After all, everything Joe Biden ever did is now illegal, silly. In this Glorious Year One of the Trump Reich, “alignment with Trump” is academic suitability. [NYT]
Trump’s Concept Of A Plan For FEMA
Great Leader explained on Tuesday that he thinks he’ll probably begin “phasing out” the Federal Emergency Management Agency once hurricane season is over, and that states will get less federal emergency funding after that so they’ll need to plan better. No problem, it’ll be more efficient, you’ll see.
Maybe the courts will stop that from happening, or perhaps Trump will be thwarted because nobody working for him can actually tell him when exactly hurricane season is, anyway. (It began June 1, and ends November 30, but you nerds probably knew that, nerds.)
Trump said at a White House briefing that in his new system, the president’s office would handle disbursing disaster funds, and wouldn’t that just be great?
“We’re going to give out less money,” he said.
“We’re going to give it out directly. It’ll be from the president’s office. We’ll have somebody here, could be Homeland Security.”
But golly, wouldn’t that be prone to abuse, like maybe a president deciding to punish states that didn’t vote for him, or whose leaders said something mean to him? Why yes, that is exactly the idea, did you forget who’s in charge and doesn’t intend to leave, ever?
This is where we point out that in this Constitutional Republic, funding for federal agencies is supposed to be determined by Congress, remember them? Congress is also allegedly the only body that can eliminate agencies it created, but we realize that’s very old-fashioned thinking from the long-ago days of January 19, 2025. [NBC News]
Trump Fires Climate Website Staff, But Cheer Up: It’s Not Becoming Oil.Gov … Yet
One of the top government websites for climate change information, NOAA’s Climate.gov, is likely to shut down soon, after all its staff were shitcanned as of May 31, the Guardian reports.
Climate.gov will no longer publish new content, apart from a few posts written and scheduled before the firings, and the entire site may go dark sometime soon. That is, if we’re lucky. The worse option would be for the site to start pumping out climate change disinformation, a not-impossible scenario.
“The entire content production staff at climate.gov (including me) were let go from our government contract on 31 May,” said a former government contractor who wished to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation. “We were told that our positions within the contract were being eliminated.”
Rebecca Lindsey, who had been the program manager for Climate.gov until she was given her walking papers back in February during the early purges of “probationary” employees, said that her former boss told her the elimination of contracts for the site’s 10 content producers was ordered “from above,” and called the firings “a very deliberate, targeted attack.”
In addition to the 10 dedicated contracted staff, the site also included articles and contributions from NOAA scientists. The site’s policy was to be neutral on politics, focusing solely on current science, Linsdsey explained, so you can see why the administration had to put a stop to that nonsense.
“We operated exactly how you would want an independent, non-partisan communications group to operate,” said Lindsey, and noted that climate.gov is housed within the science division of NOAA, not its public affairs division. “It does seem to be part of this sort of slow and quiet way of trying to keep science agencies from providing information to the American public about climate.”
In what’s probably the story’s most worrying detail, former NOAA spokesperson Tom Di Liberto, who also got sacked earlier this year, pointed out that while Climate.gov’s content team was eliminated, two web developers were spared, so now would be a good time to start playing selections from Bernard Herrmann’s score from Psycho. There could be something terrible lurking in the shower, Di Liberto and Lindsey both fear.
Lindsey said she also feared a “sinister possibility” that the administration may co-opt climate.gov to publish its own anti-science content. Lindsey said the administration could now “provide a content team from the Heartland Institute, leveraging our audience, our brand, our millions of people that we reach on social media every month. That’s the worst-case scenario.”
“Climate.gov is one heck of a URL. If you wanted to basically keep the website alive to do something with later, this is what you would do if you’re the [Trump] administration,” said Di Liberto. “It’s clear that the administration does not accept climate science, so it’s certainly concerning.”
The personnel cuts also mean that nobody will remain to run Climate.gov’s social media sites or respond to reader emails … unless of course those folks are also replaced by climate change deniers. Heck, maybe the administration will hand those duties to the antivaxxer loons RFK Jr. is bringing on to handle vaccine policy. The principle of Crank Magnetism suggests advocates of any conspiracy theory are also likely to glom on to others, so we can imagine an entirely new federal agency staffed with multidisciplinary cranks. They could call it the Ministry of Alternative Truth. [Guardian / Climate.gov for now]
We now return your attention span to the streets of Los Angeles and Washington DC, and of course to your planning for Saturday’s No Kings protests, where we all need to show up and demand an end to this dangerous fascist bullshit.
OK, that’s all. Safe to come out now. Probably. Leave the bathroom door open, and would it kill the human to put a little rug on the floor here? (True, we did pee on it the last time he did.)
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I mean, the protest slogan is "no kings" when Thornton is right there, being all regal and stuff.
Thornton Fears a Boom.