Rio Grande Valley artist Rigoberto Gonzalez was among artists and institutions targeted by The White House in a wide-ranging letter issued on Thursday, August 21.

Among artworks, ideas, information, and institutions denounced in the public posting, titled “President Trump Is Right About the Smithsonian,” is a 2020 painting by Mr. Gonzalez titled Refugees Crossing the Border Wall into South Texas. The painting had been included in The Outwin 2022: American Portraiture Today at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C., an exhibition of finalists of the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition held triannually.

Regarding Mr. Gonzalez’s painting, The White House letter reads, “The National Portrait Gallery features art commemorating the act of illegally crossing the ‘inclusive and exclusionary’ southern border — even making it a finalist for one of its awards.” All finalists are included in the exhibition, which also has award tiers for “Commended” works — Vincent Valdez was a recipient — along with First, Second, and Third Place prizes and a People’s Choice award.

Mr. Gonzalez told Glasstire that since the letter was posted, he has fielded many interview and studio visit requests, including CNN, news outlets in Japan and Sweden, and a high school newspaper from Pittsburgh.

He currently teaches painting at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV) in Edinburg, and taught art at Harlingen High School for a decade prior to that. “I always told the students to make work that is really going to stand out,” Mr. Gonzalez said. “I want my images to be really strong, and it has to say something. Because of the world that we live in, it has to be shocking. It has to really grab the audience.”

Refugees Crossing the Border Wall into South Texas depicts a family of four about to climb a ladder over the U.S.-Mexico border wall into the United States. The mother holds a diapered infant and rosary in one arm, while the father and young boy peer behind them, presumably in fear of being caught. The father’s belt holds a single bottle of water, inadequate to the perilous journey that lies ahead for most migrants crossing into the southwestern desert.

Rather than painting “pretty realism,” Mr. Gonzalez said he feels that “You have to seek out a theme that is socially relevant and contemporary, something that years from now” will have people saying “that guy was painting something that was really important at the time.” He said he plans to use the controversy as an example for his students as the UTRGV semester begins.

“If you really want to create an audience and get peoples’ attention, you’ve got to go big and be bold,” he said. Without going into specifics, Mr. Gonzalez assured that he has received much attention and several offers since the letter was released, including pre-orders for a planned print of the painting.

The August 21 letter followed other Presidential disruptions to the arts sector, including a takeover of the Kennedy Center, and a funding freeze on National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities granting programs, in keeping with the Heritage Foundation’s longstanding commitment to defund the NEA.

A subsequent executive order demanding that “improper ideology” be removed from Smithsonian Institution museums has sparked multiple issues, including a censorship controversy at the National Portrait Gallery involving Amy Sherald, winner of the 2016 Outwin competition who was commissioned by the Smithsonian to paint the portrait of former First Lady Michelle Obama for its collection of presidential portraits. Ms. Sherald canceled her exhibition American Sublime, which debuted at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, was recently on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and was set to open at the National Portrait Gallery on September 19.

Ms. Sherald spoke out publicly about the dangers of political interference with cultural institutions.  In an opinion piece on MSNBC, she wrote, “History shows us what happens when governments demand that museums perform loyalty. Nazi Germany weaponized them. So did the Soviet Union.”

Mr. Gonzalez also compared the situation to past authoritarian regimes attacking art. He said the letter “reminded me, of course, of the Degenerate Art exhibitions in the 1930s in Nazi Germany. It seemed very similar to that. … They want to find artists that promote certain ideas or further their ideas, and if you’re not within their agenda, they’re gonna try and silence you.”

The artist said he has plans for a new painting focused on ICE raids and assaults. And overall, Mr. Gonzalez said, “I wear their disapproval as a badge of honor.”

The post Rio Grande Valley Artist Responds to White House Denunciation appeared first on Glasstire.

Alex Da Corte won the 2022 Whitney Biennial with his video installation ROY G BIV, an hourlong deeply idiosyncratic art-historical fantasia, which sees the artist impersonating both Marcel Duchamp and his drag alter ego Rrose Sélavy, complete with gnarly makeup and prosthetics. In the video, Duchamp wheels in and sets up replicas of Brancusi sculptures to approximate the installation of Brancusi’s works at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in Da Corte’s hometown. (And Duchamp reportedly did personally arrange his friend’s sculptures in Philadelphia in real life.) As Rrose, he returns in the costume of a fin-de-siècle acrobat to dance around with an oversized flower to a distorted version of the Carpenters’ 1970 hit “(They Long to Be) Close to You.”

Da Corte then reappears, this time dressed as the Joker from Tim Burton’s Batman (1989), and paints the sculptures with a brush in the form of a neon sign. Colorized, they come to life as claymations and The Kiss separates into its two halves to perform a sexual, predatory pas de deux. Then, a switch back to live action with puppets and more prosthetics as the ensemble of sculptures turns into a blues combo and the female half of The Kiss sings Etta James’ 1967 “I’d Rather Go Blind.” Throughout, details reference figures as diverse as Andy Warhol, Walt Disney, Dan Flavin, and Jasper Johns.

If all this sounds a little bit unhinged and delirious, it is. A slow-moving hallucinatory ride, the video component of ROY G BIV utterly captivates. The installation part arrives in the rear projection of the moving image on one side of a large cube in the middle of the gallery, which over the course of the exhibition is painted by a housepainter in a progression of the Roy G Biv colors of the rainbow — red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet — a gesture that itself harks back to a 1977 John Baldessari film. 

This rather tenuous relation to the art of painting led the curator Alison Hearst to include Da Corte’s video as the centerpiece of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth’s retrospective of his work, The Whale, which bills itself as “the first museum exhibition to survey the interdisciplinary artist’s long relationship with painting.” ROY G BIV steals the show here, as it did at the Whitney, making it a slightly awkward pivot on which this nonetheless compelling exhibition turns.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Da Corte rejects traditional oil on canvas, so his “paintings” tend to constitute wall-bound works fabricated from unconventional materials. He also tends to forgo creating images from scratch. As in the video, he favors appropriation, referencing, and sub-referencing, from an array of sources that include not only venerable moments of art history, but also recent art by his immediate predecessors and contemporaries, pop culture (especially that of the artist’s youth), and even current events.

The exhibition begins by emphasizing Da Corte’s connections with what came before in two large galleries in which he liberally sprinkled his works among others he chose from the museum’s permanent collection. Da Corte’s Mirror Marilyn (2022–23) — a copy of one of Warhol’s ubiquitous silkscreen portraits of the Hollywood star, but uncannily reversed, rendering the original’s hold on the collective imagination clear by making it marginally unfamiliar — thus hangs next to the museum’s own Warhol of a revolver, Gun (1982). Roy Lichtenstein’s Mr. Bellamy (1961), a comic-strip scene of a uniformed military officer wondering in his thought bubble about the titular character, occupies a wall with Da Corte’s Eclipse (2021), which isolates and enlarges the peephole from a different Lichtenstein canvas so that it resembles a near-abstract depiction of a celestial event.

Duchamp’s circular Rotorelief (1965, originally published in 1935) rests in a vitrine nearby. The Lightning Strike (2024), Da Corte’s reverse glass painting (in which the pigment is applied to a sheet of glass, surface layers first) shows a vase of flowers on a table on the beach. A thunderbolt hits the vase, not only overturning it but transmogrifying the flowers that spill out of the frame into three dimensions. This work wryly sits next to Texas artist Kirk Hayes’ The Long Sigh (2003), a trompe l’oeil painting that looks like a wood-and-torn-paper collage of a bald man in an overturned chair, spouting a long and empty speech balloon.

The following galleries hold the bulk of Da Corte’s work in the exhibition, mounted on brightly colored walls according to type, which also comprise roughly chronological groupings. A room tricked out in 1970s-style stripes in gray, pink, and green, half groovy corporate logo, half school auditorium, displays more reverse glass paintings. Formatted as large squares, they resemble album covers, from which some of them derive. Prince’s 1999 becomes Da Corte’s 2999 (2020), denuded of everything but the altered date on a starry field. Bloom (2021) recreates Bette Midler’s 1972 debut The Divine Miss M with all the text eliminated and only the illustration of Midler’s stylized face, oversaturated ever so slightly to play up the red, white, and blue color scheme of her makeup.

If it was not clear enough already, works like this make manifest the camp sensibility that undergirds Da Corte’s work and the gay themes and concerns that suffuse his content. It comes as little surprise to learn that The Divine Miss M’s cover was designed by Ricard Amsel, a prolific gay illustrator, also from Philadelphia, who died of complications from AIDS in 1985. In another room, Da Corte’s Haymaker (2017) features real objects, including a blinking “BAR” sign, a printed cardboard cut-out of Margaret Hamilton as the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz, an orange plastic broom, a can of Monster Energy drink, and a plastic bottle and a few other items tinted a bilious green that matches both the Monster Energy logo and Hamilton’s makeup, all mounted on a six-foot square of bright yellow slatwall, the paneling of horizontal boards used for display in discount stores. This concatenation of an icon from a gay touchstone/children’s classic, a drinking establishment, and fortuitous color rhymes in the context of debased commodity culture speaks, perhaps, to complex psychosexual formations and the inability of our distracted historical moment to express them. But it also feels like a faintly hilarious gay in-joke with a punchline that hovers teasingly beyond our reach.

A related work, The Failure Factor (2019), mashes up the Monster Energy branding (on its side, the knobby green M looks like a gnarled witch’s hand), the rainbow from The Dark Side of the Moon, and the Nike swoosh in a single line across two square black panels. Fabricated from digital prints on fabric, spray paint, and velvet, the image makes little sense until we remember the stoner wisdom from youthful lore that the Pink Floyd album syncs up with the beginning of The Wizard of Oz, turning the painting into an emblematic narrative of some sort of queer hero’s journey over the rainbow.

In another “Slatwall” work, A Time to Kill (2016), the slats come in multiple hues of red, white, and blue, and shelves hold items that include cardboard standees of a Star Wars Imperial Stormtrooper and Elsa from Frozen, both bent in half with their heads hanging down. Among the other elements are a ceramic cat holding a fishbowl, spilled plastic fruit, a piece of chocolate cake with novelty vampire fangs on top, packaged scarlet evening gloves for Halloween, and a couple of souvenir-size disco balls, one with a kitchen knife plunged into it. Only a perusal of the label informs us that Da Corte intended that this work evoke the mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, but, unfortunately, this knowledge actually makes the hitherto enigmatic assemblage worse, not better. While some empty hanging pegs might read as poignant, stabbed mirror balls do not exactly contend with the horror and the gravity of the massacre. Da Corte’s arch ironies and quirks may not, in fact, provide adequate means for appropriately thoughtful memorializing of such recent tragic and politically incited violence. One could be forgiven for also wondering if a Disney princess really is the best way to symbolically represent the people murdered at Pulse.

In contrast to the unhurried complexities of ROY G BIV, or even the slatwall conglomerations, Da Corte’s most straightforward “paintings” stand among his most satisfying. A group of works known as “Puffy Paintings,” large-scale soft-sculpture reliefs sewn from neoprene, the material used for wetsuits, excerpt comics and cartoons. The sprawling smashed jack-o’-lantern of Non-Stop Fright (Bump in the Night) (2019) fills an entire golden yellow wall. Triple Self-Portrait (Study) (2019) pictures a coffee mug covered in drips and filled with painting tools, the studio still life faintly recalling Jasper Johns’ Painted Bronze of 1960, which simulates used brushes in a Savarin coffee can. The Pied Piper (2019) portrays two blue-gloved hands playing a carrot drilled as a flute, engendering a sly, disembodied sexual pun. And The Anvil (2023), a huge all-black depiction of the object seen from below, conjures a cartoon’s impending doom, the protagonist’s easy sidestepping of it, and the antagonist’s equal inability to do so.

Funny, smart, formally arresting, these works pack a punch. Like almost all of Da Corte’s production, they also stand on the shoulders of others. Their isolation and reiteration of motifs from the funny pages owe a debt to those of Arturo Herrera, Dan Colen, and other artists. Similarly, the wholesale adoption of the modes of retail display to showcase resonant objects in the “Slatwall Paintings” brings to mind the work of Josephine Meckseper, while the witty reconfigurations of album cover art remind one of Christian Marclay. This reliance on well-trodden artistic modes, as well as on preexisting images and objects — “things the mind already knows,” as Johns put it as early as 1959, or readymades, which Duchamp had pioneered far earlier — is a feature, not a bug, in Da Corte’s practice. The predilection for this way of working positions him as the descendant of the appropriation artists of the 1980s, the Pictures Generation and others who revisited images to figure out how they worked and how they worked on us, both culturally and psychologically. 

The exhibition’s didactics make much of Da Corte’s deployment of untraditional materials to construct “paintings,” but this is a red herring. That kind of thing has been going full force in art since at least the 1950s and Robert Rauschenberg’s “Combines.” Da Corte’s real project, it seems to me, is to take the things of the world and tweak them just enough so that the meaning they have for him personally, meaning that, more often than not, feels connected to sentimentality, becomes legible for others, sparking a frisson of recognition, of understanding, and, ofttimes, of delight.

A final room in the exhibition, off to the side, offers a coda of sorts (or an introduction, depending on how one circumambulates the galleries). Like the first galleries, it displays art from the museum’s collection chosen by the artist, but no works by him. The muted palette of this room, almost entirely black-and-white, murmurs a counterpoint to the riots of color elsewhere. A drawing by Robyn O’Neil, These final hours embrace at last; this is our ending, this is our past. (2007), more than 13 feet wide, shows a tiny figure clinging to a tightrope above a vast and stormy sea with waves that crest in fingerlike tendrils. Seestück (Welle)—Seascape (Wave) (1969) by Gerhard Richter envisions a nearly featureless patch of ocean and clouds in a photorealist manner belied by the soft-focus haze produced by the misty atmosphere. Two exquisite works by Vija Celmins, one a 2000–01 painting of a night sky, the other a meticulous drawing from 1970 of ocean swells, each impart a sense of the infinite through the diligence of the artist’s hand. And a 1979 Untitled triptych by Jack Goldstein — one of the original artists included in the 1977 Pictures exhibition that gave the Pictures Generation its name — finds a tiny painted astronaut on each panel, floating weightlessly in a glossy black eternity. 

After the frenetic ping-ponging of associations, the relentless cultural moments, both high and low, induced by Da Corte’s work, this room comes as something of a respite, a reprieve, even. But the impression of quietly intense grappling with the sublime and ineffable that this room proffers only masks the fact that none of these artists are quite as earnest as they seem at first glance. With irony intact, each of them, just like Da Corte, gives us images of things we think we know in order to make them strange again, disclose their operations as images within culture, and reveal meanings we had failed to notice.

 

Alex Da Corte: The Whale is on view at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth until September 7, 2025. This review was made possible in part by a Travel Grant from The Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation.

The post Review: “Alex Da Corte: The Whale” at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth appeared first on Glasstire.

A whole new meaning to "spin dry"
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One more for my weekend spate of developer posts, but from the opposite of the LLM-assisted cutting edge: this wonderful collection of classic-era Mac programming books, carefully scanned as PDFs. These evoke nostalgia both for the classic Mac era and for the entire notion of “programming books”. (Via Michael Tsai and Rui Carmo.)

#Kento #Mia #Ully #Rowen #RoninWarriors

I sense something. Like a million banners cried out at once.

Bounce! Behave!

It’s a madhouse… A MADHOUSE!

Hold onto your podcasting mic! During the 2024 US Presidential election, “bro podcast” hosts like Theo Von, Andrew Schulz, and of course Joe Rogan offered fawning softball interviews to Donald Trump and his surrogates, framing them as approachable and down-to-earth while sidestepping policy positions like “dynamiting all schools”. Since then, the Democratic Party has spent […]

The post Joe Rogan of the Left? This credulous dipshit is vegan appeared first on The Beaverton.

#CowboyWho

Now it's time to visit with the always deformed Professor Dave ... #CowboyWho

There’s a particular kind of person who cheers when the president deploys military forces against American cities over the objections of their elected leaders. They call themselves patriots. They wrap themselves in the flag while applauding the systematic demolition of everything that flag once represented. They claim to love America while celebrating the transformation of American governance into something the founders would have recognized as tyranny.

So let’s settle this question once and for all: who are the “real” Americans in this moment? Those cheering the militarization of domestic law enforcement, or those defending the constitutional principles that make America worth defending?

The Theater of Fake Patriotism

When Donald Trump announces plans to deploy National Guard troops to Chicago over the explicit objections of Illinois Governor JB Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, his supporters don’t see an authoritarian power grab. They see strength. When he federalizes state forces using Title 10 to override local democratic authority, they don’t recognize constitutional vandalism. They see Trump “getting tough on crime.”

This represents the complete inversion of American patriotism. The same people who spent decades lecturing about states’ rights and federal overreach now cheer the most dramatic federal military deployment against local authority in modern American history. What changed wasn’t constitutional principle—it was who holds the whip hand.

It turns out “states’ rights” was never about principle—it was just about who had the whip hand.

Funny how “federal tyranny” became “law and order” the moment their guy was holding the federal badge.

What Real Patriotism Actually Looks Like

Real patriotism in this moment looks like Illinois Governor Pritzker standing up to federal overreach: “There is no emergency that warrants the President of the United States federalizing the Illinois National Guard, deploying the National Guard from other states, or sending active duty military within our own borders.”

Real patriotism looks like Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson defending his city’s right to democratic self-governance: “There are many things the federal government could do to help us reduce crime and violence in Chicago, but sending in the military is not one of them.”

But real patriotism isn’t just for elected officials. It’s for every citizen who refuses to normalize military occupation of American cities, who votes against candidates who support domestic militarization, who organizes to defend local democratic institutions, who calls their representatives to demand they choose constitutional principle over partisan loyalty. The founders didn’t create this system to be defended by politicians—they created it to be defended by citizens who understand that democracy dies when good people do nothing.

The Authoritarian Inversion

The people cheering Trump’s military deployments have internalized a fundamentally un-American understanding of patriotism. They’ve confused loyalty to the country with loyalty to whoever happens to control federal power. They’ve mistaken submission to authority for love of freedom. They’ve traded the messy, contentious, argumentative democracy the founders created for the clean efficiency of strongman rule.

They’ve been conditioned to see their fellow Americans as enemies to be defeated rather than citizens to be persuaded. Democratic governors become “radical leftists.” Sanctuary cities become “lawless zones.” Local officials exercising their constitutional authority become “obstructionists” who deserve federal punishment.

This is how republics die—not through foreign invasion but through the systematic redefinition of opposition as treason, of constitutional limits as obstacles, of democratic accountability as weakness.

The Pattern of Militarization

What Trump is doing follows a clear pattern that any serious student of authoritarianism would recognize: declare emergencies that don’t exist, militarize responses to civilian problems, target political opponents, normalize federal military presence in domestic settings, and use military deployment to intimidate broader opposition.

Crime rates are at historic lows in most American cities, but Trump claims unprecedented lawlessness requiring military intervention. Notice that the cities being targeted—Chicago, Los Angeles, New York—are all led by Democratic officials who oppose Trump’s policies. This isn’t about crime; it’s about punishing political opposition.

Each deployment becomes precedent for the next, each “emergency” power becomes standard operating procedure, each violation of constitutional limits becomes the new baseline. The message isn’t just directed at the mayors and governors being overruled—it’s directed at every elected official considering whether to resist federal overreach.

This is the playbook authoritarians have used throughout history to transform democratic systems into military rule.

The Constitutional Crisis

Let’s be clear about what’s actually happening: the president is using military force against domestic populations over the objections of their elected representatives. This isn’t law enforcement—it’s the military occupation of American cities whose only crime was electing leaders who refuse to comply with federal demands.

The Constitution these fake patriots claim to revere contains specific protections against exactly this kind of military deployment. The Posse Comitatus Act exists precisely to prevent federal military forces from being used for domestic law enforcement. The federalist system exists to prevent any one level of government from overwhelming the others.

But constitutional protections only work when people are willing to defend them. When large portions of the population actively cheer their violation, when elected officials refuse to exercise oversight, when courts create immunity doctrines that place executives above accountability—the Constitution becomes paper rather than framework.

The Real American Tradition

The real American tradition is suspicion of concentrated federal power, especially military power deployed against domestic populations. The founders who wrote the Constitution had just fought a war against precisely this kind of military occupation by a distant government that claimed to know better than local communities.

As James Madison warned: “A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty.” They created a system specifically designed to prevent any one person from wielding the kind of power Trump now deploys against American cities.

The real American tradition is messy federalism, where different levels of government check each other’s power, where local communities get to make decisions about their own governance, where federal authority has limits and those limits are enforced.

The real American tradition is that when you don’t like how a city is governed, you work to change it through democratic means—you run candidates, organize voters, make arguments, build coalitions. You don’t send in federal troops to impose your preferred policies through military force.

Who the Founders Would Recognize

If the founders could observe this moment, who would they recognize as defending American principles? The people cheering federal military deployment against elected local officials? Or the governors and mayors standing up to federal intimidation, the citizens defending their right to democratic self-governance, the Americans who understand that constitutional principles matter more than partisan advantage?

The Declaration of Independence was written by people who understood that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, not from their capacity to deploy military force against opposition.

The Choice Before Us

We face a fundamental choice about what kind of country we want to be. Do we want to be a nation where local democratic decisions get overruled by federal military force? Where constitutional constraints get swept aside whenever the executive declares an “emergency”?

Or do we want to remain a constitutional republic where power is divided, where military force is not used against domestic populations, where even presidents must respect constitutional limits?

The people cheering Trump’s militarization have made their choice. They’ve chosen strongman efficiency over constitutional process, federal dominance over democratic federalism, military occupation over civilian governance.

The rest of us need to make ours. We can organize, vote, protest, and demand that our representatives defend constitutional principles. We can refuse to normalize military occupation as “law enforcement.” We can choose to be citizens, or we can be subjects polishing the boots that march over us.

The Test of Our Time

Every generation of Americans faces a test of whether they’re worthy of their inheritance. Our test is whether we’ll defend constitutional government against military rule, preserve democratic federalism against federal dominance, maintain civilian control against militarization.

The people cheering Trump’s military deployments have already failed this test. They’ve chosen tribal loyalty over constitutional principle, the aesthetics of strength over the substance of freedom.

The rest of us still have time to pass it. But only if we’re willing to call this what it is: not law enforcement but military occupation, not patriotism but authoritarianism, not strength but the systematic destruction of everything that once made America worth defending.

Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And military deployment against domestic populations over the objections of elected local officials is tyranny, not patriotism.

The real Americans are the ones willing to say so—and willing to act on it.

That’s what real patriotism looks like when democracy is under assault.

Mike Brock is a former tech exec who was on the leadership team at Block. Originally published at his Notes From the Circus.

Eight months ago, those of us actually paying attention—not just scrolling outrage bait about Biden’s age or the latest campus controversy, but genuinely tracking the systematic preparation for authoritarian rule—warned that Trump represented an existential threat to democratic governance. We were diagnosed with “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” The reasonable people explained, with infinite patience, that we were being hysterical. That institutions would hold. That checks and balances would constrain him. That we were catastrophizing over mean tweets and rough rhetoric.

We weren’t sharing viral clips of Biden stumbling over words or getting worked up about some college kid’s pronoun demands. We were reading the actual plans—the Schedule F preparations, the Jeffrey Clark memos, the systematic identification of loyalists willing to ignore legal constraints. We were watching what the people planning Trump’s return to power were actually doing and saying, tracking the ideological pipelines from Yarvin to Vance, the tech oligarchs pre-positioning themselves for the collapse of democratic oversight.

While everyone else was debating whether Biden was too old or whether DEI had gone too far, we were documenting the actual infrastructure being built to dismantle democracy itself.

Now grand juries are being empaneled to criminally investigate Barack Obama. The Justice Department has become a revenge machine. American soldiers kneel on tarmac to prepare ceremonial welcomes for war criminals. Our financial system is being handed over to crypto fraudsters who’ve paid their protection money to the regime. Civil servants who object on constitutional grounds are being purged. Corporate power lines up to pay tribute in a now-gold adorned Oval Office, each CEO performing their submission in increasingly vulgar displays. And those same reasonable people who were so concerned about Biden’s cognitive decline are explaining why this is all perfectly normal, actually, and besides—at least we don’t have to deal with diversity training anymore.

The Moral Panic That Ate Democracy

Let’s be clear about what happened. Yes, different people voted for Trump for different reasons—some were angry about inflation, others about immigration. But there was a specific class of commentators and self-described “center-left” intellectuals who spent years constructing an elaborate moral panic about “wokeism” as an existential threat to Western civilization.

Bari Weiss built a media empire on the premise that wokeism was a five-alarm fire for democracy. They genuinely convinced themselves that diversity training represented a greater threat than oligarchic capture, that pronoun etiquette was more dangerous than judicial corruption, that land acknowledgments were harbingers of totalitarianism while actual authoritarians were purchasing the machinery of state.

These sophisticated intellectuals should have known better. They had platforms and influence, yet chose to spend years directing attention toward minor cultural irritants while systematic preparation for authoritarian rule proceeded in plain sight. They provided the intellectual framework that let millions of Americans convince themselves they weren’t voting for fascism—they were voting against the “woke mob.”

Was there political and cultural excess on the left? Of course. Some of it was genuinely stupid. But treating it as existential—that was the lie that made everything else possible.

The Reichstag Fire of Our Time

Woke ideology became the Reichstag Fire of the 21st century—a real but limited phenomenon catastrophically inflated to justify the seizure of power. Like the Bolshevik threat that haunted late Weimar Germany, “wokeism” became the all-purpose boogeyman that justified any authoritarian measure, any institutional capture, any suspension of democratic norms.

Yes, there was a fire—some DEI trainings were genuinely stupid, some campus activists genuinely illiberal. But the response was to burn down the entire democratic order to stop it. The anti-woke commentariat played the role of those German conservatives who thought they could use the Nazis to defeat the communists—sophisticated intellectuals who provided respectable cover for forces they claimed to oppose. They spent years building the intellectual framework that let authoritarians claim they weren’t seizing power, they were just defending Western civilization from the woke mob.

Just as anti-communism justified everything from McCarthyism to military coups throughout the 20th century, anti-wokeism became the universal solvent for democratic norms in the 21st. Criminal investigations of political opponents? Necessary to stop woke prosecutors. Purging civil servants? Essential to eliminate DEI bureaucrats. Oligarchic capture of government? Better than letting the gender ideologists win.

The Availability Trap

There’s a psychological phenomenon that explains how even brilliant people became so catastrophically wrong: the availability heuristic. Our brains assess risk based on how easily we can recall examples. The more time you spend thinking about something, the more dangerous it seems—regardless of its actual threat level.

If you spend all your time reading about campus cancellations, documenting every diversity training gone wrong, collecting examples of progressive excess, eventually your brain becomes convinced this is the existential threat. Not because the evidence supports that conclusion, but because these examples are the most cognitively available.

The anti-woke intellectuals weren’t lying when they said they felt democracy was under threat. They’d trained their brains to see danger in the wrong places by immersing themselves completely in left-wing excess. Every problematic DEI training became another data point in an imagined authoritarian takeover. Every campus controversy confirmed their priors about totalitarian drift.

Meanwhile, the actual authoritarian takeover—happening through judicial appointments, regulatory capture, and systematic preparation for ending democratic governance—didn’t feel as threatening because they weren’t immersed in those stories. The Federalist Society’s judge pipeline was boring. Schedule F preparations were technical. The neoreactionary movement’s manifestos were abstract. These things didn’t create the same visceral response as a video of college students shouting down a speaker.

This is how smart people become useful idiots: not through stupidity but through selective attention. They created information ecosystems where campus politics was the main character and everything else was background noise.

The Attention Wars We Lost

The real divide wasn’t between left and right. It was between those consuming political entertainment and those tracking actual power. While millions rage-watched videos of college students saying silly things about gender, we were watching what Trump’s movement was actually planning—reading their own words, their own manifestos, their own explicit declarations of intent to end democratic governance.

The algorithm fed you what made you angry. The anti-woke intellectuals gave you sophisticated reasons to stay angry about the wrong things. And those of us warning about actual fascism? We were dismissed as hysterical by the very people who claimed to be defending liberal democracy.

Every hour spent debating whether “Latinx” was destroying language was an hour not spent noticing that Thiel’s network was placing judges who believe democracy is obsolete. Every essay about the authoritarian dangers of DEI was attention not paid to the actual authoritarians building parallel power structures. Every podcast about cancel culture was time not spent understanding that the real cancellation would be of democracy itself.

The Useful Idiots of Our Time

These anti-woke reactionaries became exactly what Lenin would have recognized: useful idiots. Not idiots in the sense of lacking intelligence—many are brilliant. But idiots in the sense of being useful to forces whose ultimate goals they would claim to find abhorrent.

Their sophisticated critiques of progressive excess provided intellectual cover for authoritarian movements that care nothing for liberal pluralism. They spent years training audiences to see university administrators as the primary threat to freedom rather than presidents who suspend constitutional rights or oligarchs who purchase Supreme Court justices.

The fascists didn’t need these intellectuals to actively support their program. They just needed them to keep everyone focused on the wrong threat while the real coup proceeded.

What Those Paying Attention Saw Coming

We saw it because we weren’t watching the circus—we were watching the crew dismantling the tent poles. While Bari Weiss was building The Free Press to combat the civilizational threat of diversity training. While others wrote books about the dangers of identity politics, we watched the Federalist Society systematically place judges who believe the unitary executive theory supersedes the Constitution.

We weren’t smarter. We just looked at what the actual authoritarians were saying and doing rather than obsessing over cultural annoyances. We read the actual words of people gaining power rather than fixating on some graduate student’s problematic tweet.

And now it’s here. Everything we warned about. The criminal investigations of political opponents. The military being deployed against citizens. The systematic replacement of democratic governance with algorithmic control. Corporate CEOs genuflecting in a gold-plated Oval Office, paying tribute to maintain their market positions. All of it, exactly as those diagnosed with “Trump Derangement Syndrome” warned it would be.

The Historical Verdict

History will see this exactly as it was: a society that fell for its own Reichstag Fire. Where the intellectual class was so obsessed with the manufactured threat of “woke totalitarianism” that they provided cover for actual totalitarianism. Where supposedly serious thinkers spent years constructing elaborate arguments about the danger of pronouns while oligarchs constructed the actual infrastructure of authoritarian rule.

The reality? The “woke excess” was just democracy being messy—requiring us to negotiate with people different from ourselves. The backlash was already happening through normal civil society channels. The notion that “woke ideology” was on the precipice of seizing total control was always nonsense.

But like the Bolshevik threat before it, the specter of wokeism justified everything. It became the perfect foil for authoritarians to weaponize the performance of liberal values like free speech—values they had no intention of upholding once in power. They didn’t need wokeism to actually threaten civilization; they just needed enough people to believe it did.

Now we’re heading toward a society where your political opposition gets criminally investigated. Where the military deploys against citizens. Where billionaires prostrate themselves before a gold-throne president to maintain their fortunes. Where democracy itself becomes a luxury we can no longer afford.

And the intellectuals who should have been warning us? Too busy warning about the totalitarian implications of inclusive language.

The Resistance That Remains

Democracy can still be saved. But not by taking these people seriously as legitimate political actors. Not by treating transparent power grabs as normal policy disagreements. Not by pretending criminal investigations of political opponents are just “hardball politics.”

And definitely not by listening to the same intellectuals who spent the last decade missing the actual threat because they were chasing phantoms. They had their chance to defend democracy and spent it providing intellectual cover for its destroyers.

The first step in resistance is refusing to normalize what’s happening. Stop looking for reasonable interpretations of unreasonable actions. Stop pretending there’s legitimate debate with people openly dismantling democratic governance. Stop treating the vulgar displays of corporate submission in the Oval Office as normal business relations.

Resistance remains possible. Not through violent revolution—that’s what they want, an excuse for harsher crackdowns. But through the simple, difficult act of refusing to pretend this is normal. Through maintaining the capacity for moral recognition. Through remembering that two plus two equals four, no matter what the algorithm says.

The Joke’s On All of Us

Eight months ago, it was “derangement” to predict exactly what’s happening now. Today, it’s “hyperbole” to notice it’s happening. Tomorrow, it will be illegal to mention it happened.

But we don’t have to accept tomorrow. We can refuse normalization today. We can stop taking seriously the people who traded democracy for the death of diversity initiatives. The bitter irony—that those who complained most about “cancel culture” enabled the cancellation of democracy itself—doesn’t have to be the story’s end.

Those of us who saw it coming aren’t geniuses. We just looked at what the people planning authoritarian capture were actually saying and doing, rather than obsessing over campus controversies. We read their words, their plans, their explicit intentions—while others constructed elaborate theories about why campus activists were the real threat.

Welcome to the future the anti-woke commentariat helped create while fighting their imaginary war against their imaginary Bolsheviks.

But we don’t have to accept it. Resistance starts with refusing to be gaslit. With insisting what we’re seeing is what we’re seeing. With remembering those of us who predicted this weren’t deranged—we were right.

And if we were right about what was coming, maybe we’re right about how to stop it.

But please, tell us more about how the real problem was woke college students.

Mike Brock is a former tech exec who was on the leadership team at Block. Originally published at his Notes From the Circus.

Following reports the company let the Israeli military use its cloud servers to carry out mass surveillance of Palestinians, several Microsoft employees staged protests, prompting multiple arrests and firings. What do you think?

The post Microsoft Employees Protest Company’s Ties To Israel appeared first on The Onion.

#Kento #Rowen #RoninWarriors

Today is the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s landfall in Louisiana. Many reflections are being written, including our own Eric Berger’s over at Space City Weather.

I don’t think we need to rehash the storm specifics, but if you’re a younger weather enthusiast reading this or you do not know the story as well as you wish, I can offer up a few reading recommendations.

I think everyone should read “Five Days at Memorial,” by Sheri Fink because it showcases the best and worst of humanity in a terrible situation, and the author does such a good job of placing the reader in the moment. That was truly a gripping book, non-fiction that reads at times like a thriller. Douglas Brinkley’s “The Great Deluge” is more like a tick tock account of how things unfolded and sets up the facts in a digestible manner. I also recommend “After the Flood,” by Gary Rivlin who did a ton of on the ground reporting in the wake of Katrina. Lastly, “Katrina: A History 1915-2015,” by Andy Horowitz ties together the very important issues of race, class, and reality that you absolutely cannot ignore when talking about Katrina.

I think there’s something to be said about forethought, planning, decision-making (deliberate and otherwise) and disaster, and reflecting on the 20th anniversary of Katrina is as good a time as any to tie that to the present day. We’ll do this again in a couple weeks on the 125th anniversary of the 1900 Galveston Storm.

Andrew Rumbach of the Urban Institute (who also writes a good publication called Place+Resilience on Substack) put together (with his colleagues) an interesting graphic that shows the last 20 years of disasters on the Gulf Coast. While Katrina was uniquely devastating, it was not a unique problem. According to their research, “disasters in the Gulf Coast since 2005 have caused $365 billion in property damage, accounting for 62 percent of all disaster losses in the US.” Just 10% of the country accounts for 62% of disaster losses. The entire report is worth your time, but while there are glimmers of positives in here the overall reality is quite sobering. I write this from Houston, Texas where disasters are on our minds frequently.

One point the article makes is that for every dollar spent by the government on hazard mitigation, the savings from avoided damages is about six dollars. So, with FEMA’s $13.5 billion in hazard mitigation funding to Gulf Coast counties, the damage avoided should be north of $80 billion, a not inconsequential number. Of course, when the total damage is over $350 billion, it makes the 80 seem less meaningful. But the message is pretty clear, and it has been for ages: Hazard mitigation is a wise investment. It’s not politically sexy to come out and say you’re going to run on a platform that will spend X billion dollars to mitigate problems that have not yet occurred. But it would be smart. A six-to-one return on investment is pretty good. Everyone wants to solve problems, but no one wants to pay to do it. And it’s a problem we have seen firsthand today.

While there have been discussions about the historic Hill Country flooding in Texas last month, and there have been some pretty standard linkages made to climate change, the reality is that this was not an unprecedented event. There is a reason the area is known as “Flash Flood Alley.” So with that in mind, it would seem obvious that foresight would go a long way here. I mean, the same kind of event happened in a similar area less than 40 years ago in 1987. This paragraph from the excellent and sobering Texas Tribune article says it all and should jump off the page smashing cymbals together when you read it.

After the 1987 flood, river gauges were installed to provide real-time information to forecasters and emergency managers. But as the years passed, political will and funding for flood warning infrastructure diminished. An effort to get flood sirens never came to fruition; local governments were repeatedly passed over for grants by the state; and the county eliminated its own flood protection tax.

When you read, it’s striking how short-sighted some of the elected officials in Kerr County seem to have been over the years.

“The thought of our beautiful Kerr County having these damn sirens going off in the middle of night, I’m going to have to start drinking again to put up with y’all,” then-County Commissioner Buster Baldwin said at a 2016 meeting.

Even after this event, there are residents in this area that are still so vehemently anti-tax that they don’t want to see any tax increase to fund warning sirens or alert systems that they feel the camps should provide. There’s clearly a disconnect here between some residents’ priorities and the reality of where they live. Even in the wake of such tragedy. I’m not here to rag on people, but it’s completely obvious that there are ways to mitigate the problem that make fiscal sense. All too often the solution is to either put a band-aid on the problem or lick your wounds and move on. This isn’t 1850. Disasters today are less failures of imagination or “acts of God” than they are societal shortcomings. More can and should be done.

The Washington Post did an investigation into an RV Park on the Guadalupe River where 37 people died last month. When lobbying to upgrade the park, the company that owned the property assured officials that they’d have an hour or two heads up on flooding and could safely evacuate the park. The developer even referred to himself as a “poor man’s weatherman,” which feels laughably condescending when considering a decision like this. The local government allowed the company to upgrade the RV Park ***in the floodway*** of the Guadalupe River. This was in 2021, four years after Hurricane Harvey exposed how much property in Houston had been built in floodways or reservoir flood pools. Again, not an unknown problem. Yet, according to the investigation, the RV Park ownership said “in a statement that the severity of the flooding on July 4 could not have been anticipated and that failures in public warning systems meant they had little advance notice.” That seems misleading at best.

The reality is that many places we choose to live in are disaster-prone because they’re often beautiful. Oceans, rivers, forested mountains. All of these places have a draw, but they also come with risk, and in some cases a lot of risk. In many ways, as Robert Paterson from the University of Texas says, “disasters are a human choice.” After these events, the blame game gets played, and in many cases now, people will blame made-up nefarious forces instead of focusing their blame on the people that often deserve the scrutiny. It’s pretty obvious that here in Texas at least, where regulation is frequently viewed as a four-letter word, we often let local governments make decisions they are not equipped to make. There needs to be some structure in place so partially avoidable disasters, like the Hill Country flood can be mitigated. I think it’s important to recognize the uncomfortable fact that a catastrophic flood occurring in the middle of the night will almost always have a bad outcome. It will always be difficult, if not impossible to get to a mythical “zero” figure in terms of damage or loss of life. Nor should we necessarily strive for that. But in reality, some thoughtful mitigation and/or regulation is better than saying something was an unavoidable disaster.

This problem is not confined to Hill Country in Texas. It’s not a problem exclusively to a red state or a blue state. This is a national challenge. We could talk about how San Antonio plans to address flooding after a deadly flash flood event earlier this summer. We could talk about how West Virginia is just now coming around to studying flooding and mitigation on Kanawha River, nearly 10 years after catastrophic flooding there. 17 years after Hurricane Ike, we’re discussing modern Galveston flood protection, the Ike Dike, and it’s still a plan on paper. The Galveston Seawall’s core structure was built in less than 10 years and began only 2 years after the great 1900 storm. And on and on and on. In the 20 years since Katrina, we’ve learned a lot but I’m not quite sure we’ve learned enough.

I brought enough cheekbones for every one of us.

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One Two Three Four, open up my secret door! #CowboyWho

In brief: In today’s post we take a look back at Hurricane Katrina, and what has changed in the 20 years since then. Additionally we discuss a front that will slog into the area and make for a soggy weekend. However, we do expect drier and cooler weather for much of next week, which is a fine way to start September.

Katrina at 20 years

As many as a quarter of a million people evacuated from New Orleans to Houston before and after Hurricane Katrina struck the city 20 years ago, today. My hope is that, if you’re from Louisiana and reading this site, that you have found a good home in the greater Houston area. One thing I love about this city is that we are generally a welcoming people, with a warm culture that rewards hard work. Hurricanes are awful disasters, tearing apart not just physical structures but communities and human bonds. In that sense Katrina is the most wrenching storm of our lifetimes, utterly transforming New Orleans and upending so many lives.

Katrina marked a defining moment in my career. By 2005 I had been writing about science for the Houston Chronicle for half a decade, and had very recently begun a science blog for the newspaper called “SciGuy.” (The Chronicle has taken it offline, but you can find it on the wayback machine). As I had written about the “big one” hitting southern Louisiana before, I decided to go all-in on covering the storm online. It was my first real experience writing about weather, forecast models, and meteorology in real time. Three weeks later I went even deeper when Hurricane Rita threatened Houston and prompted a horrendous evacuation. That experience helped me realize that it was possible to compete with television stations online in weather forecasting. It was the beginning of a journey that led to me getting an education in meteorology, becoming a meteorologist, and starting Space City Weather 10 years later. And here we are.

Finally, I worry a lot about what would happen if a storm like Katrina threatened the Gulf coast again. It surely will. Certainly our ability to predict where a storm will go, and how strong it will get, has improved dramatically in 20 years. But beyond that, as a society, I fear we are in a worse position. The public’s trust in the federal government has been shaken. For example, in the wake of Hurricane Helene last year FEMA workers were harassed. In terms of a media environment, no one trusts anyone, and misinformation about weather is rampant online. Heck, we cannot even agree on what to call the Gulf any more. Hurricanes rip at the fabric of our societies and governments, and that fabric is weaker than it was two decades ago; our communities and institutions more riven by politics and mistrust. I have spent some time over the last week reading government reports from 20 years ago in the wake of Katrina that assessed failures (i.e. this bipartisan report from Congress), and it is painfully obvious we have not heeded many of the lessons that Katrina taught us. We are bound to learn them again with future storms.

Friday

We are still watching for the possibility showers and thunderstorms later today, which could impact Friday Night Lights and the beginning of high school football. Overall chances are pretty low, perhaps in the range of 20 percent. But the atmosphere is perturbed enough that anything that gets going could develop into something with a fair bit of lightning this afternoon or evening. Otherwise we can expect a hot and mostly sunny day, with high temperatures in the mid-90s for most locations away from the coast. Clouds will increase tonight, with lows dropping into the upper 70s.

Saturday

A cool front will approach and move into the city on Saturday. Once again I want to be clear about expectations. We are not at the point of the the year when fronts come barreling into the region and one can step outside and say, “ahh, that’s refreshing.” Maybe October for that. So this front will move in and then dry air should slowly accumulate over the next few days. Alright, so Saturday is still going to be pretty warm (low 90s) and humid. We are also going to see a healthy chance of rain, about 50 percent, that will continue for much of the Labor Day weekend. It won’t be wall to wall rain for sure, but there should be rounds of showers that add up to 1 to 2 inches over the weekend, with isolated areas getting more. Lows on Saturday night will probably remain stubbornly in the upper 70s.

Sunday and Monday

I think rain chances will probably peak on Sunday before falling back a bit to about 50 percent on Labor Day. This will help moderate high temperatures, keeping them at about 90 degrees, with nights in the mid-70s. The bottom line is that yes, you probably will be able to find some sunny spots of weather this weekend, but you’re also going to need to be dodging showers that could bring some spurts of moderate to heavy rainfall. Matt and I will be watching things this weekend, and if an update is warranted regarding the potential for flooding, we’ll have something for you. But for the most part we expect these to be nuisance showers rather than something that is seriously impactful to mobility.

Next week

Rain chances should drop significantly by Tuesday. We generally should remain in a pattern where there’s a northerly flow next week, and possibly into next weekend. This means, I think, that we will see mostly sunny days with highs in the low 90s, and nights in the low 70s. Eventually (by Monday or so) we probably will start to feel some drier air that does knock down humidity a bit.

Finally, I don’t want to give anyone false hope, but the European model has been hinting at the possibility of a slightly stronger front by Friday-ish of next week for a couple of days now. I’m not certain that will happen, but it does seem possible. We shall see.

Well, I’m glad we had that moment.

Cracker Barrel announced it was reverting to its old logo after a new, more streamlined design generated intense customer backlash and criticism from President Trump. What do you think?

The post Cracker Barrel Scraps Logo Redesign appeared first on The Onion.

In Denmark’s Bay of Aarhus, archaeologists have discovered an 8,500-year-old Stone Age settlement that has been preserved like a time capsule underwater. What do you think?

The post 8,500-Year-Old Settlement Lost To Rising Sea Discovered Off Denmark’s Coast appeared first on The Onion.

NORTH VANCOUVER — A&W Canada announced their new Complicated Family Menu today, featuring old favourites like the Mama Burger and Papa Burger, plus an assortment of more modern offerings, including the Step-Mom Burger, Secret Cousin Burger, and others. The chain says the new menu celebrates the complexities of today’s royally messed up families. Company spokesperson […]

The post A&W’s new Complicated Family Menu features Step-Mom Burger, Secret Cousin Burger appeared first on The Beaverton.

Oregon lawmakers are considering a proposal that would make the state the second in the nation to require electric vehicle owners to enroll in a pay-per-mile program.

#Cye #RoninWarriors

MINNEAPOLIS—In its detailed analysis of how your corpse will appear when lying on a brightly lit postmortem examination table, a report published Friday by researchers in the University of Minnesota’s mortuary science program concluded that your naked body will make the entire morgue laugh. “According to our projections, the mortician, an assistant, and anyone else who happens to walk in and catch sight of your unclothed remains will immediately burst into uncontrollable laughter at both the size and shape of your various body parts,” said lead researcher Rachel Stein, adding that your abdomen, genitals, and buttocks, along with any tattoos you may have, will become inside jokes at the funeral home, hospital, or medical examiner’s office where your dead body will lie exposed for several hours. “Someone will look at your toe tag, chuckle as they read your name aloud, and then tell all their coworkers to ‘come over here and take a look at this one.’ A gathering of people will soon be pointing out unsightly aspects of your body and saying things like ‘That’s just goofy’ and ‘I’ve never seen one like that before.’ They will remember your name for many years, as it will become shorthand for any repellent anatomical feature they encounter from that day on.” The report went on to state that this situation will not be helped by the fact that your name is Dick B. Short.

The post Report: Your Naked Body Will Make Entire Morgue Laugh appeared first on The Onion.

WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA—Laughing as they paraded down the street with a newfound sense of freedom, sources confirmed this week that a tight-knit group’s night out was made much more fun without their broke friend. “At first, I was a little bummed that Jen couldn’t make it out, but then I realized we could hit that fancy new cocktail bar and all get sushi afterward—we haven’t gotten sushi in forever,” said 29-year-old Sara Muller, noting that it was a lot easier for the friends to enjoy everything nightlife had to offer when they didn’t have to worry about whether their poorest pal had enough money to buy a round. “There were no awkward moments of watching her eat an appetizer while everyone else enjoyed entrees, and there was no weird pressure to walk instead of taking an Uber. I can pay for everyone’s cover at the club and not worry about her Venmo getting declined when she tries to pay me back. This is, like, the best night ever.” According to reports, the carefree crew sent a video to their broke friend in which they wished her good luck with her surgery as they popped open a bottle of champagne.

The post Night Out More Fun Without Broke Friend appeared first on The Onion.