Fraser Sherman's Blog

The Amateur Athletic Union was enmeshed in a child sex-abuse scandal 15 years ago. It pledged to put reforms in place but according to Pro Publica did jack shit. You will be shocked, shocked to learn that they have suffered multiple scandals since. They’ve also become a haven for coaches kicked out by other organizations with tougher standards.

While I’m not an anarchist, I do believe this shows the fatal flaw in all organizations of any sort: organization corrupts. People worry about protecting the organization’s reputation; protecting who counts as One of Us over justice for One of Not Us; protecting their own status in the organization (why risk your job by making waves? Maybe he won’t grab any more underage girls!); and ensuring the organization can keep growing. Colleges cover up rapes so that nobody worries about sending their daughters there; evangelical anti-slavery churches in colonial America dropped their principles because they couldn’t grow in the South if they were abolitionist. The Army covers up friendly fire incidents rather than admit to a massive screw-up. I’m not an anarchist but I do think this is a major problem.

And that’s bad because busting individual sexual harassers or office rapists isn’t enough. If the system didn’t spot them or stop them, the people in charge need to figure out what went wrong. Then they need to fix whatever it is. Organizations typically hate to do that.

2)”I know this is last week’s prompt but my personal Rushmore tweet was that guy who said we should solve loneliness and climate change by abolishing washing machines and having women go back to laundering clothes by hand down at the village riverbank” — Gwen Snyder on BlueSky (I believe a “Rushmore tweet” is a really extreme online take).

Well that makes perfect sense ,… oh wait, no it doesn’t. Wouldn’t it be just as practical to, say, abolish home washing machines and make the women hang out at the laundromat? More togetherness, less work. Or hey, here’s a thought — why shouldn’t men do the laundry? After all, aren’t we suffering a male loneliness epidemic?

This puts me in mind of Kristin Kobes DuMez’ discussion of community and nostalgia for the same: “here we learn that divisions of work and authority are necessary for community. Again, a question of agency. Who divides work, who assigns authority? Who wields power, and to what ends? What check is there on that power, besides a self-avowed commitment to ‘virtue’ and ‘self-restraint’ —terms that are much more slippery in practice than in theory?” To put it another way, where are the women? What’s their role? Do they make decisions? Paul Deneen, whom she was critiquing at the link, seems to think women were better off when patriarchal society clearly defined and limited their roles.

I’m guessing Snyder’s “Rushmore tweet” dude would agree.

3)Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff made the point recently that in a time of war, the Toddler’s only interests are “to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace, gifted by the Emir of Qatar.” “Natalie” meaning Natalie Harp a Toddler aide who’s become his closest, most devoted suckup, staying close to him for a year despite not having a security clearance (she’s finally received one). She is, to put it mildly, obsessively devoted. And he likes her because she’s his human woobie: she gushes with admiration, shows him favorable news stories and unreliable polls, gives him the constant adoration he needs to feel alive. “Those occasional cabinet meetings in which everyone tells Trump how blessed and honored they are to be working in his service aren’t enough; he needs that validation on 24-7 IV drip” Apparently Scott Bessent fawning on him isn’t as cool as having a pretty young thing do it.

Republicans are seething in faux outrage, claiming Ossoff was sullying Harp’s virtue by implying she’s the Toddler’s mistress. I think that’s bollocks: he’s clearly saying the Toddler is falling down on the job. I’m not sure if they’re screaming about S-E-X because that’s the accusation they’d fling at a woman in her place or because they think the two of them banging looks less embarrassing than a doddering old fart charmed by a cute young woman and using her as his “emotional support aide.” However Republicans often get attention by whining that Dems aren’t being civil while getting a free pass on things like the White House mouthing off about Ossoff (details at some of the link). The press shouldn’t fall for it; Dems definitely shouldn’t back off.

It’s also important because, as Jamie Bouie says in his newsletter (no link, sorry), she ensures he hears only good news, and that’s bad for a leader: “He rejects information that is gathered and collected for the purpose of informing him and is highly reliant, instead, on counsel from people who have no incentive to contradict him and every incentive to tell him what he wants to hear or what they want him to hear. Trump has dismantled every institutional structure designed to curb the worst aspects of the presidency — a tendency toward isolation and groupthink — and has instead sunk deeper into his own propaganda and invented reality … Accordingly, Trump has neither avoided disaster nor managed to put the country on stable footing. Instead, he is carelessly careening toward catastrophe. So far, it’s only been a matter of luck that we haven’t crashed.” Though here’s a counter-argument that Harp is only a symptom.

Oh, and here’s a look at the Toddler, Harp and the rest of his cabinet, busily spreading lies in real time.

Now I’m seeing Democrats argue that criticizing Harp is counter-productive — she’s just a misguided woman brought up in a conservative household, trained to look up to men as gods. We’re being … mean when we attack her (which as noted above is not what Ossoff was doing). Sorry, but Harp is 35 years old, she is on the government payroll, she’s the aides who creates the Toddler’s hatemongering AI slop such as depicting the Obamas as apes. She does not get a pass.

4)If the Democrats do well in November, one of the things they’ll have to be prepared for is the Very Serious People in the party and the media trying to set limits on what Dems can do (see “Attacking Ms. Harp is just too mean!”). We’re already seeing that regarding Ossoff’s attack on the Toddler: according to Politico, if he’s too successful that’s bad news for Democrats. Digby spots Dems already warning too much focus on the Toddler is also bad for Democrats. If that’s just a strategic decision, fine; if it means “well, we won, let’s look forward and not backwards, let’s not make any big, sweeping changes” — not so good. Hakeem Jeffries has already said he’s not a fan of Medicare for All, and now he’s meeting with Jared Kushner to find areas where Dems and the Toddler can work together. As Canada could tell them, there are none.

Paul Waldman points out that as soon as Democrats regain any power in the government, the deficit will become the biggest issue of the day: Very Serious political reporters who never demanded how the Toddler was going to pay for redesigning our aircraft carriers will ask how the Dems are going to balance the budget and how can they possibly suggest Medicare for All (or whatever) when we’re in the red? Republicans, of course, will suddenly discover the joys of slashing the budget. Paul Krugman adds more. I’ve seen the Overton Window shift this way repeatedly; Dems need to learn to push back. And point out that contrary to the fantasy Republicans in pundits’ heads, the Republicans are lousy at managing the budget.

As Heather Delaney Reese says, “When this chapter of American history is finally over, when the investigations begin, and the consequences come, we cannot just go back to life as normal. We cannot pretend this was a passing storm, or that they were simply following the regulatory process, or that they somehow didn’t understand who they were standing beside and what he was doing to this country. They knew. They could see exactly what the rest of us could see, and they made their choice anyway.

And we need to remember that choice. We need to hold every single one of them accountable, so that the next time someone like Donald Trump tries to take this country, the people deciding whether to help him know there will be a price for doing it. Because if there is no consequence for standing in the Roosevelt Room and praising a man while he dismantles our democracy, then we are not just allowing this group of enablers to escape accountability. We are teaching the next group that enabling authoritarianism is profitable, and that when it is all over, they can simply walk away with the money and pretend they had nothing to do with it.”

I met that quote in historian Kevin Leman’s post about the end of the Reconstruction era. Douglass: “You want to know whether the hour is one of hope or despair. I have no time to answer this solemn inquiry at length or as it deserves, and will content myself with giving you the assurance of my belief. I think the situation is serious but it is not hopeless. On the contrary, there are many encouraging signs in the moral skies. l have seen many dark hours and have yet never despaired of the colored man’s future. There is no time in our history that I would prefer to the present.”

I’m quoting that not to hand-wave the massive problems that the Toddler and the Republican Party have inflicted on us (and it’s not like we didn’t have problems before). The situation is serious .. but it’s not hopeless. And if Douglass could preach that message, in a very dark time for black America, giving up hope now is not the way. The road is slow, we don’t know the path and it might end up going nowhere good. Even so. In that spirit, some good news and some good quotes:

Here’s a win: “Back in 2020, after George Floyd’s murder, the school board voted to rename Stonewall Jackson High School and Ashby-Lee Elementary School. They became Mountain View High School and Honey Run Elementary respectively. Four years later a newly elected board reversed that decision and brought the Confederate names back. They never really explained why.

When the case went to trial, the 2024 board members simply refused to testify about their motives, hiding behind legislative privilege. Urbanski saw right through this move. He emphasized that this case was unusual because the students were not trying to erase names that had been in place for decades. They were challenging a board’s decision to undo its own predecessor’s work, a predecessor that had already admitted the original names were discriminatory.”

The Toddler doesn’t want to admit it but crime is at record lows.

Anti-Muslim bigot Andy Ogles lost his re-election primary.

“Every time someone tries to sell you on the idea that there is something we can do, without cost, that harms other people, realize that they are lying to you.” — from a Courtney Milan thread about why violence is a bad solution.

A Texas educator lost a shot at high school principal gig after calling ICE on a graduation ceremony.

Firing people for the non-crime of criticizing the late Charlie Kirk has proven a costly mistake.

As this blog post says, I’m inclined to think of the ratcheting of Republican crazy only getting worse, never better. At the link, Wyoming says otherwise.

I’ve also seen a surprising number of left-wing blog posts the past year every time a Toddler-backed candidate wins — OMG, it’s still his party, other Republicans only live in it! Which ignores the long history of many of his picks failing to win — a pattern reconfirmed in this year’s primaries.

By missing a court deadline, the administration is now required to wipe out 170,000 student loans.

Inspiration: “The Second Reconstruction of the King Years may have ended, but we do not and cannot yet know the rest of the story or how what new “endings” and new beginnings are yet to come. It’s tempting, and depressing, to assume that the story of the Second Reconstruction will parallel the story of the first for another generation. The parallels, so far, are dismayingly close, with the federal government and the Supreme Court playing the same role they played the first time around, abandoning and betraying the promise of full democracy. But that doesn’t mean we’re doomed to generations of the new Plessy regime that John Roberts and Sam Alito dream of imposing. We are here, and here is Not Good. But here is not the end of the story. If we forget that, they win.”

“As much as we humans may be utterly dependent on saving grace, we also seem to require some measure of saving face. The ability to tell yourself that — whatever else you misunderstood or voted for or identified with or otherwise got terribly, horribly wrong — you at least were “unequivocally opposed” to this facility, for whatever reason, is the kind of face-saving knowledge that sometimes makes redemption seem more like a possibility that you might survive and, thus, more like a possibility that you might consider choosing.” — from a post about using practical arguments against ICE (or whatever) rather than ethical ones.

“When you do not choose a side, one tends to get chosen for you.”

“That is the invitation of the world that we are called to be a part of, to help create. To do it as a part of the life of this community, part of the larger community that we are a part of. To use our gifts in whatever way God has called us, to use them to care for those around us. It’s not a world where we will be particularly welcomed well, where compassion, joy, kindness, treating everybody as if they deserve health and shelter and education. That is a world that challenges the way power works around us, but it is the world that we are invited to be a part of.”

And here’s a post of mine from right after the Toddler took office again, with more inspiration in it.