Fraser Sherman's Blog

TYG had an operation on her hand this week. It went fine but having her right hand out of commission proved a challenge. I had to handle all the doses for our dogs’ medical care for a couple of days, plus walking them both to minimize any risk to her hand — Plushie’s pulling can be hard enough even with two good hands to rein him in.

On top of that, the night before the surgery I slept poorly — and I didn’t have the same freedom to take naps during the day that I usually do. The end result was that I was exhausted, plus I had less time. So not a great week for productive work.

Plus I spent an hour trying to track down one Jekyll and Hyde movie online. The one site that had it requires a subscription and wanted me to pay for it by direct withdrawal from my bank. Um, no, I don’t trust them that much. I ordered it on DVD, finally.

So another largely unproductive week. I did get in two articles for The Local Reporter. One of them, on documentary producer Joedan Okun — he worked on the Grammy-winning American Symphony, available on Netflix — is way cooler than my usual subject. The other was an update on Carrboro’s newly opened library branch.

At Atomic Junk Shop I wrote about comics’ first resurrection and the first death of a Marvel hero’s love interest. I also looked at how Captain America was becoming out of place by the end of the 1960s, as Cap reflects in the scene below. It would be a couple of years before Marvel found the solution.

On the plus side, I sold another digital copy of 19-Infinity. Whoever you are, thanks for spending your hard-earned money on me.

All rights to images remain with current holders. Art top to bottom by Curt Swan, Sheldon Moldoff, Nick Cardy and Gene Colan.

As I mentioned Monday, state department official Darren Beattie thinks white men should run everything. Giving women and POC a role in leadership is just coddling them — presumably because Beattie considers them de facto unqualified whereas white men automatically earn their positions by merit (at the link it says he’s also behind the claims there were federal agents in the J6 crowd. And I’ve read elsewhere he advocates giving Taiwan to China). Never mind how many of Trump’s crew are WEI (white, entitled, incompetent) hires.

As Karen Attiah says, this isn’t about meritocracy, it’s about segregation: “I don’t mean resegregation in the sense of separate water fountains. I mean it in the sense that a Black woman would never even be considered for a federal job or a management position at a big company — the way it was in, say, the 1960s. It is not “inclusion” the Republicans want to get rid of, it’s integration.”

Wake County School Board member Sam Hershey makes the same point: “For 250 years I think it’s really important to talk about people being hired based on their skin color and for 250 years it has been mediocre white men who have been hired based on their skin color, and those are facts.”

That is, of course, the Republican idea of equality. It’s typical of how many of the religious right think we should solve problems: by turning back the clock. Never mind the utopian past they dream of didn’t exist, at least white men will be on top again!

And never mind the New York Times paints such criticisms as a matter of opinion, that “some see” racism. It’s racism. Likewise, when Charlie Kirk says his first thought on seeing a black pilot is to question their qualifications, that’s not because of affirmative action or DEI, it’s because he assumes black people are unqualified (or he’s lying).

Costco has rejected calls to drop its diversity, equity and inclusion programs so multiple Republican AGs are suing them. Pam Bondi, Trump’s new lapdog attorney general (DOJ attorneys are his attorneys, not the government’s) has announced she’s investigating private companies’ DEI programs.

I find myself wondering if these suits will continue even if there were no diversity programs to scream about. As I wrote in Undead Sexist Cliches —

— our society still has a default assumption that white male achievements are earned — if the leadership of anything is all male, that just shows they’re superior beings. If it’s even moderately female, it’s suspect. This attitude didn’t start with Trump. The late columnist John Leo was adamant in the last century that having low numbers of women doesn’t prove discrimination; if there was a male minority, that was prima facie proof of reverse discrimination!

Before DEI the complaint was “affirmative action,” or it was “they’re just a token” or for women, “who’d she blow to get that job?” Or simply “what’s that bitch doing taking a man’s job?” Because women simply can’t be better than men … can they? (Spoiler: yes, easily). Affirmative action isn’t why Kirk (or anyone) assumes a black man or a woman of any color can’t do the job.

Consider FOTUS and JD Vance shrieking that “diversity” means lots of highly qualified manly white men were denied jobs as air-traffic controllers and it’s the unqualified POC and disabled people and women who caused that crash. Never mind that we’ve had diversity programs in the FAA for years without massive crashes. Obviously if we’d had more white men with the sterling qualifications of a Vance, it wouldn’t have happened (sarcasm font).

Or as HL Mencken once put it, “”The central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true desserts. He ascribes all his failure to get on in the world, all of his congenital incapacity and damfoolishness, to the machinations of…some…den of infamy.” In too many cases the den of infamy is a secret man-hating feminist cabal.

To end on an up note, people are pushing back against the Trump white male supremacist leadership. Senator Brian Schatz. Multiple protests. Trump backed off his tariff plan for Mexico and Canada when they pushed back. Wall Street Journal reporter Katherine Long “linked DOGE staffer Marko Elez to a deleted X account that advocated repealing the Civil Rights Act, backed a “eugenic immigration policy,” and wrote, “You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity.” Dude resigned, though Musk and JD Vance got pissed — and got him reinstated. Some state AGs are pushing back against DOGE accessing citizens’ data, including my NC AG, Jeff Jackson. American kids in Germany booed Pete Hegseth.

We can’t save everything but we can save some things. Decide what you want to save and look for ways to help do that.

For more of me venting about misogyny, check out Undead Sexist Cliches in paperback or ebook. You can also order it straight from me from the Behold the Book page.