The National Butterfly Center, located in Mission Texas is (was) the North American Butterfly Association’s (NABA) “flagship facility and a primary focus of its efforts aimed at educating the public about the value of biodiversity, the beauty of the natural world, the wonder of butterflies, particularly, and the powerful role they play in maintaining healthy ecosystems and sustainable food resources.”  The NABA was founded in 1993 to study and preserve the butterfly populations that migrate between North and South America, and hold butterfly counts and other conservation programs to protect these delicate creatures.

Why am I writing about a butterfly sanctuary?  Because it was forced to close indefinitely in late January after suffering years of harassment by QAnon followers and other rightwing nutjobs who believe that the sanctuary is not really a butterfly center, but actually a hub for child sex trafficking.  Remember PizzaGate where some idiot shot up a pizza shop believing bullshit that it was being used by cannibalistic Democrats led by Hillary Clinton for child sex trafficking? Well, the same thing has been going on now for 4 years at the butterfly center after rightwing grifter and pal of Steve Bannon, Brian Kolfage, unleashed a barrage of false accusations in retaliation for the center filing suit to stop TFG’s construction of his border wall right through the sanctuary.  Kolfage, who, along with Bannon, is under federal indictment for fraud over their “We Build the Wall” project that duped a whole lot of gullible people out of about $20 million.  Kolfage is well known for releasing nonsense and wild conspiracy theories into the rightwing Noise Machine to attack his perceived enemies.  He’s been banned from social media for all kinds of things including spreading conspiracy theories and creating fake accounts, but his followers do most of his dirty work now for him.

One of those followers is a fringe candidate for Congress from Virginia, Kimberly Lowe, who is apparently so far out there that she was even uninvited to the anti-immigration “We Stand America” rally recently in South Texas, but she took the opportunity while there to “investigate illegal immigration and sex trafficking” at the butterfly center with her friend who was apparently posing as a Secret Service agent.  It went about as you’d expect, with a physical altercation between the center’s director, Marianna Treviño Wright, Lowe, and her friend.  Lowe had demanded to see where the “smuggling” was going on, and, well, you can guess the rest.  The center had planned to close for the duration of the rally, but is now closed indefinitely due to the danger posed to the center and its staff by nutjobs.

It’s easy to stand back and shake your head at the nonsense that proliferates on social media, but this stuff is so corrosive that it’s actually endangering lives and has poisoned all reason, threatening the very foundation of our system of government. It’s especially bad in Texas and other red states where this nonsense has infiltrated once mainstream conservatism and goofy conspiracy theories are now repeated by elected leaders.  Since the base is now crazy, and gerrymandering has cemented it in, I don’t see a path for a return to any kind of reason.

Yesterday, even as Mike Pence FINALLY told the truth about Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, the RNC officially censured Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for participating in the January 6th Committee that they claimed was “persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse”.  Liz Cheney fired back with a Tweet:

This was January 6th.
This is not “legitimate political discourse.” pic.twitter.com/lKgbVyVcJr

— Rep. Liz Cheney (@RepLizCheney) February 4, 2022

TFG is cementing his grip on the RNC for 2024.  With weaklings like Pence finally finding their backbone, though, maybe it won’t be as easy as he thinks it is.

There is a plaza in Berlin now called the Bebelplatz.  When it was constructed in the mid-1700s, it was known as the Opernplatz, because the State Opera house is on the plaza’s east side, but that is not why it’s famous.  I visited here a few years ago, not to see the opera, but for another important reason.  In May of  1933 this was the location where ritual book burnings began in Germany, led by the German Students Association, which, along with the Hitler Youth, the SS, and the SA (Brownshirts) were groups that grew out of the National Socialist German Workers’ (Nazi) Party.  The ritual burning on May 10th followed an inflammatory speech by Josef Goebbels, Hitler’s head of propaganda.

On the first night, 20,000 books from the library of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute of Sex Research) were burned.  On other nights, thousands of other “unGerman” books, written primarily by Jewish authors, were burned on the plaza.  One of those authors was Albert Einstein.

On the site of those book burnings is a memorial that sits in the plaza.  Called The Empty Library, it’s a 16′ by 16′ below ground room surrounded by empty bookshelves that would hold the 20,000 books burned on that first night.  The ceiling is a glass panel so you can see it from the plaza above.  It is impressive.

If I could, I would charter an airliner from Texas to Berlin and put all the book banners on it, including Greg Abbott all the way down to that Little Shit Matt Krause (who briefly ran for Texas AG against a rogue’s gallery of weirdos trying to unseat Indicted for Fraud and Insurrectionist Ken Paxton).  It’s Krause who compiled a list of 850 books he wants banned from Texas schools which includes books by Pulitzer Prize winners.  These clowns need to see where their politics is going.

Texas has been under the control of Republicans since 1997 and the results are exactly what one would expect of a system rotten to the core like ours.  Wedge issues designed to keep the base stirred up are now fed in a continuous stream including the normal guns, God, gays, school vouchers, abortion, non-existent voter fraud, immigration, and all people not white.  The latest is now CRT, mandates, science, and books.  If you listen closely, you can hear the voice of Josef Goebbels and Adolf Hitler in the words of book banners.  The language of these wedge issues eerily echoes their language as they took over the German government and started killing what would end up being millions of innocents they deemed to be “unGerman” and unacceptable.

There is a plaque at The Empty Library that is inscribed, “Where they burn books, so too will they in the end burn human beings”.   Inspiringly, Texas students are not taking this latest move by finger wagging book banners.  Last week at a meeting of the Granbury ISD outside of Fort Worth, a high school junior told the panel,

“No government — and public school is an extension of government — has ever banned books and banned information from its public and been remembered in history as the good guys.”

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

This week the NY Times published an excellent analysis of US response to the COVID 19 epidemic by compiling data from Johns Hopkins, the World Bank, and the US Census Bureau.  What the data show is a stark picture of just how badly the US responded to the pandemic compared to other developed countries.  The stupidity of the response is well illustrated in just two graphs:

The left graph is cumulative deaths per 100,000 since the pandemic began. The right graph is cumulative deaths from only the Omicron wave.  Notice that the US “wins” the death race over other wealthy countries by a LOT, and that failure stems from stupid public policy that is engrained in the US; the failure is worsened as a result of the stupidity of millions of Americans who chose to believe bullshit and have participated in politicizing science, vilifying of scientists  and doctors, and spreading nonsensical conspiracy theories about vaccines.

At the beginning of the pandemic, most wealthy countries locked down quickly, including the US.  The difference, though, was how the US did that compared to other countries.  Unlike the US, other wealthy countries, especially in Europe, took over the paychecks of their citizens, keeping them financially secure, which encouraged them to stay home and safe.  Characteristically, the US did it wrong.  First the US government stupidly poured a TRILLION dollars into companies with the stated goal of keeping people on the payroll, but the program was botched, and much of that money went into the pockets of the wealthy with little reaching  those who actually needed the money.  Second, GOP lead states like Texas started the misinformation campaign that developed into what is now a death cult among conservatives.  Recall that during this time, Dan Patrick, retired talk show host and bar owner, actually suggested that we should sacrifice the old and weak in favor of saving the economy.

Red states like Texas did extend unemployment benefits for a time, but that support was nowhere near livable, forcing millions of people to choose between risking the lives of themselves and their families and putting food on the table.  We all know how that turned out.  Add that to bullshit coming out of TFG’s mouth, his shutdown of all pandemic response that Bush II and Obama had put in place, and putting PPE response into the hands of that idiot Jared Kushner, and the perfect storm of stupidity flooded the entire country driving the US to the highest case and death rate in the developed world.

And it continues.  Playing to their base in an election year, Republicans all over the country are trying to out crazy one another doubling down on anti-vaxxer fears,  goofy conspiracy theories, and trying to to distract them with wild rhetoric about critical race theory and banning books.  And while they’re doing everything but their damn jobs, people continue to die.

Interestingly enough, even the president of the United States isn’t immune from the discussion of identity politics and racism. It seems that he is even leaning into it by pledging that the next Supreme Court justice will be a black woman. As the link points out and as everyone kind of knew going in, there was much protesting. Some people have called it reverse discrimination. Then again, it is not completely out of the realm of possibility for conservatives to also play identity politics. Amy Coney Barrett replaced Ruth Bader Ginsberg. Clarence Thomas replaced Thurgood Marshall. I’m sure those were just coincidences.

What exactly is systemic racism and what can we do to combat it? When institutions and companies make extra efforts to be diverse are they in fact participating in reverse discrimination? These are excellent questions and questions we don’t have easy answers for.

Unless there is a compelling reason, each institution, company, or organization should reflect the overall demographic breakdown of the community it is in. There are notable exceptions where we look foolish for arguing otherwise. Hooters is not going to hire male wait staff. The vast majority of teachers, garbage collectors, and soldiers will be skewed to one gender or another. The vast majority of professional and amateur athletes won’t be a representative sample either.

So, do we make specific efforts to be inclusive when those efforts might stack the deck for a particular position? That of course depends on the specific reason why someone like Biden might be restricting his search. The law impacts different groups in different ways. The court currently has three women on it. It has one African American. Adding an African American woman adds both of those perspectives.

When we measure the presence of racism based on the measurement of the outcome we often paint with a very broad brush. Yesterday, I mentioned the NFL. Jack Easterby was hired by the Texans in 2019 as an executive vice president. Without going into specifics on him we could simply say that it was a position he had never held before.

So, how in the blazes did he get such a position? Obviously, he knew some people and one thing led to another. That’s usually how these things work. The trouble is that when the vast majority of owners and executives are white then the “he knew someone” usually translates into hiring of another white guy. People hire people they are comfortable with or already know. It doesn’t make them a racist per se, but the outcome is a negative one for people of color.

Easterby got his start as a character coach of sorts. A character coach should be adept at relating to players and other employees. They should be comfortable with him. If a majority of the players are African American then wouldn’t it make more sense to have a character coach that is African American? Of course, they hired someone else to be a character coach when Easterby was promoted. He is someone Easterby knew and of course he is also white.

I don’t have any easy answers. This isn’t to say that men can’t relate to women or vice versa. This isn’t to say that people of color can’t relate to white people or vice versa. This isn’t to say that someone that came from money can’t relate to someone that didn’t or vice versa. If relating to special populations is a considerable part of the job then whether or not someone can represent that special population has to be a serious consideration. If we continue go with the “guy we know” then that isn’t likely to happen.