When I was about eighteen, I left my abusive parents in New Orleans and moved to New York City on my own. I'd been writing for a magazine based in San Francisco that was planning to move its offices to NYC, and I'd been promised a full-time staff role once that happened. I moved a month ahead of time to get settled, but then things at the magazine went tits up (it was a weird situation — they even made a movie about it) and it fell through. Suddenly I was in NYC without the job I'd been promised, right as Bush kicked off the Iraq War and tipped the US into recession. I'd spent what little I had to my name getting to NYC and getting a place; I'd naively paid a deposit and first month's rent up front on what I thought was a studio apartment, only to find out once I arrived that I was renting a room in a sharehouse owned by a creepy geriatric who "normally only lets Chinese college students move in" and who sexually harassed me on multiple occasions. When the job fell through and I had no way to pay rent, he offered to let it slide another month if he got to watch me jerk off to his collection of gay Asian porn. I declined, and moved out.

What followed was nearly a year of homelessness — mostly couch surfing wherever I could find a place to crash, with some bouts of sleeping rough. I quickly made friends with a group of other homeless queer teenagers who hung out around Christopher Street Pier, its significance to queer history something I'd only learn about much, much later. Many of them were people of colour, many of them were trans, many of them were sex workers. I never accepted anything outright transactionally, but across that year I definitely went on dates with men significantly older than me — men I never would have talked to if I hadn't needed a place to stay and a shower, or if they weren't shouting dinner. I didn't know the term "survival sex" at the time, but that's absolutely what it was. Still, at one particularly low point, I remember calling my mother from a payphone in the middle of the night and screaming into the receiver that, despite everything I was dealing with at the time, it was still better than living with them. So, there's that.

After about a year, I finally landed a job and a stable place and started putting my life together. I stayed friends with the people I'd met, many of whom I absolutely credit with the fact that I'm still alive two decades on, but the one I cared about the most was a gorgeous six-foot-five Puerto Rican trans girl a couple years older than me named Roxi. Roxi was the first trans person I ever (knowingly) met, and she could shift from the most glamorous human being god ever put on this earth to absolutely the sort of soldier you'd want in the trenches with you. In the stretch between getting said job and said apartment, while I was saving money up, I got jumped by a couple of guys who were going to rob me or bash me or worse — I don't know which. I still have a scar on my upper thigh where one of them slashed me with a knife. Then, out of nowhere like deus ex machina, Roxi showed up with a hammer, cracked one of them in the leg, and sent them all running. Afterwards, she helped me limp back to the pier, and I got drunk for the first time with the other queer kids while she stitched the slash up. I don't think I asked her how she knew how to sew stitches but then that was the sort of thing she would have known how to do.

Roxi was making money the way many trans women of colour who "hung out" around the Christopher Street pier did, and one day she disappeared.

This wasn't unusual for some of the other kids, but it was for her. She was a few years older than the rest of us and had adopted a matriarchal persona; she was also one of the few I never, ever saw doing drugs, even though I couldn't begrudge most of the kids there whatever form of escapism they needed. It was out of character, and we were all concerned. My experience with the police during her disappearance — whose interest in doing anything about it was not merely absent but negative — is certainly one of the things that's coloured my opinion of the job as a whole. By the time I was twenty I had founded a non-profit in her memory, and one of its chief objectives was advocating for cops actually giving a shit about crime against queer people.

I have been in the room with queer folks — predominantly cis, white and white-passing men like myself — much older than me, who stood there with smarmy, patronising expressions, lecturing me on the right and wrong way to do advocacy. I have sat in on arguments where those with the most power and privilege talked down on those with the least, dismissed their experiences and worries as unimportant next to their own, and triaged whose struggles got to matter. I was present when groups like the Human Rights Campaign threw trans people under the bus because they didn't want to rock the boat and risk their access to Democrats — which in practice meant Democratic events and the donors who funded them. I have said fuck them and fuck their money, and had people roll their eyes at me like they were playing six-dimensional chess and I was too young and too naive to "get it" — only to sit here two decades later as the smug little Cassandra I always end up being, going "I told you so" while everything plays out exactly the way I said it would back in the 2000s.

Mainstream queer — though I should be specific: "queer" generally meant the issues that affect white gay men first and foremost, with everyone else a trickle-down afterthought, if anything — organisations refused to stand up for trans people because their struggles were politically unpalatable to their own, and rather than show some selflessness and solidarity, they let conservatives and bigots carve us up. That didn't make things better, it just showed conservatives and bigots where the movement's weak points were.

And, having identified those weak points, they've spent decades exploiting them.

Oh, but we can get married (for now) and serve in the military (for now), so mission accomplished for us, I guess.

Anyway — this isn't a post about US politics. It's a post about Australia, and how, having watched this shit happen over there, I now get to watch the same types of people shoot themselves and the rest of us in the foot, with absolutely no lessons learned.

This weekend there will be a vote on several motions around the Sydney Mardi Gras parade and its governance. Several were brought up by a faction called Pride in Protest — predominantly organised by younger, gender-diverse people of colour — and several have been added to the docket by "Protect Mardi Gras," a faction of generally older, cis, white gay men who are exactly the sort who lectured me two decades ago about how there's a right and a wrong way to do politics and that I "just didn't get it". It might be a different cover artist, but they're singing the same song.

"Protect Mardi Gras" came into existence solely because Pride in Protest was making enough noise to be noticed. And the privileged cadre of people who don't want the boat rocked, who don't want their access revoked, who don't want to worry about things they're lucky enough never to have to, have come out well-financed and swinging. While we're watching trans folks erased from public life in front of our very eyes, "Protect Mardi Gras" is sitting on high tone-policing and telling others what the right way to be angry and demand their rights is.

I'm nearly half as old as many of the '78ers, and I know that there were plenty of people at the first Mardi Gras parade — just as there were at the Stonewall Riots and during ACT UP's protests demanding that politicians pay attention to the gay men dying of AIDS — saying "this isn't the right way to do this". Having secured a pyrrhic victory for themselves, they're pulling the ladder up behind them.

As I write this, Pride in Protest's main social media presence has been banned from Instagram, and people affiliated with "Protect Mardi Gras" are claiming credit for it via a mass reporting campaign. Look at the comments on anything on social media shared by either camp and you'll find people saying some of the most virulently heinous crap about Pride in Protest's organisers — up to and including calls to review the visa status of asylum seekers.

I shouldn't have to spell out how dark and outright evil it is to use the same weapons the bigots use against us — a few weeks ago The Laird was banned from social media; Midsumma has complained about shadow banning; other queer artists, non-profits, and venues in Australia and abroad have been swept up in mass banning campaigns potentially initiated by bigots and religious extremists.

And let me underscore, once again, that for most of the people involved in "Protect Mardi Gras," who count failed Labor political candidates and current Liberal political operatives amongst their strange bedfellows, trans people being disappeared and a genocide on the other side of the planet is an annoying thought-exercise — but it's an existential crisis for the people on whose behalf Pride in Protest are asking for recognition, affordances, and safety who are facing this stuff right now and being retaliated against by our own community for speaking up about it.

Well, it's an existential crisis for the cis white gays, too — they just don't realise it yet. Because for every cis gay man who thinks the discrimination stops with trans people: you're in for a rude awakening, the same as every cis gay man in the US now staring down a reality where the bigots are already reaching for more. For every cis gay man who takes up the weapons and language of our oppressors and uses them against the least protected of us, you're in for a rude awakening when they start doing it against you too. South Australia didn't abolish the "gay panic" legal defence until the end of 2020 — within my own lifetime, queerness and "think of the children" were still treated as inseparable, and now we've got Mardi Gras board members doing the same thing with trans identities.

If I cannot appeal to your general sense of empathy and "hey, maybe I shouldn't be a fucking asshole", then perhaps, strategically, you guys can look at the state of queer — and gay — civil rights in the US and realise there's safety in numbers. Rather than worrying about your party getting ruined, you can think about the bigger picture: what happens when a conservative government comes along and rips up the marriages you care so much about, or stops you visiting your spouse in hospital, or won't let them inherit your assets after you've passed, or denies them medical care — or decides to bring back lobotomies, electroshock, and conversion therapy. This stuff is not distant history, and I'm not that fucking old.

"Protect Mardi Gras" do get half of it — they keep complaining that Pride in Protest are showing our enemies where they can divide us; but they stop there, and in stopping there, they make it obvious they think they should be the ones deciding where our resources go and whose struggles actually matter. "Protect Mardi Gras" say that participating in the parade shouldn't be a reward for good behaviour (a bizarre stance to have) and act as if kicking police and bad politicians out will hurt us — but not a year goes by where people aren't harmed by police during the parade itself, and the NSW police watchdog had to order an investigation into over-policing at queer venues in Sydney just days ago. How did letting them march alongside the community they regularly terrorise prevent that bad behaviour, again?

I'm reminded of the story of Sammy Davis Jr, who — despite being one of the most successful performers of his era, a Rat Pack member alongside Frank Sinatra, and a tireless campaigner for JFK — was disinvited at the last minute from performing at JFK's inauguration because he was in an interracial marriage. And this was after he'd agreed to move his own wedding up a month so it wouldn't create controversy in the final days of the election. He did what he was asked — not for himself, but because he thought JFK would be more receptive to the issues affecting Black Americans and would actually do something about them — and he was still kicked out of the room once he gave them what they'd expected.

When you throw the more vulnerable under the bus, you don't get to insist you're still on the same side. And when you're not on the same side, you don't get to dictate the terms on which the people actually under threat get to be angry and fight back.

Hi [Labor MP], me again.

I'll confess that I've been intending to write something to you for a while now, but the world is a bit crazy these days and every time I thought I had zeroed in on a particular theme I wanted to share my thoughts on, something else has hit the news cycle straight away and I've had to restart my unsolicited essay from scratch. With World War 3 breaking out, I guess there's no avoiding it anymore.

I'll preface this by saying that I recognise you are not the Prime Minister, but I also don't sit in his electorate so you're standing in as his proxy. However fair that may or may not be I can only empathise with, but I'm also not the one who got into politics.

A quick run-through of the things I've wanted to express my thorough disapproval with Labor, and Anthony Albanese specifically, over the last several weeks — again, every time I sat down to write something, he'd dwarf the original topic with some new blundering gaffe, so at this point there's genuinely a list:

• rushing through censorship laws piggybacking off of a horrific national tragedy that clearly have little to do with antisemitism and far more to do with trying to keep people worried about the climate or Australia's material support in what's broadly considered to be genocide from irritating Albanese; I'm a New Yorker with Jewish heritage, I can see "political expedience" for what it is having lived through 9/11, as well as having watched how breathlessly that was capitalised on even before the bodies had been pulled out of the World Trade Center. History proved the utter, abysmal abdication of moral authority that war gallivant turned out to be, and I won't be told this crackdown in the name of "antisemitism" that plenty of Australian Jews don't support is anything else except using one tragedy to try and deal with an unrelated annoyance.
• said censorship laws being rammed through legislatively when queer people and other minorities have been advocating for similar protections for decades, only to have that not be included in supposed "comprehensive" anti-hatecrime laws — but Albanese still marched in Mardi Gras this past weekend, so I guess he's a great ally as long as he's not required to actually lift a finger to protect anyone; you've likely heard about a wide string of attacks against queer people by criminals luring them to meet up on dating apps and attacking them when they're there. This has generated a lot of news, suddenly, because the latest permutation of this may or may not involve individuals claiming to be aligned with Islamic State, but these attacks have happened for many, many years long before Murdoch's press could froth excitedly about being able to include "Muslim terrorists" in the same headline as "gay hookup apps." Queer people have been begging for protection from extremists for ages and at one point in time Albanese vocally supported those efforts — before he became Prime Minister, that is.
• Grace Tame; good god, if "completely avoidable public embarrassment" could be handed to one government official on a plate — Albanese went back for second helpings. It boggles the mind why the Prime Minister is doing word association games with hostile right-wing press given everything else his time and attention could be focussed on, but he really has no one else but himself to blame when he describes a victim of sexual assault, who has spent the majority of her young life advocating against men in positions of power who abuse it, as "difficult," while describing a felonious pervert mentioned over thirty-thousand times in a document dump belonging to the most notorious paedophile in recent memory as "President." Nobody remotely buys the attempted walk-back afterward of "I was only referring to her difficult life," please. I don't know which is worse, the blatant misogyny or how stupid he must believe we are. I think at least even Scott Morrison would have owned it, and I resent having to think better of Scott Morrison in a situation.
• Pauline Hanson doing what Pauline does and even other conservatives were shocked and horrified about it, but Albanese took a full day before he joined them in condemnation; I assume he wanted to see which way the wind was going to blow on Sky News before he decided to express an opinion disavowing appalling bigotry, but he's very quick to issue statements when he misjudges where support is going to be (I'll come back to this one in a moment).
• the general palling-about with Trump when braver leaders whose countries are much closer to the US are planting their feet and refusing to placate a bully. Look, I can only imagine the difficulty in diplomatically threading the needle when a nuclear superpower is lead by a pathological narcissist with the emotional regulation of a hungry two year old, but he doesn't have to look happy about it. He's certainly not required to post selfies with the man, either.
• and now the current crisis of the moment, the US and Israel committing international war crimes and there's Albanese first out of the gate giving both the thumbs up about it.

That all of these things take place against the backdrop of an economic and cost-of-living crisis disproportionately affecting those of us who are not the Prime Minister, now only likely to get worse as dementia weakens the Mad King's grip on where he is and what he's not supposed to do with the US' stockpile of tomahawk missiles, and you can perhaps begin to see why odious reptiles like Pauline Hanson are eager to seize the discontent even without Gina Rinehart — Australia's Temu Elon Musk — trying to bankroll her into The Lodge.

While I enjoy watching the Coalition embarrass itself as much as anyone who believes in equality, respect, dignity, and "not being a jerk" in general, their dysfunctionality appears to be giving Labor a false sense of security. Plenty of people have been mining old tweets of Albanese's where he criticised things the Coalition was doing that he is now equally guilty of himself — I don't believe that a politician, much less a person, can't change their minds, but many people are making the same connection that the Albanese of old seems to have lost a lot of his progressive values and virtues now that he's Prime Minister. If this is because of some misguided belief that conservatism has "won" and he needs to lurch to the right as well, the same mistake a lot of other leaders made in interpreting the absolute insanity of Trump winning the US election in 2024, I hope I can help disabuse that notion.

In the last day or so, a sitting Democrat was challenged for her seat by someone running against her after her vote in support of Trump's gestapo. She's held the seat for fourteen years and lost the primary on Tuesday 70% to 22% by a challenger whose platform was getting her out because her votes were the tiebreaker that allowed legislation making it easier for ICE to occupy a major city as part of their national racist brutalisation campaign. Similarly, a candidate in Texas also just won the Democratic nomination and has significant favourability despite the state Republicans' open vote-rigging and gerrymandering efforts. Labour in the UK just lost a seat they've held for nearly a century to a Greens candidate, the first ever Greens MP elected in the north of England, and Kier Starmer's former deputy is challenging the PM to be "braver" and says the election loss must be seen as a "wake up call."

It should be taken as a wake up call across the board. And it's not always wise to try and interpolate voter behaviour from one country into another, but the collapse of the Coalition vote (and the collapse of the Coalition itself, repeatedly and hilariously) here in 2025 — whose review was so scathing of how Dutton conducted the campaign that the Opposition leader threatened to sue for defamation — should be seen as a wake up call for Labor here, as well. It is not a good thing for a healthy democracy. While One Nation might siphon off disgruntled conservatives from the Coalition in the short term, it's patently obvious that Gina Rinehart is throwing so much money at Pauline Hanson not because she thinks she's electable — but because the objective is to move the Overton window that Labor operates in further and further to the right, too. The vast majority of the world does not want the world to become more conservative, meaner, nastier, more insular and violent to its people and its neighbours, and return to a time where the bigger and stronger took what they wanted when they wanted it. That is why those who do — and the billionaires who want to be left alone to operate with the impunity they believe their money should entitle them — are trying inordinately hard to amplify the voices of useful idiots who do not reflect the empathy, heart, and humanity that most of us actually feel towards one another but are too tired to do much about when we can barely pay rent or feed our families.

I don't want to see our Prime Minister taking smiling selfies with a criminal — convicted, accused, obviously guilty of in ways he managed to slime out of. I want the version of Anthony Albanese from over a decade ago who advocated for equality, fairness, speaking truth to power, and all of the things he was brave about when he had the luxury of not needing to back those words up with action.

I get that we're all scared of Murdoch, and Donald Trump, and an army of paid-for bots on social media. But we're also all taught early on that appeasing bullies doesn't make them leave you alone, it just makes them push you around more. I said to you last time, before the election, that people like me don't need to be told life will be worse under the Coalition — but as Democrats in the US are also discovering, establishment politicians who support the status quo and hope to get by on "hey, at least we aren't the other guys," like some sort of abusive ex partner capitalising on your fear to make you stay, this isn't working so much anymore. We expect a party that purports to call itself "centre-left" to actually advocate for progressive policies. It's in the absence of that, when people are fed up and don't see things getting better, that populists like Donald Trump and Pauline Hanson can slide in and take advantage of the disaffection.

I beg of Labor, at all levels of government, to give the country something better and more optimistic than "it could always get worse" — before it does under pathetic narcissists who use that need for change to only enrich themselves.

(This post contains obvious spoilers for Heated Rivalry, in case this catches anybody off-guard.)

Unless you've been under a rock lately, you've undoubtedly heard of the six-episode Canadian series about a gaggle of closeted hockey players navigating their private sexuality with their public projections of being heterosexual men. This isn't a review of it, per se, though if I were to give one I'd say that for all I heard about how relentlessly smutty it was, there were raunchier sex scenes in Queer as Folk over twenty years ago and I generally found much of the show extremely cliched, implausibly written, with pacing that made little to no sense (the six episodes take place over nearly a decade, somehow, which means that there are time-jumps of literal years within minutes of on-screen footage) — Jacob Tierney, the writer and creator of the show, was one of the co-writers on an absolutely brilliant Canadian series called Letterkenny, so I'm a little surprised by how sloppy the whole thing was. It's subsequently been revealed that it was an extremely low-budget production shot over the course of a month before HBO caught wind of the buzz and swooped in to give it broader exposure; this is being held up in an underdog sort of way but mostly I would say "it shows." It was shlocky and some episodes literally had me audibly groaning out loud (and not in a good way) — I am admittedly holding it to a higher standard than I think it intended to be, but there's so little queer media on the whole so it feels like a missed opportunity when it's not particularly great. Still, the last two episodes in particular redeemed it a bit further and I'd give another season a watch to see how it fares with more intentionality behind the writing and production instead of "we did not expect this to blow up the way it did." It shows.

Anyway, my not-review aside, I want to talk about something else that came up during the early marketing of the show — particularly around the real-life sexuality of the two main actors in the series, Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie. In an early interview with Jacob Tierney (himself one of the only two queer people headlining the show) and the two leads, Tierney shut down a journalist who asked about the sexualities of the main actors. My initial response was "oh yeah, sure," but after thinking about it for half a second I think dismissing this line of questioning is a disservice in and of itself.

Whether straight people are allowed to do queer roles is a perennial question and nothing remotely new, and there are advocates on either side of the argument. What I find particularly irritating in the case of Heated Rivalry, however, is that the "are they really gay in real life" question was a central part of the viral marketing that both actors — and showrunners — happily capitalised on around the show's release, so acting like it's an irrelevant question when everyone involved was happy to gay bait for attention is a little ridiculous to me.

In a perfect world, this would be irrelevant and straight people could do gay roles without issue or judgement — but the reverse is not the case, and in many professional realms someone coming out as queer is detrimental to their careers.

I mean, this is the central conceit of Heated Rivalry itself and why the three main characters, all of whom are queer, keep it to themselves for fear of losing their jobs if anyone finds out about their relationships with other men — coming out will destroy them and has to be kept a secret.

Straight actors can get Oscar nominations for playing queer roles while queer people are still often relegated to only the sassy best friend who fixes the straight main character's life, like some literal fairy-godhomo.

François Arnauld, himself openly bisexual, plays the character of Scott Hunter who comes out dramatically in episode five of the show. Scott Hunter had secretly been in a relationship with an out gay man, Kip Grady, who finally ended things after being unwilling to continue lying to friends and family to protect Scott's closeted secret. This is a reality that many queer people have lived experience about, both as the one begging their loved one to keep the secret and as the person being forced to do so. For those of us who feel our public identities have been hard-fought, it's an incredibly distressing thing to be asked to go back into the closet for someone else. On the topic of whether or not Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie are gay in real life, Arnauld had a similarly dismissive and reductionist response as Jacob Tierney.

In the season finale, Scott Hunter gives a speech at a ceremony where he accepts a MVP award soon after his public coming out. In that speech, he talks about how living a lie for so long was toxic and damaging to him and the people he cared about and how after going public with his sexuality, he was overwhelmed by the love and support — especially from other people who felt that they could come out as well. François Arnauld has said the same things about coming out openly as bisexual, as has Mitch Brown, who recently came out as the first bisexual man in the AFL's history.

I am genuinely happy for both Williams and Storrie who by all accounts were broadly unknown actors plucked up and thrown into something that became much bigger than anyone was prepared for. I hope this gives them many opportunities in the future and this is just the break they both deserved.

But visibility matters, and visible people bring us closer to a world where it is irrelevant if a straight actor is playing a gay role — because the same opportunities are afforded to queer actors, athletes, professionals, and creatives instead of forcing people to compartmentalise and hide parts of themselves out of fear. Until that day, queerbaiting for viral attention while being unwilling to answer whether or not it's genuine feels very much like trying to have the cake and eat it too.

This current Sydney Mardi Gras board member, who is re-running for his position with the backing of the "Protect Mardi Gras" initiative (I'll get back to them) doesn't seem able to respond to my question to him on Facebook. Weird, can't imagine why.

Of course, the question itself is rhetorical, because for all the Orwellian gaslighting by "Protect Mardi Gras" and gross misapplication of language, it's very obvious what the organisation actually wants to "protect" against. Since my original message has gone unanswered, I'll expand on my perspective about all of this and why I think it's important.

A primer for those outside of Australia: Mardi Gras is an event that takes place in Sydney every year and is one of the largest queer festivals in the world. Grown out of initial marches in Sydney arguing for queer rights through the 70s, the first "Mardi Gras" happened as a protest parade in 1978 in commemoration of and solidarity with the Stonewall Riots. At its inception it was a protest about the treatment of queer people, particularly by the police — the parade's permit was suddenly revoked and the parade itself forcibly broken up with over fifty people arrested — and a call for greater visibility and acceptance of queer people throughout Australia.

As in other parts of the world, as that visibility and acceptance has grown, those with the least discrimination against them are the first to step off the ladder and try to pull it up behind themselves. Assimilationist queers are not a new thing, and every oppressed minority has its own flavour of folks who think appeasement and ass-kissing is the best way to save their own necks.

Given the parade's origin out of police brutality against queer people, there's long been friction between those who don't feel they should have a presence in the parade and those who disagree.

There's been lots of compromises offered that stop short of a full ban: for example, police and military can march in other floats like every other community organisation does; why should they be given a special bespoke position in a parade that these days is already so long that actual legitimate queer organisations have their applications turned down due to lack of space? Even giving them that space but asking them not to march in uniform is seen as an unreasonable bridge too far at our event created because of their actions, harassment, and discrimination.

It's also often said that queer police and military should be able to march alongside allies, to which my response is: quit your job? A uniform you can take off is not the same as an innate, intrinsic part of your identity that you will lose your rights — or worse — over.

Anyway, this friction has come increasingly to a head over the years, particularly in light of what is seen by an increasing portion of the voting membership as institutional failures by Mardi Gras itself to hold politicians accountable for doing more to protect us. Many people don't feel that the organisation holds wide swaths of the queer community in equal regard, and it's not hard to see why.

This is where I, with great reticence, must speak about Jesse Matheson: a former board member and now interim CEO of Mardi Gras who is also an odious, detestable person that I would rather never have a synapse fire about in a perfect timeline, but this is the timeline that we live in.

I won't get into the Jesse Matheson I knew privately as a person, but I don't really have to because his public record speaks for itself: when he was a writer for Star Observer, Australia's largest and longest-running queer publication, I once saw Matheson referred to as a "gay Miranda Divine" and I can think of no comparison more appropriate. He's most infamous for an incredibly offensive piece defending the sacred right of queers to discriminate against other queers on dating apps, but genuinely — this is really the tip of the iceberg of awful, nasty things he wrote during his tenure with Star Observer as far as I'm concerned. Unfortunately, much of his archive there was pulled at his request a few years later so you can't truly experience the spectrum of shitty opinions Matheson had about everything (don't worry, I have a lot of contempt with Star Observer agreeing to do this, as well — what examples can you think of a "journalist" asking a former outlet to eliminate their contributions to that outlet, and that outlet agrees?). When Matheson was running for the Mardi Gras board initially and his terrible writing (both in content and in style) started generating controversy that might overshadow his attempt to get a board seat, this was when he, suddenly — though the articles had been online for years with no retraction or apology before then — had a public change of heart and penned an apology explaining that in the — checks notes — ~three years between the original article and wanting to run for a board seat, he'd grown older and wiser and learned "the power of words." Convenient.

(The years-later apology was taken down in the later purge as well, incidentally — not simply the original, offending article. I'll leave it to the reader to interpret how remorseful that action comes across.)

I find that people contemporarily try to justify his writing back then by pointing to his age. And, yes, those of us like myself who knew Matheson at the time could certainly tell you that he was young and stupid and confidently writing opinions about things he was ill-equipped to speak on — like many people who are given a platform beyond their world experience. But those of us who knew him also know that he demanded to be taken seriously as a Serious Journalist™, and dismissing him using that platform in a national publication "because he was nineteen" does a disservice to every nineteen year old who isn't writing divisive, discriminatory, and damaging things to generate attention.

He's also only a few years younger than I am, and as a contributing writer to one of the US' largest print magazines for young queer people, I certainly wrote things that I look back on now and cringe at — because I was a sixteen year old giving life advice to strangers that, though it came from a place of sincerity, I had no lived experience to speak to.

But, I am happy to say that across my entire career as a writer I don't think I'm likely to find myself in a position, years later, of having to retract and apologise for offending people with something that is now taken as bigoted — and certainly not because I was intentionally trying to be ~ * ~ controversial ~ * ~, either.

He also is fine pointing out that when he was elected to the Mardi Gras board at twenty-four he was one of the youngest members ever on it — why does his age exempt him from criticism for using his platform at the time to share opinions which hurt and disenfranchised even more marginalised members of our community when he wants to use his age as an accomplishment in and of itself later on?

In any event, the argument that "he was young" is blown out of the water when two years ago or so he referred to an indigenous elected representative with offensive language in response to her actions in protest against police at the parade itself. Lidia Thorpe has been a more consistent ally and champion for queer people and queer rights beyond anything he's done for anyone who doesn't look like he does, and calling her an "idiot" is truly contemptible.

It was disheartening enough that he got elected to the board in the first place, but especially moreso that he was installed as interim CEO without external deliberation and allegedly following a board-only meeting that he, himself, was present at.

The internal reaction to his appointment was a mass exodus of staff directly citing his promotion as their reason for quitting, and a letter signed by thirteen of the organisation's then-fifteen employees directly calling the board out for it:

Signed by 13 of the non-profit’s then-15 employees and delivered on a Friday about 40 days ago, the letter was blunt: the board’s appointment of Jesse Matheson as interim CEO, announced to staff earlier that week but not made public until five weeks later, was said to pose a serious reputational and financial risk – and could potentially jeopardise the organisation’s ability to pass an upcoming audit.

Their departures came as Mardi Gras was still grappling with the fallout from a scathing governance review by auditors KPMG, mandated by Destination NSW as part of its agreement to provide the non-profit with the $1.1 million in emergency funding.

The final report, given to Mardi Gras in October last year but leaked to Gay Sydney News in December, identified issues with a financial report Beckwith had presented to the directors and raised concerns about Bear simultaneously serving as board co-chair, company secretary, and chair of the audit and risk committee – roles it said “should ideally be independent of the Board Chair position”.

Classified as an “extreme” risk was the independence of the unpaid board. It said many members had longstanding ties to Mardi Gras through volunteer roles or governance history, which the review said could “potentially impair their ability to act completely independently”.

Despite the review’s warnings about blurred governance lines, the board responded to Beckwith’s resignation by appointing company secretary Matheson as interim CEO.

That decision – which staff argued in their letter was made without a transparent selection process and, according to a source close to the organisation, was made immediately after a closed-door, board-only strategy session on governance and operations that Matheson himself took part in – would go on to unravel confidence within the organisation.

“That certainly raised eyebrows,” the source said of Matheson’s participation in the session, adding that co-chairs had told staff he was chosen directly after the all-day meeting.

Promoting the company secretary – who had already been attending board meetings – to interim CEO blurred essential lines between oversight and operations, staff wrote.

Speaking only for myself, if I'd been promoted to a position and the response by a significant amount of current staff was to quit and write a letter to the board about my appointment, I'd assess whether or not it was best for the organisation I'd been promoted in to still be there. At bare minimum I'd listen to the overwhelming voices in opposition, internally and externally, instead of thinking I knew better.

But, then again, my ego fits within the same room I'm in, so perhaps I'm operating on a different wavelength here.

When I ran Sydney Gaymers and GX Australia, I regularly had conversations with young queer kids of colour who specifically told me about their experiences on dating apps like Grindr — a comment by one particularly sticks in my mind whenever I think about this topic: "when I came out and started looking at going on dates and saw wall after wall of profiles saying 'no asians,' it hurt more than any bullying I'd ever experienced beforehand."

I do genuinely hope that Matheson has taken the time to reflect on the pain and harm his actions caused, and how when he had the opportunity to use his platform for good he tried "to create conflict" instead; given his propensity to blame it on his age and immaturity, though, I think he's more concerned about losing career opportunities and progression now than any genuine contrition over his behaviour back then — behaviour that I have little reason to think has changed, only that he's been shrewder about how publicly he shares it.

In any event, and with the fervent hope that I never have to think about this truly awful person ever again, this is the backdrop against which "Protect Mardi Gras" enters the chat and the "inclusivity" they seem to want to maintain.

Though it purports itself to be a grassroots organisation, their official website has no information about who they are, who the initiative is organised and paid for by, and who is directing things. One can certainly intuit, given that there's only a handful of actual names directly quoted on the site, and in other sources and interviews externally there are people identified as "founders," but it's quite an odd absence to be missing from the official website and other official resources. The decision to register as an international .org domain instead of an Australian-specific .org.au also conveniently sidesteps the registrar requirements in this country that the organisation be an actually-incorporated non-profit identity whose finances (and directors) would be available for public scrutiny. This omission is particularly weird given some of the people they're directly endorsing for the Mardi Gras board in the upcoming AGM vote.

"Protect Mardi Gras," with its flashy and splashy marketing (but using a gmail address), came in opposition to other actually-grassroots initiatives that have been increasingly successful in trying to hold the Mardi Gras board accountable to the queer community and force it to respect its political and activistic origins. Their particular ire is towards the Pride in Protest faction whose motions have increasingly grown in support year on year and whose criticism of Mardi Gras overall is that it's an overly-corporatised event which falls far short of what it needs to do for queer Australians.

I think it's obvious by now that I agree more with Pride in Protest's aims than "Protect Mardi Gras," and think the latter absolutely falls into assimilationist and appeasement territory. I don't think police have a reason to be marching in a parade that was inspired by their treatment of us — especially when that treatment continues to this day. I'd stop short of a full ban completely, but there's certainly no reason for them to have a bespoke slot in the parade lineup when other organisations actually operating within our interests can't get in.

And if Albanese wants to march again so badly, he and Labor can actually adopt some progressive, leftist politics for once.

Even more pointedly, given the fact that the last time there was a vote on banning police participation at Mardi Gras it nearly passed with 50% of the votes, it's obvious that enough people don't want them there and don't feel comfortable with them there that any leader with any sense of morality and decency wouldn't wait to be banned — they'd opt not to participate out of respect for the clear voices who don't feel safe with them around, and commit to earning that safety back instead of forcing their way in like bullies.

Asking our community to demand accountability and action from government leaders, alongside promising protection and safety for those within our community who are not white or cis-passing and are treated disproportionately worse because of it, is not "divisive" and "non-inclusive." Using double-speak to muddy intention is childish at best, and if you're the sort of queer who thinks that not rocking the boat will get us rights and respect, I will politely ask you to do the same sort of self-reflection that I think Mardi Gras' interim CEO — someone who was happy to use his platform to ridicule, diminish, and demean for clicks when it suited him, who now wants to be excused for his age and immaturity now that it no longer does — needs to engage in.

(I will also impolitely tell you to grow up, too. Considering the very tone-deaf response by "Protect Mardi Gras" co-founder Peter Stahel in response to one of the board candidates his organisation is backing sending unsolicited campaign material that outed a voting member to their homophobic parents, I don't have high hopes there, though.)

You've got until November 15th to register as a voting member for the upcoming AGM if you're interested in having a say on the direction where one of Australia's most important events for queer visibility ends up heading. One faction doesn't want to be too inconvenient lest banks back out of sponsoring (oops) or the party gets ruined with "politics," the other wants accountability from law enforcement, corporations, politicians — and one another — so they actually do more for our community and our status as equal human beings. I know where my vote will go.

In a breathtakingly dumb op-ed (which, these days — boy howdy is that saying something) from The New York Times and published on September 11th, Ezra Klein (paywall) makes a wet-spaghetti argument that Charlie Kirk was a mere orator who was sadly "assassinated" for his political opinions And We Don't Do That In America™ — absent all the other times exactly that has happened in the US throughout history, I guess.

Let's get one thing out of the way upfront — Charlie Kirk was a white supremacist with Nazi-adjacent (and often outright Nazi) beliefs who used the platform that made him a multi-millionaire to terrorise and destroy the lives of people he disagreed with politically. When this inevitably led to violence — either indirectly as a result of the climate he contributed to or directly from his "professor hit lists" and other encouragement of bad behaviour — he wiped his hands of accountability or said the victims in some way had merited it. As has done the rounds many times since then, he said that gun violence was the price to be paid so conservatives with gun fetishes can misunderstand the Second Amendment. As the kids say these days, fuck around and find out.

BuzzFeed has a 101 primer of some of the odious shit this awful person said before his murder, but let's not pretend he simply had political views out of alignment with others. He advocated for violence against those he disagreed with and gleefully cheered when it happened. He was literally spouting hate up to the last moments of his life.

Do I think he deserved this? No, shooting people is not really a solution I advocate for in most instances. Am I surprised that someone who was fine with violence against those he disagreed with ideologically found himself the victim of it? Not in the slightest. Am I going to mourn a racist bigot no longer being on the planet? No — dying doesn't make you less of an asshole in life, and I'm more fearful for how this action is going to be co-opted to turn him into a martyr than I am sad at his loss.

Because, indeed, even before anything was known about the shooter it had already been decided that this was the action of "the left," Democrats, queer folks, academics, etc etc. Ignoring the fact that violence is generally the purview of conservatives/the militant right and murdering Charlie Kirk does nothing to advance leftist causes in any capacity, up until earlier today there was zero indication about the politics or motives of the shooter. Now that there's a suspect in custody, people are trawling everything for evidence to confirm their knee-jerk suspicions. The Wall Street Journal bleated that "pro-trans messages" had been engraved on the bullets believed to have been involved in the murder only to quietly go oops presumably after someone explained to them that "TRN" related to the Turkish company, Turan, that likely manufactured them.

Other information about the suspect strikes me as general 4chan meme bullshittery that people who aren't terminally online won't understand; that's often the objective of 4chan on the whole, too — co-opt language and references to confuse people who don't understand them contextually so nobody knows what you're really affiliated with. While it's still early, all indications are pointing to the likelihood that the suspect was an adherent of the "Groypers," an even more horrible group of neo-Nazis started by Nick Fuentes who think that Republicans and MAGA aren't awful and racist enough.

The Free Speech Absolutists of the right have responded to all of this as you'd expect — violent calls for retaliation (paywall) against people who had nothing to do with it, targeted attacks and death threats (paywall) against women/queer/black folks who aren't self-flagellating themselves for not mourning Kirk's death sufficiently enough, and so, so much censorship (paywall).

I expect this sort of hypocrisy from conservatives because being ideologically consistent is never something to be relied upon with them, but it's obnoxious as all hell for theoretical-lefitsts like Klein who are rushing to get on a high horse as if Kirk's only crime was being a bit controversial.

He was an awful human being, and while I don't think that's enough to merit being murdered I'm not going to pretend that the world is a better place with viewpoints like his in it.

At about the same time as Kirk's murder, a sixteen year old opened fire at his high school and wounded two people before killing himself. This puts the tally at over three hundred mass shootings in 2025 (much higher depending on how "mass shooting" is defined). Thankfully no one was killed so far aside from the shooter, but law enforcement are saying that the teenager had been radicalised online.

The right is lamenting that there will never be another person like him again — we can only hope, but I'm not optimistic that someone worse isn't gearing up to take his place.

My name is Joshua Meadows; whilst I am originally from the United States, I've been living in Australia for nearly twenty years. In September, I will mark my tenth anniversary of being a dual citizen of both countries. More to the point, I've been a member of your electorate for about two years and this will be my first election where I'm casting a vote for who gets to hold the seat. I moved from the CBD back in 2023, in an electorate held by the Greens, and this is my first time living in a seat held by Labor.

Coincidentally enough, I live just down the street from your office and regularly pass it while heading to and from the train station, which is why I feel there is value in reaching out directly.

I recently received campaign material from you putting the upcoming election into a stark contrast between a better future with Labor or a dramatic regression under Peter Dutton and the Coalition. As an American living overseas for two decades, I've been watching what such a regression might look like as Trump and his enablers enact wide swathes of devastation across economic and social safety nets, trash civil rights for vulnerable minorities, arrest and terrorise those who are just seeking a better life for themselves and their loved ones, and destroy democratic norms that have been taken for granted for hundreds of years. I'm terrified for what my friends and family back home are going through, and I'm terrified at how easily the same thing could happen here.

But, I must strongly disagree that the upcoming choice we have in this election is a simple binary one between Labor and the Liberals. One of the wonderful things about Australia is that the two-party system is not a requirement, unlike back in the United States, and there are other options if the major parties are leaving much to be desired.

While Temu Voldemort would objectively be a terrible, horrible development for Australia (I lived through Abbott, Turnbull, and Morrison in quick succession, so I know what a right-wing government does when it has the chance), I don't think a Labor majority is objectively much better than simply throwing one's arms in the air and saying "can't be worse."

Labor has been in government for several years now and has done nothing to meaningfully deal with income inequality, media consolidation in the hands of wealthy people who do not respect democracy, immigration justice and fairness for the neediest who are fleeing situations all of us cannot even comprehend, protecting trans folks or tackling the existential threat caused by climate change, nor taking a bold moral stance on recent global developments like Trump's catastrophic reappearance or the ongoing genocide in Palestine. I constantly look for Albanese to put forth a brave and powerful point of view on these issues and countless times I am simply left wanting. And, while you are not Anthony Albanese himself, you're campaigning under the same party — a party that is asking me to make a choice between an objectively awful future for everyone without millions of dollars in their bank account or "well, at least it won't get worse."

That's a political binary I am used to in the United States, but it fortunately is not the case here. While I preference Labor above the Coalition (and certainly above the more regressive and bigoted parties like One Nation), they have not done much to directly earn my vote. I don't hold the view that they do well for the majority of the country when they are in the majority themselves — why would they, when so many Labor MPs are similarly also millionaires and landlords with investment properties benefitting from negative gearing who went to the same private all-boys' schools that send off feckless, spineless "journalists" to cover corruption and inequality in the country?

I know I am amongst many across Australia who feel that the binary choice between the two major parties is not making life better for most of us. It's disheartening that such attrition goes to the right-wing nationalist fringe groups when Labor could pick up a lot by putting forth genuinely transformative policies instead of being catatonic at the possibility of what Dutton and Murdoch might whine about; if Labor didn't vote in mostly lockstep with the right-wing and then complain that genuinely progressive groups are taking them to account for not being that different on paper, they would eagerly get the votes from people like me.

Albanese doesn't hold my seat, but you do — and if the historical record is much indication, you will likely retain it next month. But, for all this letter might simply be pointless recrimination when you don't need my vote one way or another, I politely extend the advice that repeatedly giving people a choice between "worse, or the same" every time only works to a certain point.

It's an undeniable reality out of the 2024 US election that millions of progressives simply stayed out of voting, in a country where it isn't compulsory, because the Democratic party failed to meaningfully engage with anyone at all left of the centre (and even there it's debatable given how far the US' Overton window has shifted). Labor is repeating the same mistake: I, and millions of other progressives like myself, don't need to be sold on the possibility that the Coalition will make things worse — we all know that they will. If you care about courting our votes, we need to be sold on the idea that Labor is going to make things better.

I'd rather not see Australia emulate what is happening in the US when someone with populist charisma and abhorrent viewpoints on democracy comes along to pull enough of the disenfranchised and disaffected who feel let down by the status quo. We're all getting to witness what that looks like in real time, and I want Australia to be better than "can't get any worse."

So, for the sake of us all, if Labor gets a majority government again, I hope you actually do something with it beyond "hey, at least we aren't Peter Dutton."

Of that much, we surely have to all agree. Even the biggest boot-lickers have to realise what incompetent bozos we've presently got behind the levers of power in the United States.

The same [predominantly white dudes] who breathlessly bleat and blaaah about meritocracies over "woke DEI," by which they always mean "people who don't look like me and don't agree with me got things that I, by virtue of how I look and think, feel entitled to have instead," would never get into these positions on their own merit. Which is why we're here now: trust fund babies with daddy issues —surrounding themselves with useless sycophants who always tell them what good boys they are — have failed upwards into the most important roles in the most important spheres of influence which control the most dangerous mechanisms of democracy, government, military, and societal structure.

What a fun time to be alive.

These dipshits can't do their jobs because they fail at most things they've ever done, and without even bigger failures to enable them they'd never get anywhere in the first place. So they break, and they break, and you have to presume at one point that the breaking really is the entire objective because surely they wouldn't seriously go out and tell people that they're doing a good job when you just know Pete Hegseth is literally crying to his own reflection in the mirror every night.

They even suck at doing a shit job.

So, to take a page out of the Trump shortlist of insults he can still remember, these people are losers. And you know it's true, because Trump trots that one out to literally anyone who ever disagrees with him — and, it's a hallmark of a narcissist to project their own insecurities onto everyone else around them. He knows they're all losers, too.

More to the point on my last post:

The lawyer defending the administration clearly ignoring judicial orders and deporting people without due-process is an individual making an individual choice.

I don't care why, or the circumstances behind that job activity; this is someone who is choosing to stand up and defend Trump in an obviously-illegal action.

The lawyer standing before the court and obfuscating who was responsible for policy attacking trans service-members is an individual choosing to carry out this action.

I don't care why, I have no interest in their justifications over the fact that they're willing to enable this bigotry.

The lawyer pretending he does not know who's actually in charge of DOGE when we all know who's actually in charge of DOGE is choosing to feign ignorance.

I don't care why. They're either for this bullshit, or they'll grow some scruples and stop participating in it.

Every single individual who has anything to do with any aspect of the operation of ICE is complicit in this. I hold out less hope that they'll realise the fascist, bigoted systems they're gears within, but I don't want a lack of mention to be mistaken for ignorance of their support for the institution of American Gestapo.

Again, I don't care why you're doing it. "I was just following orders" is not, and has never been, justification for abhorrent behaviour.

We have all grown up learning history about the individuals who made the right decision when it mattered most. To the extent those stories are lionised, exaggerated, embellished, or otherwise doesn't matter — their lesson remains the same. People participate in these systems, and people can refuse to allow their energy, time, effort, and labour to help them run.

Every awful thing done because Trump, and his enablers, demands it of you is still an action on your conscience, in your name, and on your soul.

May history remember you for the actions you've taken.

(As an addendum, we should also remember, and be inspired by, those who take a stand in defiance to this sort of capitulation and cooperation — people like Rachel Cohen, who has used her position of relative power and privilege in stark contrast to those who are too scared to.)

I don't particularly care what Trump has threatened to do, thought about doing, or actually done. Trump is a vessel of resentment, self-entitlement, animosity, and vengeance. What we're seeing these days is that Id brought to the forefront and given free rein to do whatever it wants in all its nasty, anti-social glory. Trump is a creature driven entirely by spite — spite against those who stood in his way during his first administration, who now need to be taught a lesson. This extends from comedians who made fun of him to foreign leaders who obstructed him, to say nothing of individual civil servants, judges, lawyers, or anyone else who told him "no." When you understand that root psychology, nothing about the man is shocking or surprising.

So, I don't really care what he does — he's going to do what he promised he would, and that he has shouldn't surprise or appal anybody. Trump will burn the world down out of petty, myopic narcissism if he's allowed to do so.

Instead, I care about those who are enabling this. Much can be said about the Republicans in Congress entirely abdicating their responsibility for the legislative functions of the government and I don't think their feckless subservience bears anything more than contempt. They've been on this authoritarian slide for forty years and it's been obvious that their motto has been "power at all costs" for half as long.

But the day to day people enabling the worst of Trump's impulses? The useful idiots in DOGE who think Musk is a genius and don't realise the criminal behaviour they're engaging in? The cowards who have rolled over at the first hurdle — or even earlier — rather than stand up for their previously-professed principles? These are where the finger should be pointed.

Trump is Trump, this is apparent now more than it ever could have been. He's doing what he promised to do.

But everyone else doesn't have to go along with it, and when they do you must ask why. Not everyone is operating from a place of fear — enough are, certainly, but enough are just chickenshit, or self-serving, or gleeful collaborators. And plenty of people are just disconnected from this until it becomes a problem they, personally, cannot ignore. You're going to have to get involved a lot earlier than that — at bare minimum, the apparatus enabling Trump is trying to break as much as it can before it's properly stopped, ideally at a point where stopping them doesn't make a difference, and people are going to have to decide how much of that they wish to put up with before they become their own impediment to this chaos, too.

History will judge, etc, etc, but nothing's stopping us from shaming all involved in real time now, too.

There's a lot of terrible news coming out of the United States these days, so much of it that it seems difficult keeping track of everything, but this patently transparent bit of hate does bear a specific call out:

The National Park Service has removed all mentions of the words "transgender" and "queer" from its web page dedicated to the Stonewall National Monument, a site that marks a landmark moment for LGBTQ rights quite literally led by transgender and gender non-conforming people.

The site's online hub for the New York visitor centre and park honouring the 1969 Stonewall Uprising, a turning point for LGBTQ activism and civil rights in America, now only makes reference to "LGB civil rights," omitting the T and Q representing transgender and queer people in the acronym.

Erasing our history requires more than deleting text on a website, but capitulation here will lead to more extensive reality retcons.

And, let me be emphatic here: any queer people aiding and abetting this bullshit under the pretext of thinking they're going to spare themselves from similar trouble is delusional and throwing their community under the bus in the name of self-preservation they're never going to get. You can't nice your way out of fascism.

I'll also leave with this from Heather Cox Richardson:

Protesters today packed Christopher Park in New York City’s Greenwich Village near the Stonewall National Monument after the Trump administration erased “TQ+” from the LGBTQ+ on the monument’s website. The Stonewall Uprising of 1969, six days of conflict between police and LGBTQ+ protesters after police raided the Stonewall Inn, brought the longstanding efforts of LGBTQ+ activists for civil rights to popular attention, making Stonewall a symbol of LGBTQ+ rights.

Trans activists Marsha P. Johnson and Silvia Rivera were key figures in the Stonewall Uprising. Acknowledging their contribution, one protester held a sign that read, “NATIONAL PARK SERVICE: YOU CAN’T SPELL HISTORY WITHOUT A ‘T’”

Former Republican operative Stuart Stevens had a different take. He posted: “When I see the sexual orientation hate come out of the Republican party under the pretext of just being anti-Trans, I am very tempted to name the Republican operatives and elected officials who are closeted gays. It’s not a short list.”

There's a specific nuance to the fact that Musk is primarily utilising very young dudes as his hammer wrecking shit in the federal government at the moment. I've seen guys like him a lot in tech and nerd circles — and particularly in video games. Guys who absolutely cannot interact with their own peers or community in any meaningful, normal way — either because they have abhorrent opinions, terrible social skills, or make others uncomfortable/unsafe — but in a very specific niche they have found a group of folks who don't know better who look up to them as idols.

I doubt in Musk's case it's any explicit or calculated behaviour, and I'm sure all of us have known some dude whose friends are always creepily way, way younger than he is. That dude probably wasn't also the richest person on the planet, which makes the scenario even sadder on its face.

But he's getting these young guys — some of them literally still teenagers — because they're not old enough to question any of this and probably think Elon is a super cool dude. And because Musk is an absolute loser, he's surrounded himself with young sycophants who don't know better.

And, yeah, I'm sure there's some alignment of viewpoint too but these guys are also young enough that I doubt they have genuine convictions as much as somebody they think is super cool is giving them this super cool, important responsibility. They just don't know better and can't remotely fathom the consequences of aiding and abetting this.

This isn't to make an excuse for any of it, either, but I recognise a lot of behaviour in this situation from past ones I've personally had to deal with where a creepy, vaguely predatory figure needed to be managed for the safety of others.

But Musk is a thin-skinned manbaby who is so deeply pathetic that despite having more wealth than many countries' GDP still lies about being good at video games and (almost) assuredly has faked several sockpuppet accounts to make himself look better. It would be funny if it wasn't so serious.

I've been making a concerted effort to avoid doomscrolling and have been dramatically limiting the amount of articles I read and the sources that I allow that news to come through. My social media time is deliberately curtailed more than it really ever has been.

It's not in an attempt to avoid anything, but rather an understanding that psychological blitzkrieg is the aim here, and even if Trump says something that gets a flurry of headlines and causes spontaneous outrage 1) he's probably only saying it to cause a distraction from something else 2) he's going to change his mind five minutes later because he has the attention span of a particularly stupid cocker spaniel. (No offence intended to cocker spaniels).

That said, though, and lest I be accused of hypocrisy here — I'm not really sure how the situation right now can be described as anything but dire.

Musk treating the US federal government the way he treated Twitter — smash everything up and figure out how to monetise the pieces — was not precisely on my bingo card. Or, I hadn't expected him to get as much chaos through as quickly as he has.

But this is a constitutional crisis of epic proportions; even if the courts tell Musk to stop — and they are telling Musk to stop — the branch of government that's tasked with enforcing those rulings are also under the control with the person who's issuing the orders. And Musk is not known to just accept decisions he dislikes — this is taking "ask forgiveness, not permission" to insane extremes, and he's clearly going to break everything he can and hope it's a moot point by the time anyone might be able to stop him.

There's resistance in the brave civil servants who are refusing to play ball, but yet again Trump et al provide an ample example that the founding fathers never accounted for a scenario where one party would have this much control and everything would rest on the reliability of people refusing to do terrible things.

In other news: I have set up a Bluesky account since that seems to be where everyone has gone. I was already on Mastodon, and will probably see how feasible it is to crosspost to both before deciding whether or not to keep the latter, but feel free to add or engage with me there (or on both!), too.

An unelected, immigrant (possibly working illegally on a student visa, at that) billionaire taking control of the levers of government is a coup.

Putting college interns with no government experience in charge of the most vital systems behind the US' federal finances, who are beholden to no one but him, is a coup.

Firing people who refuse to play along with this, or in retaliation for following the law in a way that made Trump angry, is a coup.

On the one hand, all of this was so obviously going to happen — Trump emphatically said he was going to do this — that part of me is in a state of "well, what did anyone expect?"

On the other, this is shocking, and it's shocking how little it's being treated as shocking. There is no real scramble to fight against it that I can see. The Democrats appear to be rolling over and doing nothing in the face of a hostile takeover of the US. Chuck Schumer is being sarcastic about the price of tomatoes while federal officials are locked out of their jobs and classified computer systems are being breached because Musk wants access to things he was denied clearance to access.

It's always been apparent that Trump has never wanted to be President in any political capacity: he wanted the cachet of the title to lord over those whose respect and admiration he demanded or felt entitled to; he wanted the office to operate as a grift for the financial benefit of himself (first and foremost, and his family at a distant second); he wanted to stay out of prison for his various criminal offences and find a way to escape penalties for the civil ones. He's notedly bored of the realities of the office and his poor attention span and impulse control has always led to scenarios where someone else could easily manipulate him in other directions if they knew the right buttons to press.

Ergo, where we are now with Musk.

The only potential saving grace is that he's as much of a narcissist as Trump is, and I don't think he's clever or calculated enough to stay behind the scenes enough to not provoke Trump's ire. Nor do I believe he's going to be satisfied playing second fiddle and not getting the credit.

But either way, this is all in the "worst case scenario" category and is absolutely frightening to witness in real time.

The brilliant-as-always Grace Tame on why Anthony Albanese has been a goddamn disappointment as Prime Minister, even if Peter Dutton is an objectively evil alternative, and how Rupert Murdoch is the most evil of all:

In the past two days, there’s been more outrage over my silly t-shirt than this genuinely outrageous reality, or the fact that on January 26, footage of young boys referring to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders as “slaves” and “n*****s” flooded the internet. Australia’s mainstream media machine has once again proven itself to be a vacuous, hypocritical, self-serving vortex of exponential waste, ironically ensuring that my point was made over and over and over again. The imperialist hegemony is more afraid of equity, justice, truth, peace and a sense of humour than it is of the world literally burning.

I've also been saying this about Australia for nearly two decades but maybe if it comes from a "real" Australian, the lesson will be internalised:

It’s also revealed that while Australia casts itself as a laidback larrikin, game for a laugh, it is in fact a cowardly cop bought by the illusion of civility politics.

This is also how you can tell these people aren't genuinely serious; for all the whining about decorum and civility, the nastiest, biggest bully in history just got re-elected to be President; an odious individual of a magnitude that has him brazenly mocking those with disabilities, attacking the appearance of women who have criticised him (or accused him of assault), and called wounded veterans losers.

Maybe Albanese should be concerned with more than a swear word on a t-shirt, but I appreciate that the US exports its shitty politics as well as its shitty reality television.

Also, this great, scathing critique of everyone's favourite emerald Nazi:

Elon Musk could have redefined transportation, reshaped cities, and written the future. Instead, he chose to be a 4Chan-guzzling reply guy with a failing car company, hemorrhaging value while screeching about pronouns. While he sets fire to his credibility, his competitors are engineering the products he was too busy shitposting to build. And so, the final chapter of Tesla isn't about innovation. It's about the hubris of a white supremacist who thinks he rules the world. The brand that once promised to save the planet is now a study in how fast one ketamine-addled man-child can drive a company off a cliff.

Growing up in the southern US and learning about slavery and then the Holocaust and whatnot, I used to genuinely not understand how any of those injustices could have ever happened.

I asked relentless questions of the adults teaching me that history because I couldn't understand why slaves didn't just stand up for themselves, I didn't understand why people went along with the fascists, I couldn't understand why nobody stopped the Nazis before they became powerful; as a child it just seemed patently obvious to me that there were more people around who could say no and not enough to punish everyone who did.

My naivety was dismissed.

Of course, as an adult I do now understand how much of a motivator fear is, and how easily people can be terrified out of doing the right — and hard — thing. I've learned how bad people can exploit that. I've learned how the pressure to fit in and not draw attention to yourself can, slowly and incrementally, be pushed to horrifying extremes.

But what those history lessons really should have gone into about more is that a lot of people don't need to be afraid at all. A lot of society — a larger portion than would genuinely and introspectively admit it to themselves, much less openly — is happy to fall in line when a fascist demands it because a lot of people have their own authoritarian undercurrent.

"I was just following the rules."

"They deserved it."

Anyway, I took for granted that this stuff was just something I'd read about in the past tense. I never anticipated being alive during a time where I'd directly witness proactive capitulation by the people and institutions who are supposed to stand firm against this stuff. The historic examples of fascism I learned about are always framed in a good vs evil kind of way that really failed to show how selfish and self-serving it actually all is.

Fun times.

First, in "oh gee oh golly you don't say" news, this from Mashable:

Published by misinformation watchdog NewsGuard, the analysis found that only 14 percent of sampled posts with Russian, Chinese, and Iranian disinformation narratives were flagged as false by Meta. "The vast majority of posts advancing foreign disinformation narratives spread without carrying any of the fact-checking labels used by Meta: False, Altered, Partly False, Missing Context, or Satire," the organization claims.

I think anyone who has ever reported anything on Facebook, of which I have done dozens if not hundreds of times in the near-twenty years I have had an account, knows that Facebook has never done a respectable job of getting rid of content.

A couple of years ago a bunch of deepfake videos of Australian politicians and business leaders were all over Facebook scamming people and this became a big enough issue to be on the mainstream news here; I've seen and reported many of them and Facebook still came back saying that they found nothing wrong with the clearly fake, clearly scammy, clearly misrepresentative content they take ad revenue for.

Anyway on a separate topic — and I had already made this conscious decision for myself ahead of the Cheeto's actual installation in the White House this past week — I'm pointedly refusing to engage with the news (specifically as it pertains to Trump) to the extent that I used to. The objective is to overwhelm and despair and I'm not doing it this time around.

I saw this mentioned on social media and it seems like a good idea as otherwise I was essentially limiting my Trumpworld engagement to the very stunning daily newsletter by Heather Cox Richardson (even if it is on Substack).

Reis thinks the once-a-day timing of The Logoff can provide a sort of permission structure for stepping back from the headlines. “So much of the first Trump administration was trying to understand his actions in real time,” he said. “He’d make an announcement, and we’d all rush to cover what he’d said. Then, an hour later, it would come out that what he said wasn’t representative of what was happening, so we’d all rush to cover the gap between what he’d promised and what he’d said. And then he would deny he ever said what he said, and we’d all rush to cover that. And in the end, we’d end up basically where we started, but we’d have put readers through several rounds of whiplash in pursuit of being ‘first.'”

I think refusing to engage with all of this in realtime is an extremely critical part of surviving the horror of the next few years. We don't need to experience every randomly-firing synapse in this narcissist's brain as it happens.

This article from The Atlantic (back in 2020!) is behind a paywall, but worth the read if you can access it. It does a good job of contrasting the last few decades of Republicans abandoning any pretence of adherence to the ideals of anything beyond power at all costs with similar examples of exuberant support of fascism throughout history.

"In the 1950s, when an insect known as the Colorado potato beetle appeared in Eastern European potato fields, Soviet-backed governments in the region triumphantly claimed that it had been dropped from the sky by American pilots, as a deliberate form of biological sabotage. Posters featuring vicious red-white-and-blue beetles went up all across Poland, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia. No one really believed the charge, including the people making it, as archives have subsequently shown. But that didn’t matter. The point of the posters was not to convince people of a falsehood. The point was to demonstrate the party’s power to proclaim and promulgate a falsehood. Sometimes the point isn’t to make people believe a lie—it’s to make people fear the liar."

As a survivor of an abusive, violent, chaotic childhood, it's taken a lot of effort, therapy, and willpower (which I'm still not always great at) to pull myself out of interpreting every conflict I find myself in through the lens of a powerless child who was being treated poorly by the adults who were supposed to protect him.

For much of my adult life, my reaction to those situations was a dramatic and decisive overcompensation where I certainly made it clear that I wouldn't be bullied, but usually at the cost of freaking out or scaring people who didn't intend to.

So, seeing news coverage of some of the worst people in the United States parading around in a smug victory lap triggers some of the deepest and intense feelings of moral injustice that I'm capable of feeling. I had to stop looking at the news after a short amount of time.

As I wrote a couple days ago, it's easy — and, quite fair, I would say — to feel despondent in this moment. I feel deep sadness that this is where we now are. I feel deep fear for those who are more disadvantaged and less privileged than I am, still stuck in the US when I am thousands of kilometres away watching the shit-show from a distance.

It's very hard not to feel bitter that enough people hate those who look different, live different, or believe different than they do that they'd put a narcissistic abuser into the most powerful position in the US government, aided and abetted by sycophants and psychopaths who gleefully get to unleash their worst impulses on the country and the world.

And while I wouldn't say that everyone who voted for Trump is a bigot, enough of them certainly are, and did so in excited anticipation of him remaking the country on those terms. I don't know if I have more contempt for those than I do the poorly-informed and politically-disengaged who ridiculously think Republicans (and Trump, one of the least successful businessmen to ever fail upwards) are going to bring the cost of living down for the average person. At least the bigots are honest in their hate.

History always feels like an abstract, distant thing — something that happened then, not something you're constantly in the stream of as it happens now. It's only with hindsight that you see how it mattered and the ramifications of things that seemed less ramifying in the moment.

I write stories for a living. I'm lucky enough that I get to do it as a career. When the bad guys win, it's just a temporary setup for a later triumph in pursuit of fairness, empathy, truth, and love.

But real life doesn't always work out that way. Sometimes, the bad guys win, and win in traumatic, evil, and unfair ways. This present moment in history has the potential to mirror other harrowing points in our timeline. Only time will tell if it does, or if people stepped up and stopped the worst of it from taking place — as has also happened throughout history, too.

So, while right now feels like a loss, I've never been one to let bullies get away with it. And giving in is exactly what they want from all of us.

Cultural victories are not political wins. But that doesn’t mean pop culture doesn’t have power. “It is important to be seen on film, especially for our children, our grandchildren [...] normalizing something like this is very important,” said Hinetu Dell, who plays Abuela Alma, on the Encanto Reo Māori red carpet. These rereleases can act as learning tools, inspirations, and thorns in the sides of those who want to clamp down on te reo.
- [Disney has landed in the middle of a fight over an Indigenous language]

New Zealand, compared to Australia, is comparably notable amongst the Commonwealth for actually attempting to have some sort of treaty with its indigenous population. (This was, incidentally, one of the factors that kept New Zealand from Federating into a country with Australia as Australia's poor relationship with its own indigenous peoples at the time was seen as a step back on what NZ had negotiated and agreed to already.)

Whilst I don't speak any of the languages mentioned in this article personally, it's surprising to see a company at the scale and size of Disney put the amount of attention and care into their localisation efforts to the degree that it sounds here. (It apparently marks the first time that they've released a te reo version of a theatrical film at the same time as the english version.) And it's deeply disappointing for the New Zealand government to try and diminish the cultures of the people who were living there first.