Friday News Roundup
It has finally arrived. It is the first Friday News Roundup after the inauguration of Trump 2.0. I am now realizing that this process may be just as much as sanity check for me as it could be for my subscribers.
It is a new era. Let us begin.
In 2003, the idea of a Black white supremacist was so absurd that it was used as the basic for a satirical sketch on the first episode of the Dave Chappelle show. In 2025, a Black white supremacist just perpetrated a school shooting in Nashville. This independent Jewish news site, the Algemeiner, has the best article so far that goes into the shooter’s praise of Adolf Hitler, his re-posts from the anti-Semitic Goyim Defense League, and “a sprawling manifesto full of anti-black content.” The manifesto also showed familiarity with the extremist philosophy of accelerationism, which I argued in my column on the Vegas Cybertruck bomber is slowly getting normalized outside of far-right extremist circles.
In the Deportation Watch section of our newsletter, the Trump administration has already invaded several U.S. sanctuary cities to arrest nearly 500 undocumented immigrants in nationwide sweep conducted by federal law enforcement and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). U.S. District Judge John Coughenour from Washington state, a judge appointed by Ronald Reagan, has temporarily blocked Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship. According to Coughenour, "I've been on the bench for over four decades. I can't remember another case where the question presented is as clear as this one. This is a blatantly unconstitutional order."
The inauguration of the Trump Administration has already led to a suspiciously timed announcement by aerospace giant, Boeing. The Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace, the union representing 17,000 Boeing workers in the Seattle area, has revealed union-busting cutbacks imposed by Boeing management. Boeing plans to cut its work force by 17,000, which is (what a coincidence!) the exact size of the membership of its union in the Seattle area. Boeing, which experienced two crashes of its 737 MAX plane in 2018 and 2019, is continuing undermine the safety-first culture of its professional engineers with this blatantly anti-union action.
In addition, Donald Trump has already imposed a gag order (euphemistically referred to by the media as a “communication pause”) on employees at the Department of Health and Human Services as a result of the Faustian bargain he made to neutralize RFK Jr.’s third party presidential bid. The gag order also includes a ban on employee participation at health summits, which are necessary for the sharing of scientific information.
Culture War Watch
Trump has already pardoned 1,500 criminal defendants who participated in the January 6 insurrection against the U.S. Capitol building. I believe this event confirms the writer John Ganz’s assertion that the January 6 coup was successful. It did not put Trump back in power by overturning the 2020 election, but Trump’s return to power was only partially delayed. He has never suffered legal consequences for his incitement of the seditious January 6 attack, SCOTUS immunized him against being constitutionally disqualified, and the right-wing thugs who perpetrated the attack are getting off scot free.
Trump bans non-US flags from being flown at US embassies. The policy is targeted at previous times when the LGBTQ+ pride flag and the Black Lives Matter flag were flown at embassies abroad under the Biden Administration.
The Trump Administration has also issued a broad executive order attacking transgender people. The order withdraws several pro-LGBTQ executive orders by Joe Biden, including the right of transgender people to serve in the military. The executive order also tries to enshrine into law that there are only two genders (male and female), a falsehood easily contradicted by the biological fact of intersex people. It is as absurd as issuing an executive order claiming 2+2=5 or that the sun revolves around earth.
Trump’s executive order is so ignorant of biology that he may have accidentally assigned all Americans as female by executive order. According to the order, “Female” means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell." The problem is that the large reproductive cell is the egg, not the sperm. And since all humans, both those assigned male and female at birth, come from a human ovum, Trump’s definition of “female” means that we are all female. Expect similar absurdities to emerge during the Trump administration as he continues trying to overrule known facts by executive fiat.