Open Thread: Countering Vitriol on School Boards and X (Né Twitter)

This will be a pot pourri open thread, so don’t obsess about finding a theme. [Vern: Okay, we will not obsess!]

1. Learn How to Counter Violence at School Board Meetings!

Hans Johnson is one of the best activists in the California Democratic Party — among other things a strong LGBTQ activist for decades, a unionist who won’t brook corrupt practices, and an environmentalist who was a key ally of ours in organizing party actors against the Poseidon scheme. (Can I call it a “swindle” at this point? “Attempted swindle”? I’ll muse on that.) He’s now turned his attention to vitriol (which I presume includes veiled threats of violence) at school board meetings.

Hans is putting on a Zoom seminar next month for the Orange County chapter of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, Saturday Oct. 21 at 4:30 p.m. (Sorry for the fuzzy image; the registration link is here and that’s all you really need.)

Anyone who has been following school board meetings around the country and the county has seen an increase in threats against school board members for not bowing to “parents rights” — a concoction of conservative ideology from attacks on sex education; on sexual preference and gender identity to civil rights movements based on race and gender; and much more. To some extent, respectful discussion of these issues is legally protected, even if it creates some level of discomfort among those whose rights and dignity are being affronted, but it commonly goes waaaaay past that, with indignation leading to indignity and leading teachers, parents, children and commenters to fear for their safety.

I can think of few people better equipped to reason their way through these situations than Hans Johnson — and you should participate in his Zoom discussion if you can. I’ll remind you (because he’ll remind me to remind you!) as it gets closer.

2. How Do Deal with Nazi-Style Degradation on X (Né Twitter)?

Elon Musk has finally gone all-in on MAGA ideology, blaming Jews from the “Anti-Defamation League” for the worsening condition of his privately owned site “X”. He claims that the reason he’s losing money is that the Anti-Defamation League (which centers mostly on what it considers Anti-Semitism, although some Semites, like Palestinians, are generally left out of that equation) has been critical of Musk letting Twitter become a cesspool of racist, sexist, anti-woke, and anti-non-Christian religious bigotry.

Elon losing money is probably a pretty decent outcome here — I’m still pissed off at his denying use of his “Starlink” satellite communications to Ukranians back when it was badly needed — but there’s a bigger problem (every way but literally) with Elon’s public texting website right now: our apparent need to keep calling it “X, the site formerly known as Twitter.”

The solution to this, which seems to have evaded pretty much everyone, is the one I employ above: unearth the adjective we’ve historically used for name changes: “née” (pronounced to sound like “nay”) for women who adopted their husband’s surname upon marriage and “né” for men who changed their name for any reason.

As Elon is a famously masculine troll, and his site “X” did not get married I think that we should deem “X” a masculine site and use “né” for it. Rather than “X, the site formerly known as Twitter,” we should start saying “X, né Twitter” (with the stress pattern of “Hail, dear sister”); soon afterwards it would become “X né Twitter” with the stress pattern of “wreck the hitter.” Eventually “X” will just be referred to as “X né” — which rhymes with “X-ray,” and we will no longer need to invoke the name “Twitter” at all. The best part of it being “X né” is that it sounds so much like “ixnay” — Pig Latin for “nix,” meaning “negate” or “reject,” as in the old campaign slogan “Nix on Nixon” — and eventually it will just become “ixnay.”

And that is how we fight rampant bigoted violent trollishness on X: we ixnay it!

The question of what word should replace “tweets” on ixnay remains an open one; I’m trying to figure out a way to make “xcrete” work, but Musk is not likely daft enough to accept that term. But … maybe not!

3. VOC Asks the Right Question, Then….

This story from the VOC asks a critical question — “Can You Really Reform City Halls from the Inside?” — but doesn’t do much to answer it, or to take on the alternative question of “Can You Really Reform City Halls from OTHER THAN the Inside?” (The one place from which I suspect one could reform Anaheim’s City Hall is from the Disney Corporation’s Boardroom, but so far they seem disinclined.)

We should discuss this at length. They’re treading into our thematic territory here, but I’m happy to have the company. (As usually, they won’t acknowledge the work we’ve done.) As I’ve said before, so long as the reprobates owns a majority (or, better, a supermajority!) of the City Council, they have no real reason to change (shame not being part of their makeup) unless they face jail time. But let’s all read the story and come up with our own responses, ok?

4. What Will Happen if Gavin Newsom Runs Against Trump?

Governor Gavin Newsom has been positioning himself to be the “savior” Democratic nominee — as an alternative to his old Northern California frenemy Vice President Kamala Harris — if President Joe Biden should somehow falter in his drive for re-election. [Or, rather, falter further. This story on his G20 trip almost made my brain climb out of my skull.] So … let’s talk about that Newsom option!

Here’s what I am highly convinced that Republican Party nominee-in-waiting will do if Newsom is chosen as the nominee: he will choose his eldest son’s girlfriend and Puerto Rican-and Irish-American screamer of deep-voiced invective Kimberly Guilfoyle as his running mate. Guifoyle is, notably, the former wife of Gavin Newsom — on whom he notoriously cheated in 2006 with his appointments secretary Ruby Rippey-Tourk, the wife of his then-Chief of Staff Alex Tourk, who didn’t find out about it until 2007, after Newsom and Guilfoyle divorce. This is arguably worse than anything Donald Trump did in cheating on his wives, which was never, so far as I know, with the wife of his best friend. (Then again: does Trump even have a best friend?)

Orange County Democratic establishment absolutely loved Gavin Newsom; they knew that the rich kid had their same blood in his veins. And that’s one reason that tried to take Kamala Harris down, by using then-Rep. Loretta Sanchez as a battering ram. I think that something similar is going on now: Kamala has poor approval rating, partly because she is a disappointment to the far Left — the “Tulsi Gabbard no- longer-Left” far Left — and because moderates don’t want to step up and defend her, possibly because they have someone better — Kimberly Guilfoyle’s ex Gov. Newsom — in mind and, both being from California, they can’t survive on the same ticket. The problem, of course, is that if Biden does falter, the closer it happens to the election the surer it us that Kamala will have to be the nominee — and it may be too late to turn around the poor public perception of her that she really hasn’t done much to earn.

5. 2011 Called — and It’s Pissed! George Lakoff Foresees 2023

Finally, while trying to remind myself who it was that came up with the “harsh father” model of political thinking, I ran into a video the cognitive linguist and polymath George Lakoff from 2011 on political thinking — and it’s amazing. (Every time you hear him say “conservatives have a 40-year head start” on framing political thinking, remember that by now it’s over 50 years.) Yeah, Lakoff was the person I was thinking of: it came from his 1996 book, Moral Politics, and it’s “strict father,” not “harsh.” (But that father is sort of harsh, an punishment into obedience is a big part of that model.)

This is an hour-and-ten minute video — but it’s not boring because it comes off as a collection of “George Lakoff’s greatest hits,” some of which are indeed quite great. I haven’t followed Lakoff’s work that much over the past decade, so I don’t know if this material has been supplemented or supplanted, but it struck me that he probably has as good an idea as anyone about what to do with what’s happening in our MAGA-infused contemporary political scene. I’ll go explore his site a bit, but meanwhile this is a good bit of weekend viewing for anyone who’s so inclined.

Finally, here are AI-generated versions of the above graphic prompt we got from Microsoft Bing’s shop: respectively in the manner of pop artist Peter Max, “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” illustrator Ralph Bakshi, and cartoonist Cathy “Cathy” Guisewite — all from the same prompt!

(I did mention the speaker having facial hair; my bad.) This is your “actually on the weekend!” Weekend Open Thread; talk about the above, or anything else you’re like, within reasonable bounds of decorum and discretion. Otherwise, you or your comment might get nixed!