• Josh Marshall points out how Trump’s anti-labor Department of Labor is promoting it’s latest effort against H-1B visas using what appears to be Nazi imagery. It’s not so much a “Hire American” campaign as a “Buy Aryan” one.
Here’s a sampling of the Reich-y propaganda art being published by the DOL:
Explicitly white supremacist? Yes, obviously.
Creepily Nazi-adjacent? At best.
But it also strongly suggests that there’s at least one person working for Trump’s Department of Labor who really, really, really wants to f–k Tom Brady. This reeks of sexual longing and desperate obsession.
I never thought I’d say this as an Eagles fan, but I’m worried about Tom Brady’s safety.
Watch your back, Tom. (Go Birds.)
• “Girl With Ravens (The Bratislava Witch)”
One of the first recorded victims at that time was Agáta Tóthová-Barlabášová from the village of Podunajské Biskupice (now part of Bratislava), who became one of the first recorded witch execution victims in the city. In 1602, she was imprisoned in the dungeons of the Old Town Hall, where torture extracted confessions of her supposed fantastical crimes: harming a butcher’s business, flying on broomsticks, and communing with the devil at sabbaths.
On May 24, 1602, Agáta was burned alive on a special pyre designed for witch executions. Her death was part of a broader pattern of witch hunts that swept through Central Europe, targeting vulnerable women and extracting confessions that implicated others in a cycle of tragedy.
I am confident that Agáta was innocent of the crime of flying on a broomstick because that is not a thing that anyone has ever done. As for “communing with the devil,” I would say that is a good description of torturing people into confessing that they have flown through the air on broomsticks so you can then burn them alive on special pyres.
In any case, the torture and execution of Agáta Tóthová-Barlabášová is a clearer and more typical example of “political violence” than any case of fratricide amongst 4chan-poisoned right-wing white American boys.
• One thing that some humans began to learn from political violence like the torture and killing of poor Agáta — and from the political violence that erupted every time a new government succeeded the old — was that religious establishment was a dangerous thing.
Other humans failed to learn that lesson and, instead, “learned” the opposite. Their theory is that such political violence is best avoided by ensuring that both the officially state-sanctioned sect and the state sanctioning it are so firmly entrenched with such unquestionable, unchecked power that dissenters, witches, and those heretical apostates from the Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912 will never dare to make trouble. Essentially, we just need to build even more special pyres for witch executions, Quaker hangings, etc.
One contemporary expression of this latter view now goes by the polite name of “Christian nationalism.” Kash Patel, the nominal director of the FBI, is not a Christian and does not look like Tom Brady, but he has hitched his wagon to the Christian nationalist movement in the hopes that this will somehow keep him in their good favor. This is not working out well for him so far.
• The Republican mainstreaming of mid-20th-century anti-fluoride conspiracy theories is going to mean lots of pain and financial hardship for American families.
Quality health insurance in America is rare and expensive. Quality dental insurance? That’s like space tourism — something that’s unimaginably out of reach for most Americans. The only dental plan most of us have is “chew on the other side.” (My dental plan at work is very affordable, but that’s because it doesn’t actually cover anything. It’s not so much insurance as a Christmas Club layaway program for an annual cleaning. This is better than what a lot of people have.)
Dental pain hurts, yet millions of Americans just try to deal with it because they cannot afford to get it treated. It’s “just a toothache” — maybe it’ll go away. Or maybe it will lead to infection, sepsis, and death. Not a great gambit, but when the price of dental care is out of pocket and out of reach, people have no choice but to take that risk, accepting an enormous amount of severe pain in the meantime.
Fluoridation doesn’t solve that problem, but it reduces its scope and frequency. Getting rid of fluoridated water will increase the scope and frequency of that problem — more pain, more unaffordable expense, more people losing the cross-your-fingers-and-hope gambit that their dental woes won’t lead to other, life-threatening health issues.
This conspiracy theory nonsense isn’t just immensely dumb, it’s also cruel.
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