This is hardly the craziest thing Donald Trump said today in Iowa, but it struck me because I happen to live in California:
[Joe Biden] never sticks up for Washington. You know, they've taken the name George Washington off many schools. Can you believe it, the name George Washington is coming down from many schools, many in California.
This is not even remotely true. One (1) school in California, Berkeley's Washington Elementary, is slated to be renamed because Washington was a slaveowner. That's it.
San Francisco considered renaming Washington High School in 2021 but ditched the idea within a couple of weeks. And Washington Middle School in Pasadena was renamed a couple of years ago, but it had nothing to do with disapproval of George Washington. It got a new name to honor the late science fiction novelist Octavia Butler, who grew up in Pasadena and attended the school.
POSTSCRIPT: As for Biden "never sticking up for Washington," this is just fantasy. Trump was referring to Biden's speech earlier today at Valley Forge, which was almost embarrassingly hagiographic toward Washington. I think Biden's paean managed to include practically every notable Washington cliche this side of the cherry tree.
TFG is such a know nothing compulsive liar. He will spew any kind of bull shit that comes into his putrid little mind and his fans (and most of the media) eat it up with a spoon.
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Trump's second event that day, in Mason City, Iowa:
"he said, sir, if George Washington and Abraham Lincoln came back from the dead and decided to run as president and vice president, you'd beat them by 35 points"
video
https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1743476810115924114
This is not even remotely true.
Doesn't matter, to him or to his cult. He really doesn't care about truth -- classic "bullshitter" per Frankfurt -- and his cult will repeat it like gospel because they care primarily about belonging and demonstrating that they belong. He could claim the Earth was flat and they'd duly repeat it ("boy that'll get those know-it-all libz mad!"), then turn around and say the opposite 5 minutes later and they'd follow his lead again.
The cult are hopeless. The real problem are the "moderates" who know better but go along with it anyway because he'll make the trains run on time and make Customer Service stop giving options in brown-people language ("oprima wut? don't they know this is America?!?").
I had a thought of using the term Trump's Random Bullshit, or for convenience TRB. Though TRB has been taken by the New Republic (for its lead column; I first learned of it when Michael Kinsley was writing it).
Also, RIP Harry Frankfurt (about six months ago).
We Lefties open ourselves up for this kind of crap when the media amplifies random philosophical musings and fads from the ivory towers. Well, why wouldn't they? People freed to imagine anything can come up with some real doozies, like the whole Q Continuum and Unconditional Cancellation of All American Hero Slave Owners. That gets clicks! That means ka-CHING!!!
Big money ruins everything, and most definitely the public discourse and with it, democracy itself.
What's the alternative? Certainly not laying back and tut-tutting. Demand the evidence! Facts! Examples!
I was once in a hearing in Santa Fe on repealing the state's ancient ban on abortion -- the repeal passed before the corrupt Scotus repealed Roe, thank goodness. Any number of people "testified", tearfully and with great emotion, about how their hair dresser's cousin in law had overheard somebody who she thought might have worked at a hospital somewhere say....
Well, you get the idea. All caca de toro. But delivered with high histrionics. Nobody called them on it, either, but the legislators voted against their impassioned gynophobic pro-fetus pleas.
No not lefties fault, it's the media choosing to only nutpick from one side and ignore the elephants in the room who bully anyone who dares nutpick on the conservative wacko side.
I haven’t watched it, but the renaming ceremony can be seen via the school’s website at https://www.pusd.us/octaviabutler
Actually, it's a thing here in California, at least in one place.
https://pajaronian.com/watsonville-community-split-on-removal-of-washington-statue/
The outcome was that they moved the statue. The irony, I think, is that most people in the town probably didn't even know George was hanging out in the park.
So one school got renamed and one other object got moved in the entire state of California. Thanks for your anecdote, which added nothing of consequence to the conversation, but somehow needed adding anyway to i guess buttress your statement of “it’s a thing here.” 2 instances does not “a thing” make in my estimation but you do you.
Whenever Trump says some weird random thing that makes people think “huh, what was that about” there will be someone who cites something somewhere and says, “well, if that’s what Trump means, he has a point”.
Jeez, left right, still effing idiots.
I'll log out now.
I'm sure Trump is well aware of the debate in Watsonville...that occurred in 2020.
But Trump's audience is the baboon colony, the quintessential low-information personalities. They vaguely overhear something, then they happen to see their approved authority figure say something about it and they're certain they're now hearing the straight story, what's really going on.
Next week he could be saying Washington and Lincoln endorsed him just before they died, or came back from the dead with an angel and crowned him in a secret ceremony, which was deeply moving, and they filmed it and will make it available to everybody so everybody can see it, when the time is right, and all of MAGA will insist it happened.
A thing that stuck in my memory from years of listening to bits and chunks of talk radio is Michael Weiner/Savage saying approximately "Obama, like almost all liberals, is a low-information person who has probably read very little."
This from a Trump supporter. (Maybe one of the earliest in the rightwingosphere, I think.)
Pasadena resident here with kids in PUSD. It was pretty much a proactive name change, related to the specific African American sci fi author who had her roots in the community and the fact that the school is the STEM magnet. Of course, the origins of the idea were indeed rooted in the reckoning of 2020, so that will obviously be painted with a broad brush by mindless critics.
"The Parable of the Sower" is a surpassingly excellent book. Octavia Butler deserves to have schools named for her everywhere, not just in her home town.
Why Butler and not other far more influential science fiction authors like Robert Heinlein, Robert E Howard, L Sprague deCamp, Poul Anderson, etc?
Those poor white men, never getting the recognition you think they deserve.
They didn't grow up in Pasadena and didn't attend the school.
In the future, there will be schools named after President Trump. The very best students will get Fs in their classes and claim the grading was rigged and that they really got the best score in the class and really the best score anyone had ever seen. They will encourage others to protest and call in death threats to the teacher and anyone who defends the teacher. They will claim that the machine that scored the test was altered to change their answers and that their wonderful A+++ result was snatched away from them.
At the front of the school there will be a statue of Donald Trump “Sir, your statue is so great that no pigeon would dare shit on it!,”
But there would be huge, even bigly pools of cat urine at the foot of the stature.