Trump, says Anand Giridharadas yesterday on the Ink, takes advantage of other people's civil discourse "by ascribing the [airplane] crash to...DEI." Are we "being governed by a manosphere podcast"? Maybe.
"We don't know what caused the [airplane] crash. But the crash should be cause for reflection about the project of disemboweling the state.
The crash should cause us to remember that government matters. That staffing at agencies matters. That public goods matter. That competent leadership at the Pentagon matters, instead of hegsethian vapidity. That it’s dangerous to email millions of government workers, trying to trick them into quitting their jobs.
In short, there is much one can say in a moment like that while still being factual, still being classy, still being decorous. But refusing to be in the void-excavation business."
Stop digging the hole. Stop expanding the void.
Hey, a couple rules from Giridharadas:
"The first rule is not to leave the void. Don’t wait for meaning to make itself. It won’t.
The second rule: find ways of reacting that don’t end up being unconscious hyping.
When Trump attributes plane crashes to DEI, you don’t have to consent to having a conversation about DEI and plane crashes. You don’t have to do the newspaper thing of calling the statement controversial or reporting it and citing a 'lack of evidence.'"
Karen Attiah says we should reply to him by saying: "Are you saying that this crash was caused by desegregating the races?"
I actually wish the media would stop using "DEI" and "diversity hiring" and just get to the essence of the thing and ask: "Are you saying that this crash was caused by desegregating the races?" And see what happens.
— Karen Attiah (@karenattiah.bsky.social) January 30, 2025 at 12:25 PM
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Jessica Marie Johnson (no longer on Bluesky) said: "Resegregation orders. Not anti-DEIA orders. Not a "rollback" of DEIA. A rollback of DEIA is a return to segregation. You don't break even on a desegregation order issued in 1965 or after. Resegregation. Segregation. Segregationist. Resegregation. Segregationist." (January 31, 2025)
"The remedy," Giridharadas says, "is not to avoid reacting to Trump. He is, like, the president. The remedy, rather, is to live in more than mere reaction to him. It is to go on narrative offense."
Insofar as "they are having fun. They are having a good time," (Christina Sharpe, Dec 5, 2025), maybe going on narrative offense means to make it less fun for them. It is tricky for me to come up with such a strategy, since it requires me to think like them. I don't actually know what deep degree of awfulness is the ingredient that enables them to have fun doing what they're doing. I don't know how suffering becomes glee, how shame becomes pride. I don't know why they don't have a second-order desire to change.
"Any Democrat who says “Voters don’t really care about this stuff” needs a good smack in the head. The answer to that problem is to make them care. Republicans do this all the time; if they have something they wish was on the agenda, they force it on the agenda, no matter how ridiculous it is or how removed it is from people’s lives. How many Americans cared five years ago about whether some middle school trans kid a hundred miles from where they live wanted to play softball? But they care about it now, because Republicans made them care."
— Paul Waldman, Democrats Need to Treat the Supreme Court Like the Villain It Is: The Court is out of control, and we'll never see reform unless we build the case for it. Starting now. Dec 5, 2025
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