Don’t Piss Off the Pope
When the Catholic Church tells you you’ve taken your imperialism too far, you should probably take note. Pope Francis threw some New Testament–level shade when he called Trump succinctly “not Christian” this week for…well, just about everything. But mainly for his strict immigration policies and his border-wall babble. Other moral transgressions that have gotten Trump in trouble with the Pope: his rebukes of climate change, his hand in the Dakota Access and Keystone XL oil pipelines, and his similarities to Hitler.
Did He Really Just Say That?
That’s the thought that crossed the minds of everyone who witnessed Trump’s, er, “candidly incoherent” press conference last Thursday. When Fox News thinks you’re off your rocker, you should REALLY take note. Because that was exactly Fox News anchor Chris Wallace’s reaction — what in the name of a full-fledged media war did we just listen to? Here are some Trump gems from the conference:
- Claiming he’s the “least racist person” person in the room and then asking a black reporter if she can set up a meeting with the Congressional Black Caucus.
- Contemplating nuclear warfare with Russia. Like a kid playing a heated game of Battleship, he stated his best move would be to “shoot that ship that’s 30 miles offshore right out of the water.” Real life isn’t a board game.
- A broken-record insistence that he’s “not a bad person, by the way.” OK, we’ll believe it when we see it, but the evidence is slim.
Immigrants Fight Back
One wonders how Trump was feeling about his “bad hombre” comments when many of those hombres skipped work for the service industry’s nationwide “Day Without Immigrants” strike. A little hometown pride here — the list of Bay Area businesses that participated is impressive—Caffe Trieste, Tipsy Pig, Papalote and Tacolicious, just to name a few. Take a moment of silence for the 100 workers who were fired for participating in the strike.
Milo’s Bad Day
If Milo Yannopoulos thought his trip to Berkeley ended badly, one can only guess how he’s feeling now. A book deal, a speaking engagement at CPAC, his job as tech editor at Breitbart — all of it evaporated after videos surfaced of him condoning pedophilia. It’s nice that he finally crossed a line, but the fact that this was the line is troubling — racism, misogyny and delirium don’t cut it anymore. Conservatives could have long ago put a stop to the factually warped bile that spills out of the mouth hole beneath his preposterously bleached hair. They just didn’t want to.
A Bad Month for Uber
The Silicon Valley transportation app just can’t catch a break. This week, former Uber software engineer Susan Fowler published an in-depth blog post detailing the machismo and sexism she experienced during her year at the company. While frustrating to read, her words validate every woman who’s fought to survive in a man’s world. Boys will be boys, but blog posts can send your company into a celebrity-lawyer-laden harassment investigation.
Imaginary Terror
You’d think that Trump and his circus of alternative-fact-juggling clowns would have learned their lesson from the whole Bowling Green Massacre debacle—that lesson being that you shouldn’t make terrorism into a fairy tale because people will notice and former Scandinavian prime ministers will put you on blast. During his campaign rally (seriously) in Florida over the weekend, Trump told the crowd to be wary of radical Islamic terrorism, because “look what happened in Sweden!”
What did happen in Sweden, Trump? A health-care system that takes care of its citizens? Free college education? Low crime and unemployment rates? In all seriousness, though, a terrorist attack did happen in Sweden, but by a neo-Nazi group on a refugee center.
