The 2024 election made me suicidal for a few days because I didn't want to live in a country so fundamentally rotten that it would choose someone like the orange taint as its leader, let alone twice. (My mother's response to this was, and I quote, "You could move to Costa Rica.") I still don't, and the destruction that the orange taint has wrought on crucial government institutions, human rights, human quality of life, and the economy has more than validated my futile warnings to the dipshits who voted for him. (I predict that in a few years, most of them will mysteriously forget that they ever supported him, but fortunately their Facebook and Twitter posts will set the record straight.) Even though his human rights abuses haven't affected me yet, and I can cope with him making everything more expensive because I've spent my entire adult life in poverty and have a semi-ascetic lifestyle, the last year has been hard because I suffer from a disorder called "empathy." I don't know why. It's not hereditary, that's for damn sure.

But at the same time, I've really enjoyed protesting and connecting with people who share my values and don't support Nazis, and my cautious optimism has grown as it's become clear that the orange taint and the ass-kissers he surrounds himself with are far too stupid to win in the long term. I've wanted to be optimistic all along, but I didn't want to delude myself. I don't subscribe to the delusion that the United States can't become a dictatorship because it's inherently superior to other countries. Naturally, I had a much more positive response to the 2025 elections, in which the orange taint's preferred candidates got hammered like Pete Hegseth at a 10 AM meeting. I believe this proves that Americans are finally done with his shit, and I believe it foreshadows a blue tsunami in 2026. Democrats obviously suck in their own ways, but because they meet the very low bar of not supporting Nazis, I'm rooting for them to curb-stomp Republicunts back into the 1950s, which is where they want to be anyway. Republicunts will, of course, try every voter suppression and gerrymandering tactic they can think of, and it will take hard work to overcome that, but they don't have the power to rig or cancel elections altogether. We now have proof.

I also believe Zohram Mamdani, the new democratic socialist mayor of New York City, foreshadows the Democrat Party being dragged kicking and screaming to the left and forced to actually fight for normal people and address the rot that runs through this country. Voters chose Mamdani over a mainstream Democrat, Andew Cuomo, first in the primaries and then in the general election when the latter ran as an independent and got endorsed by Trump and Musk because they knew the Republicunt didn't have a chance in hell. Cuomo previously served thrice as governor of New York even though I've never heard of anyone who likes him, he forced nursing homes to admit COVID-positive patients and then intenionally undercounted the resulting deaths, and he resigned in 2021 over sexual misconduct allegations, which probably helped Trump and Musk accept him. ​On the other hand, Mamdani is a socialist with scary socialist ideas like checks notes free public transportation. You know, I experienced free public transportation for over a decade in the socialist hellhole of Logan, Utah. I don't know how I ever survived. The buses were always exploding, and people who owned cars were always complaining about having to pay taxes so that lazy freeloaders could get to work. Just kidding, Logan is very proud of its free public transportation, and when the city council considered charging fares, they dropped the idea after an overwhelmingly negative response.

Anyway, yeah, I know nothing is "free." I'm not stupid. I have to pay taxes regardless, so I'd much rather pay for socialist programs like free public transportation than for bombs that are used to murder Palestinian children. Most conservatives, excepting the most extreme nutcases who want to defund everything, have a double standard between existing programs and proposed programs. I don't hear them complaining about paying taxes so that other people can borrow library books for free, but if someone suggested that idea today, they'd lose their shit. But the narrative has shifted a lot within my short lifetime. When Obama (who's center-right by the standards of normal countries) was accused of being a socialist, it was an attack that he had to defend against. Now people come out and identify as socialists, and young people who are tired of being raped by our current system love them. I don't identify as a socialist, but I'm tired of being raped by our current system too. I'll take a socialist over a fascist every time.

The only position I got to cast a vote for was the mayor of Midvale. To my delight, Salt Lake County has ranked-choice voting, which should be the standard everywhere. Brandee Boyer was my first choice because of her focus on the needs of renters. Incumbent Dustin Gettel, a gay man who defied a bullshit state law and refused to remove a Pride flag from his office, was my second choice, and I wasn't upset when he won (though I was a little irked that all the incumbents won, which suggests to me that people didn't take this election seriously). David Fair was not a choice. With the option to vote for multiple candidates, I took pleasure in not filling in a bubble for him at all. At the very beginning of the candidates' town hall, it was a red flag that he wanted to expand the police force, and later, he was the only candidate for any position who said that he would have the police cooperate with ICE. Fuck ICE. The other six people basically said "Fuck ICE" in polite, professional ways. Anyway, I'm sure 2026 will continue to suck, and democracy will not have an uninterrupted string of victories, but there is hope. I believe I came to this Earth at this time to help at this critical juncture. I'm doing my best, dang it.

At this point, I've deconstructed so much from the LDS Church that I barely remembered General Conference was going on this weekend, and I wasn't interested enough to put much effort into finding out what happened. I put on a recap of the first session during lunch yesterday and promptly zoned out for most of it. I'm so proud of me. Three years ago, I was still so entrenched in my Mormon upbringing that I watched General Conference to keep up with the church even though I'd already resigned from it.

I've only heard three things about this one. First, that Ronald Rasband gave an awful talk about the Family Proclamation where he doubled down on gender roles and heteronormativity - you know, the things that Mormon God is concerned about instead of real problems like climate change, fascism, school shootings, and genocide. This is the Family Proclamation's thirtieth anniversary. The church still peddles the fiction that it was prophetic about the social changes that have happened since 1995, when in reality, it was not only reactionary to the social changes that were already well underway, but also clearly inspired by the right-wing evangelical "Family Manifesto" published in 1988. The LDS Church has really painted itself into a corner with its myopic social views, but since the Family Proclamation hasn't been canonized, future prophets and apostles can still quietly phase it out and hire scholars to quietly publish an anonymous essay explaining that it was never doctrine. Doubling down on it now just because the US is temporarily going backward on women's rights and queer rights is very unwise.

Second, I heard that there was increased security and a veiled reference to the shooting at a Mormon chapel in Michigan last week by an evangelical Trump supporter. In case it doesn't go without saying, I am appalled and disgusted by violence against people in any place of worship except the Westboro Baptist Church. Some Mormons are blaming "anti-Mormon" podcasters for inciting the hate that led to this act. Baloney. I've watched several podcasters who are critical of the LDS Church, and not one of them has said anything that would lend support to a violent act like this. Beliefs are not people. Just because you feel personally threatened when someone criticizes your beliefs doesn't mean that person wants you dead. Anyway, if "anti-Mormon" podcasters are responsible for this violent act, then Mormons are responsible for every anti-LGBTQ hate crime.

Third, I heard that prophet-in-waiting Dallin Oaks - who, by the way, is not the kind of person I have the slightest interest in emulating or spending eternity with - didn't announce any new temples. No surprise there. I used to get so excited about temple announcements because they were a tangible measure of the church's global growth. Then Russell Nelson came along and started announcing temples in random places where the membership is too small to even staff them, let alone use them on a regular basis, just because he had a grudge against Gordon Hinckley and wanted to beat his temple announcement record. Congratulations, Nelson, you won your pissing match, and Mormons who don't do any research outside of what they hear from you probably believe that the church is growing and really needs a temple in Belgium. Oaks, at least, seems to be more pragmatic and less concerned about appearances. Oh yeah, Nelson died a week ago, in case that wasn't clear. I think he was a self-absorbed tool, but I didn't hate him, but I'm not sad that a 101-year-old man died in his sleep. It was just a thing that happened and wasn't important enough for me to mention at the time.

And that's all I know about General Conference, and I'm not going to learn anything else about it on purpose. I'm so proud of me.

​Anyway, I'm not sure if I'm okay or if I have repressed trauma from being so close to the incident and thinking an active shooter was on the loose for the next several minutes. I felt pretty bummed out over the waste of life, especially after I learned that it was an accident facilitated by Utah's gun laws (or lack thereof). I coped by taking two Kush Kubes, sitting under a tree in my backyard, and trying to communicate telepathically with it while I listened to this great track I recently discovered by accident because it has the same title as a Smithsonian Folkways compilation of Maroon music from the earliest free Black communities in Jamaica. I got so blissed out that I couldn't feel my body, and I imagined the funkiest monks in the universe escorting me up a snowy yet sunny mountain trail into paradise. 

Anyway, after the shooting last weekend, I wrote, "I would say that maybe the people who brought their kids shouldn't do that next time, but then again, in the United States of America, you expose your kids to a risk of gun violence any time you bring them out in public at all." That very evening, a teenager at a carnival elsewhere in Utah proved me right by shooting four people dead, including a baby the same age and in the same city as my niece. The news didn't identify the baby, so I thought it might be my niece, and I didn't like that, but I didn't hope it wasn't my niece because I didn't hope that someone else's baby got murdered instead. Someone's baby got murdered, and there's no positive version of that, so all I can hope is that the victims' families find peace and the murderer gets raped in prison. This country is sick.

We might be at war with Iran now. I don't like it when Trump does illegal things like bomb other countries without Congressional approval, but it's funny to see more of his supporters turn against him, and I'm not going to lose any sleep over Iran's brutal dictatorship getting what it deserves. It blows my mind to see leftists portraying a regime of virulently bigoted murderers and torturers as innocent victims of Israeli and American aggression. I understand that legally, countries don't have a right to attack each other whenever they want, but morally, the Islamic Republic doesn't have a right to exist. And honestly, the United States is largely responsible for putting this regime in power and erasing decades of social progress overnight in the first place, so helping to exterminate it is arguably a moral obligation, though it should have been approved by Congress. I wish Ayatollah Khamenei a very stressful and short rest of his life. I happen to know that many Iranians, even those who fear for their own lives amidst the turmoil, are stoked.

Sarah McBride was elected as the first openly transgender member of Congress last year, one of the few silver linings in possibly the shittiest election in American history. I haven't heard anything about her since then except that her Republican colleagues intentionally targeted her by making her use the men's bathroom in the Capitol building, and she didn't argue or resist, and that made some trans rights activists angry. In this conversation with Ezra Klein, she explains that fighting it wouldn't have helped anything, but it would have given Republicans the reaction they wanted, and since she didn't give them the reaction they wanted, they've stopped targeting her as much. She didn't spell it out, but of course this is another illustration of how modern Republicans have the mentality of middle school bullies. Stupid, godawful people. Anyway, this conversation is about why the trans rights movement has faced so much backlash and so many setbacks despite a promising start. She says a lot of nuanced and reasonable things. Of course, I have no empathy whatsoever for the hardcore anti-trans bigots who don't understand anything and refuse to learn, but I can understand why ordinary people feel confused and threatened when the oversimplified understanding of the world they've believed in for decades is upended so suddenly. In 2018, when a college professor asked for my pronouns for the first time, I thought it was stupid. I didn't go out of my way to make other people's lives worse as a result, though.

it means so much more. Thousands of attendees at Pride accepted each other for whoever they are, whatever they are, and whomever they love. They really can play their own parts and their own pieces, not the ones that Mormonism and other queerphobic religions have scripted for them and forced on them. It's so beautiful. I'll admit I think furries are freaking weird, but they've never hurt me, so I feel no compulsion to make their lives worse. Just let people live how they want and don't be a dick. It's not that hard. If your beliefs tell you to do something different, get less shitty beliefs.

I don't feel like writing much about this because I've made my political views well known and written about the experience of protest and futilely encouraged other people to protest several times. I just want to say that, again, but for real this time, my pictures don't do the scale justice. At least 10,000 people were there. Not bad for the same weekend as the Mormons' General Conference, which I'm pleased to say I heard and cared very little about. The next nationwide protests are April 19th. Join them, for Christ's sake.