Donald Trump claimed: “Tina is sitting in a Colorado prison for the ‘crime’ of demanding Honest Elections. Today I am granting Tina a full Pardon for her attempts to expose Voter Fraud in the Rigged 2020 Presidential Election.” In fact, he has no power to pardon Tina Peters, since she was convicted under state law. His claim is an illegal usurpation of power.
The news media have a long tradition of yielding to sitting presidents, and they’re doing it again.
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Another in my series of posts on SFF conventions’ codes of conduct. This time I’m writing about the one for Arisia 2026. Arisia is held in Boston or Cambridge in January each year. I haven’t attended Arisia in years, but I found the code of conduct surprisingly reasonable. However, there’s another requirement which potential attendees could find burdensome.
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On several occasions I’ve mentioned that I don’t support the Salvation Army because it holds that I’m going to Hell, along with all other non-Christians, while trying to look like a secular charity. This doesn’t seem to bother many people, though. Far more people blast it for being allegedly anti-LGBTQ. They pay no attention to the shift in the church’s tone; to them it’s now and forever hostile to gays.
While I don’t like the Salvation Army, I also don’t like unjust accusations. On its website, the page titled The LGBTQ Community and the Salvation Army, the US organization says it serves the LGBTQ community, it will provide shelter to transgender people, and it does not consider sexual orientation or gender identity in its hiring practices.
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The World War I years were the worst in the United States’ history for freedom of speech. Eugene Debs was sentenced to ten years for opposing US participation in the war. Charles T. Schenck got the same for distributing petitions against the military draft, and censorship advocates today applaud Judge Holmes’ equation of his advocacy with “falsely shouting fire in a theatre.” There was also a movie that got its creator a federal prison sentence. What did this film do? It celebrated the American Revolution. That made it anti-British, at a time when Britain was our ally in the war.
If that sounds insane, it is. Under the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, the federal and local governments stomped on freedom of expression as never before or since, and the Supreme Court said it was fine. Still, The Spirit of ’76 is a weird case. The film was released on May 28, 1917, the month after the USA entered the war. Chicago censors made him cut some scenes depicting British atrocities. It opened in November in Los Angeles; I don’t know if it was seen anywhere during the intervening time. The Los Angeles showing included the censored scenes.
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The first year of the second Trump administration isn’t over, and it’s already sunk into premeditated murder and death threats against members of Congress. If the USA were at all sane, Trump would long since have been impeached, convicted, and kicked out of the White House. Where we’ll be by the 2028 election is depressing to think about.
The US government has conducted extrajudicial killings of the crews of several boats in the name of stopping the drug trade, and recent disclosures show that survivors were slaughtered without cause on orders by Pete Hegseth:
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