I Hate This Administration. I am so angry I could spit.

F*ck Elon Musk and F*ck 47.

I just got done posting that I’d be scarce for a time.

Then I woke up at 4 this morning and did a bunch of reading. After I read/watched a few things yesterday that made me angry.

First, I read about how Tesla’s in trouble. In Forbes. Forbes still lets you read 4 articles a month before the paywall goes up.

It’s satisfying that Tesla’s in Deep *poop emoji*. It was in trouble before the 2024 election because Elon doesn’t actually know things. He just bulldozes people who know things. He’s good at tricking people who also do not know things into thinking he knows things.

He’s bad at outsmarting the Chinese. He put up a Tesla plant in China just in time for them to glean his IP and make better, less expensive EVs than him. *tongue sticking out emoji* Take that, Musk.

(Sidenote: this is a case study in why these tarrifs will not work for one of the stated purposes of “bringing manufacturing back to the US.” Tesla used to be a US-made brand. Tesla had to move some manufacturing to China to stay competitive. BECAUSE IT IS EXTREMELY EXPENSIVE TO DO MANUFACTURING IN THE US, BECAUSE WE ARE A NATION OF CONSUMERS WHO DON’T REALLY MAKE TOO MUCH STUFF ANYMORE B/C PEOPLE IN OTHER NATIONS WILL MAKE IT FOR LESS $$, and American workers are expensive. And now, with tarrifs, anything we did manage to make here will either have to stop being made b/c it will be cost prohibitive to do so, or will become so pricey that only the 1% will be able to afford it. Here’s a reddit thread of real live small business owners who’re going to be shuttered by tarrifs.)

Look, I am not in favor of the communist government, and I feel so deeply bad for Chinese people who live under Xi Jinping’s tyrrany. But I am also just fucking giddy that these folks are sticking it to our American Oligarchs the only place they feel anything: their wallets.

Musk is the world’s worst manager. He has no character and no ethics. He gets less good at managing people for every dollar he is worth.

If he wants to find waste, fraud, and abuse, he should look in the mirror. My Forbes Rabbit Hole led me to this wonderful article about how Elon is a government welfare vampire.

And that made me think about the protests last weekend. Millions of people — I’ve seen counts as high as 5m — took to the streets to holler and yell for this degenerate to get his hands off, for 47 to quit signing executive orders, for social safety net, state parks, civic and arts organizations, international cooperation, and any of a hundred other things there are to be absolutely lathered about right now.

But even 5 million people isn’t a huge percentage of the 340 million folks who live in the US. Around 1.5%.

I believe many more folks than that are lathered. I also believe not as many folks can go protest as want to. For lots and lots of reasons, but some of them are widespread poverty, the hustle, and FEAR.

In order to conceptualize the sheer volume of millions versus billions, there’s this guy who’s working with rice on Youtube/Tiktok. (he does personal finance videos and this is one of many rice vids.)

There are a lot more dollars than there are people, to a staggering scale, and dollars, apparently, always win. And we’re gonna need to get a lot more rice out to protest, eh?

So yesterday somebody shared a satisfying, but false, meme about Karoline Leavitt (worst spelling ever) saying that if ya wanna understand these tarrifs, you should avoid woke things like math. It’s so hard to tell when it’s bullshit and when it’s true.

Like another friend shared a video about working with Musk and in it, he takes dumps on the floor and then jetpacks through the ceiling. It is so funny, and also, I could absolutely see this guy pooping on the floor when he doesn’t get this way. But I knew it was false only becuase of the jetpacking through the ceiling. 100% of the rest of this is believable.

This Press Secretary? Who spells her name wrong? She is an inexcusable traitor. Since this Navarro Guy who made up an expert who’s an anagram of his name and Musk have been fighting in their big manly strong way by sniping at each other on the internet, her analysis is, “Boys will be Boys.” *vomit emoji*

And all of this shit is just like—more in the cacophony of bullshit alnogside the fact that TOMORROW (Thursday, Apr 10), the congress will vote on this SAVE act shit whose SOLE PURPOSE is to stop women (primarily), deployed people in the military, and poor people from voting by REQUIRING citizens to prove their right to vote by presenting a very narrow number of documents, IN PERSON.

Gosh, April, you might be thinking, why would you want them NOT to pass the SAVE act when it will disenfranchise more republicans than democrats?

BECAUSE, DESPITE EVERYTHING, I BELIEVE IN DEMOCRACY.

On the night of the 2016 election, the first time we would wake up with an orange president elect the next day, I worked in a six-pack shop. I asked every single person who came in if they’d voted. I asked them even knowing many of them would be 47 voters (then 45), even though they were the exact folks 47’s policies would harm the most. If they said no, I asked them why not and encouraged them to get to the polls.

This was the job in which I learned that alcoholic money smells different. The job in which I learned that there are actually people who just pop into various shoppes for a comically tall can of something strong throughout every single day. The job in which I learned people do, actually, raid the couch cushions for literal sockfuls of change with which to buy hooch. I felt so unbelievably naive when I was there. I counted so many dimes, nickles, and pennies into dollars.

And you know what? That job did *not* make me hate “those” people, or think about them differently because of the way they spent their money. I was a bad month or week away from being them. I still am. It is very likely I will be before this term is through, if things continue to go as they are. Or I will be in jail or an internment camp for writing things like this on the internet.

But somehow, so so many folks who have a little bit of an economic advantage start thinking about folks who do not as other. Start judging what they do with their money. Start believing they’re superior to folks who struggle.

It is maddening. I get sick talking to landlords who villainize tenants who will live in their janky ass apartments. I tire of talking to upper-middle class white republicans. Especially if they call themselves Christian. You can paper walls with their lack of compassion. You can fill oceans with their hypocrisy.

You don’t have to go to church to have compassion.

You don’t need a degree in economics to see that it is simply INHUMANE to deprive folks of social programs, or that tarrifs do not work.

You don’t have to be a historain to see that we are BARRELING toward oppression, genocide, and war the likes of which we have not seen since the 1930s.

And you don’t need a degree in psychology to understand that people who are struggling or in crisis NEED AND DESERVE to have a roof over their heads and enough food to eat, and many of them are using substances as medication because they do not have access to healthcare because in the US, we have private, for-profit healthcare. Which is also, just, immoral.

And if we use the democratic process in good faith and use our votes as our voices and if we get big money out of politics, then we can solve all of these problems safely, legally, and without giving a ketamine-crunching egomaniac and an orange senior citizen the proverbial keys to the nation.

Even to me, right now these things feel MILES out of reach. And I am an insufferable optimist.

I feel like I’m on a roller coaster I regret agreeing to ride.

I feel like I’m 8 months into a pregnancy I don’t actually want.

I feel like I’m 3 years in to a job I realize is eating my soul, but that I can’t afford to quit.

And I’m angry at the folks who are leaving the nation because they can.

Even though I desperately wanted to leave. Even though I feel trapped here. Even though I can think of nothing I would like less than being rounded up as a heretic and put in jail.

But we need good people to stay and fight.

We need people who will and can keep calling this shit out.

And we need to take back our government.

So. Do me a favor. You can subscribe here if you want, but if you’ve been thinking about doing that, why don’t you donate to my campaign for City Council instead. You can subscribe later.

or really any amount is great. You can enter your own. $5, $10, $2.50, $1… all great amounts.

If you enjoyed this rant, or you didn’t, but you did (I am consuming a lot of writing I hate but also love right now), you can do one of these things:

If you’re just feeling like you wanna bitch up a storm, go on and

If, instead, you want advice about your love relationship,

If you think I need to be more caffienated,

Whatever your condition, thanks so much for humoring mine. I am grateful for all of you to an extent I do not think I can really even describe.

With love.