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| The first LGBTQ characters I remember seeing on screen are the lesbians who fought Pam Grier in Foxy Brown. But it had an opposite effect on me than the one the makers of the movie probably desired. |
On Twitter today, a question was raised which had me chasing memories. It was:
Finish this sentence: The first time I remember seeing a queer person on screen was ______.
— The Most (@Most) February 1, 2021
We all know that the anti-LGBTQ industry is targeting the transgender community in an attempt to undermine President Biden's general push for LGBTQ rights. But we should as adept in knowing about the no-so secret weapon in its attack - Fox News. There is justifiable focus on distortions and lies propagated against the trans community as well as the groups pushing those lies, such as the Alliance Defending Freedom and the Family Research Council. But equally important is spotlighting how Fox News is helping to spread these lies under the guise of "objective news coverage."
According to Media Matters:
On January 20, President Joe Biden signed an executive order telling federal agencies to protect LGBTQ Americans from discrimination in numerous areas of public life, such as housing, health care, employment, public accommodations, and education. Despite the order’s myriad protections, over the following week, Fox News aired 19 segments -- totaling 51 minutes -- that miscategorized the order as a move that would destroy women’s sports; only one of those segments even alluded to its nondiscrimination protections.. . . From January 20 through 27, Fox News aired at least 19 original segments that mentioned the executive order, amounting to a total of 51 minutes. In every segment, Fox hosts and guests misleadingly framed it as focused on trans athletes, falsely claiming it would allow boys to play in girls sports and that it would destroy women’s sports. The Fox personalities also repeatedly misgendered trans athletes as “biological males.”In fact, only one segment of the 19 alluded to the broader nondiscrimination protections covered by the executive order. In that segment, anchor Sandra Smith asked, “President Biden signed an executive order aimed at eliminating discrimination based on gender identity, but instead of leveling the playing field, could this move threaten the future and fairness of girls sports?”In some of the mentions, Fox framed the executive order around locker rooms and bathrooms in addition to athletics; right-wing media have long and falsely suggested allowing trans people to use the restroom would pose a threat to women’s safety and privacy.
Notably, nine of the 19 segments were on Fox’s so-called “news” side programs (as opposed to opinion shows), and every single one of the guests or commentators who discussed the executive order held either right-leaning or anti-trans views. These included Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), Beth Stelzer of anti-trans group Save Women’s Sports, and The Federalist’s Ben Domenech.
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| President Biden |
Editor's note - Trump may be gone (thank God), but the policy established by this blog to every now and then focus on light LGBTQ issues in order to de-stress ourselves will continue.
Openly gay actor Wentworth Miller made a comment in a recent article which got me thinking. To summarize, he was tired of gay roles which are defined by struggles and sadness. He wanted more roles which put LGBTQ people in a position of power and authority. And I agreed with him. I have long wanted to motion picture featuring a gay black man as an androgynous action hero who saves the world while beating the hell out of bad guys. To tell the truth, I would settle for seeing any LGBTQ action hero doing all of that. I thought I had never seen that portrayal before.
It turns out that I was wrong. I had seen the character before. And so had a lot of America. In 2017, Academy Award-winning actress Charlize Theron starred in the hit motion picture Atomic Blonde. In the movie, she portrays undercover agent, Lorraine Broughton, trying to retrieve a missing list of double agents. Check out the trailer:
I got this form email from Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council:
If you are following the record number of executive orders that the Biden administration has issued during their first week in office, then you know how important it is that we pray and stand. The measures range from canceling the Keystone pipeline and shutting down oil production to imposing trangenderism upon our military and America's schools.
Tonight we will pray for our nation -- specifically, for the men and women who serve in our nation's military and their families who will be impacted by the executive orders aimed at using the military to advance a radical social agenda. We will also pray for our nation's media, that any deceit designed to misguide the American people will be exposed and new sources of information that will speak the truth will be elevated in this critical time. Please join me . . . along with Lt. Gen. (Ret.) Jerry Boykin and former pastor and congressman Mark Walker, at . . .
s we seek to hear and obey the voice of God and walk in His ways. He is our only hope!
God forbid Perkins prays for honesty, understanding, and little bit more kindness in the world. His prayers fall strictly in the political realm.
This is the same Tony Perkins who lied last night about how Biden canceling the Keystone Pipeline is costing ten of thousands of jobs while trying to pass off a junk science report he had a hand in creating as legitimate work from the Department of Defense.
The same Tony Perkins who signed a letter not that long ago spreading the lie that Biden's electoral win was fraud.
The same Tony Perkins who called LGBTQ people pawns of the devil and leads an organization whose mission is to make our lives miserable at every turn.
When he says God is our only hope, just who is he talking about?
Chyle please. I wouldn't bother to squint my eyes around Perkins and his ilk or even stoop to pray around them. Not even a little bit.
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| FRC's Tony Perkins tells so many lies, he probably doesn't remember the definition of truth. |
Yes, I know that to LGBTQ Americans, the fact that Family Research Council head Tony Perkins has has a habit of telling lies is rather passe. He and his group have told so many lies about us that if they ever accidentally told the truth, that would be the story.
But anti-LGBTQ industry lies about us are like lumps in oatmeal. Every time one pops up, you have to beat it down.
And this latest lie about President Biden is a doozy. Perkins is attempting - like the rest of the right, no doubt - to create a belief that some Americans are now having rethinking their votes for Biden. The fact that Perkins is attempting to pass along this talking point is simply more proof his hypocrisy. It wasn't that long ago that he and his group were a part of an effort to claim that Biden's win was the result of election fraud. So how can there be voter remorse if there was election fraud?
But it gets better. The entire theme of Perkins's piece is that Biden's honeymoon as president is supposedly over because he is costing Americans their jobs and prioritizing things like transgender rights:
Just three days in, the hashtag #BidenRemorse started popping up on social media. By then, the new president had stopped work on the border wall, shut down the Keystone XL Pipeline, and issued an oil and gas moratorium for drilling on federal land -- firing tens of thousands of workers in the process
. . . an exhaustive study by the State Department concluded that the Keystone XL project will result in just 50 jobs, including “35 permanent employees and 15 temporary contractors.” Further, the report stated that spending on the project would support only 3,900 temporary construction jobs if construction lasted one year and just 1,950 temporary construction jobs if construction lasted two years. The report also states that a majority of potential other jobs supported by the project would come from “indirect and induced spending,” yet a recent Washington Post article detailed how the “indirect” job estimates themselves don't hold up, as some have already been created in anticipation of the pipeline, and most would last for less than a year . . .
Unfortunately for our troops, the new president doesn't seem to care how his social experimentation affects our actual warfighting. Unlike Donald Trump, who insisted the military study the comprehensive effects of such a policy, Joe Biden -- from the so-called "party of science" -- has not asked for any updated information. In fact, he claimed this morning that opening the doors to transgenderism "does not have any meaningful negative impact on the Armed Forces" and "minimal" effect on "readiness and health care costs."That's interesting, since the findings of then-Secretary James Mattis in 2018 were that the Obama administration had to ignore stacks of research to justify the change. After wading through 21 months of actual fallout, the DOD believed that introducing this type of gender chaos into the military presented a "considerable risk" to its "effectiveness and lethality." The memo does a great job dismantling the flawed and outdated RAND study that both Presidents Obama and Biden have used to prop up their decision. After almost two years of seeing the real impact on troops, the DOD argued that RAND had "mischaracterize[d] or overstate[d] the reports on which it rests its conclusions" (p. 39). "In fact," officials write, "the RAND study itself repeatedly emphasized the lack of quality data on these issues and qualified its conclusions accordingly" -- a fact the Biden administration hasn't bothered to mention.
The recent situation regarding Biden's repeal of Trump's ban on transgender troops is a good example of what I'm talking about. Now when Trump announced the ban, he claimed that he consulted with his military leaders. But this turned out to be a lie. They too were caught by surprise.
In that same month, America learned that the ban did not come about from genuine concern about the military. It actually came from the minds of the anti-LGBTQ industry with assistance from former Vice President Mike Pence.
According to LGBTQnation:
Multiple sources are saying that Mike Pence – along with some anti-LGBTQ activists – wrote the report behind Donald Trump’s new transgender military ban. The White House released a plan on Friday night to purge transgender people from the military, which revoked the previous transgender military ban that was announced last year.Accompanying the new plan was a memo signed by Defense Secretary James Mattis and a report from the Department of Defense. Multiple sources told Slate that Mike Pence “played a leading role in the creation of this report,” along with anti-transgender activists Ryan Anderson and Tony Perkins.Anderson works at the right wing Heritage Foundation and recently wrote When Harry Became Sally, a book that claims that being transgender is a mental illness based on the narratives of “ex-transgender” people. Perkins works for the Family Research Council, an SPLC designated hate group. Another source told Think Progress that the report was a product of a “working group” led by Pence that produced a report with different conclusions from Mattis’s committee report. The source said that Pence “overruled” Mattis’s report, but did not explain exactly what that meant.
Christiana Holcomb, legal counsel at the conservative nonprofit organization Alliance Defending Freedom, which represents the plaintiffs in the Connecticut suit, said she is seeing a growing trend where lawmakers across the country are recognizing that it’s “a real problem” when state athletic associations or school districts allow transgender women to compete in women’s sports.
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| Since being appointed by Trump as director of the Office of Civil Rights at HHS in 2017, Roger Severino seemed to have made it his mission to strip LGBTQ Americans of basic health rights. With Biden's victory in November, he is out of a job. |
As of now, LGBTQ Americans have one less homophobe in government to worry about. Thanks to the Biden Administration, that is.
Roger Severino is gone from Health and Human Services.
In March 2017, Severino was appointed by former president Donald Trump as director of the Office for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. His appointment created immediate and intense consternation within the LGBTQ community because he had a long history of employment with groups who worked against our rights and safety, such as the Heritage Foundation and the Becket Fund.
While with those groups, his job was to specifically target our rights. And while employed at HHS, he continued that endeavor:
In 2018, The Advocate claimed that he was attempting to "erase trans people out of existence" by pushing a memo which would say that gender identity doesn't exist and that gender is set at birth and defined by genitalia.
Severino was also responsible for an attempt to create a rule which would roll back protections for the trans community against discrimination through Obamacare, and a "conscience rule" which said any healthcare worker could deny services to LGBTQ people based on "moral or religious" reasons. In November 2019, three different federal courts struck down the rule and one court found that HHS exaggerated a justification for the rule. Severino was pointed out in an NPR article to have contributed to that exaggeration.
While probably not as attention-grabbing as the Trump Administration's other exploits against LGBTQ Americans, Severino's actions had to potential to garner more negative repercussions. The Centers of Disease Control and other major medical centers have pointed out that a major impediment to good LGBTQ healthcare is a fear of discrimination and stigma. We are scared of being outed, being humiliated, or even of possible violence This makes us less likely to seek out good physicians and the medical care we need. In addition, the stress created by this situation makes us more susceptible to depression, drug abuse, and STDs.
Anything which undermines our ability to receive decent medical care, even if it is a rule which discriminates against us under the deceptive tone of "anti-religious discrimination," has the potential to have a negative effect our health. And the results would allow the anti-LGBTQ industry to exploit the evergreen trope of "homosexuality is a dangerous lifestyle."
My opinion is that Severino knew this. And had Trump won a second term, he would have been able to do more damage to us.
But now, Severino is out of a job. He is no longer employed at HHS. Dismissed. Purged. Given "the old heave ho." No matter how you phrase it, that turkey is gone and I am extremely glad about it. His page on the HHS site is also gone and in place of his name on the HHS leadership webpage is Robinsue Frohboese as 'acting director.'
From what one of my sources tells me, Frohboese previously served as principal deputy director of OCR (Office of Civil Rights). In addition, Frohboese worked for 17 years in the Special Litigation Section of the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, first as Senior Trial Attorney and subsequently as Deputy Chief. Lastly, Frohboese has played a key role in many civil rights initiatives and OCR’s implementation of the HIPAA Privacy Rule.
Isn't it nice to have a qualified person in this position instead of an overpaid lackey for anti-LGBTQ think tank?
After four years of Trump, I guess we're back to normal with the religious right snatching up its petticoats and screeching about "homosexual indoctrination," boycotts, and cries of "won't someone PLEASE think of the children."
I received this email via the American Family Association:
If you look forward to having your annual Cadbury Crème Egg each Easter season, you might not like how the company celebrates the risen Savior. Cadbury just released a commercial that has resulted in a backlash of comments from Christians and non-Christians alike. Everything from "disgusting" and "very disappointing" to "yech" and "gross."Todd Starnes best describes the ad this way: "It's like Disney's 'Lady and the Tramp' scene where the two dogs share spaghetti. Except, it's two grown men spinning around in a circle and sharing a creme-filled chocolate egg in a sexualized way."The 10-second segment is part of a longer commercial called "Crème Egg Golden Goobilee," showing ways to eat a Cadbury Crème Egg. You can see it here. Warning: This video is graphic and offensive. Cadbury makes a huge push to sell its Crème Eggs in America during the Easter season each year.A portion of each sale goes to help finance Cadbury's social agenda that has nothing to do with chocolates and candies. If U.S. sales are strong, Cadbury just might bring this ad to American televisions for your children to see. Taking a stand now will send a strong signal that their eggs are cracked up.
Donald Trump is gone. He is no longer president. In his place is Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. With their ascension comes optimism that America can repair all of the damage Trump caused over a course of four years.
But he is not without his defenders. Chief amongst them is anti-LGBTQ hate group the Family Research Council and its president, Tony Perkins. Perkins took it upon himself to praise Trump in long diatribe saluting not only the former president, but the members of his administration who stayed until Biden took over so that they could add last minute policy changes and rules.
These policy changes and rules include a ridiculous piece of something attacking trans athletes here, something enshrining the right-wing bastardization of "religious freedom" there, and a bit about abortion sprinkled throughout. Hopefully now that Biden has taken over, these policy changes and such will be eliminated. However, they are a good personification of the relationship which Trump had with religious conservatives these past four years. It had nothing to do with integrity or values. It was all about what Perkins and company wanted, what Trump gave them, and what he got in exchange. He gave them the bigoted legislation and policies and the conservative judges they wanted and they kissed his butt as if it were a holy relic left over from Jesus' crucifixion.
The last part of Perkins' cloying piece is especially nauseating:
. . . while the media and far-Left drone on about how ashamed Americans should be for supporting this president, I refuse to be. This administration wasn't just about one man -- it was about thousands of people living out their conviction for us. They leave these four years exhausted, but they should also leave them proud. Because regardless of how the chapter ended, the story of what they achieved matters.
As comical as that one is, it is the one of Facebook which will probably gain more attention. There, Graham implies that Trump's second impeachment is like the biblical betrayal of Jesus by Judas Iscariot.
For those who don't know, this betrayal led to Jesus's crucifixion:
Shame, shame on the ten Republicans who joined with Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats in impeaching President Trump yesterday. After all that he has done for our country, you would turn your back and betray him so quickly? We have never had a president like him in my lifetime. He gave us lower taxes, a strong economy, and low unemployment. He made NATO take notice and pay their own way. He had the guts to take on North Korea and meet with their leader personally. He didn’t let China walk all over us. Just his Mideast peace initiatives in the last couple of months deserve a Nobel Peace Prize. He has defended religious liberty like no president before him, and that matters to all people of faith. He has worked to bring prison reform and secured our southern border. He defeated the ISIS caliphate in Syria, and he strengthened our military. He was also the most pro-life president we have ever had. But the House Democrats impeached him because they hate him and want to do as much damage as they can. And these ten, from his own party, joined in the feeding frenzy. It makes you wonder what the thirty pieces of silver were that Speaker Pelosi promised for this betrayal. President Trump isn’t a perfect person. I don’t support or agree with some of the things the President said and did the last couple of weeks. January 6 was a low point in his presidency. We knew he had flaws when he ran for office in 2016. But I, and millions of others, voted for him because of the platform and policies he promised. I still support those. The Democrats have been trying to get rid of the President since the day he took office. What they did yesterday only further divides our nation. I hope President-elect Biden will keep his word and work for unity as he has said.
First, I must post this letter of congratulations to Donald Trump.
Dear Donald Trump,
Congratulations on your second impeachment. While you probably will never receive the Nobel Peace Prize, your dubious honor today ensures that you will serve a special place in American history as the worse president we ever had. And I would like to especially commend you on the fact that you earned every bit of this dubious "honor" of being the first and only president in the history of this country to be impeached TWICE.
WOW! You must be thrilled. I should also alert you to be on the lookout for messages of congratulations from Hillary Clinton and probably the family of the late President Richard Nixon.
Now then, while a lot of us greeted the news of Trump's 2nd impeachment with glee and satisfaction, some of his supporters are livid. One is even so livid that in his raging, he practically "owned" himself. Or in layman's terms, said something which made him look like a huge fool.
Who else but Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council?
Of course he is upset about the events of today and claims that it is proof of the supposed hypocrisy of Democrats:
While the repressive hand of the Democrats and their Big Tech allies will only fan the flames of resentment and hostility, it may very well leave many of those who voted for Biden on the promise unity and healing questioning their vote. Surely today's spectacle, an exercise in reckless, selfish, retaliation, isn't what they signed up for. Not only does it destroy their trust that Democrats can be the adults in the room, but it exposes them for the hypocrites they are. Men and women like Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) are blaming Trump for starting an "insurrection." They argue that the senators and congressmen operating within their constitutional rights to object to the election results should "resign."
Where were they in 2000, 2004, and 2016 when Democrats protested the presidential results in battleground states "Thirty-one Democrats voted to overturn the presidential election results in Ohio in 2005," Rachel Bovard tweeted. Ten of them are still in Congress. They serve beside House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who herself insisted in 2017, "Our election was hijacked. There is no question. Congress has a duty to protect democracy and follow the facts."
Editor's note - my posts should not be considered 'gotcha moments.' They are truths which we constantly need to be reminded of. There are groups and personalities out there who claim to be religious. They claim that they are morality and integrity-based, but their tactics are deceptive. They deliberately traffic lies which harm LGBTQ rights and safety. And, as we see with this post, the modus operandi they use when stigmatizing LGBTQ people is also being employed in other areas.
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| FRC president Tony Perkins |
After last Wednesday's riot at the Capitol, online services are clamping down on those who have been spreading false stories which contributed to the situation. An online app geared to conservatives, Parler, has been removed from several social media sites.
Since 2018, Parler was the home for many kicked off of Twitter for violating its rules of conduct. It's also the home of many conservative and Republicans, including members of Congress, conspiracy theorists and far right activists. Some of these individuals post violent content, which Parler does not clamp down on in the name of "free speech." Because of this and in view of last Wednesday's terrorist attack at the Capitol, companies such as Amazon, Google Play, and Apple removed it from their stores.
But to hear the Family Research Council and its president, Tony Perkins tell the story, this clamping down is censorship on conservative views.:
Most Americans thought they understood censorship. They've watched it evolve and expand this last decade, scooping up more people in its nets in the name of "tolerance," "diversity," and "non-violence." But what happened this weekend was not a tweet blocked here or an account suspended there. No, this was much more ominous. What Twitter, Facebook, Google, and Amazon did by locking out the president wasn't just a heavy-handed punishment of Donald Trump and his supporters -- it was a scorched-earth campaign against the tens of millions of people who dare to think differently than they do and the open forums that give our movement a voice."Amazon will be shutting off all of our servers," Parler's John Matze announced to stunned surprise on Saturday. It was the second major bombshell to drop in the new war between Big Tech and the other half of the country. After careful, behind-the-scenes coordination from Silicon Valley's chiefs, the popular alternative to Twitter was scrubbed from the Apple store, Google Play, and any other place users could download the app. "We will try our best," Matze insisted, "to move to a new provider..." But in the meantime, the message to conservatives is clear: Big Tech isn't just coming for Trump. They're coming for all of us -- and corporate America isn't far behind.The Tech giants used the claim that Parler allowed its platform to be used to advocate and coordinate violence at the capitol last week. If there was ever a case of the pot calling the kettle black, this is it. Homeland Security was forced to weigh-in this past summer in a letter to the social media giants saying the popular platforms appeared to play a role in facilitating "burglary, arson, aggravated assault, rioting, looting, and defacing public property." Are Twitter and Facebook responsible for the burning of Portland or the siege of Seattle? Then why are they holding Parler to a different standard? . . . This isn't about upholding any rules. This is about cutting off the oxygen to free speech on the Right.
Amazon had told Parler that it had seen “a steady increase in this violent content on your website, all of which violates our terms”. Amazon Web Services sent a detailed letter to the company including instances of such violent content and making clear that it believed Parler did not have an effective process to comply with the AWS terms of service.
I am not attempting to make light about last Wednesday's madness, but something happened during the situation which underscores how entitled those rioters were. And it not has gotten enough attention. One of them, who identified herself as "Elizabeth from Knoxville," got maced while trying to break into the Capitol and she was not happy about it:
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| Family Research Council president Tony Perkins |
Last week's incident on Wednesday was not only awful, it was spirit-killing. I don't really want to talk about it anymore right now. I will let Randy Rainbow handle it in a way which can at least bring some semi-lighthearted facts into the situation. And if Randy Rainbow is too tame for what you are feeling, then go on Twitter and hashtag #blacktwitter. You will get what you need there. Either way, enjoy:
Dear Evangelicals for Trump,
There is no use hiding. America knows who each and every last one of you are. Goodness knows as many times as some of you were so quick to appear in photo ops with Donald Trump, the country would have had to have been in a coma to not know how close you are to him.
I'm sure you've heard what happened at the Capitol on Wednesday and I know several you offered standard statements and comments such as "we are all sad" and we need to pray to God."
That's all well and good, except those statements will never do. You're gonna have to be a little bit more extra. And that's simply because you all contributed to the chaos yesterday.
Now I know what you're going to do. Don't pull that fake shocked routine. Don't pretend to be offended and don't even think about pulling out that cross from your closets which you intend to nail yourselves on while attempting to steal the role of the victim in this situation.
That role is already taken.
In the Bible, which I know you are aware, there was a king named David. He generally a upstanding God-fearing man. But once he messed up by lusting after a married woman he viewed bathing herself. He slept with her, she got pregnant, and to cover it up he had her husband killed.
The prophet Nathan, who advised David, came up to him after it was all over and said (I'm basically paraphrasing here): "You know you weren't right. What you did was wrong and you need to check yourself."
That's what an religious advisor to a leader should do - call him or her out when they are wrong.
But none of you ever did that with Trump.
Not when it came to prejudiced immigration policy,
not when it came to his constant lies,
not when it came to his absolute abysmal handling of the COVID pandemic,
not when it came to his lies about his election loss,
and finally not when it came to the storming of our Capitol on Wednesday, which he clearly instigated.
Over the past four years, you've taken time to tell everyone how much you loved him when he gave you things you wanted:
anoint him as a "great defender of Christianity:
Or generally kiss his ass:
And you also embarrassed yourselves making excuses for his behavior or declaring that you're giving him "mulligans."
Why didn't you call him out when he was wrong? Your deliberate inability to denounce Trump's past behavior got us to this point where a rampaging mob - a lot of them no doubt follow you - thought it was appropriate to storm the Capitol in his "defense." Why weren't you the moral voice before then when they needed you. You failed them because you portrayed Trump as an angel when you knew he was the devil.
Was it worth it? Did you stop abortion? What about LGBTQ rights? Have they been done away it yet?
Now that we are struggling in the aftermath of Wednesday, where are some of you now?
I will be honest. I never liked any of you. I've always viewed you as self-righteous, entitled hypocrites who are more concerned with scapegoating 'the other' and playing victims when the rest of us won't play your game. I've always believed that when you had to choose between your own interests and that of the country, America would lose.
That time is now. As much as I hate to admit it, I am very disappointed to be proven right.
America needs you to be honest for a change and denounce Donald Trump. How difficult can it be? If you find it hard, just pretend he passed a law helping LGBTQ people. You seem to never be a loss for words when denouncing things like that.
What are you scared of? Do you think he's going to rain fire from the sky on you? Do you think he's going turn you into a pillar of salt? Do you think in the last remaining days of his piss poor presidency, he's going to take away your access and privileges to the White House?
Or have you gotten everything you wanted from him and, like some cheap john, attempting to sneak away without leaving the money on the dresser.
America is waiting for you to say something.
