It's the 'Gulf of America' now

Should we drown ourselves in it?

Good evening, readers, and happy new year. Sort of. Did you watch the Golden Globes? I was particularly chuffed to see Nikki Glaser, the first woman ever to host the show solo, crush her opening monologue and outperform expectations. And then Ali Wong became the first woman to win the stand-up comedy category, both proving that women can, in fact, be quite funny. (Yea, I’m still mad about this piece from 2007.)

I’m finally back in Brooklyn, where the wind chill has finally dropped low enough that I had to force my 18-pound dog into a sweater this morning. It wasn’t fun for either of us.

“We used to be wolves.”

On a darker note, I’m here to discuss a series of alarming developments from the past few days re: this country’s cannonball into fascism. First, Trump gave yet another bizarre and unhinged press conference this morning in which he previewed his plans to make himself not just POTUS, but some kind of Emperor of the Americas. As part of this plan, he floated:

• Using “economic force” to annex Canada as the 51st state and “get rid of that artificially drawn line” (literally all borders are artificially drawn lines?), presumably to take Canada’s oil. (Justin Trudeau responded that there’s “not a snowball’s chance in hell” that we will conquer Canada.)

• Using military force to acquire Greenland and the Panama Canal, which he insists we need for “economic and national security.” (Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen reiterated that “Greenland is not for sale and will not be in the future either,” as Denmark currently owns Greenland, though she did not respond to to the insane suggestion of a violent takeover.)

• Renaming the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America,” just to be a dick, while also launching a “soft invasion” of Mexico under the pretense of fighting “drug cartels” (which would actually just be a straight-up declaration of war with a friendly neighboring country that can’t fight back.)

  

  What’s especially frustrating about all this is that Trump has long benefitted from the appearance of being the “anti-war” candidate, and a lot of his voters seemed to genuinely believe that he would be the guy to keep us out of global conflicts and maintain world peace. “Trump’s antiwar message resonates with white America,” J.D. Vance wrote in a 2016 op-ed that the New York Times really should not have published. There were even a few pro-Palestinian voters that believed Trump would be the more likely president to secure some kind of peace there, which is so naive it’s difficult for me to type. I’d say it will be interesting to see how the doves who voted for Trump will react if he actually follows through on any of his imperialist ramblings, but I fear it will be far too late for it to matter what anyone thinks.

Meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg—or Cuckerberg, as I now call him—has fully taken his mask off and inserted Trump’s boot into his mouth. He announced today in a series of videos that because this election felt like a "cultural tipping point towards prioritizing free speech," which is code for taking the guardrails off right-wing disinformation, Meta will be moving its headquarters from California to Texas and instituting a series of policy changes that will further turn Facebook and Instagram into a propaganda breeding ground. Meta is scrapping fact-checkers in favor of a community notes system, similar to what Elon Musk did with X, and removing restrictions on content that’s abusive and discriminatory towards women, immigrants, and trans people. This includes overhauling the Hateful Conduct policy to allow Meta users to say queer and trans people have “mental illness.”

The move from CA to TX, he said, is to “remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content”—because in the new world order, right-leaning opinions are considered genuinely-held beliefs that we have to respect, and left-leaning opinions are a form of bias that won’t be tolerated.

It’s not necessarily a new development that Cuckerberg is bending the knee to Trump; Facebook notoriously delivered Trump the 2016 election and has played an outsized, deliberate role in the death of the news industry. But now, with his million dollar donation to Trump’s inauguration and policy changes that overtly benefit Trump, it appears that he’s openly gunning for a sweetheart deal in the Federal Trade Commission’s big antitrust case against Meta.

And finally, I would be remiss not to check in on our boy Elon Musk, who has decided that it’s time for more “positive, beautiful” content on X in the wake of being absolutely dragged by MAGA over his stance on H1B visas. “Algorithm tweak coming soon to promote more informational/entertaining content. We will publish the changes to @XEng. Our goal is to maximise unregretted user-seconds,” Musk wrote. I have regretted every second I’ve spent on that platform since Musk bought it, but I don’t think his proposed changes would help.

Meanwhile, this is the kind of positive, informational content that Elon himself has posted on his own platform after condemning all the “negativity”:

Even as we laugh at them, the fact remains that Trump, Musk, and Cuckerberg are a truly terrifying trifecta who have enough money and power combined to do genuine damage to democracy and the planet for their own gain. And we are watching this happen in real time before Trump has even taken office. I’ve said it once, and I’ll say it again: You’ll miss the free press when it’s gone.