
Kicking Ass

A church in St. Petersburg, Florida, is taking an opportunity to speak out in support of the family of George Floyd, who died this Monday after a police officer pressed his knee against Floyd’s neck for up to eight minutes.
Boston-based GE said today it would divest the lighting business to Savant Systems, a smart home management company also based in Massachusetts. The companies did not disclose financial terms of the deal, but sources told The Wall Street Journal that the transaction was valued at about $250 million.
A statue of rock and roll pioneer Little Richard will be erected outside the musician’s childhood home in Macon, Georgia.
The musician, real name Richard Wayne Penniman, passed away earlier this month after a battle with bone cancer. He was 87 years old.
But since his first day as a presidential candidate, I have been baffled by one mystery in particular: Why do working-class white men—the most reliable component of Donald Trump’s base—support someone who is, by their own standards, the least masculine man ever to hold the modern presidency? The question is not whether Trump fails to meet some archaic or idealized version of masculinity. The president’s inability to measure up to Marcus Aurelius or Omar Bradley is not the issue. Rather, the question is why so many of Trump’s working-class white male voters refuse to hold Trump to their own standards of masculinity—why they support a man who behaves more like a little boy.
May 2014, a month after I published my first article about being trans, I woke up at dawn between two naked men, on the top floor of a townhouse in Park Slope. I’d followed the rules of straight womanhood for over a decade, and it hadn’t made me happy, so I wanted to test my boundaries, push myself to be with people in ways I hadn’t before. That was when Barrett and Jason came along, a bisexual couple I met online who were interested in dating a woman.
For months, equestrian center workers were puzzled by a spate of injuries to horses and ponies in Delaware. It seemed someone was sneaking into the stables in the dead of night and tying up the animals’ back legs. Eventually police launched a sting operation to figure out who could have embarked on such a bizarre crime spree.
The president was already the poster child for an outdated, dangerous and defunct form of masculinity before the coronavirus hit. But now that we are in the midst of a global pandemic, he has become a pathetic parody.
Between the White House’s and the Justice Department’s attempts to undermine the Mueller report and the president’s response to the coronavirus, a committee tasked with ensuring the efficacy of the federal government should be working nonstop. And yet, to date, Johnson hasn’t issued a single subpoena on any matter that has unfolded during Donald Trump’s presidency.