Q Toon: A Little Song, A Little Dance

Phoning in to the Fox Noise panel program "The Five" last Thursday, Donald Commodius Trump made the bizarre claim at the heart of my editorial cartoon today.

“Now I think I did very well with the gay vote, OK? I even played the gay national anthem as my walk-off, OK? And I think it probably helped me. But I did great. No Republican’s ever gotten the gay vote like I did and I’m very proud of it, I think it’s great. Perhaps it’s because I’m from New York City.”

The "gay national anthem" Trump referred to is the Village People's "Y.M.C.A.," one of the staples of his 2024 presidential campaign appearances (including the one where Trump appeared on stage and called for a 34-minute impromptu concert, after the crowd had already been standing for hours listening to music while waiting for him to arrive).

For dropping their cease-and-desist order to stop playing their music at Trump rallies, the Village People were rewarded by landing the gig to perform "Y.M.C.A." at Trump's "Make America Great Again Rally" and the Turning Point USA Inaugural Ball on January 19, 2025. 

I hope they were paid enough to be worth it, because I would argue that "Y.M.C.A." can no longer be considered the gay national anthem. Not only is it now a staple along with "Mambo #5" and "Electric Slide" of different-sex wedding receptions, the Village People front man and co-author of the song Victor Willis has disavowed its gayness:

“There’s been a lot of talk, especially of late, that Y.M.C.A. is somehow a gay anthem. As I’ve said numerous times in the past, that is a false assumption based on the fact that my writing partner was gay, and some (not all) of Village People were gay, and that the first Village People album was totally about gay life. 

“This assumption is also based on the fact that the YMCA was apparently being used as some sort of gay hangout and since one of the writers was gay and some of the Village People are gay, the song must be a message to gay people. To that I say once again, get your minds out of the gutter. It is not."

Don't count on being able to convince Secretary of Excursions Pete Kegsbreath to enlist "In the Navy" as a recruitment tool, however.

There are plenty of other nominees for Gay National Anthem, any of which is unsullied by association with the Absolutely Corrupt Trump Regime. There's "Born This Way," "I Am What I Am," "You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)," or "Supermodel (You Better Work)" — just for starters.

Dozens of new ones come out every summer, and I haven't even gotten around to the Lesbian National Anthems, Bisexual National Anthems, Transgender National Anthems, Queer National Anthems, and all the Plus National Anthems.

If you saw Monday's sneak peek, you will have noticed that I completely changed the last dialogue balloon. Originally, I had Trump "weaving" to the topic of his pens, the subject of a five-minute monologue during a recent televised cabinet meeting.

After I had nearly finished inking the cartoon, it occurred to me that it would be better to have him show off his ability to identify the five Village People. Just in case you thought he knew their actual names.

Inking on top of white-out doesn't work very well, so I wrote the substitute dialogue on a sheet of bristol board that I have used for drawing backgrounds for repetition in multi-panel cartoons. What I failed to consider was that the sheet of bristol board was from a bundle susceptible to bleeding. Instead of staying where I draw it, ink spreads out along the fibers of the paper. 

Not far, but not neat.

That's fine for backgrounds, which aren't meant to be in focus anyway. Lettering has to be neater, though, so I ended up spending a considerable amount of time cleaning up that lettering in PhotoShop.

So if someday you notice that I've switched over to using Comic Sans, cut me some slack. I'm not planning to do it, but lettering is probably the least favorite part of any cartoonist's job.

The Ass in a Lion's Skin

Aesop's Fable Updated

 An Ass found a Lion’s skin left in the forest by a hunter. He dressed himself in it, and roamed about in the forest amusing himself by frightening all the foolish animals he met in his wanderings. All took to their heels the moment they saw him.

The Ass was so pleased to see the animals running away from him, just as if he were King Lion himself, that he could not keep from expressing his delight by a loud, harsh bray. 

A Fox, who ran with the rest, stopped short as soon as he heard the voice. Approaching the Ass, he turned to the other animals and proclaimed: "Behold! Here is Lion, King of the Beasts, here to Make America Great Again!"

The Muskrat twittered Xcitedly, "All hail King Lion!" And he leaped and  jumped for joy.

The Zuckerbird agreed. "Whatever you say!"

Then the canary chirped, "But he's an ass!"

The Wapopotamus and the Raccoon-cheong turned sharply to her. "Be quiet!" they grunted and hissed. "Are you trying to get us in trouble?"

And the creatures bowed and prayed to the Lion King that brayed.

Q Toon: GOP House of Terror

Requblican advertising in these late days of the presidential and congressional campaigns is focusing on their policy of persecuting transgender persons. 

The Trump campaign has recently dropped at least 17 million on ads highlighting Harris' support during her 2019 presidential campaign for access to gender affirming-medical treatment for transgender people. It's part of a broader Republican strategy casting the Democratic Party as taking transgender rights to extremes. According to data compiled by AdImpact for NPR, these ads have aired more than 30,000 times, including in all seven swing states, and with a particular focus on NFL and college football broadcast audiences.

Here in the battleground state of Wisconsin, the campaigns of Donald Duce Trump, Eric Hovde, and their ilk are desperately trying to tar Kamala Harris and Tammy Baldwin with anything they've ever said or voted for that treated transgender persons as having any humanity at all. Even if they have to lie outright.

(Hovde and his party's Senate Leadership Fund ads also play up, in sinister tones, that Senator Baldwin has a "girlfriend" who works for Wall Street and lives in a swanky New York apartment. The ads all include a black-and-white photo of the woman, just in case you hit the mute button during commercial breaks.)

Republicans are running the same sort of transphobic ads against Senator Sherrod Brown in Ohio, Congressman Colin Allred in Texas, Sen. John Tester in Montana, and Sen. Bob Casey in Pennsylvania. The ads whip up fear and hatred against immigrants and the transgender community, using images of visibly gender-nonconforming people such as Queer Eye's Jonathan Van Ness and drag performer Pattie Gonia, neither of whom consented for their likenesses to be used.

Naturally, some GQP operative dug up the trifecta of an undocumented immigrant who had gender correction surgery while in prison for murder. The Trump ads make it sound as if Kamala Harris personally wheeled her into the operating room.

A Trump ad that began heavy air play this week begins with a ten-second video clip from Charlemagne Tha God's radio show on September 30 apparently calling Harris's position on the transgender issue "nuts," surely calculated to drive in the wedge between Harris and black male voters. 

He may have merely complimenting an earlier Trump ad. In any event, if the rights of transgender Americans came up during Harris’s hour-long grilling on Mr. Tha God’s show on Tuesday, I’ve found no mention of it in any news reports.

Harris was asked about transgender surgery for prison inmates at a Fox town hall later that day, and said little more than promising "I will follow the law."

She must have decided that the Trump team had enough material for their transbashing house of terror already.

Q Toon: Nutcracker Suite

 

Fox Noise prime time talking head Jesse Watters was going off on petty shit that ticks him off the other day — his primary job at the news channel, apparently — fixing his pique upon holiday décor diversity.

Specifically, Watters is annoyed that Target stores offer LGBTQ+ Pride nutcrackers for sale. (Their dark-skinned Santas in wheelchairs also bug him.) 

Perhaps still smarting from the outrage ginned up by the snowflakes at Fox against its Pride merchandise displays last spring, Target offers the gay nutcracker only on line, not in their brick-and-mortar locations. Well, perhaps if Target has an outlet in the Castro or on Christopher Street, you might find one on the shelf there. Or locked away in a cabinet behind the jewelry and pain medications. I dunno.

The important thing, however, is that these Fox buddies must keep stoking this supposed "war on Christmas" to keep their audience engaged and enraged. Answering the call to arms, all the other right-wing culture warriors have joined the fight.

For its report on the LGBTQ+ Pride nutcracker, Catholic News Agency, instead of finding a picture of an actual nutcracker from Target's website, dug up this much more titillating image from Shutterstock:

A more accurate description of the product is in paragraph four, but no doubt most of CNA's readers think Leather Boi is what greets Christmas shoppers as soon as they walk in the doors of their local Target with little Patrick Xavier and Mary Elizabeth.

Our home has several wooden nutcracker dolls that we bring out every December: traditional, drummer, swordsman, king, wine steward, Packer fan, Santa, and on and on. Same basic woodwork, different paint job, maybe each its own prop.

No matter that the actual outfit LGBTQ+  Pride nutcracker wears is the same cut as all the others, just with rainbow colored paint and pinkish hair. It's the image from Shutterstock that will lodge in CNA's readers' heads, even if they did not skip over paragraph four in search of the address to complain to.

Just for that, next year’s nutcracker oughta be in drag.

Q Toon: Stumped Speechless

Here at last is my cartoon response to Fox Noise's cattle call in Milwaukee last week of eight of the Republican candidates hoping against hope that something, anything, will force Corrupt Donald Trump to drop out of the presidential race.

At the moment, even though Trump is facing four separate felony trials going into the election, for everything from paying off a porn star to trying to subvert an election to sending a lynch mob into the halls of Congress, that seems like a long shot. Trump does not know the meaning of defeat.

Or truth, or integrity, or perfect, or democracy, or Constitution, or Corinthians.

My cartoon, of course, is riffing on Bret Baier's asking the candidates to raise their hands if they would support Trump as the nominee of their party even if he were convicted in one of those trials. Depending on whom you ask, former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson was the only candidate who kept his hands down. 

Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has been most vocal of any of the eight in proclaiming that Trump is unqualified to be President again; but he sort of halfway raised a hand. Perhaps he was asking recognition to speak.

The other six definitely raised their hands: Tech Bro Vivek Ramaswami right away; Florida Governor Ron DesAntis after checking what the candidates to his right and left were doing.

It was a trick question anyway. Each candidate, in order for permission to be on stage at all, had to first sign a promise to support the Republican presidential nominee, whoever that trumps out to be.

Meanwhile, the only thing more universal among Republicans than slavish loyalty to Donald P0115809 Trump is their fear and loathing of transgender Americans. The candidates pledged to continue their party's assault on transgender student athletes especially:

"If you’re able-bodied in America, you work. If you take out a loan, you pay it back. If you commit a violent crime, you got to jail. And if God made you a man, you play sports against men." — Sen. Tim Scott, closing statement.

“[T]here’s a lot of crazy woke things happening in schools ... biological boys don’t belong in the locker rooms of any of our girls.”— former Gov. Nikki Haley, in response to a question

“I’m saying in North Dakota, we made a priority of protecting women’s sports and we’ve done that in our state." —Gov. Doug Borgum (who vetoed one anti-trans athlete bill in North Dakota but signed two others)

"There are only two genders." — Vivek Ramaswamy

I think we have finally found here one thing that might just possibly shake Republicans' unquestioning devotion to Trump — as absurdly incredible as his declaring himself a transgender student athlete would be.

But then, he does seem to think that he's 6'3" and 215 pounds.

And he does have the vocabulary of a third grader.

Q Toon: In a Customer Service Room

Last Monday, Audrey Hale, 28, shot his way into Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee, and fatally shot three staff members and three 9-year-old students. Hale, a former student at the private Presbyterian school, was armed with a semi-automatic pistol, an AR-style rifle, and a handgun.

Initial calls for sensible gun controls after this, the 130th mass shooting in 2023, were quickly drowned out when police let everybody know that Hale identified as transgender on social media. Aha! Something besides guns that Republicans could blame this one on! And they were already trying to ban transgender therapy! Oh, goody!

Several conservative political figures, including Sen. J.D. Vance, Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene, and Donald Trump Jr., were among the personalities on social media who implicated the role of the shooter's transgender identity in the shooting. The motive for the shooting remains unknown, according to authorities.

Statistically, transgender Americans are much more likely to be the target of violence than its perpetrator. Yet right-wing propagandist Benny Johnson cited three other presumed transgender or non-binary mass murderers to argue that "the modern trans movement is radicalizing activists into terrorists."

To which someone with more authority to speak on the issue replied:

"4 shooters out of over 300 mass shooters since 2009 are transgender or non binary. That's just 1.3 percent of all shooters," Anthony Zenkus, a lecturer in social work at Columbia University, wrote on Twitter. "You just proved our point: 99 percent of mass shooters in the United States are cis gendered."

Tennessee politicians have called for publication of a manifesto that Hale left behind, but many in the LGBTQ+ community worry that while his manifesto might help police understand his motives, publishing it only serves to inflame right-wingers' passion for trans-bashing, while perversely glorifying the murderers' twisted thoughts and potentially inspiring some future killer.

We didn't need to read what the Las Vegas shooter thought about casinos, or how the Tree of Life shooter justified slaughtering worshipers in a synagogue, or why the Monterey Park shooter objected to Lunar New Year celebrations, or the ruminations of the guy who killed the journalists at the Capital Gazette regarding freedom of the press.

To list but one cisgender mass murderer for each of the transgender killers Benny Johnson named. 

All we need to know about them is that their minds were filled with hate and rage. Of which, like military-grade weaponry, we seem to have no shortage of peddlers on social media and right-wing "news" channels.

Q Toon: Tedious

It seems like eons ago that we coined the term "Obama Derangement Syndrome" to describe Republicans' irrational, virulent response to anything and everything about Barack Obama: from their embrace of birtherism even in the face of overwhelming evidence that our 44th President was indeed born in Hawaii, to their revulsion against his wife planting a vegetable garden, to their howls of shock and horror that time he wore a tan suit.

When the electoral college elected as president Donald Berzelius Trump, the most prominent flogger of birtherism's dead horse, right-wingers quickly purloined the idea of "Trump Derangement Syndrome" — as if there were something pathological about Americans being upset over having our country run by a solipsistic, self-serving, lying, cheating, boorish grifter who was using the presidency as a Keep Out Of Jail Free card while billing taxpayers to put up the Secret Service in his own personal hotel chain.

So, now that the party that was just fine and dandy with all that is now falling all over itself proclaiming transgender folks to be the biggest danger to the republic since affordable health care, I'm stealing "Derangement Syndrome" back.

Q Toon: Sticking to His Guns

Last Thursday, Fox Business host Neil Cavuto asked Senator Ron Johnson for his reaction to the horrific murder of 19 third- and fourth-grade students and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, by an 18-year-old armed with AR-15 semi-automatic rifles.

"Do you think we would require stiffer background checks?" Cavuto asked RoJo.

“You know, no matter what you do, people fall through the cracks,” Johnson shot back. “You can’t identify all these problems. You can’t arrest somebody for a crime they haven’t committed yet. These are difficult issues.”

Reiterating his belief that the solution lies in “renewed faith” and “strong families, Johnson then quickly leaned into the latest right-wing moral panic.

“We stopped teaching values in so many of our schools. Now we’re teaching wokeness,” the senator fumed. “We’re indoctrinating our children with things like CRT, telling, you know, some children they’re not equal to others and they’re the cause of other people’s problems.”

Pushing back, Cavuto interjected: “But school shootings have been happening long before CRT.”

Undeterred, Johnson asserted that “CRT’s been going on under the radar for quite some time as well,” declaring that “wokeness” and “liberal indoctrination” have also been going on for a long time.

“This is a much larger issue than what a simple new gun law’s going to, it’s not going to solve it, it’s not going to solve it,” he concluded.

If I shared Wisconsin's senior senator's confidence that banning "wokeness" was going to solve our gun problem, and if I thought that Critical Race Theory had the slightest relevance to any of this, I'd be right RoJo's pushing for a return to teaching heterosexual white male supremacy. 

But I don't.

Nor do I think that it's at all practical to post guards armed as if for World War III at every entrance to every school building, grocery store, hospital, movie theater, house of worship, fast food diner, office holiday party, and open-air garlic / music festival.

But since Ron Johnson, and the rest of the GOP, are steadfast in their belief that American gun killings have nothing whatsoever to do with American guns, give him an E for Effort for trying to link the carnage to some Republican talking point, any Republican talking point.

Q Toon: A Shot of Preposterone

 

Remember when the Baby Boomers hit middle age, and suddenly newsmagazines were running cover stories about menopause (it's not just for women any more!) and 50 being the new 39?

Well, now it's Gen X's turn.

Having discovered erectile dysfunction, Fox Noise host Tucker Carlson has decided to devote a week of his program to his fears that American men are losing their testosterone. The montage of manly images in the ad promoting his series included this bizarre image:

It turns out that this wasn't some idiot plugging into a hilltop Tesla recharging station. Instead, it has something to do with some self-appointed expert whose Rx for iron-poor testosterone is to bathe one's testicles in red light. I assume he was inspired by the folks who claim to have found health benefits from exposing their anuses to ultra-violet light to explore arousing his sperm by exposing his testes to the other end of the visible spectrum.

Look, I'm sure the dude has published dozens of peer-reviewed studies. 

I mean, click-bait dick pics.

The peers interviewed by Newsweek, on the other hand, were not amused.

Urologist Petar Bajic, MD, at the Cleveland Clinic's Glickman Urological and Kidney Institute, in Ohio, ... told Newsweek that men considering red light therapy to enhance their testosterone levels would be wasting their money.

Dr. Bajic said: "The bottom line about red light therapy for low testosterone is that there is no evidence to support its use and no psychological basis for how it might even work because light wouldn't penetrate the skin to enter the testicles. ... "

Mr. Crotchy McSunbather, the guy prescribing submerging into ice baths, and whatever the deal is with the shirtless fellow milking cows without a bucket — they all fit into the melting together of New Age Holistic Anti-medicine and anti-vaxxer eagerness to try anything from horse dewormer to injecting bleach, as long as the doctor didn't order it.

Sometimes it feels as though that particular crowd are just testing us all to find out just what weirdness and ridiculousness they can foist on their followers before even those gullible disciples crack up laughing at the utter inanity of it all.

Kind of like fashion designers.

It's stylish, and, what the hell, it promotes fertility!

Anyway, getting back to Tucker's War on Flaccidity, it's hard (no pun intended) to believe that his fearmongering isn't meant to frighten his viewers into believing that transgender persons and gender dysphoria are brand new phenomena, a novel threat never seen before in the history of Manlinesskind.

But just as every generation is the very first to discover sex, every generation eventually, inexorably becomes the first to discover diminished sex drive.

Ms & Ms

The Mars candy company decided to redesign the outfits of their two female animated M&M characters this month. No longer does the brown M strut about in stiletto heels. The green M has swapped out go-go boots for sneakers.

All this was too much for Fox "News" host Tucker Carlson, who lit into Mars Incorporated on his show for going all woke and ruining his hard-shelled chocolaty sexual fantasies.

Now, for all I know, the scenario I have presented this week would really turn Tucker on. As long as the gals didn't start wearing flannel, khaki and facial piercings. They've already got the shaved head look.

After several week's of nothing but wordy four-panel cartoons, I was ready for something in a single panel. So thank you, Tucker Carlson, for devoting some of your umbrage to a couple of candy mascots changing their footwear.

Just wait until he finds out that the blue M was assigned pink at birth.

Q Toon: Set in Boldface Hype

Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI), a leader in his party's fight against the fight against global pandemics, was on Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade's podcast on World AIDS Day last week. He acknowledged the occasion by accusing Dr. Anthony Fauci, Chief Medical Advisor to President Biden, of exaggerating the danger from COVID-19 as well as from HIV/AIDS.

“Fauci did the exact same thing with AIDS. He overhyped it,” Johnson told Kilmeade.

“He created all kinds of fear, saying it could affect the entire population when it couldn’t,” Johnson said, without citing scientific evidence. “And he’s doing, he’s using the exact same playbook with COVID, ignoring therapy, pushing a vaccine.”

Update: And now, Johnson has told a "town-hall" phone call, “By the way, standard gargle, mouthwash, has been proven to kill the coronavirus. If you get it, you may reduce viral replication. Why not try all these things?” Do I really need to tell you that no medical professional or mouthwash company agrees with him?

Anti-vaxxer Johnson should, by all rights, be an embarrassment to the state of Wisconsin, except that there are vast expanses of the state where folks think that a background in business entitles one to spew bullshit at will. PolitiFact has no problem coming up with over a dozen "Mostly False" to "Pants On Fire" statements by him.

In March, he told radio host Joe "Pags" Pagliano that the Capitol rioters on January 6 "were people who love this country, that truly respect law enforcement, would never do anything to break the law. Now, had the tables been turned, and Joe — this is going to get me in trouble — had the tables been turned and President Trump won the election and tens of thousands of Black Lives Matter and antifa, I might have been a little concerned."

And, yes, he doesn't think January 6 was an armed insurrection, but he does want Hunter Biden investigated.

✍

Johnson hasn't yet announced whether he'll run for a third term next year, although his full-throated endorsement of Trumpism, conspiracy nonsense, and COVID denial has convinced other Republicans to stay out of the race. On the other side of the primary ballot, twelve Democrats to date have launched campaigns to unseat him.

Democrats think Johnson's is the one Republican Senate seat they can flip in 2022, and a group called "Opportunity Wisconsin" has been advertising heavily here all year urging us to tell him to stop doing bad things. For much of the fall, its ads starred a former employee of Hufcor blaming Johnson for a tax break that rewarded Hufcor for moving overseas. The current TV ad features a navy submarine veteran accusing Johnson of voting for tax cuts that resulted in Johnson doubling his wealth.

The Opportunity Wisconsin ad blitz started last February by telling Johnson to stop blocking COVID-19 relief checks. No wonder he thinks the pandemic has been overhyped — relief checks only encourage people not to work. Tax cuts encourage employers to lay them off.

✍

Meanwhile, here are the facts about HIV/AIDS and COVID-19, just in case anyone out there actually thinks they have been overhyped:

New HIV infections have been reduced by 52% since the peak in 1997. 

• In 2020, around 1.5 million [1.0 million–2.0 million] people were newly infected with HIV, compared to 3.0 million [2.1 million–4.2 million] people in 1997.
• 37.7 million [30.2 million–45.1 million] people globally were living with HIV in 2020.
• 79.3 million [55.9 million–110 million] people have become infected with HIV since the start of the epidemic.
• 36.3 million [27.2 million–47.8 million] people have died from AIDS-related illnesses since the start of the epidemic.
  

AIDS-related deaths have been reduced by 64% since the peak in 2004 and by 47% since 2010.

• In 2020, around 680,000 [480,000–1 million] people died from AIDS-related illnesses worldwide, compared to 1.9 million [1.3 million–2.7 million] people in 2004 and 1.3 million [910,000–1.9 million] people in 2010.

People living with HIV experience more severe outcomes and have higher comorbidities from COVID-19 than people not living with HIV. In mid-2021, most people living with HIV did not have access to COVID-19 vaccines.

• Studies from England and South Africa have found that the risk of dying from COVID-19 among people with HIV was double that of the general population.
• Sub-Saharan Africa is home to two thirds (67%) of people living with HIV. But the COVID-19 vaccines that can protect them are not arriving fast enough. In July 2021, less than 3% of people in Africa had received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine.

And here is the death toll from COVID-19, as of last night:

5,294,887 deaths worldwide; 813,904 in the U.S.

In just two years. 

 

Q Toon: From Here to Paternity

Fox Noise talking head Tucker Carlson recently got his panties all in a wad because Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was taking some time off from work to join husband Chasten raising their newborn twins.

“Paternity leave, they call it," Carlson sniffed, "trying to figure out how to breastfeed. No word on how that went.”

Buttigieg took Carlson's crap in stride.

“Well, look, in his case, I guess he just doesn’t understand the concept of bottle feeding, let alone the concept of paternity leave,” he said.

“But what is really strange is that, you know, this is from a side of the aisle that used to claim the mantle of being pro-family,” Buttigieg added. “What we have right now is an administration that’s actually pro-family. And I’m blessed to be able to experience that as an employee, being able to have the flexibility to take care of our newborn children, which is, by the way, work. It’s a joyful work. It’s wonderful work, but it’s ― it’s definitely work.”

Buttigieg further explained that there is this thing called the internet, which allows him to keep abreast of any developments at the Transportation Department, including supply chain bottlenecks and the Build Back Better But With Coal So Joe Manchin Might Vote For It Bill. He only took six weeks off, so he has since returned to work (and to the Sunday Morning Talk Shows).

Carlson's swipe at the Buttiegieg family, echoed by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), Noisemax, and others of their right-wing ilk, is just another example of the stuck-in-the-1950's thinking we've come to expect from the Republican Party these days.

Carlson's sad implication "breastfeeding" is the only significant task for people who have children ― an especially depressing take from a father of four ― does a disservice to all parents, of all genders and sexualities.

When men do take parental leave, research shows they see it as an overwhelmingly positive experience, reducing the professional risk for both them and their partner, increasing their bond with their child, and strengthening their relationship. As part of a gay couple, Buttigieg's example in taking leave is particularly significant.

And, as many others have pointed out, Fox Noise itself offers paid paternity leave to its employees, and they greatly appreciate it in spite of the diaper changes and nose fridas.

 I cannot thank Fox enough for providing all fathers who work here with such a generous paternity leave. This experience has changed me in a profound way and in ways I won’t fully comprehend until my daughter is older. But for now – that smile coming from the crib each morning, immediately followed by morning snuggles – is what I will cherish the most. There is nothing better. 

Q Toon: A Tucker Born Every Minute

I developed this week's cartoon in response to Tucker Carlson's fawning interview with Hungarian fascist homophobe President Orbán. Surely my "Any Day Now" scenario in which Mr. Carlson would be equally infatuated with the family, faith, and heritage clan's conquest of Afghanistan is utterly ridiculous.

Or maybe not so much.

It turns out that Carlson is already warming up to the Taliban proud boys' club in Afghanistan.

“Thanks to American-imposed gender quotas, dozens of women ultimately were installed as representatives in Afghan’s parliament,” Carlson complains. “How did that work? Well, the whole thing was a sham, as always.”

“It caused revolts, but officials kept doing it, they kept pushing radical gender politics anyway, because they could, because they were in charge of these Stone Age people they were going to educate. This is the face of the late American empire, gender studies seminars at gunpoint,” he claim[s]. ...

“It turns out that the people of Afghanistan don’t actually want gender studies symposia. They didn’t actually buy the idea that men can become pregnant. They thought that was ridiculous,” he continues. ...

He claims the Taliban rejects that because “They don’t hate their own masculinity. They don’t think it’s toxic, they like the patriarchy, some of their women like it too, so now they’re getting it all back. So maybe it’s possible that we failed in Afghanistan because the entire neoliberal program is grotesque.”

Once upon a time, it was conservatives who were all in favor of cultural imperialism — onward Christian soldiers and all that —; but when it comes to equal rights for women and the LGBTQ+, the right-wingers have suddenly discovered the virtues of medievalism and the divine right of the biggest psychopath in the land. If the local warlords want to imprison women in their homes and force them to wear burlap tents, if they believe in crushing innocent LGBTQ+ people under stone walls, well, you just have to respect local customs.

And sigh that those were the days.

Q Toon: Is Fox News Evil?

I'm exaggerating any antigay animus on Fox News's part because this is a cartoon drawn for the LGBTQ+ press. That animus exists — especially against transgender people as the whipping boy/girl/children du jour — even if Fox News hasn't been up in alarms about marriage equality or Gays In The Military lately.

What I'm not exaggerating is Fox News's reliance upon stirring up its audience's phobias and resentment against The Other, and promoting The Big Lie. As a Republican media outlet, Fox News is acutely aware that majority rule is a potential threat to their party; so it is eager to cast doubt upon the legitimacy of free and open elections.

Absent any real evidence of massive voter fraud by Democrats, Fox News can't state it as fact. (Indeed, nearly all of the instances of voter fraud that have come to light, rare as they are, have been individuals casting a second vote for Republican candidates.) Instead, Fox News puts democracy in jeopardy by casting its aspersions in the form of a question.

Fox News isn't accusing Democrats of busing dead illegal immigrant voters to the polls. It's just asking whether they might be doing it. Journalists are supposed to ask questions, aren't we?.

Hence the title of today's post.

Q Toon: Keeping Up with the MAGAshians

 

At the moment, one of the leading candidates to replace Governor Gavin Newsom in California's recall election is former Olympian, Wheaties cover athlete, and surreality TV personality is Caitlyn Jenner. In a crowded field, that may simply be a matter of name recognition, but California has a history of electing  celebrity candidates; viz., Ronald Reagan, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sonny Bono, and Clint Eastwood.

You will note that all five celebrity candidates in that paragraph are Republicans. Non-GOP celebrities running for office elsewhere tend to get dismissed as lightweights in general elections (except in Minnesota).

In a series of interviews, Jenner's grasp of the issues has proven less than impressive: she didn't vote in the last election because she wasn't interested in any of the propositions on the ballot, and she is upset that homeless people have driven away the owner of the airplane hangar across from hers. So why is she running?

Although a lifelong Republican and a Trump supporter, the 71-year-old performer possesses a flimsy résumé; she’s not a natural candidate any more than she is a crooner. The smart money in California says she doesn’t have a chance to unseat Gov. Gavin Newsom, who enjoys the support of 56 percent of the California electorate. (Though the examples of Donald Trump, Al Franken, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sonny Bono suggest you can’t be too sure.) 

She told Dana Bash that she would make up for her inexperience in government by surrounding herself with "really good people," which sounds an awful lot like a certain twice-impeached former president's promises in 2016. But the Politico article speculates that her run is "a reality show by other means," or perhaps intended to set up a congressional run.

Interviewers have had a hard time pinning Jenner ("I don't like labels") down on the issues — even on the one issue with which she is most identified. Accepting the Arthur Ashe Award at the 2015 ESPY's, she voiced her support for young trans athletes, telling the audience, "I also want to acknowledge all the young trans athletes who are out there — given the chance to play sports as who they really are."

 

But now that Requblican legislatures around the country are passing bans on transgender athletic participation, Jenner has done a complete 180, telling TMZ, "This is a question of fairness. That's why I oppose biological boys who are trans competing in girls sports in school. It just isn't fair. And we have to protect girl sports in our schools."

 

When Sean Hannity attempted to bring up the subject during their airplane hangar interview, Jenner kept diverting the conversation away toward Joy Behar or Jenner's mother having misgendered her. As Hannity pressed her on the issue, Jenner complained, "To be honest with you, I don't know why they keep asking that. What do you think, Sean? I don't know. Why do they keep asking me that question?" and decided to come out strongly against wildfires instead.

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Drawing Caitlyn Jenner is going to present a challenge to cartoonists insofar as, well, let's just say it's pretty obvious that she's had some work done over the years, and it has made drawing her in a way that avoids charges of being anti-trans damned near impossible.

I completely understand that Ms. Jenner wishes to appear the way she sees herself, and she may not see herself as a 71-year-old woman. There's nothing exclusively transgender about that, or even exclusively Californian. Plastic surgeons are able to sell the fantasy that nips, tucks and collagen injections will make someone look like Angelina Jolie circa 2003 because nobody sees themselves as Dame Judy Dench except Dame Judy Dench's stunt doubles.

Some other cartoonists are choosing not to dignify Ms. Jenner's campaign by expending ink and pixels on her. That's their choice and their right, and solves the problem of how far to take her caricature.

But LGBTQ+ news is my bailiwick. Until she sinks to asterisk levels in the polls, I may be stuck with her.

Toon: Cooler Heads Must Prevail

It is nearly impossible to satirize the level of desperation at Fox News.

This week, they got caught lying about President Biden's putting America on a vegan diet, and about every immigrant child receiving Vice President Harris's book as a welcome gift. 

Then, perpetually perplexed Tucker Carlson actually urged his viewers to report to the police any children wearing protective masks in public. Because, I guess, the police don't get in enough trouble responding to non-emergency calls.

No, it's because COVID-19 is safe and effective, and has been since Easter of last year, just like our Trump and Savior promised it would be. Or something like that. Anyway, as any parent knows, you can't catch diseases from children. 

It's masks that are dangerous. Them and vaccines.

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In my inked version of this cartoon, I had Larry Kudlow offering Tucker Carlson a "bacon-based beer," but I decided I had better change it in Photoshop.

I've watched enough episodes of "Chopped" to know that someone has undoubtedly produced and sold a beer made with bacon. 

And some Connor Sewer undoubtedly buys it.

Q Toon: Welcome to the Job

Signalling a reverse after four years of Trump Health & Human Services appointees who were devoted to okaying religion-based discrimination against transgender persons, President Biden's nominee for Assistant Health Secretary is Dr. Rachel Levine, a transgender person herself.

Pediatrician Dr. Levine has been Pennsylvania's Secretary of Health since 2017, and before that the state's Physician General. In those posts, she has overseen Pennsylvania's response to COVID-19 and the opioid epidemics, and established the state's medical marijuana program. If confirmed as the nation's Assistant Health Secretary, she would be, among other things, the Surgeon General's boss.

A Republican state legislator from western Pennsylvania, Jeff Pyle, responded to Dr. Levine's appointment by posting a derogatory image about her on his Facebook page, sparking immediate backlash. "I had no idea" that the post would be "received as poorly as it was," he mewled after deleting his post.

Breitbart News persistently misgendered and deadnamed Dr. Levine throughout its reporting on her nomination. Over at Fox Noise, Tucker Carlson attacked her appointment and

falsely referred to Levine’s gender as her “sexual orientation or sex life,” saying, “This is like the perfect encapsulation of everything I despise about neoliberalism. You're supposed to be thrilled by this person's sexual orientation or sex life or whatever, her personal life.” He concluded with a rant that Levine’s nomination was “an effort to see how big a middle finger can we wag in the face of the country..."

But at least he got her gender right. You take your progress wherever you can find it these days.

Q Toon: Assault in the Wounds

Statues were not the only things laid low during last Tuesday's Black Lives Matter protest in Madison.

Tim Carpenter has represented Milwaukee in the state legislature since 1984. He's a progressive Democrat, openly gay, and from what I've read, reasonably well liked and respected among his peers.

Tuesday night, he started to take a video of the protests when two protesters charged at him, punching him to the ground and began kicking him in the head and ribs. After the assault, he started to walk away but collapsed and was taken to a hospital.

As it happened, Donald Berzelius Trump happened to have a Fox News town hall scheduled in Green Bay two days later, and a member of the audience asked him about the incident. Trump ... well, proceeded to be Trump.

AUDIENCE MEMBER:  Great to have you with us.  My question for you is: With all the unrest we’ve seen across the country, and right here in the state of Wisconsin last night, in our capital city —

THE PRESIDENT:  Yes.

AUDIENCE MEMBER:  — a senator was beaten.  Lady Forward was ripped off her pedestal.  We lost some other statues.  What steps is the administration taking to give us back our streets?

THE PRESIDENT:  So, very strong.  You happen to have a Democrat governor right now.  If you would have had Governor Walker, that wouldn’t have happened.

AUDIENCE MEMBER:  That’s right.

THE PRESIDENT:  Wouldn’t have happened.  (Applause.)  I mean, I’m not saying it.  If Scott were your governor, that would not have happened.  But it did happen, and it was a shame.  And the person they beat up was a Democrat who happened to be gay.  And he was probably out there rooting them on or something, because Democrats think it’s wonderful that they’re destroying our country.  It’s a very sick thing going on.  Nobody has ever seen it.

The rest of his lengthy answer had nothing whatsoever to do with the question, so let's just move on.

"I don't know what's worse, the beating or having someone turn something so personal that happened to you and weaponize it against you," Carpenter told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel after their reporter relayed Trump's comments.

If you ask me, the beating ought to be worse. When Donald Joffrey Trump trash-talks you, you're in pretty interesting company.

Q Toon: Side Eye for the Gay Guy

South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg is now an officially declared candidate to become the first openly gay president of the United States since James Buchanan. As such, he now qualifies to have antigay zealous crackpots bellowing about Sodom and Gomorrah at his campaign events.

Mayor Pete came out in 2015, two years into his first term, while his state's governor, now Vice President Mike Pence, was preaching the right-wing gospel of exclusion and Christian Privilege, and the Supreme Court was about to rule on Obergefell v. Hodges. He married his husband in an Episcopal church last June, and their first stop in their wedding Studebaker was the local Pride Week block party. His penultimate appearance before making his presidential campaign official was on The Ellen DeGeneres Show.

So it might surprise you to know that Mayor Pete is getting hit from both sides.

There is a certain camp of people, mostly within the LGBTQ community, who think that Mayor Pete may be gay, but he isn't gay enough.

There is a certain kind of gay guy. He is very likely white. He would say that he is in his “mid-thirties,” although he is much closer to the end than to the beginning of his last credibly young decade. Older women think he is handsome; younger men are not so sure. He is a professional of some kind — not ostentatiously wealthy, but comfortable enough to take the occasional ski trip in Colorado or spring vacation in Spain. He probably enjoys “the theater.” He is sure to mention at some point that he likes to read.

The knock on Mr. Gay Whitebread is that we've had enough white men in the White House, and it's a woman's turn now, preferably a Latina or a Muslim, and transgender if possible, and perhaps a paraplegic, except we've already had one of those so scratch that. He can always come back in another eight years once the cuteness factor has worn down (or in four if either of the two candidates currently leading in the polls wins the nomination).

Frankly, at this moment in history, I'm fine with any of the 147 candidates for the Democratic nomination. I'm not 100% thrilled about half a dozen of them, but I find the criticism that Buttigieg is too Midwestern Nice and doesn't check enough boxes tiresome and just a little bit dangerous.

All of this seems like an attempt to write Buttigieg off as “just another white guy,” standing in the way of more diverse candidates. It’s the Oppression Olympics at its worst: In a battle to prove that one community is more discriminated against than another, we tear each other apart rather than unite in common cause.

Or, as Geneve Thomas-Palmer, the editor of Ann Arbor Community High School's newsletter (and wow! Have high school newsletters changed since I was in bell bottoms!) warns:

"By suggesting Buttigieg appears too heterosexual to run for office, Democrats have sent a clear message to their almost 12 million queer voters; we do not care about diversifying our party, we only care about appearing as though we do."