Q Toon: J.D.'s Stand-up Act

Before coming to the defense of Vivek Ramaswami’s despicable attack ad last night, J.D. Vance was campaigning with Texas's eminently corrupt Republican senatorial candidate, Ken Paxton, last week. Some fellow in the crowd there called out "I love you" at the Vice President.

In the interest of leaving some room for drawing, I left out a little of  Vance's reply. Perhaps I should have left in the line, "I'm the Vice President," in case my caricature of him in his skivvies might not be readily identifiable. I hope readers could tell that this wasn't Volodymyr Zelinskyy, Ted Cruz, Zohran Mamdani, or Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.

So anyway, Republicans have determined that if they can't say anything nice about their own candidate, just make shit up about the Democrat. James Talarico isn't a gay vegan transgender commie Buddhist French dauphin, but that hasn't stopped Republicans from joking-no-joke that he is. 

All kidding aside. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.

P.S.: Being a seminarian, Talarico would perhaps love that guy from the Paxton rally in an agape way.

Q Toon: Breaking Bad News to the Boss

The Absolutely Corrupt Trump Regime™ was dealt a setback in its persecution campaign against transgender Americans last week. A federal judge in Oregon rejected in no uncertain terms Health & Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr.'s new policy threatening to block Medicare and Medicaid funding from any hospital that offers gender reassignment therapy to transgender youth who want it.

At least 40 hospital systems across the country had halted gender therapy services after the Department of Health and Human Services issued the "Kennedy Declaration" on December 18, 2025; as a result, even families who had left transgender-hostile red states for transgender-friendly blue ones found that their children were still denied proper care.

“Unserious leaders are unsafe. There is nothing more serious than our leaders’ dedication to the rule of law so that we might maintain the integrity of our constitutional democracy,” [U.S. District Judge Mustafa T.] Kasubhai wrote.

“This case demonstrates how disregard for the rule of law does not merely result in an abstract infraction. Rather, and tragically, this case is one of a long list of examples of how a leader's wanton disregard for the rule of law causes very real harm to very real people.”

Ruling in favor of the 21 states* and the District of Columbia who filed suit against the Kennedy Declaration, Judge Kasubhai found that it exceeded the administration’s authority, violated federal rulemaking requirements, and conflicted with existing law, "effectively banning by fiat an entire category of healthcare."

Judge Kasubhai's 49-page decision rejected as "absurd" the HHS contention that reversing the Kennedy Declaration would deny the Secretary his right to express his views on important public issues. 

"Defendants cannot bully or gaslight this Court into ignoring the many procedural and legal flaws of the Kennedy Declaration by invoking one of the most sacred principles of our constitutional democracy — the freedom of speech — when that principle comes nowhere close to being implicated. Rather, Plaintiffs' claims challenge Kennedy's authority to unilaterally, categorically, and without any process, supersede professional standards of care regarding gender-affirming care that apply in the Plaintiff states."

A higher Court (ahem) might have five or six more charitable opinions of an unserious leader's wanton disregard for the rule of law. But for now, let's enjoy our successes and liberties while we still have them.

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* The 21 states are California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawai'i, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington, and Wisconsin.

 

Q Toon: Off Limits

Never satisfied that there happen to be Democratic and Independent voters out there whose right to vote they haven't taken away, Republicans are pushing yet another plot to throw voters off the rolls.

Calling their scheme the "SAVE Act," the bill as passed by the House "requires individuals to provide documentary proof of U.S. citizenship when registering to vote in federal elections," according to www.congress.gov. And by "documentary proof," Republicans mean your birth certificate.

The Senate version of the bill requires voters to provide documentary proof of citizenship not only when registering to vote, but also every time they come to cast their vote. Every time.

What could possibly be the problem?

But one in 10 voting-age American citizens, or an estimated 21.3 million people, either don't have a proof-of-citizenship document like a birth certificate, passport or naturalization certificate, or don't have easy access to one, according to a 2023 survey commissioned by voting rights groups. The survey found people of color are more likely not to have a document proving citizenship.

Obtaining these documents takes time and money. Only about 43% of Americans have passports, according to an analysis by the Voting Rights Lab. The bill says voters can show an ID that indicates citizenship, but currently only five states — Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Vermont and Washington — offer IDs that meet that criteria.

One rather significant group that faces disenfranchisement should the SAVE Act pass the Senate is married women who have taken their husband's surname — whose legal name therefore does not match the name on their birth certificate. A smaller group, but one well-represented in my LGBTQ+ readership, are transgender citizens who have changed their name to match their gender identity.

An even smaller group consists of the Vice President of the United States, Mr. James David Vance, né James Donald Bowman.

SAVE's defenders say that all that married women, transgender persons, and J.D. Vance need is to provide certified documentation of their name change. But there again, those documents cost time and money — and for transgender people in "red" states, dealing with a hostile government bureaucracy.

Side note: As my little form of protest, I've been bringing my passport to the village polling place for identification ever since state Republicans passed photo ID voting into law several years ago. Some poll workers have been taken aback by my showing a passport instead of my driver's license like everybody else. 

Passports do nothing to prove that one resides in the polling district (and I suspect that there are a few owners of summer homes and winter get-aways — a more or less Republican demographic — who have used a driver's license to vote in one location and a passport to vote in another, especially to keep those property taxes down and school levies defeated).

The South American vacation from which I've just returned was within three months of my passport expiring, which meant that I had to apply for a new one before we left. That automatically voided my existing passport, but poll workers here in the village would have had no way of knowing it was invalid had I used it as voter ID in elections last fall or this week's spring primary.

(Lest some Trumpster at DOJ launch any voter fraud investigations against me, my village had no elections in November and no primary races on Tuesday.)

Returning to the topic at hand: The SAVE Act also voids independent voter registration drives. It federalizes elections, demanding that states turn over their voter registration records to the Department of Homeland Security. Mailed ballots from military service members that arrive after Election Day won't count; universal mail-in voting will be outlawed. 

If this SAVE Act slips through the Senate to be signed into law by the Felon In Chief, you can bet your bottom dollar that Republicans won't be satisfied for long. They're sure to pass a SUPERSAVER Act requiring voters to come to their polling place DNA samples from all four grandparents, the deed to their house, and an automobile-dealership-sized American flag.

After all, if Barack Obama's birth certificate wasn't good enough for them, why would they accept yours?

Sticking By Our Guns

Almost ten years ago, I posted a collection of my cartoons I drew in response to mass shootings in the U.S. Even though my bailiwick is the LGBTQ+ press, I'm still drawing cartoons on that same tragic topic, because the carnage hasn't stopped, and the LGBTQ+ community has by no means been spared.

Today's Graphical History Tour highlights one cartoon I've drawn about mass shootings in America per year since my last round-up of the damn things.

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After the Pulse nightclub massacre nine years ago, when a gunman killed 49 patrons of an Orlando nightclub with a predominantly Latino clientele, I submitted two cartoons to Q Syndicate. One, featuring an American flag at half staff, a rainbow rising out of black clouds, and a quotation attributed to one of the victims, was the one run by most (if not all) publications that printed my cartoons.

June, 2016

Because I thought that the cartoon did not work in grayscale, I also submitted this alternative cartoon, highlighting the callous reaction of the Lieutenant Governor of Texas, and his non-apology apology for it. But even the Philadelphia Gay News, which prints my cartoon in grayscale, went with the flag and rainbow cartoon.

The next year, a heavily armed gunman holed up in an upper floor room of the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas and opened fire on an outdoor country music festival across the strip. Armed with enough high-powered rifles and bump stocks to equip a battalion, the gunman fired 1,000 rounds into the crowd over the space of ten minutes. 58 concert goers were killed and hundreds injured before the gunman turned a gun on himself.

October, 2017

The list in this cartoon is tragically incomplete. I could have added Catholics at mass, Jews at synagogue, newspaper staffers, Veterans Home workers, Waffle House patrons, and on and on.

Some forty years ago, we used to call mass shootings "going postal," on account of cases of disgruntled postal workers shooting up their place of employment. Nowadays, we can just call it "going American."

February, 2018

In February of 2018, the scene of mass shooting was Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Death toll: 17 students and staff. Injured: 18. Response by the Florida legislature: legislation to protect students from the evils of pornography and requiring the posting of "In God We Trust" in every classroom in the state.

August, 2019

In one week in July and August, 2019, a mass shooting at a Garlic Festival in Gilroy, California left three dead; 23 were killed at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas and two at a Walmart in Southaven, Mississippi; yet another outside a bar in Dayton, Ohio killed nine; and one was killed and fourteen injured in a pair of mass shootings in Chicago.

Those were only five mass shootings out of 417 that year as defined by the Gun Violence Archive — more than one per day on average — with a total death toll of 15,381.

Such incidents dipped in the COVID year 2020. There were no mass shootings recorded between March 20 (Springfield, Missouri) and September 19 (Rochester, New York), the longest such gap since 2003.

And all it took was a mysterious, incurable disease taking hundreds of thousands of lives the old-fashioned way.

December, 2021

Congressional Gun Nuts Thomas Massie (R-KY, and yes, he's the Republican co-sponsoring a bill demanding release of the Epstein files) and Lauren Boebert (R-CO) responded to a late 2021 school shooting by posting photos of themselves and their families posing in front of their Christmas trees, everyone brandishing a high-powered rifle.

November, 2022

Five patrons of Club Q, in Colorado Springs, Colorado, were killed and 25 injured when a gunman armed with an AR-15 style rifle, a Glock 17 style polymer handgun, and wearing protective body armor, shot his way into the LGBTQ+ nightclub. The attack took place the night of November 19, 2022, the eve of Transgender Day of Remembrance. (Facing hate crime charges, the killer claimed after their arrest to identify as non-binary, but no acquaintances or family remember them so identifying before that.)

Colorado Springs is in Congressbanshee Boebert's district, so she dutifully issued the tweet I summarized within her Christmas card of the previous year.

You may have noticed that I didn't have a mass shooting cartoon for 2020; so here's an extra one from 2022 — because I've drawn more than one cartoon about mass shootings almost every year:

May, 2022

Americans were shocked by the mass shooting of schoolchildren in Uvalde, Texas, in the spring of 2022, despite mass shootings having become commonplace in this country. While Uvalde police dithered around Robb Elementary School for over an hour, an 18-year-old with an assault rifle and black body armor went from room to room, methodically shooting children and staff. Children had to pretend they were dead as he returned to rooms he had left, shooting the wounded and anyone who called for help. 19 children and two teachers died before Border Control agents stormed the school and shot their murderer.

As in the aftermath of other school shootings, there was much talk by opponents of gun control of "hardening" our schools — making them impenetrable to mass murderers and just about everybody else. The nitwit Senator from my home state, on the other hand, went on TV to prescribe getting rid of "wokeness" and Critical Race Theory.

For the record: the Uvalde killer entered Robb Elementary through a locked door that failed to latch; and Critical Race Theory has never been part of the curriculum for schoolchildren in Uvalde or anywhere else.

April, 2023

Congresscretin Tim Burchett (R-TN) responded to the April, 2023 massacre of six schoolchildren and staff in Nashville, saying, "It’s a horrible, horrible situation, and we’re not going to fix it. Criminals are gonna be criminals. And my daddy fought in the Second World War, fought in the Pacific, fought the Japanese, and he told me, he said, ‘Buddy,’ he said, ‘if somebody wants to take you out, and doesn’t mind losing their life, there’s not a whole heck of a lot you can do about it.’"

September, 2024

There were some 50 or so school shootings in 2024, but what most concerned presidential candidate Donald The Terrible Trump was his bonkers delusion that kids were going to school and undergoing gender reassignment surgery in the nurse's office. (JD Vance's presence in my cartoon references an awkward campaign photo op in a doughnut shop.)

But yes, Trump literally did respond to a mass shooting in Iowa, in which a sixth grader was killed, with "It’s just horrible, so surprising to see it here. But have to get over it."

I nearly pulled this cartoon, drawn the same weekend that a bullet supposedly grazed Trump's ear at a Pennsylvania campaign rally. He got over it — you and I have had worse paper cuts — but his loyal minions spent the next week wearing gauze over the sympathetic injuries to their own right ears.

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I'm afraid I don't have any witty remarks to wrap up this week's Graphical History Tour. No words of encouragement. No easy answers. 

Just the Gun Violence Archive map of mass shootings so far this year.

Q Toon: Prevost, Previously

People are, for the most part, applauding the election of Fr. Robert F. Prevost as Pope Leo XIV, the first pope from the United States (or the second one from South America, as he also shares Peruvian citizenship), and the first one from an Augustinian order.

These days, just about everyone leaves their digital footprints all over the place, and that includes the new head honcho at the Vatican. Father Bob/Pope Leo has voiced his opinions on Twitter/X, so we know, for example, that he disagrees with Vice President Shady Vance's views on how to ration out Christian caritas. 

He strongly criticized Trump and El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele for doing nothing to free illegitimately deported and imprisoned Kilmar Abrego Garcia ("Do you not see the suffering? Is your conscience not disturbed? How can you stay quiet?"); he also condemned U.S. policy of family separations during Trump's first term.

He has echoed calls for stronger gun control legislation, and opposed abortion.

It should have nothing to do with his Twitter account, but we even know that he voted in Democratic primary races in 2008 and 2010, and Republican presidential primaries in 2012 and 2016.

Drawing cartoons for LGBTQ+ press as I do, I was obliged to find the queer angle to the election of Pope Leo XIV, and this cartoon is it.

When then-priest Robert Prevost criticized western media for fostering pro-LGBTQ sympathies, unsympathetic Benedict XVI was the Pope. Most (but not all) Catholic priests tend to echo the attitudes emanating from the Vatican or they hold their tongues. If Father Bob had opinions about “the homosexual agenda” or same-sex parenting during the papacy of “Who Am I to Judge” Francis, the western media have yet to discover them.

Perhaps someone will find Facebook Messenger chats between him and his older brother, Louis.

Transgender Catholics may have cause to be wary of the new pontiff, who shared on Twitter a December, 2016 article by a Peruvian archbishop in La República attacking "gender ideology" ("an inaccurate term deployed by opponents to undermine and dehumanize transgender and nonbinary people," according to GLAAD). Benedict XVI was three years into his retirement at that point; Francis has been credited with a more accepting embrace of transgender persons.

Leo XIV's opening remarks as Pope offer some hope to LGBTQ+ Catholics, reiterating his immediate predecessor's goal of recreating the Roman Catholic church as a "missionary" institution, "always open to receiving with open arms for everyone, like this square, open to all, to all who need our charity, our presence, dialogue, love."

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Just as I finished inking this cartoon, I noticed a huge, glaring mistake.

I had drawn the cardinal on Leo XIV's right in the first panel and on his left in the second.

During the pencil sketch phase of the drawing, I had been conscious of where Pope Leo and Cardinal Whatsisname had to be in relation to each other when drawn from behind. But somewhere along the line, I got too distracted, trying to figure out what their robes should look like from the rear. And deciding how to draw the hallway that they are walking down.

I've been to the Vatican twice. The first time, our tour group entered by way of a long, slightly sloped hallway with an arched ceiling and decorated with wall tapestries depicting Bible scenes and objets d'art depicting... well, this sort of thing:

The second time, our tour group came up a winding ramp that came to an open arch with a lovely view of Rome. It would have been a much nicer setting for my cartoon.

But I digress.

I stared at my work for a while, trying to decide which panel to redraw. But it was already after midnight, and, after first looking at the cartoon in a mirror, I ultimately to handle the problem in PhotoShop.

This was a mistake I had made once before, in a cartoon depicting a couple watching television on their couch. One panel showed them from behind so the reader could see the TV, and the other showed them from the front  so readers could see their faces. That time, I drew their heads on a separate sheet as they should have been drawn in the second panel, and copied and pasted those heads onto the cartoon in PhotoShop, also redrawing the tail of the dialogue balloon digitally.

For today's cartoon, I decided to flip the first panel, which entailed unflipping the dialogue. Happily, I didn't also have to contend with fixing the part in Pope Leo's hair.

Q Toon: Desperately Seeking Leo

Max probably doesn't get a lot of sympathy wearing that cap into a government office.

Plotting out the dialogue for this week's cartoon, I immediately realized that Max and Leo do not have last names; the government worker here should have addressed Max as Mr. Whatever-his-last-name-is rather than by his first name. Unless they already knew each other, I suppose.

In any event, Max is getting a taste of the chaos he voted for, courtesy of the Deepstate Oligarchy's Generalissimo Elon. Musk is bringing the same reckless management style to government that he brought to Twitter: fire everybody and find out.

The resulting chaos is not a bug but a feature. Musk shares with his fellow South African expatriate  billionaire Peter Thiel a contempt for minorities, the working class. Their stated target may be bureaucracy, but it is in fact democracy itself.

That is no exaggeration or hyperbole. In Thiel's own words, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

The New York Times reported on the Paypal mogul last October:

As the internet blossomed, Thiel began to encourage a new set of even more provocative thinkers. At their center was an ex-programmer named Curtis Yarvin, who blogged under the nom de plume Mencius Moldbug, sketching out the framework for a nascent reactionary movement — later called the new right — aimed at deposing the cabal of liberal elites running the country. Yarvin saw democracy as a “destructive” form of government, instead proposing a techno-monarchy run by a national chief executive. Americans, he said, had to “get over their dictator phobia.” ...

Substacker "Just Plain Kris" ties Musk into Thiel's Make Apartheid Great Again movement:  

Elon Musk, while not a formal part of the neo-reactionary movement, has been linked to its ideas through his actions and statements. Musk’s political philosophy reflects a skepticism of democratic institutions and a preference for corporate-style governance (The Atlantic, 2023). His attempts to influence government operations and his support for far-right political movements align with the neo-reactionary belief that democracy leads to social decline (Financial Times, 2024). 

In Donald Joffrey Trump, the Afrikaners found their ideal front man: a blustering, racist of extremely limited intellect, all ego but no self-awareness, easily malleable with flattery and money (remember how he used to be stubbornly opposed to electric cars, cryptocurrency, and TikTok?). As an added bonus, he is anti-democratic, polarizing, mercurial — and expendable. Back to NYT:

As Thiel became wealthier and more powerful, he continued to help like-minded men accumulate their own wealth and power. They included a lot of Stanford Review alumni, like Josh Hawley, now the 44-year-old senator from Missouri, but also others who came to him via different routes — most prominently JD Vance, who has cited Yarvin as an influence himself. ...When Vance ran for Senate in 2022, Thiel was by far the biggest donor to his super PAC, giving $15 million.

If the day ever comes when Trump overplays his hand, his luck runs out, he outlives his usefulness, or gets to be the star at a state funeral, the Afrikaners' hand-picked protégé is right there presiding over the U.S. Senate. Even without impeachment and conviction, or the 25th Amendment, JD Vance will be the heir apparent in 2028 to continue the dismantling of democracy.

To which end Musk will have all the data he needs on every voter, polling place, and computer system in the country to pre-determine the outcome of any election he wants.

And no pesky bureaucracy in his way.

see also https://www.truthdig.com/articles/elon-musk-and-peter-thiels-war-on-democracy/

Toon: Hocus Pocus

This year's vice presidential candidates more or less held their own during their debate performance the other evening, or at least that's the conventional wisdom so far. They voiced agreement with each other several times and mostly avoided patently obvious lies on a Trumpian scale.

Which, since Trump got his whopper about Haitian immigrant petivores from his running mate, is remarkable.

For vice presidential candidates, Job Number One is not to fnck up. Check, and check.

Job Number Two is to brown-nose the boss. For JD BH Vance, that meant pretending that the Corrupt Trump Administration™ was a halcyon quadrennium of universal peace, bipartisan comity, and economic miracles. (Pay no attention to Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Nigeria, Sudan, impeachments I and II, Nancy Pelosi tearing up a state of the union speech, cramming dogmatic right-wingers onto the Supreme Court, and a nation struggling to find toilet paper, diapers, infant formula, and places to bury COVID fatalities.) 

Why, Trump even saved Obamacare, and we didn't even notice it at the time! It just goes to show what a modest fellow Donald J. Trump truly is.

Late in the debate, after Vance risibly claimed that Trump “peacefully gave over power on January the 20th,” Tim Walz tried to get Vance to confess that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. But Vance refused to take the bait, replying instead, “Tim, I’m focused on the future.”

His focus on the past is mighty gauzy, that's for sure.

Q Toon: Graveside Manners

Shortly after I pitched this idea to my editors and sat down at my drawing board Sunday, I saw the news that yet another attempt to assassinate Mr. Trump by some deranged idiot equipped with weapons of mass casualty had been thwarted. I seriously considered hunting for some other topic for this week's cartoon; perhaps if some comment by Pete Buttigieg on Meet the Press had tickled my fancy, I would have found one.

Since I didn't, here's this one.

Trump's repeated insistence that somewhere in this glorious country, parents are sending their children off to school only to have the little tykes come home having been subjected to spontaneous gender reassignment surgery in the principal's office apparently falls under JD BH Vance's theory that it's okay "to create stories so that the American media actually [pay] attention."

The ReQublican Qandidates are remarkably less concerned with the very real instances of children going to school only to come home with mortal coil reassignment surgery performed by another one of those deranged idiots equipped with weapons of mass casualty. There have been two attempted assassinations of presidential candidates this year; as of September 6, there have been 46 mass shootings at schools in the United States in 2024.

And zero gender reassignment surgeries at any school anywhere in the country.

Right-wingers have been quick to accept Dear Leader's fairy tales, however, and to discount reality. They dismiss grieving parents as "crisis actors," so it's hardly surprising that some on the other side immediately spread wild conjecture on line that the Mar-a-Lagoon golf course wannabe sniper is also some sort of crisis actor, hired to distract the electorate from Trump's ridiculous debate performance, or Project 2025, or reports that inflation is down and employment is up.

And the Fox Noise Machine just as quickly answered that the guy was inspired by Democratic campaign warnings that Trump is a racist, a fascist, and danger to the Republic, just because Trump says racist, fascist things and promises to be a dictator on Day One.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan's admonishment that "You are entitled to your opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts" is so passé these days. Pick and choose whatever facts you fancy, tune out the rest, and believe whatever you want. The gunman is a Republican! He's a Democrat! He's a Ramaswamian! He's a Bernie Bro! He's a floor wax! He's a dessert topping! He's Schrödinger's assassin!

How long, O Lord, how long have we been coming here?

This Week's Sneak Peek

Well, well, if it ain't Mr. Hillbilly Allergy makin' his day-boo in my 'toon this here week. Land o' Goshen, what dya figger he's got on his mind there?

Toon: Pet Peeve au Poivre

Allow me to chime in to the tintinnabulation of the Trump-Harris Debate Cartoons.

If there is a God, future historians will look back upon Corrupt Former President Donald Trump's clinging — doggedly — to the false allegation that Haitian immigrants have been killing and eating the household pets of Springfield, Ohio, as the moment that Trumpism died.

It's a lie told by Trump's running mate, J.D. Bowman Hamel Vance, picked up from some racist Ohioan's social media spewage, repeated from the rumors told about Vietnamese refugees in the 1970's, hearkening back to the old wives' tales slandering Chinese immigrants in the 1800's.

Given that history, it's probably overly optimistic to hope that the cost of keeping such a racist trope alive will be an ignominious end to Trumpism — which, after all, thrives on that sort of bilious excreta.

The Springfield angle to the story apparently grew out of the nativist uproar after an unlicensed driver from Springfield's Haitian immigrant community collided his minivan into a school bus last year, causing the death of an 11-year-old white boy. White Springfielders demanded that their city council stop any more Haitian refugees from coming to their town, and spread horror tales demonizing the Haitians already there.

At the city’s Haitian Community Help and Support Center on Wednesday, Rose-Thamar Joseph said many of the roughly 15,000 immigrants who arrived in the past few years were drawn by good jobs and the city’s relative affordability. But a rising sense of unease has crept in as longtime residents increasingly bristle at newcomers taking jobs at factories, driving up housing costs, worsening traffic and straining city services.

To their credit, the bereaved parents of that 11-year-old boy have spoken out against politicians and rabble-rousers exploiting their tragedy to stoke fear and hatred. The Father, Nathan Clark, went so far as to tell a city hall forum that he would rather his son had been killed by a 60-year-old white man, because "if that guy killed my 11-year-old son, the incessant group of hate-spewing people would leave us alone."

“This needs to stop now. [Politicians] can vomit all the hate they want about illegal immigrants, the border crisis and even untrue claims about fluffy pets being ravaged and eaten by community members,” Clark said. “However, they are not allowed, nor have they ever been allowed, to mention Aiden Clark from Springfield, Ohio. I will listen to them one more time — to hear their apologies.”

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By the way, those Haitian immigrants are not in Springfield illegally, and Trump did not actually call them "illegals" in that part of the debate. But he has devoted much of his political career to making "illegal" into an noun, synonymous with "immigrant."

As far as I'm concerned, Mr. Trump's 34 felony convictions make him an "illegal." And, as I told a Trump loyalist a while back, "You may be comfortable voting for an illegal. I'm not."

Q Toon: X Stranged

Elon Musk, the eccentric South African billionaire who bought Tesla and Twitter and founded SpaceX, used to be considered a cool, innovative mastermind. But he has lurched rightward in recent years. Money, and a nostalgia for apartheid is apt to do that to one. 

You just can't keep these masterminds from becoming the evil kind, I guess.

Musk's right-wing politics has included animus toward transgender persons, and for him, it's personal.

He is estranged from his transgender daughter, Vivian Wilson; they haven't gotten along for years. Musk discussed their broken relationship psychologist and conservative commentator Jordan Peterson, streaming the conversation on X for the world to see. As one does when one is an evil mastermind.

He didn't support Wilson's gender identity, he told Peterson and the Xitterverse, repeatedly deadnaming her during the livestream. “I lost my son, essentially,” Musk said, adding that she was “dead, killed by the woke mind virus.”

Wilson, very much alive, responded to her father in a phone conversation with NBC: 

Wilson, 20, in an exclusive interview with NBC News, responded to comments Musk made Monday about her and her transgender identity. On social media and in an interview posted online, Musk said she was “not a girl” and was figuratively “dead,” and he alleged that he had been “tricked” into authorizing trans-related medical treatment for her when she was 16.

Wilson said that Musk hadn’t been tricked and that, after initially having hesitated, he knew what he was doing when he agreed to her treatment, which required consent from her parents.

Musk’s recent statements crossed a line, she said.

“I think he was under the assumption that I wasn’t going to say anything and I would just let this go unchallenged,” Wilson said in a phone interview. “Which I’m not going to do, because if you’re going to lie about me, like, blatantly to an audience of millions, I’m not just gonna let that slide.”

Wilson said that, for as long as she could remember, Musk hasn’t been a supportive father. She said he was rarely present in her life, leaving her and her siblings to be cared for by their mother or by nannies even though Musk had joint custody, and she said Musk berated her when he was present. “He was cold,” she said. “He’s very quick to anger. He is uncaring and narcissistic.”

I don't know Vivian Wilson, but her case seems fairly credible. Musk is the sort of person who crows that he's a fighter for Free Speech, and then suspends the X account of  White Dudes for Harris for no apparent reason. (Were they somehow "violating [X's] rules against evading suspension" without violating some other rule to begin with?) Reports of his volatile temper and intolerance are legion.

There is perhaps some risk in posting a link to this cartoon to X, that someone at Elon's evil lair will take notice and I'll end up having violated some codicil in the Muskovite TOS or other. 

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It would have set up the final panel of my cartoon if I had had Musk use Vivian Wilson's birth name in panels two or three, but I chose not to. Deadnaming a transgender person is considered very rude, on a par with addressing a divorced woman as Mrs. Ex-Husband's Full Name.

Similarly, I had given thought to drawing a cartoon of J.D. Vance, another vocal opponent of transgender persons, objecting to being deadnamed himself. I have not, however, come up with any novel approach to the well-worn on social media topic of his having twice changed his birth name.

Not that I'm precluding such a future cartoon about it. It is just a little bit — you know— weird.

This Week's Sneak Peek

If you were expecting me to jump on the bandwagon with a smart aleck cartoon about J.D. Vance waxing prosaic about Sofa King Unlimited in his memoir, Hillbilly Allergy, I'm afraid you're going to be disappointed.

That was just someone else's joke.

Like Sarah Palin being able to see Russia from her house.

Or George W. Bush saying "strategery."

Or Al Gore claiming to have invented the internet.

Or Gerald Ford being a klutz.

Of course, Ford did actually stumble on the Air Force One stairs a few times. But so has Joe Biden.

You'd think someone would have fixed those stairs by now.