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Cake day: June 1st, 2023

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  • They’ve just gutted the State Department Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. They’re continuing efforts from the previous Trump admin to redefine it based on “natural rights”. In the first post on the new State Department substack (an absurd phrase), Marco Rubio called the bureau “a platform for left-wing activists to wage vendettas against ‘anti-woke’ leaders in nations such as Poland, Hungary, and Brazil, and to transform their hatred of Israel into concrete policies such as arms embargoes,” and their new “senior advisor” is a 26-year-old Catholic theocrat who wants to completely 180-reverse the purpose of this bureau to go after foreign officials who have properly enforced their democratic laws (eg those who prosecuted Le Pen for embezzlement). They’ve successfully converted the human rights bureau into supporting rather than opposing human rights abuses in the name of supposed freedom of speech and religion. Even after this administration ends, there’s no way the US diplomatic apparatus can really go back to supporting human rights abroad the way it used to.



  • I don’t like her views on pseudomedicine, and there was some troubling reporting on how she’s verbally abusive to staff, but on basically every important political issue she’s better than most mainline Democrats. The soundbites and debates definitely made her sound weird but on 1-1 interviews she seemed fairly well-spoken and with admirable ideals and moral consistency. When most politicians on both sides of the aisle are supporting crackdowns on migrants, tariffs on renewable technologies, and genocide, it definitely seems to me that some weirdness isn’t really the top priority here. At the very least she was the best candidate, policy-wise, on the 2024 Dem primary ballot.