Go Ahead, Jump to Conclusions
I am not someone who likes drama. Maybe it comes from growing up with a lot of chaos and violence, and maybe it’s also my nature. On my first birthday, my mother baked a heart-shaped cake for me. My birthday is the day after Valentine’s Day, and she had really hoped I’d be born on the 14th. My entry into this world almost killed us both, so it’s too bad she couldn’t have that one thing, but I don’t think it was my fault or hers. Some things are not up to us. She put the cake down on my highchair tray in front of me, and I stared at it.
The apartment was decorated with balloons and streamers. My beloved Nanny, aunt, uncle and cousins were there, and so was my mother’s best friend Cheryl, along with other friends of my parents, all dressed like they just stepped out of Klute.
Everyone sang Happy Birthday. I guess everyone but my mother expected me to stick my hands in the cake, but I did not. I watched everyone singing, and then I looked at the cake again. There are pictures of this from many angles, and it became a bit of family lore. Me, looking at the cake with my hands hovering in the air like two question marks. My mother had raised a baby with manners. My mother’s friend Cheryl, who I called Aunt Cheryl when I started talking, and who I cannot call anything other than Aunt Cheryl to this day — could not bear it.
She came up behind me with her twinkly eyes, took my two tiny hands, and shoved them in the cake. She was trying to help me act like a normal kid. I stared at her and then at the frosting on my hands, and started crying. My mother took me to get cleaned up. Aunt Cheryl had the right idea, but it took me about forty years to figure it out.
I share this with you so you understand, I have always been a watcher. I take my time figuring out what I think. I take my time figuring out who I can trust. No one would accuse me of diving right in, or throwing caution to the wind, or judging a book by its cover. I have always been drawn toward spontaneous, wild people, though, because I must have known we need balance in life, and some of my seriousness was borne from necessity. As grownups, it’s not easy to quantify nature or nurture in any of us to an exacting degree.
I don’t need as much time these days, I do know that. I have learned the very hard way, when I don’t trust my intuition, I’m always sorry. I still go slowly with some things, but if a person shows me who they are — and who they are is a draining asshat — I don’t need a second warning. If someone tells me a story that doesn’t add up, I don’t question whether it’s me. I know if I’m being deceived, whatever the reason.
Even easier, if someone has a Nazi tattoo, I don’t sit around and wonder if they got it emblazoned on their chest and somehow didn’t realize what it meant. FFS. Y’ALL. You don’t have to jump to conclusions to decide that’s a dealbreaker.
But also, I don’t need four whole women to come forward with sexual assault allegations before I decide this is a man I don’t want to know. I don’t need three women to come forward. I don’t need two. Nothing good happens to women or girls who decide to talk about what happened, the cost is always greater than any possible “reward.” Women and girls rarely get anything for their bravery but grief, and more trauma. They get attacked again. Especially today, when social media has turned people into the most vicious, heartless versions of themselves.
Even E. Jean Carroll who won her case, has not been paid, and if you mention this to the president’s supporters, they will deride and debase her, and sneer that it is “just a civil case” — as if that somehow changes the fact that a jury found him GUILTY of attacking and sexually abusing her — penetrating her with his fingers in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room — which, if you need things parsed out, does not qualify as “rape” in New York, but does qualify as rape in federal court.
Side note: Isn’t it interesting how women’s rights to bodily autonomy change from state to state, and somehow or another it always seems to end up in favor of the rapists, the child molesters, and the P(ieces)OS who commit incest?
In New York, someone can only be convicted of rape if they can prove vaginal penetration by a penis. In Carroll’s testimony, which mirrored what she had described privately for decades and publicly for the first time in 2019, she said Trump used both his fingers and his penis in the assault. But during the trial, the jury had only concluded that Trump had “deliberately and forcibly penetrated Ms. Carroll’s vagina with his fingers, causing immediate pain and long lasting emotional and psychological harm,” Kaplan’s decision from last year reads.
That the jurors did not find that Carroll had proven rape, Kaplan explained, “does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape.’” “Indeed,” he continued, “as the evidence at trial recounted below makes clear, the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.”
Federally, rape is defined as “penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim.” This broader explanation, while still dependent on penetration, would include assaults using fingers.
Facts, jury trials, and convictions be damned, his supporters will copy Dear Leader’s talking point that this is politically motivated and a “witch hunt” because “she wasn’t his type”, easily the most misogynistic and disgusting non-defense imaginable. I wonder if they ever stop to consider why it is when he tries to sue E. Jean Carroll for defamation, it gets laughed out of court. Or how they’d feel if they were assaulted at a department store, and whether they’d want strangers laughing about it on the internet.
Even when you “win” as a woman in these cases, you don’t win. You get more grief. More people saying horrible things about you. Meanwhile she hasn’t been able to be intimate with anyone since it happened. It is incomprehensible how much pain and suffering this one man has caused to so many.
Graham Platner finally dropped out, and he did it like an angry narcissist, as anyone who has ever been with an angry narcissist will tell you. I almost could not believe his handlers didn’t make him reshoot the “we are suspending our campaign” video twelve more times, until he could cosplay a humbled man more convincingly. A man who might have remembered to mention that he has the utmost concern for survivors of assault, or a man who says he is sorry for all the pain he’s caused. Instead, he tripled and quadrupled down and said the allegations were false, all of them. Let’s see if he sues anyone for defamation.
It made me think of a couple of people I used to know, and every one of these memes:
Republicans who voted for the president need to realize when it comes to anything resembling morals or ethics, the bottom fell out for them long ago. When you vote for a man who says he “grabs women by the pussy”, the Goodbye, Ethics ship has sailed, and you purchased a ticket. This is how it goes, you don’t get to have it both ways. No drama, just how it is. We can all be grownups. Rapists are rapists, and if you don’t draw a hard line there, at least own it and wave from the deck. Don’t try to talk about Graham Platner, though.
Maybe next time, Dems will vet progressive candidates with serious people, not out-of-state baby-consultants who aren’t from Maine and don’t even know how to give an interview without it seeming like an SNL/Onion mash-up. The linked interview is painful to watch, and apparently, the only qualification to vet candidates was truly unfathomable vocal fry.
It has surely been a disappointing ride for so many reasons, and it’s unfortunate it needed to go this far, but it is not a surprise that this is where we ended up. Susan Collins’ team is disappointed, too. They were happy for her to run against Platner, because they thought she’d be able to focus on his scandals, and not the wildly unpopular policies of this administration. Even though it took a very long time for people to see the writing on the wall, maybe there’s still time to find a happy ending.
While we’re on the topic of endings, Mitch McConnell has been MIA since June 14th, when he was hospitalized; no one has seen or heard from him since. His office has not said why he was hospitalized, and his last vote was June 11th. On July 1st, independent journalist Desirée Townsend released an EMS recording of a call made from McConnell’s address the morning of June 14th, informing first responders that CPR was underway, someone there was unconscious due to cardiac arrest, and they needed Advanced Life Support.
The detestable Laura Loomer posted shortly after the release of the recording that she’d heard from high-level people at the White House, Mitch McConnell was brain-dead and hooked up to machines, and a cover-up was underway. Normally I wouldn’t take her word for anything, but Desirée Townsend reported she was hearing the same unverified claims, and she was reporting from the hospital where McConnell remains.
Within hours, well-known Republicans who’d been mum about the situation for weeks were suddenly reporting they’d had “20-minute conversations” with McConnell from his hospital room, which seems extremely, completely, laughably hard to believe. I don’t think Mitch has had a 20-minute conversation with anyone in a very long time. Governor Andy Beshear has now formally asked Mitch McConnell to please give him a call and let him know what’s up. Yo, Mitch, spare me two minutes and let me know you’re alive!
Otherwise, the law would indicate it’s time to schedule a special election. Not that Republicans in Congress care about the law anymore, LOL. They only have until August 3rd to schedule the special election, though. After that, his seat remains empty until November. There are rumors that Republicans are trying to “Weekend at Bernie’s” this thing to avoid the special election so Thomas Massie doesn’t run, not that he’s said he would.
If this were a Dem, they’d be raising hell. Remember Dianne Feinstein? And hey, I thought she should have stepped down, and I am all for term limits. In any case, they have 52 votes instead of 53 without Mitch, and he’s voting against all the SAVE Act crap (or someone is on his behalf), so I don’t really care. Let him rest. But is the “everyone is having 20-minute phone calls with Mitch” story credible? No, m’fers. No. It is exceedingly hard not to assume they are lying liars who lie a lot.
Remember when Kristi Noem said Renee Good had been part of a mob of “angry rioters” who surrounded ICE agents who were blocked in on an icy street, and that she’d “rammed them with her car” and so an ICE agent had shot her in self-defense? Of course you do. They are at it, again. ICE has killed an unarmed man on his way to work.
Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was not the intended target of this ICE “mission”, he just drove a white van and “looked like the person they were looking for” and somehow that’s all it took for him to end up dead. His death has been ruled a homicide, though of course the agents are saying he tried to “weaponize his car” and “run over one of the agents” which is getting really old.
Lorenzo Araujo ran into a pole which you can see when you look at where the van ended up, so I am really unsure how a car could have fit between the pole and his van, and prior to that, ICE agents were chasing him in their unmarked cars. His wife and three sons are devastated. One of his sons found out his father had been killed because he saw a video on Facebook, and he heard his father’s voice calling for help. My heart. All of his children were born in the states. Lorenzo had his own construction business, he was a good, family man. Now he’s gone. If you are in a position to help his family with funeral costs and legal fees, there is a gofundme.
It’s going to take a while for the DA to go through all the footage from neighbors and surrounding stores, because for some wild reason, none of the agents were wearing body cams, which they 100% are supposed to wear at all times, and they had the GALL to try to blame Dems for a “disruption in funding” because their audacity knows. no. bounds.
DHS is the one government agency that has been over-funded during this entire nightmare. For the fiscal year 2026 they have an annual base budget of $9-11 billion, and it’s bolstered by the remaining billions they already had from massive, multi-year funding allocations, which gives them an actual annual spending allowance of nearly $29-38 billion. In June (last month), Congress approved an additional $70 billion immigration package for ICE and Border Patrol through reconciliation — a portion of which will be spent on this administration’s continuing mass deportation efforts (aka: long-term detention/for-profit/free labor camps), along with the acquisition of more large-scale “regional processing centers” aka “inhumane detention forced labor camps.”
So we can jump to every single conclusion about why these ICE agents weren’t wearing body cams, and not one of them has to do with any funding disruptions.
Of all the stories, though, Nolan Xavier Wells is the one that hits me in my mama gut and makes every alarm bell go off. I am sure you have heard what happened by now, but I want to talk to you as someone who has a nineteen-year-old son who goes out with his friends all the time. I have an almost seventeen-year-old daughter, too. This story makes no sense.
If my son went out on a boat with three of his good friends on July 4th, and they went to an island that can only be reached by boat and has no cell service, and then my son’s three friends returned that evening and said my son was “talking to a girl” and he told them he wanted to stay behind, and he’d get a ride back on someone else’s boat — so THEY LEFT HIM (in his swim trunks and nothing else, no less)? I would not be okay with that at all. But also, it would never happen. My son would not do that, and my son’s friends would not do that, full stop. Eighteen and nineteen-year-old kids know better than that.
Nolan’s parents were on Good Morning America today, and they cannot fathom why he would ever split from his group. They said they always taught him, “If you go with a group, you stay with the group. If you go with five, you come back with five. You do not separate from the group, there’s safety in numbers.” It does not sound like Nolan would have decided to leave with some other boat voluntarily.
You don’t leave your friends behind with no way to reach anyone if something goes wrong. You do not do that, and it is insulting to eighteen and nineteen-year-olds everywhere to suggest otherwise. If your friend was talking to a girl, you’d tell him to get her number when you got back to the mainland.
At the very least you’d find out whose boat your friend was going to take back, when that boat was leaving and what the plan was, and you’d make sure your buddy had his phone and whatever t-shirt and shoes he brought along, so he could text you when he had a signal to let you know he was back, along with something to throw on when he got off the boat. You’d make sure you had the number of the person he’d be riding with if you didn’t have their number already.
You take care of your friends. That’s what a friend is.
And we are FOR SURE going to talk about the fact that these were three white boys who left their Black friend alone. If you are white and you have children and you have not talked to them about how to look out for their Black friends, we need to talk. That is a conversation I have been having with my kids since they were old enough to be heading out into the world on their own, and we live in a liberal city on the west coast, often called “the Left coast”, the land Faux News hates with a snide and venomous rage. Even here, this is not the same world for my blonde, blue-eyed son or my white, brown-haired daughter as it is for their Black friends.
My kids can take chances on the street. They can get loud and be silly. They can dance around, and chances are, if they annoy someone inside a house the worst that will happen is that person will stick their head out the window and yell at my kids to keep it down. A real jerk might call the cops, but if they did, the cops would start asking questions. What do the kids look like? Do they seem drunk? Do they look like they live in the neighborhood (code for what is their race)? If that person said the kids are white and well-dressed, just annoying and loud, the cops probably would not bother to come. If they did show up, my kids would get a warning. The cops might even joke around and say the person in that house is old and cranky, wink wink.
If someone calls the cops because a Black child is making noise on the street, there are no guarantees that child is making it home for dinner. There are no guarantees that child is ever having dinner again.
A Black child cannot be loud and silly on the street. If you do not explain that to your white children, and you send your white children out into the world with their Black friends, you are making their Black friends less safe, because what if your white kids get rowdy while they’re together, and some neighbor calls the cops? Also, you are raising kids who are oblivious to their own privilege, and they will not be the kind of kids who grow up looking out for their friends, especially the ones who don’t look like them.
I don’t know what happened to Nolan Xavier Wells, but I do know that the parents of his friends do not seem to have taught their kids some very basic things about being white in this world, and that strikes me as very fucking odd, given that this happened in Mississippi, a state that has a long and sordid history of not taking care of its Black children.
I am trying hard not to jump to conclusions, but it is not easy to come up with many reassuring reasons Nolan’s mother had to track his phone on Snapchat and Life360 in order to figure out where it was, and when it looked like it was back on land, it was only then that Warren said they had the phone, but Nolan had stayed behind on the island. Nolan’s friends did not bring his phone to Nolan’s mother, she had to track it to see where it was, and then she asked her friend to go and pick it up while she frantically made phone calls trying to figure out where Nolan was.
His “friends” have deleted their social media accounts and lawyered up, and I can’t think of good reasons to do that if there’s nothing to hide. If my son’s friends did that, I would not be feeling like they were doing everything possible to help me understand what happened in the last hours of my child’s life. If you, like me, would like to contribute to the gofundme to help Nolan’s family with funeral costs and legal fees, I know any little bit is appreciated.
Lastly, there is a story out of Chicago about a woman and her husband who went jogging together on the 606 Trail in Chicago at about 7:30am Sunday, July 2nd. I shouldn’t say they went jogging together, because the husband took off, and the wife jogged behind, and that’s when a man grabbed her by the neck, put her in a chokehold, threw her to the ground and began groping her over her clothes. I imagine her husband was wearing headphones.
She managed to fight her attacker off and get away, but he chased her, grabbed her again, threw her to the ground and knelt on top of her. A woman inside a nearby house heard her screaming, and alerted her husband, who ran outside barefoot and told the woman and the attacker he was calling 911. His wife then ran out with an aluminum baseball bat. (I love her). The attacker ran off, the house husband grabbed the bat and ran after him, and he and another person were able to detain the attacker until the police got there.
The victim was taken to the hospital by ambulance and was treated for her injuries, prosecutors said. She had suffered bruising to her left ankle, the left side of her neck, her right knee, her wrist, and her forearm, as well as swelling to her hand and a twisted and swollen ankle, prosecutors said.
I don’t know when her husband found out what happened. I imagine he got to the end of his run, stretched, watched the path for longer than seemed right and started texting his wife, or calling. I’m guessing, I don’t know this part of the story, or why he didn’t hear her screaming. He probably runs a faster mile, and she likely told him to go on ahead. Maybe it’s what they always do. I don’t want to vilify the guy, but also, I do a little bit. Because he can just go running, y’know? He can put on his shorts and sneakers and run, and not think twice about it, but not a single one of us who isn’t a man can actually do that tiny, simple thing, and I wonder if that ever occurred to him.
I don’t want to jump to that conclusion, but sometimes in life, it’s so hard not to, isn’t it? I want so much to live in a world where the conclusions I jump to are that people will take care of each other. I want to trust if my children are out in the world and I’m not there with them, strangers will be kind, just like I swear I would be kind to anyone’s child who came across my path, and it wouldn’t matter to me how old they were. They could be sixty-eight, and they’d still be someone’s child. It costs nothing to be kind.
We all belong to ourselves, to the world, and to each other. I don’t know why that isn’t the most obvious conclusion of all. Sending you so much love, friends.
Oh. And then fucking Graham Platner. He is the other end of the Kavanaugh horseshoe.
Damn. Just damn it all. I hate that you are performing such a necessary service, Ally. Thank you.