I was impressed when Ontario’s Premier Doug Ford towed a hardline with Felon 47 who wants to bully Canada into becoming a 51st state. Felon 47 hopes to do this with tariffs.
But here’s what Americans need to know about how ridiculous, mean-spirited and stupid Felon 47 actually is.
Canada is the world’s third largest supplier of energy. Only Saudi Arabia and Russia supply more energy. The United States consumes more energy than it produces.
Canada and the United States’ electrical grids have been integrated well over 100 years for the security of both nations. New England and many parts of the northeastern United States are heavily dependent on Canadian electricity.
Canada is the second largest supplier of hydroelectricity powered by moving water which generates nearly 60 percent of Canada’s electricity. Electricity Canada, which is based in Ontario, provides clean electricity to Canada and the United States.
(Ontario Premier Doug Ford, photo by Chris Young/The Canadian Press via AP)
So, here’s the deal. For now, Ontario’s Premier Doug Ford has decided to hold off on raising tariffs by 25 percent on electricity exported to the US. He still could impose, however, those penalties where consumers in the northern USA see their electric bills go sky high or they could find themselves looking for candles.
Felon 47 has decided to withhold imposing a 25 percent increase in tariffs on Canadian aluminum and steel for now. Yet, he is discovering that his role as a bully is being met by leaders who have better sense and materials the United States is dependent on.
Here’s one thing everyone better understand. Canada can survive and thrive even if it cuts its diplomatic and regional ties to the United States. It has already been established that with some adjustments to its economy, Canada can continue to thrive. It is not clear whether the same can be said of the United States.
I remember back when Arthur Herman Bremer shot former Alabama Governor and presidential candidate George Wallace in 1972. Wallace ended up in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. He had been an avowed segregationist for most of his life.
He became a humanitarian after he was shot and paralyzed from the waist down. To his credit, he did assist Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm with passing legislation that aided workers and farmers. Their alliance, brought on by his tragedy, was unique in the annals of American political history.
Wallace assumed he was invincible. Yet, no matter how much power you have or think you have, you cannot hold that power forever.
No matter how many times you kiss the ring of those in power, and swallow your pride and principles for the approval of those in power, you too will eventually be sacrificed with neither your dignity nor principles to hold your legacy together.
The Muskrat and Felon 47 will die, just like all of us will. History will record them as monsters because that is exactly what they are. The politicians who shy away from questioning the rationale of their policies will be recorded as the cowards they are.
Shutterstock photo of depressed man/New Africa
As activist Audre Lorde said, “Your silence will not protect you.” In the end when the folks upon whose altar you have sacrificed all of your principles are done with you, you will be no more than the rest of us. All you will ever be is mortal.
Power does not transfer to the grave. Your progeny will live long enough after your death to be vilified and hated while struggling to figure out what it is that they have done. History will answer them the same way it has answered all others in perpetuity, “Your crime is your having been born unto monsters.”
I originally wrote about this on Christmas Eve, 2024:
The United States imports most of its strategic minerals. China is our largest supplier. Polysilicon, Geranium, Palladium are vital to semiconductors. Magnesium metals, and etcetera all come from China.
We also import critical minerals from Australia, South Africa, Chile, Brazil and Peru.
Out of the 35 critical minerals that are absolutely essential to our economy and to the efficacy of our military, we only produce 4 of those necessary minerals. The other 31 are imported.
While folks in Canada and Greenland and Panama are naturally and rightfully insulted and concerned about Felon 47’s bluster about invading their countries to bring them under the US umbrella; it’s not likely to happen. It is the USA that better be concerned.
(Photo by Martin Konopka, EyeEm/Getty Images)
The only thing that would need to happen is for the United States to be isolated by both its enemies and its friends where no nation sells us any critical minerals anymore. With a weakened economy and weakened military we are ripe for the pickings.
China has already banned the sale of critical minerals to the United States. That’s what all that early “let’s ban Tiktok” mess from the U. S. Congress was about. Congress already knows that China can thumb its nose at the USA. Elon and his demented minion Trumpolini can fool around and they will find out.
Today on March 2, 2025, I had a great exchange with one of the best young minds out there challenging us to think. His name is Kahlil Greene—look him up. He waxed poetically and flawlessly about this past week’s fiasco of a talk between Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky and our bully-in-chief that I personally refer to as Felon 47. Greene brought up the striking contrast between Biden and Felon 47.
After I brought up the USA’s ongoing need for strategic minerals, he reiterated that US dependence on these strategic minerals had serious repercussions for our natural environment and for our indigenous Native American nations.
Here’s another age-related reminder that I wrote to him:
“Kahlil, you may be too young to remember these protests: But back in the late 1980s when we were clamoring and protesting to get universities, companies, and etcetera to divest from the racist apartheid regime in South Africa, the response from Washington was often ‘South Africa supplies many of our strategic minerals that support our military.’
At the time, I was quite young and did not know what a strategic mineral was, but I started paying attention.
Ukraine is about as mineral rich as any country you can find on earth. Without certain minerals, the USA cannot be militarily secure and we cannot build semiconductors that support our electronics industries. You made a damned good point about the environment and what this could mean for our First Nation brothers and Sisters. I am going to leave this discussion right here.”
I’m not going to write a full analysis of the late historian Mike Davis’ exceptional book “Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World.” I do, however, want to revisit it and emphasize a few points Davis made about European colonialism in the late 19th century.
Davis’ examination of famines and droughts in Southeast Asia, China, Africa, and Latin America underscored how indigenous peoples were dispossessed of their land; and their time-honored farming traditions were also dismissed. It created ecological and environmental problems we now deal with today but rarely think about.
Davis acknowledged that land theft, the closing off of common farming areas, and violence against these populations were key components of European colonization and expansion, but he added one more element—the weather.
European colonizers studied El Niño weather patterns to determine when populations in Southeast Asia, Latin America, Africa, China, and etcetera, would be at their most vulnerable.
El Niño is part of a long-existing and large weather pattern. During El Niño, areas of the Pacific Ocean experience unusually high surface temperatures. El Niño disrupts typical weather patterns, affects rainfall, temperatures, and etcetera. The period when these waters are much cooler is called La Niña.
Europeans studied when the weather was working against the people and the lands they wished to colonize—The colonizers struck most often at those times proving that famines are human-made.
The book’s preface offers a detailed account of former U. S. President Ulysses Grant and his family on vacation in 1877 after he left office. He and his family visited Europe first, but soon ended up visiting places devastated by famine. Grant took notes about what he saw, but he did not report the degree of ecological destruction he witnessed.
Davis’ book was published in 2001 and it remains a rare gift because his research proved that heads of state and monarchs in the western world tended to ignore the long-term ecological damage from their destruction of natural resources. Indigenous populations were seen as inferior, therefore their farming techniques and cooperation with their native ecologies were dismissed by Europeans as well.
The fires that recently destroyed homes and huge areas of California were made worse by what is called “Hydroclimate Whiplash.” When heavy rains due to El Niño soak the ground leading to the excessive growth of vegetation, what follows next are extremely long dry spells.
The dried up vegetation becomes little more than fuel for fires. The results of El Niño are much more troublesome now due to climate change. It’s not just happening in California. It’s happening everywhere around the world.
What is often left out of discussions about climate change and the usage of El Niño’s disruptive weather patterns, is the racism against and the subjugation of peoples of color by Europeans and others that has aided and abetted climate change crises around the world.
Davis was not the first historian to understand what European colonialism did to the natural environments of countries around the world, but his book “Late Victorian Holocausts” is one of the few histories to recognize that the routine and natural disruptions of El Niño were deliberately weaponized against Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans in horrific ways that few individuals realize.
This essay is specifically directed to cisgender women. I have heard all of the debates about that term “cisgender.” For the record, I am a Black cisgender woman which means I was assigned the biological designation of “female” at birth and identify as a woman.
I am not a Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist. I am a feminist who welcomes anyone, cisgender or transgender, who identifies as a woman and who is trying to help us women out. I welcome the guys too. The more inclusive you are, the more you learn.
Too often, we cisgender women assume that transgender women’s problems and issues (i.e. access to healthcare, safe housing, safety from violence, the ability to play sports, and etcetera) have nothing to do with us. We could not be more wrong.
What caught my attention in her essay was her analysis of Felon 47’s Executive Order titled “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.” I know that’s a mouthful.
The order is designed to make trans women disappear by virtue of eliminating any accurate human definition or category for them. You’re either male or female which is biological fiction. This leaves intersex individuals in the lurch. I encourage you to do your own research about intersex individuals and also research what hormone therapy does to and for a transgender woman’s body.
When you consider that less than 1 percent of the US population is transgender; along with the fact that only 10 transgender athletes currently play on the collegiate level, you should know by now that you are more likely to be struck by lightning than to meet a transgender person in your lifetime. You may meet them, but you may never know they are transgender.
The Executive Order says virtually nothing about transgender men. Trans men are ignored because the point of the order is to restrict and control all women’s reproductive choices.
Rosa pointed out that the language in this executive order establishes that a person is formed at the moment of conception. The order insists that anything blocking or interfering with the process of reproductionis against this order. In other words, she argued that this anti-transgender order can just as easily be used as an anti-abortion and an anti-birth control directive against cis women.
Individuals who seek to control the reproduction of cisgender women use people’s biased and misinformed opinions about transgender women as litmus tests before they place restrictions on cisgender women.
Felon 47 and Republicans have used transgender women as their political football for years now. They are obsessed with cis and trans women’s bodies. Yet, this obsession begs the question: Exactly how do they (or you) know whether a woman is transgender or cisgender?
I have had transgender friends and students, but I did not always know they were transgender until they told me. I have also met many cisgender women who looked like men to me. So I stopped making any assumptions about gender based solely on appearances over 30 years ago.
Right wing nuts will eventually insist that there is only one way to absolutely determine whether a woman is trans or cis; that proof will most certainly require that their genitalia be examined.
So, are we prepared for our little cisgender, but tom boyish, daughters to have to drop their panties for anyone who demands it? Are any of you willing to expose yourself on demand? Do these kooks in the Republican Party really think they will easily get away with this?
Republicans, Felon 47, and huge numbers of White Christian Nationalist wackos want cisgender women to believe that transgender women are their enemies, or worse, that trans women are actually men just waiting to sexually assault you when you use a public toilet. I urge you to research what happens to the penis of a biological male transitioning to female.
It is these hyper-masculine Republican kooks who are the ones that cis and trans women need to be afraid of. Let’s face it, anyone obsessed with another person’s genitalia is up to no good. Anyone obsessed with controlling a woman’s reproductive organs has an agenda.
The hard truth is people classifiable as “white” are disappearing. The world has always been majority people of color. Right now, however, the average ages of peoples in countries in Southeast Asia and in Africa range from 20 to 30 years of age. The average age of a European is 44 years old with one of the lowest birth rates in the world.
The negative reactions to transgender women, birth control and abortion are not anchored in any religious beliefs coming from the political and religious Right. They don’t give a damn about cisgender or transgender women of color. They only care about whether white cisgender women reproduce babies. Trans women are seen as not reproducing babies, but that’s not always true.
Let me paint another scenario. Imagine you are a cisgender woman or girl who, by ordinance of Felon 47, has to be either physically inspected by some government-appointed matron or carry some card verifying that you are a cisgender woman before you are allowed to enter a women’s public restroom to simply urinate.
Imagine the requirements for receiving a gender identity card are achieved by having your DNA, your genitalia, and your hormones tested. God forbid you are a cisgender woman whose body naturally produces high levels of testosterone. Two cisgender women athletes were disqualified from competition at the Olympics because their bodies naturally produced more testosterone than the Olympics deemed acceptable. And that’s the problem.
Felon 47 and his henchmen (and women) not only want to invalidate the identities and lived experiences of trans women, they want to create a single standard for who and what a cisgender woman is when there is no one-size-fits-all definition of what a woman is. Women come in a variety of shapes and sizes with bodies that generate different levels of hormones that vary throughout the year, and vary from one woman to the next.
What’s next? Do they throw menopausal cisgender women under the bus because they no longer have the capacity to reproduce or because their hormone levels have certainly dropped since they were in their childbearing years?
Are cisgender women slowly losing the right to determine our own gender identities without the interference of men in power who don’t have a clue what being a woman means to each woman individually? Do we cisgender women attempt to deny gender dysphoria (look it up) as a real condition in some vainglorious attempt to deny womanhood to transgender women who we don’t always understand?
We lose nothing by protecting the rights of transgender women. But we could lose everything ignoring our connections to trans women and the policies that affect their health and well-being, and ours.
Leslye Joy Allen 