DeAdder Fired and the Weird Week

Yesterday afternoon, Michael DeAdder announced that he’d been fired by the Postmedia-owned Halifax Chronicle Herald, where he has been the editorial cartoonist for more than three decades, and for which he has won numerous awards. He had just submitted a powerful cartoon depicting the world as a whole being incredulous that the United States remains undecided about their presidency. It came the same day that Watergate journalist Bob Woodward published that Trump has been having regular private conversations with Vladimir Putin since losing the presidency.

It’s been a weird week. The American election is in the home stretch, being only one typical Canadian campaign in length away from being put out of its — or our — misery.

We’ve seen vp candidate JD Vance state in the middle of the vice-presidential debate “Margaret, the rules were that you weren’t going to fact check” after the moderators gently correcting the record after he’d said something profoundly misleading.

We are seeing unprecedented weather anomalies, with the first ever recorded instance of three hurricanes co-existing in the North Atlantic after September. It’s been just over a week since Hurricane Helene ravaged Asheville, North Carolina, a city over 2,000’ above sea level and hundreds of miles inland, and the US is bracing for Hurricane Milton, a rare Category 5 hurricane heading up the Gulf of Mexico straight for Tampa Bay, Florida.

Aside from the obvious implications of extreme weather events taking place the year that we breached the 1.5 degree average global temperature increase warned as the tipping point, there are politics to it. And they’re really weird.

Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Green says that “they control the weather,” in response to the devastation of Hurricane Helene, suggesting that Democrats had used the hurricane to attack Republican-leaning voting districts.

Another Republican, Florida congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna, voted against funding the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the American department responsible for hurricane relief, then publicly demanded more money faster from them in anticipation of Hurricane Milton hitting her district the next day. These people have no shame.

Yesterday, it was also revealed that Florida governor Ron DeSantis, another Republican, refused to speak to Kamala Harris — the sitting vice president — about getting that same hurricane relief going for his state.

Then, to make matters more weird, Elon Musk appeared at a Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, the same town where Trump took a bullet to his ear three months ago, for which no injury is apparent.

Monday, Musk and former Fox News personality Tucker Carlson posted an interview where they talked about the assassinations of President Joe Biden or Vice President Kamala Harris not happening because it would be ‘pointless’.

For all the people who want to do something for the environment by buying an electric car from Musk, it’s all very disappointing to learn that he is throwing the proceeds at getting an anti-labour anti-environment anti-women anti-progress anti-truth Trump elected, supported by people like Luna, Green, and DeSantis.

Musk keeps making weird statements about the resistance. Back in August, he tweeted:

You watched "The Hunger Games" and sided with the resistance.
You watched "Star Wars" and sided with the resistance.
You watched "The Matrix" and sided with the resistance.
You watched "Divergent" and sided with the resistance.
You watched "V for Vendetta" and sided with the resistance.
When it's fiction you understand.
Yet you refuse to see it when it's the reality you're living in.
Wild.

It’s difficult to comprehend how the wealthiest man in the world, on track to being the wealthiest person in recorded history, believes he is leading some kind of rebellion against anything except the common working person.

His opposition to the rights of workers is the only value I can see in common between him and Trump, who last week said “I know a lot about overtime. I’d hated they give overtime. I hated it. I’d get other people, I shouldn’t say this, but I’d get other people in. I wouldn’t pay. I hate it.” at a Michigan rally.

Last week also saw a major US labour disruption averted when dockworkers secured a 62% pay increase over 6 years with the support of President Biden and his Democratic transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg, who actually care about the common working person.

For most of the rest of the world, it’s fairly obvious who would make a more honest and competent leader of the United States. That Trump, a convicted felon who attempted to stage a coup to retain power after losing the 2020 election, is still in the running is absolutely mind-boggling.

When celebrated cartoonist Michael DeAdder prepared yet another cartoon making this point, we can only surmise that he irritated the new owners of the paper who overwhelmingly want Conservatives to be in power.

Elon Musk’s rebellion indeed.