"All that has happened is there was a peaceful transition of power from Trump to a career politician, in Joe Biden, who has done far more violence than Trump has..."

"... because he’s been … a politician for decades. We didn’t topple anything. All we did was replace one figurehead with another, we’ve done nothing about the institution. It’s not about the leader, it’s about the institutions and the structures and the systems of capitalism and white supremacy that we reside under that are the main forces of domination here."

Said Joshua Briond, of the Black Alliance for Peace and co-host of the Millennials Are Killing Capitalism podcast, quoted in "Organizers: Nothing is fundamentally changed under Biden-Harris While many are taking 'joy' in the new Biden-Harris administration, grassroots organizers remain laser-focused on dismantling white supremacy" (NBC News).

NBC also copies this quote from an article by Ta-Nehisi Coates: "Trumpism did not begin with Trump. ... To Trump, whiteness is neither notional nor symbolic but it is the very core of his power. In this, Trump is not singular." NBC goes on to summarize what Coates wrote next: "He added that presidents before Trump 'carried whiteness like an ancestral talisman.'" 

I clicked through to Coates's January 21st article (it's in the Atlantic), and I can see why NBC shied away from quoting the full sentence. It's: "But whereas his forebears carried whiteness like an ancestral talisman, Trump cracked the glowing amulet open, releasing its eldritch energies."

"Eldritch" is a Scottish word that means — according to the OED — "Weird, ghostly, unnatural, frightful, hideous." I had to look it up, though it sounds familiar, because of the book title, "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch."

On Mars, the harsh climate could make any colonist turn to drugs to escape a dead-end existence. Especially when the drug is Can-D, which translates its users into the idyllic world of a Barbie-esque character named Perky Pat. When the mysterious Palmer Eldritch arrives with a new drug called Chew-Z, he offers a more addictive experience, one that might bring the user closer to God. But in a world where everyone is tripping, no promises can be taken at face value.

That world where everyone is tripping might make more sense than Coates's notion of Trump's cracked-open glowing amulet. But Briond's position is easy to understand, and I give it my "Biden attacked from the left" tag.

"When I say that Joe Biden is basic, by which I mean 100 percent medium grade, I don’t intend it as an insult."

"I mean it as an honest description of everything he seems to want to assure us he is: ordinary, relatable, comforting in the lack of intellectual, ideological, or political threat he poses. Biden looks and talks like presidents have looked and talked—before the election of Barack Obama and his bilious cartoon inversion, Trump—since forever.... Biden had a long and largely unremarkable political career as a senator from Delaware.... Prior to 2020, he had made two unsuccessful tries at the presidency, in 1988 and again in 2008, when he lost the Iowa caucuses well behind two historical firsts, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. During his primary contest against Obama, Biden had made gently racist comments about his opponent, noting the 'storybook' qualities of 'the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.' With this paternalistic appraisal, and its lightly resentful affirmative-action framing of Obama’s success, Biden had projected attitudes so familiarly American that they perhaps sealed his deal as Obama’s running mate—the strain of average white masculinity he radiated would calm the nerves of some who might be discomfited by the meteoric rise of a Black man.... And now [Biden] is received as a balm. For what injury? The one caused by the spasm of violent revulsion and resentment millions of voters and politicians felt after having elected a single Black man to, and considered a single white woman for, the American presidency. Of course, neither of those people—Obama or Clinton—fully challenged the system of white capitalist patriarchy that Biden is a neater symbol for. Had they presented more substantive rebukes to that system, they never would have made it as far as they did."

From "America Is Back, Indeed With Biden we’ve restored our country’s favorite tradition: basic, middling, white patriarchy" by Rebecca Traister (NY Magazine). This gets my tag "Biden attacked from the left." Like the article, the photograph is hostile: