"Brady McCarron, spokesman for U.S. Marshals Service in Washington, D.C., confirmed [Judge] Dugan was arrested at about 8 a.m. at the Milwaukee County Courthouse and is in federal custody."

(Also, as mentioned, because of its social function, the use of humor is wrapped up inextricably with ethics -- so it's good for all of us to look hard at how we use humor and ask whether we're assimilating or alienating people or ideas that we don't actually want to assimilate or alienate.)

18. Seriously. We already saw what happened on Jan 6 after years of Trump "joking" about armed revolt and assassinating political opponents. Do we really want to be watching Trump seize dictatorial power while we say, stupidly, "I thought he was just joking"?

17. Bottom line: don't accept "just joking" as a defense or excuse for what Trump says. He's pushing ideas to his in-group, and if he's using humor to do it that doesn't mean it can be ignored -- it means he's using an effective tool to push those ideas and we should pay close attention. And object.

16. But it was pretty clear that Trump was not joking satirically about armed revolt prior to Jan 6 -- he meant to do the work of assimilating the idea, and he did so successfully. And it's pretty clear the same is true of his "jokes" about being king or staying in office past the end of his term.

15. Of course, humor can be complicated. Sometimes what superficially appears to be racist humor is actually parody or satire -- designed to actually alienate (reject) racism by mocking racist humor. So interpreting humor can get tricky.

14. In fact, to accept "just joking" as a defense is to be passively complicit in the assimilation of the ideas being conveyed by the "joke." This is why it isn't ok to let racist "jokes" go unobjected to. And the same should be true of "jokes" about armed revolt or being king.

13. To dismiss these statements as "just joking" is a mistake. Jokes matter. Humor performs a social function. It does social work -- and in this case it's the sort of work that should be condemned. Vigorously.

12. Now -- not for the first time -- Trump is "joking" about being king. Those who dismiss it as "just joking" are failing to recognize the work that these "jokes" are performing. Trump's in-group has been assimilating the idea of Trump-as-dictator for some time now. Lines are being drawn.

11. (Little did I know, in 2016, that my claim would later be supported by an actual armed revolt staged by Trump's in-group on Jan 6, 2021.)

10. My original thread was written in response to Trump's "jokes" about assassination or armed revolt. I said that when Trump "jokes" about these ideas, he's asking the in-group to assimilate these ideas. Because that's what jokes do.

9. The racist "joke" does its work, in other words, by drawing the line between the in-group and the out-group (constructing identities) -- those who accept the racism and those who reject it. And the fact that it draws these lines means it is never "just" joking.

8. This is why we're never "just joking." The just-joking defense is meant to convey (to the out-group) that the statement was meaningless. But to the in-group, no defense is needed because the idea (here, racism) is accepted/acceptable. So the statement clearly wasn't meaningless.