Been busy and not on here much -- will try harder next week, but if you miss me, try my newsletter Roy Edroso Breaks It Down, wherein I'm contractually obliged to provide five (5) items every week and you only pay a party, miserly, seven (7) dollars a month for this cornucopia of content.
The first one is by Rev. Dean Nelson who, as a backwoods African-American lad, learned to shrug off incidents of racial prejudice like being called names and chased by a guy with a gun (!) but when he went to the Big City to study at Howard (cue sinister music) he got indoctrin-o-mated with "something like the thinking behind The 1619 Project narrative." As "a country boy, easily impressed by my more sophisticated urban peers," Nelson tried to get with the cool kids and "started viewing little slights in an entirely new way." Fortunately, as General Jack D. Ripper told Colonel Mandrake, he learned how to interpret these feelings correctly, and "decided that ignorant whites were no longer going to command my attention" and "I would do all I could to improve the situation of blacks in our country," which he now does by running "pregnancy centers" that browbeat "abortion-determined" women into bearing children. You can see why DeVos loves it.
• For once 9/11 is your lucky day! There are a number of open-to-the-public issues of Roy Edroso Breaks It Down available this week (they're the ones without lock icons at the website), including today's 9/11 column. (The ending is almost upbeat!)
On that subject, I have to say I was surprised by Paul Krugman's Twitter stream that starts with "Overall, Americans took 9/11 pretty calmly. Notably, there wasn't a mass outbreak of anti-Muslim sentiment and violence..." (The rest of it is unobjectionable and accurate about the Republican exploitation of the event.) I guess he figured, like the commentators who say police don't kill that many black people while ignoring all other forms of racist policing, that if there weren't public Muslim burnings things must have been chill. It's easy to forget that Krugman worked for Ronald Reagan and was speaking favorably of him even during the Obama Administration. This is not to suggest Krugman has been insincere in his conversion on Republican governance, but it shows that -- as with NeverTrump apostates like Jennifer Rubin and Max Boot who will occasionally remind us that they're still PNAC/glibertarian creeps under it all -- there is a distinct, clueless worldview shared by all accomplices in the last 40 years of misgovernment that in most cases persists even when the scales fall from their eyes in other respects. So of course Krugman would not think the anti-Muslim animus engendered by his old buddies -- and which persists today, not least in the form of a Muslim travel ban! -- was all that big a deal, really. It's kind of like people who say they're not racist who get pissed when you say Black Lives Matter.
Happy Labor Day weekend. Take it easy -- but take it!
• I haven't unlocked one for a while so here's my Monday edition of Roy Edroso Breaks It Down, on the evolution of conservatives' that traditional hate-on for New York City; whereas after 9/11 they briefly pretended to care what happened to the City, now that it's challenged by COVID-19 they exult in fantasies of its death.
• As we get closer to the election, conservatives and Republicans are getting increasingly obvious about what they really stand for, and it ain't Small Government and Sound Fiscal Management. Here's a Facebook ad from Majorie Taylor Greene, a racistQAnon lunatic who stands a good chance of winning election to Congress from Georgia:
In case you can't make it out, she's holding an assault rifle. Democratic Congresswomen Ocasio-Cortez, Tlaib, and Omar earned their office by proposing new policies and advocacy to their constituents; Greene apparently seeks office by threatening to kill them. And it's equally clear that while the wave of the Democratic future is young, diverse, and Democratic-Socialist, the wave of the Republican future is white supremacist violence. Remember Ole Perfesser Instapundit Glenn Reynolds, the O.G. rightblogger? He's still at it, and here's what he had to say September 1st:
Stalin said it doesn’t matter who votes, but who counts the votes. But people know that now, and the months of (Democrat-incited) civil unrest have moved the Overton Window on political violence. If this leads to Democrats being hanged from lampposts, it’s their own fault.
You can see why double-murderer Kyle Rittenhouse has become a hero to these guys. Rod Dreher, need you ask, slobbers all over the guy; here's a post in which Dreher suggests that, because one of the guys Rittenhouse killed, Joseph Rosenbaum, turned out upon investigation to be a pedophile, Rittenhouse's vigilantism was justified. "The world would be better off with more Kyles and fewer dirtbags than the child molester he shot," ran the story's teaser, and Dreher wrote, "After reading those court documents, though, I can say without fear of contradiction that the world was not diminished by the passing of Joseph Rosenbaum." (Dreher and The American Conservativeremoved the line and the teaser later, I guess to show how Christian Dreher can be when his social anxieties are engaged. Him and Jesus are still cool with Rosenbaum and the other guy getting iced, however.)
There's no need to sugarcoat it: These guys are fascists, and their fight for Trump's reelection is a fight to make America a fascist state. Plan accordingly.
I think Rod Dreher has no more to teach us about how bad Rod Dreher is -- that is, he does not show unplumbed depths of mendacity, bad faith, and derp, he just does them like usual but sometimes dumber. We've talked a lot about his "reader" "mailbag" shtick, where he blockquotes passages allegedly sent to him by people who he sometimes vouches for ("a reader of this blog writes as a decades-long resident of the New York Congressional district just won [effectively] by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez") and which are often from liberals who are disgusted with liberalism, which always gives Rod some prodigal-son pep, and which are obvious bullshit -- either made up by Dreher himself or sent to him by conservative operatives or possibly trolls playing a deep game.
This is both sad and infuriating. It’s from an anonymous academic who posted it on Twitter as @publicola17:
1/ Woke anti-racism is child abuse.
My family is living the antithesis of @thomaschattwill's Self Portrait in Black and White. And I fear it may damage my children irrevocably.
Let me explain
2/ I'm white, my wife's black. When we met, we "saw each other's race," but we didn't think that was the most interesting thing about us. We foolishly thought our children would be part of a post-racial future, in which all Americans could just be human beings to one another.
3/ Then came Trump. I decided I should try to learn more about my fellow citizens, who I now realized were completely opaque to me. In contrast, my wife decided she was at war with an immutably white supremacist America.
4/ My wife began to read authors like Nikole Hannah Jones and Michael Harriot. She had a "racial awakening," concluding that she'd been "inauthentically black" all her life...
I actually had to C&P this from elsewhere because Dreher only provides a screenshot of this thing, which goes on to detail the alleged destruction of this poor guy's family as his wife does things like "regularly explain to our kids that the police want to kill black people" because "NHJ [Nikole Hannah-Jones] and [Ta-Nehisi] Coates are always telling her how traumatized she should be just because she's black in America," while the husband -- I shit you not -- looks forward to the day when his tykes can read Thomas Chatterton Williams and get clear.
Are your bullshit detectors ringing? Not Rod's! (Even though the @publicola17 account has disappeared.) He goes on for hundreds of words about what's "bizarre and twisted" about the woman and how "this is what the identity-politics left is going to bring to all of society: ruin, hatred, endless suspicion" and the Bible story about "when Jesus frees a demoniac by casting the evil spirits out of him, and sending them into a herd of swine," etc.
Finally:
UPDATE: Some of you believe that the Publicola narrative is fake. You might be right. It resonated with me because, as I’ve said, I’ve known people in marriages like that...
More such gush; then --
Even if the anonymous man Publicola’s narrative is nothing but an exercise in creative writing, it still tells a truth.
Punchline: Dreher's upcoming book, which he pimps endlessly, is called Live Not By Lies.
Just got attacked by an angry mob of over 100, one block away from the White House. Thank you to @DCPoliceDept for literally saving our lives from a crazed mob.
'It was horrific': Sen. Rand Paul threatened by protesters after the RNC
What was the threat? Here's the most violent thing in the story:
Protesters knocked one of the officers, who had a bicycle, into Mr. Paul.
I hope the poor man was rushed to the ER.
Making this snowflakery even funnier: This video report from a Washington Post reporter. Looks like both Paul and the protestors were in serious danger of being overwhelmed by news photographers. The usual suspects are shrieking over it: rightwing rageclown Sara Carter portrays Paul's hecklers as "unstable protestors and rioters" -- man, they love to call people who are self-evidently not rioting rioters -- and expressed terror that today's Washington protest will devolve into chaos and anarchy:
As crowds begin to line up early this Friday morning in Washington D.C. protesting what they say is criminal justice reform and racial equality, we must remain vigilant. Innocent protestors, police officers, businesses and citizens going about their own business will get swept up in those that are sure to attempt to riot and destroy the city.
Worse, the fear that the situation could escalate to the point that someone could lose their life is very real.
LOL. I'll try and get over there later (goddamn job is in the way, gripe mutter) but so far the "Take You Knee Off Our Necks" gathering looks like a sedate church-crowd event. I guess Carter only knew the attendees would be black. Ooga booga!
UPDATE. Took a long lunch to run down and get a look and take some snaps. Got there as CeCe Winans was singing! !Lots of people -- probably bigger than the last big Lincoln Memorial protest I attended in June -- and a great feelings of revival, remembrance, and resolution. Had to get back to work but wish them well on their March. And as for the fools like Sara Carter who are scared of this -- in a way, you should be.
I'm releasing today's newsletter to the public: Another White House scene, in which the latest conservative hero is groomed for greater things.
A patrol of the fever swamps shows the Kenosha assassin is very popular with the folks who usually only get to attack protestors verbally (and who also like to play internet defense lawyers for the cops who shot Jacob Blake seven times in the back as well as for Rittenhouse). That figures; given the popularity of Trump, anyone who just does what he pleases regardless of law or morality to kill people conservatives have been aching to kill for years will get a big thumbs-up from the people who have really made the term "law and order" completely meaningless.
Picture mobs of Bernie Goetzes -- who was a weaponized incel avant la lettre -- going out to kill, and you have some idea of what these guys want for America. We forget how popular Goetz was and how even decent people went along because there was a lot of crime and it felt good to them to see someone hit back. But Rittenhouse didn't go into the 1980s New York subway with a concealed weapon waiting for someone to Make His Day -- he went to a Black Lives Matter protest open-carrying, confident of (and receiving!) the approval and assistance of the police. That's the New Model Army of Trumpism.
• I have said many times, and meant it too, that I hate seeing anyone go to prison, but the Trump Gang has really tested my resolve on that and I must admit the prospect of former presidential advisor and current Nazi Steve Bannon going away gives me some pleasure. But who am I kidding, he'll never taste justice -- he'll either treat with Trump for a pardon or make a deal with the feds. But at least we have the joy of knowing that in addition to being an active and evangelical fascist Bannon is also the cheapest sort of grifter, one who exploits the weak-mindedness of rubes to swindle them out of their savings. True, the rubes in this case are Trumpkins and sufficiently racist that they threw their money at an obvious scam just because they thought it would keep dark-skinned immigrants out of the country, so I can't feel too sorry for them. Indeed, the saga would have some of the picaresque air of a con game movie like The Sting, but that we have the gargoyle Bannon instead of Newman and Redford, and instead of ending with "You're right, it's not enough -- but it's close!" we'd probably get the 14 Words.
No one believes any of this, though conservatives have to pretend to. One popular take has been that the Post Office problems don't actually exist and Democrats are pretending they do to make The Leader look dishonest. It's a "wildly irresponsible and baseless conspiracy theory," says Rep. James Comer (R.-Ky.) at Fox News; Tucker Carlson claims the Democrats are trying to "make America even more paranoid and fearful than it already is" and are in fact the real vote-stealers, in furtherance of which stupid point he hauls out the usual discredited charges that voting by mail is easy to rig.
This routine probably only works on rightwing true believers, since many of us have experienced the slowdowns first-hand and DeJoy more or less admitted they've been happening, so the brethren will probably switch over to a deeper, more old-fashioned propaganda cut: That public services are trad, Dad, and privatized mail is where it's at.
This is the tack taken in a recent Wall Street Journal editorial on the subject that blames "Congress," which in their 80s-vintage interpretation means tax-and-spend Democrats coddling inefficient government services: The PO is "a Blockbuster service in a Netflix world" and "overall mail volume peaked in 2006" -- all the cool kids use email! (Yes, I know about the 2007 pension law that wrecked USPS' finances -- WSJ obviously hopes other readers don't.)
"A misalignment like this wouldn’t last in private business," says WSJ, "but the Postal Service answers to politicians." Also, what to bleeding hearts looks like DeJoy's conflict of interest (a $30 million stake in USPS contractor XPO Logistics) is to WSJ a Horatio Alger story: "Mr. DeJoy built a trucking company from 10 employees in 1983 to almost 7,000 in 2014," etc.
At the Wall Street Journal it's still 1984; everybody's wearing suspenders and smoking Macanudos and thinks Big Government should make way for awesome privatization -- or, if that's too scary for you (for the moment), more Reagan-era, hostile-takeover, cut-to-the-bone "reform" that heretofore and everywhere else has meant worse service for us peons and bigger dividends for the 1%, but this time for sure free-market pixie dust will do the trick:
...it isn’t credible to say the USPS merely needs pandemic relief. What it requires is reform. Privatization can’t pass Congress, so ignore that boogeyman. But lawmakers could give the USPS more freedom to act like a business: to raise prices if warranted; to close lonely, desolate post offices; to stop Saturday mail -- or Wednesday mail if it comes to that.
Or, if you're out on a rural route, maybe you'll get mail every couple of weeks -- it'll be your own fault for being too inefficient to make a profit on. If Biden's speech didn't convince you these guys need to be voted out of the known universe at the very least, think on that.
