FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: BIG FASH AND SMALL VICTORIES EDITION.

Eatin' up suckers as if I was Pac-Man.

 Even though they lie like they breathe and are still fucking shit up in Minneapolis, the administration’s announcement that DHS is doing a “drawdown” there is meaningful because it shows that even these id monsters realize they’ve run into heavy weather. Their whole  M.O. has been smash-and-grab from the DOGE rampage to now; letting the peons see that they don’t give a shit what they think is part of the terrorization process. So when they get stopped, as opposed to just running out of things to destroy, it’s noteworthy -- it means they actually have been made to give a shit, which means their terrorism has not yet reached escape velocity, and can be effectively challenged.

Again, don’t get it twisted -- they’re still building concentration camps (which the Prestige Press still has trouble calling by their proper name, despite the obvious intended purpose of spending billions of dollars on giant prisons for brown and black people). But those camps are getting pushback even in towns not associated with “resistance” -- and by pushback I mean some towns are actually getting  those camps stopped. Yeah, they can always go somewhere else, but it's meaningful whenever someone says "no" and they can't just walk over them; their carte blanche is tarnished.

And voters are picking up on it -- which is clearly why Gallup said, hey, guess we ought to stop doing Presidential approval polling because huggermugger rutabaga synergy etc. This cowardice is discussed in this week’s first ROY EDROSO BREAKS IT DOWN freebie, as is the misbehavior of  Tubby’s moll Bondi at a Congressional hearing -- which shows, among other things, that at least a few of his gang are still out there making a show of impunity; I think it’s meant to rally and reassure such adherents as they still have, because normies have all but given up on them.

Our remaining REBID freebie is a little dramatic scene, such as some of you enjoy, about how Tubby intends to fight back against growing disapproval of his anti-immigrant policies. Worth a try, anyway.

I’ll just add that The Atlantic, like the New Yorker and other classy mags before them, has shipped a Rod Dreher puff piece, taking his pseud sanctimony and Just The Tip Trumperism at face value (“’I had never been enthusiastic about Trump,’ Dreher told me, ‘but I was enthusiastic about him this time because it seemed like only somebody like him could put a stop’ to ‘wokeness and the madness of transgenderism’”). The author even tells us “the story of Dreher’s personal Calvary begins with his father,” and his divorce “took a terrible toll and left him almost entirely alone.” An asshole dad and a divorce! Can you blame the guy for being a fascist? Anyway, here and here are a couple of my old funsies at the wispy God-botherer’s expense.  Enjoy! 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: LEMON, IT'S WEDNESDAY EDITION.

Sabor.

Here’s where I'd repeat the 30 Rock What A Week joke except I assume even people who never saw the show know that one by now because every week is What A Week. 

ICE and Border Patrol continue their reign of terror in Minneapolis (and elsewhere; let’s not forget they haven’t completely vacated their previous terrorization targets like Chicago and Los Angeles). I reckon this week’s historical shorthand -- i.e., what Rick Perlstein or whoever will use to portray Feb. 1-7 years hence, if we haven’t all been locked up in concentration camps -- would be feds snatching a child and being forced to give him back, only to try and snatch him back and snatch another child (yes, I know they snatch children all the time), and a federal agent kicking a puppy, which matches perfectly the purpose and character of these occupations. Some fucking drawdown. 

Also proceeding apace: The enshittification of the news. As Bari Weiss continues to sabotage CBS News, Jeff Bezos obliged Mr. Big with some massive layoffs at the Washington Post. Our first ROY EDROSO BREAKS IT DOWN freebie for non-subscribers gets into that, and the long-term revenge mission behind it. 

Meanwhile Tubby’s mayhem continues. Facing dismal polls (and some truly catastrophic special election results) he’s trying to steal the midterms with the help of Tulsi Gabbard -- whose unusual presence at the FBI raid on the Georgia 2020 election files is further proof that they need a validated trusty on hand every time they do something shady to keep the agents from blowing the whistle. And, apparently hoping to shore up his hardcore constituency, he circulated a racist video of the Obamas. 

And Trump’s shutting down the Kennedy Center for two years, allegedly for renovations (supported by his longtime lies about the building’s condition) but obviously because artists are bailing left and right because of his thuggish management. His dreams of what the place could be are the subject of our second ROY EDROSO BREAKS IT DOWN freebie, which also alludes in the end to another Trump headline from the week -- one less damaging than the others but every bit as emblematic.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: IS IT FASH YET? EDITION.

You better run.

Tubby and his mob have been busy, seizing voting records in Georgia (presumably to manipulate in furtherance of his years-long Stolen Election scam) and arresting black journalists for the crime of covering a protest in a Minneapolis church. Looks like I was right on the money calling them Nazis well before they began their rampages.

Naturally, as they get more obvious about their fascism -- so much so that even centrists who doubted it are coming around --  their Prestige Press enablers increasingly rush to say nuh-uh. Did you guess Megan McArdle would be among them? My sympathies, you’ve been paying attention! 

McArdle is willing to admit to “Trump’s authoritarian instincts, bellicose contempt for norms and fundamental disrespect for America’s democratic traditions,” presumably because those abstractions sound much better than “Sending masked goons to abduct and murder citizens, using the Armed Forces to loot foreign countries and put the money in The Leader’s private offshore account, shaking down law firms and college for payoffs, etc.” 

But fascism? Come now, he’s no Hitler -- the courts still oppose him, sometimes, without actually punishing him or anyone else for his crimes (thanks, Supreme Court!). Though McArdle says “America looks less like a liberal democracy than it did a decade ago — much less than I would have believed possible before 2016,” she judges it impossible that in the next two or five or ten years he can surprise her yet again and make it all the way to full Hitler. Fool me twice, right? 

Anyway, McArdle says, it’s you stupid resistance liberals who are the real problem, using big fancy words like “fascist” that just confuse people:

Saying “He’s a fascist” (or an authoritarian, or a caudillo) will not do the trick. It’s more likely to be counterproductive, as people look up from our scribblings and observe that elections are still happening, courts are still demanding due process and the press is still free to complain about Dear Leader... it will be much easier to convince them that he’s just a bad president who should be replaced by someone who has different policies. 

So stop being dramatic when everything is so (relatively) normal, and count on fixing this with the free elections that will certainly be allowed once Tulsi Gabbard gets done making those seized Georgia ballots conform to the boss’ expectations! 

Here’s your ROY EDROSO BREAKS IT DOWN freebie for the week, on what I made of the alleged “drawdown” in Minneapolis -- briefly, that MPLS people power has made the goon squad sweat, but don’t trust them to actually start acting like legitimate law enforcement now. For one thing, they lie like they breathe; for another, being (I will say it again) fascists, they are committed to breaking their enemies, which is how they perceive those who oppose their vicious and undemocratic policies, and will not stop until someone stops them. Fortunately, there are a whole lot more of us than there are of them, and unlike McArdle we’re not even pretending to be deceived about what they’re doing. 

One last note: Most of you know what evil brain poison Scientology is. Sometimes the story of one victim can tell that tale better than anything else, and my old boss Tony Ortega has done a great job with the sad story of Romey Beliles. Read it here. 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: TAKE IT EASY BUT TAKE IT EDITION.

You got to spread a warnin' when the army they come in.

All honor and best of luck to the comrades in Minneapolis on general strike today. The ICE goons are feeling the added chill, and have sent their prevaricators and propagandists into overdrive:

Walz “is courting more ugly incidents,” the Wall Street Journal editorial page scolds. “The President has the legal authority to unleash ICE, and the agents are doing what they are told to do. The way to defeat the Trump policy is at the ballot box, not by obstructing agents in violation of the law.” National Review’s Noah Rothman argues, “What Walz is advising his citizens to do is likely to result in more violence and, potentially, more death.” Zachary Faria writes in the Washington Examiner, “What you have with ICE agents in Minneapolis is people exercising the lawful authority to detain illegal immigrants and, on the other end of that, anyone interfering with federal law enforcement actions.”

The premise underpinning this argument is that ICE is acting legally and in the service of legitimate immigration-enforcement goals. That assumption is difficult to square with on-the-ground reporting.

And that’s from Mr. On The Other Hand himself, Jon Chait! Even he smells what the Prestige Press is cooking. Meanwhile lower-end lie diffusers are trying to tell us the monstrous child abductors are actually just twyinh to hewp the widdle babies:

No one believes that -- they don’t, you don’t, even the few rage-goblins still sporting MAGA red believe that. What they do believe in is the power of the big lie. It got them this far, they reason (for want of a better word), and besides, what else have they got? So they push their flunkies in the press to uncritically repurpose their press releases and send their “influencers” to cities targeted by Trump to generate up new bullshit. They’ve even sent a few goons to Baltimore, probably inspired by Tubby’s tweeted footage of a few dirty alleys that he claimed as proof that the city was a “rodent-infested mess” in 2019. Maybe Nick Shirley will take video of the Old Town Mall and tell his rubes it’s City Hall and Brandon Scott is from Somalia. 

Like I said, it’s all they know: Hatred of cities and hatred of foreigners have worked for them in the past, and to truth and good governance they are strangers. But as both Tubby and the economy deteriorate before their eyes voters are less inclined to go for it again. 

It was another great week at ROY EDROSO BREAKS IT DOWN -- here’s a freebie for non-subscribers, about the considerable downsides to being a Trump toady, the generous pay packet notwithstanding. Speaking of money, subscriptions are cheap, treat yourself. 

Update. That the rightwing press keeps peddling claims that ICE is actually helping these children by kidnapping them -- even as they continue to kidnap children -- is merely the most outraging of all these outrages.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: FRAUDS ON PARADE EDITION.

24 years? Really?

I was grateful, in this grim and gloomy week, for the laughs afforded by Evan Mandery’s story in Politico, “They Wanted a University Without Cancel Culture. Then Dissenters Were Ousted.” Yes, he’s talking about Bari Weiss’ University of Austin, TX scam -- which those of us who were paying attention knew was a rightwing boondoggle from the start, but Mandery and number of his interview subjects (mostly founders or early adopters who have skulked away) claim never to have seen it coming: 

Because so many of its leaders lean conservative, UATX has been portrayed in some quarters as having been a right-wing project from the start. However, the truth is vastly more complex.

A land of contrasts, you might say! Mandry admits that the founders "leaned right," but says this was mitigated by the presence of Larry fucking Summers ("had served in Bill Clinton’s Cabinet and as Barack Obama’s chief economic advisor") and "unconventional, independent thinkers" like Jonathan Haidt. This was clearly not designed to recreate the School of Athens, yet Mandery professes surprise that sugar daddy Joe Lonsdale and several hardcore rightwing creeps have stripped away the Free & Fair Inquiry veneer of the thing and left it exposed as MAGA University.:

The ultimate irony is that UATX fell prey to the very impulses that its founders and supporters so detested. “It’s easy to see when other people lack these things,” [Ilana] Redstone said. “It’s harder to see in themselves.” Redstone hastens to add this isn’t just a failure at UATX. It’s fair to ask whether any university lives up to these ideas.

Any university! Not too many institutes of higher learning, from Harvard to Fritters Community College, devolve as quickly and as utterly as UATX has. Well, Florida’s New College did, once Ron DeSantis forcibly removed all the “woke” influences and made it into a conservative consent machine as well -- one that readily agreed to the Teach MAGA or Die demand that Trump has placed on all the big schools. 

The allegedly “anti-woke but not rightwing” has in every instance turned out to be rightwing. It’s the institutional equivalent of Just The Tip Trumpers -- whether they were lying to con the rubes or to con themselves.

If only Trump’s own buffoonery were less consequential, we could enjoy that too. I’ve thought about exactly what's so annoying about his acceptance of Machado’s Nobel as if he had won it himself, and concluded that it's because this so perfectly reflects a signal aspect of Trumpism -- in a word, fraud, and by that I mean more than criminal fraud: I mean the impulse that leads Tubby to wreak havoc, for instance, among the armed forces with fraudulent tough-guy “warfighter” yak, and leads his incel creep followers to yammer about the values of Western Civilization when they’ve clearly only read the Classics Illustrated versions of the canon and don’t even understand those. That is, they are experts at nothing but fakery; so they must be wholly devoted to fraud and double down every time they’re challenged, as with their continued bullshit excuses for the murder of Renee Good in Minneapolis. No wonder Tubby treats the pass-along of the Nobel as the same thing as earning it by his own actions -- why sweat it, he’s got people for that. 

Speaking of Minneapolis, the ongoing rule by goon squad in the Twin Cities is the subject of this week’s ROY EDROSO BREAKS IT DOWN freebie -- it’s great that polls show the voters are catching on to the truth, but the Prestige Press is very slow about acknowledging that the administration’s lies have grown so threadbare that not even the most vapid institutionalist could possibly believe they must be respected in the court of public opinion (though not a few careerists may). The way to do it is the way Willamette Week does: By saying that ICE “asserted” something and “did not offer evidence to substantiate that account,” for example, rather than just doing steno for them. 

Oh, you were expecting more free stuff? Subscribe -- it’s almost free!  

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: YOUR LYIN' EYES EDITION.

Some trippy shit right here.

Just a week after we all hoped for better days in the new year, an ICE officer murdered a young woman in Minneapolis and, despite widely-disseminated video showing the murder, the rightwing hate machine flooded the zone with mendacious misinterpretations of what everyone with eyes could clearly see. Erick Erickson, for example, lied his fat ass off about that video and, when a fresh one taken from the murderer’s perspective surfaced, lied about that (‘the car lurches forward, hitting the officer” -- that is not on the video). Erickson also left off that the killer called Good a “fuckin’ bitch” after he shot her. What a way to make a living.

A bunch of other rightwingers like Rod Dreher are also lying about it ("this clip shows Renee Good was coming straight for the ICE agent" no it doesn't you twat). Who'd have guessed that worshippers of Donald Trump would have no respect for the truth?

Maybe even worse, in my view, are the sneakier conservatives who pretend to see the murder from BOTHSIDES. Bari Weiss’ CBS News installee Tony Dokoupil professed sympathy for the victim but also for alleged authors of “passionate notes in my inbox from people who want to see our immigration laws enforced.” By “passionate” I assume he meant filled with racial slurs.

Weiss’ own Free Press tsk-tskd over “two sharply different narratives” that “were actively pushed by politicians on both sides of the aisle,” that is, murder is bad vs. “Fuckin’ Bitch.” 

Also, The Free Press says, “the videos leave room for reasonable debate about the nature of the incident and who was at fault,” which, no. These people are professional propagandists whose whole career is about telling you it’s raining when their funders piss down your leg. There is no percentage in being drawn into a bullshit Charlie Kirk “debate” in which they counter your plain facts with handwaving nonsense. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had it right when some Fox News chucklefuck told her to come on Jesse Watters’ show and she told him Watters had made gross sexist remarks about her so why should she. 

Anyway I said my say about this in the first of this week’s Roy Edroso Breaks It Down editions released to the general public. If you want something a little less grim, here’s one from earlier in the week about the Fracas in Caracas -- Tubby’s way of showing everybody what a big tuff guy he is. The best you can say for the Maduro escapade is, it shows that whether the rightwing foreign adventure is headed by an allegedly intellectual think tank or a self-evidently brain-damaged old clown, the result is pretty much the same: a brief boo-yah and then years of disaster and waste. 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: THROW THAT YEAR IN THE GARBAGE CAN EDITION.

[no caption]

This Friday I’m not going long (nor early, neither!) with ‘Round-the-Horn, because I’m on vacation. Yes, both this and Roy Edroso Breaks It Down will be in abeyance till the week of Jan. 5 while I lie in a stupor. 

This week, I mostly eschewed the new and did a four-installment Week in Re-Phew! As my final magnanimous gesture for 2025, I have opened all parts to the punting public! You may find them here:

Part 1: Musk and the Feral Rich; RFK those germs away!; and  Vice-President Fuckface goes full fash.

Part 2: Democrats: Wussys vs. Winners; AI vs. humanity; No Kings, or Mild in the Streets; and Bari-atric Surgery.

Part 3: ICE Follies; and Charlie (Kirk) and the Chaos Factory.

Part 4: Tumblin’ Tubby.

Enjoy, absorb, show ‘em around at parties. Also subscribe! And have a great time on New Year’s, because we’ve got our work cut out for us in 2026.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: XENOPHOBOMANIA EDITION.

My new music cicerone Gabbie hooked me up.

Another rocky week, America! Lots to be bummed about, like Judge Dugan being found guilty for protecting a defendant in her charge from ICE goons. Keep hope alive for her appeal and the preservation of this wrecker administration’s poor record in court. It’s annoying that we have to assume every prosecution out of that cesspool, like every detention proceeding from it, is designed not to do justice but to mock it. 

Also, when the FUBAR FBI finally found the (alleged, dead) perp in the Brown University shooting, he turned out to be from Portugal, so Tubby’s retaliating against all foreigners by killing another visa program, as if the shootings prove that immigrants are more likely to do murder than native-born Americans. It’s a preposterous supposition but one familiar to students of previous rightwing immigrant panics, like the Kate Steinle shooting, which led to much xenophobic screaming in 2017. The overreaction then was not so outrageous, probably because the actual killing took place before Trump came to power; now any headline provides cover for his racial-purity campaign. Maybe next he’ll tell us his bombing spree in the Caribbean is actually retaliation for immigrant murders going back to Sacco and Vanzetti. 

Speaking of which, I was surprised Tubby didn’t use his Wednesday night address to announce Operation Fracas in Caracas -- guess we’ll have to wait for the release of some creepier Epstein Files to goad him into declaring war. As it was, the speech turned out to be a bizarre tantrum. As I’ve observed before, even when touting his (largely fictitious) achievements, Trump seems totally uninterested in persuading anyone who isn’t already prone to believe anything he says; like his other wacky displays -- the giant ballroom, the triumphal arch, sticking his name on the Kennedy Center and dumb insults on Presidential portraits -- it’s all just an endless ego rampage by a dangerous lunatic who should be nowhere near the levers of power.

Speaking of which, there is one (1) free Roy Edroso Breaks It Down issue this week, about what Tubby’s Rob Reiner rant says about his approach to governance.  If you guys want more of this stuff -- and what sophisticated connoisseur of Substackery wouldn’t? -- you should subscribe, especially at our HOLIDAY SALE price that makes the already  absurdly low annual price genuinely unbeatable at $56/year. Click here for savings MAKES A GREAT GIFT! 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: KICKING THE PRICK EDITION.

Ignorance of your culture is not considered cool.

It’s not like I’m gonna get very optimistic about the State of the Nation but there have been some good tidings lately. For instance, the long, vicious persecution of Kilmar Abrego Garcia by the Trump goons in ICE, the Border Patrol, and DOJ seems to have reached a temporary lull at least as, after months of judicial findings adverse to his detention and extraction, Judge Xinis ruled he must go free pending further hearings. The assholes are still snarling and slashing at him, hoping to cheat justice for their mob boss, but for the moment they are thwarted.

They’re thwarted in Indiana, too, where the Republican legislature Trump attempted to threaten into passing a new gerrymander said, you know what, fuck you, Tubby.

This is good for a few reasons, not the least of which is that it punctures the puffed-up image people have of Tubby as an unstoppable force.  I remember when the Prestige Press used to call him the “Teflon Don,” a homage to John Gotti and that other piece of shit Ronald Reagan, as if their ability to escape the consequences of their actions were a gift from God rather than the result of cold political calculations by cowards too scared to stand up to them (aided, of course, by the greasy obsequity of the press itself).

This has put those of us who opposed the fucker from jump in a bind: We have to make clear how massive a threat to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness Trump is -- but being clear about it also helps make him look unstoppable, because he keeps performing outrages and, thanks to the cowards (and to the weaknesses of a system not designed to withstand the consequences of rule by mobsters), getting away with them.

Well, now he’s not getting away with them as much, and that’s something that needs to get around: Despite having control of all three branches of government, this bum can be beaten. That’s the theme of the first of this week’s ROY EDROSO BREAKS IT DOWN freebies for non-subscribers, “The End of Invincible Trump.”

And for our second freebie, I’m gonna change it up a little and let you in on the latest Fun Friday -- our weekly invitation for readers (who always make good use of the comments feature) to respond to prompts like “what’s a book that lit you up as a kid,” “what’s a piece of furniture you loved,” and, in this case, what’s the first movie you remember seeing.  

Subscribers get Fun Friday every week -- and semi-regular features like the ellipses-intensive Caen Spree; episodes of political news show Received Opinion with Bolt Upright, Peoni Doyenne, and Chafe Dramaturgy; scenes from the Mar-a-Lago Throne Room; film reviews and other arty-farty stuff and oh so much more. 

AND IT’S ON SALE! Order an annual subscription between now and December 25 (that’s Xmas, heathens!) and get 20% off. Yes, that’s 52 weeks of my five-day-a-week brilliance -- 260 editions, if you’re counting -- that usually goes for the absurdly low price $70, marked down to the GTFOOH rate of $56! That’s like a nickel a newsletter, you’re insane if you don’t CLICK HERE FOR THE DISCOUNT! 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: CHEESY SCENES OF WINTER EDITION.

RAWK.

In the not-too-distant future, I hope and pray, we will look back on the Age of Tubby II and think, “Holy shit, I know I complain about President AOC’s mandatory composting and land acknowledgements but have we forgotten how FUCKED UP AND FASH things used to be?” 

Things are pretty crazy for yet another week. For one thing, if you thought Republicans’ Iraq War-era love of extraordinary renditions and black sites was as disgusting as it could get, now we have Trump, Drunken Peter Hegseth, and assorted GOP flunkies like Tom Cotton endorsing the murder of some guys clinging for dear life to the wreckage of a boat WE BLEW UP from a country WITH WHICH WE ARE NOT AT WAR. (Makes sense Cotton would go for it, as during Trump I he endorsed sending U.S. troops to shoot U.S. citizens.) 

The Prestige Press is acting like the big takeaway here is that Hegseth might get in trouble, but if we were anything like the country we pretend to be, we’d be worried that an angry God might just blow us all up. 

Also the Supreme Court, the conservative majority of which just endorsed a gerrymander obviously created to suppress the minority vote in Texas because that favors the party that gives them bribes, has agreed to hear a case that hinges on whether, when the authors of the Fourteenth Amendment said “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside,” they didn’t mean “except if it makes bigots mad.” 

Smart people are saying SCOTUS would never, but I’m not so sure. All Democrats to the left of Schumer and Jeffries (that is, most of them) are saying pack the court for fuck’s sake, these guys are crooked as Satan’s pecker, and even the normally indifferent public has grown sick of their janky jurisprudence. The Roberts gang know it’s curtains for them if the Democrats ever get back into power, so I wouldn’t be shocked if they did outright fuckery and sprinkled some Latin over it in hopes that Tubby and his mob will appreciate it let them keep their jobs when they go full Franco and I don’t mean Zeffirelli.   

I could go on, but it’s Friday, let’s not make ourselves miserable -- in fact, the two (2) ROY EDROSO BREAKS IT DOWN freebies I’m linking are comic sketches, which is to say laffs if you don’t mind a darker blend of fun: First, a meeting of Top Centrists on how the Democratic Party can best hem and haw and bothsides its way into irrelevance so sellout dipshits can make big bucks; second, a look at Tubby backstage in these deep days of his dotage -- the old bastard's looking plenty rough and his minders have taken to giving him fake Peace Prizes to keep his fading mind occupied, so who knows -- maybe someday soon we’ll open the news and get a more pleasant sort of surprise than usual.