It’s Drunky Pete Warfighter time! It’s a weird war for sure, done Trump style -- no warning, no reason, and especially no serious attempt to get the public onside. I mean they’re claiming this is not a new war (or not a war at all, depending on who’s phumphering), merely Trump ending Iran’s 47-year war on us, which is so dumb only hardcore neocons can even pretend to believe it, and putting out social media video with cut-ups from war and superhero movies that even the dumbest MAGA will find insulting to their intelligence.
God knows you’ve seen plenty about how nuts this is, but if you want more and better, have I got a two-parter for you at ROY EDROSO BREAKS IT DOWN! It’s about the similarities and differences between this stupid war and the 2003 stupid war in Iraq. Here’s Part One and Part Two. These are FREE to non-subscribers; subscribers get this kind of thing five days a week for low, low prices, just saying.
Lastly, I want to point out that Trump already showed he wants to fuck with accurate economic measures by firing people who make sure they’re accurate, so as bad as the new jobs report is? You know it’s worse. And it’s not gonna get better until we get these guys out, so check your registration, volunteer as a poll-watcher, and tell your electeds not to pass the SAVE Act or any other Trump election overturn scheme.
At least we can enjoy the Ellisons’ acquisition, via the Paramount Skydance takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, of CNN. True, the rightwing scheme of taking over and vandalizing media entities like CBS News as vengeance for years of perceived “liberal media” persecution is disgusting, but look on the bright side: Those entities were shit anyway. Every time I come across CNN in a waiting room or rest home, it’s bawling some LCD bullshit as if trying to get the attention of hyperactive monkeys. True, whatever capacity these institutions had for investigative journalism will be wrecked, but let’s face it, their will to make good use of those resources was already fading with their ratings anyway; the real talent is all in independent media now, and the opportunity to put some muscle behind it and make a real difference is there waiting for some smart, civic-minded rich guy to pick it up -- now, if only there were more (or any) smart, civic-minded rich guys out there.
This week’s ROY EDROSO BREAKS IT DOWN freebie (yes, just one, this particular indie journo enterprise needs paid subscribers, and can’t be giving it away like a soft-hearted country gal in the big city) is a post-mortem not so much on Tuesday’s State of the Union as on the very idea of paying attention to Tubby’s cheeseball spectacles in the first place. I mean, the guy who’s planning to celebrate America’s 250th anniversary with a wrestling match is not going to show us anything except how low the country has sunk, and we know, brother, we know.
Being who and what he is, Trump says he’s gonna find a loophole, probably based on some stray comments by Justice Gorsuch in his concurrence with Roberts’ opinion. (It makes sense that Gorsuch, trying very hard to play the reasonable non-joiner in his filing, winds up giving Trump something he can at least pretend supports his actions.)
It’s worth remembering that Trump’s not in there to help anyone but himself. Just because he lets billionaires continue to get off tax- and consequence-free doesn’t mean he’s actively trying to help them. He has a nostalgic feeling for Reagan-era oligarchy, and considers the rich endlessly fucking the poor to be the natural order of things, but that just means keeping the status quo -- he still needles the oligarchs for tributes and donations, and as he gets more senile and belligerent I expect we’ll see him make them carry him around in a chair like Idi Amin.
But the tariffs only matter to him as an idée fixe -- something he’s convinced will be a big success because he’s a genius and everything he does is brilliant. He doesn’t care if the SCOTUS ruling makes his pursuit of alternate justifications even more painful for his subjects, who already chafe at the high prices the now-outlawed tariffs caused. If they squawk, that just means more people to tell “fuck you” as he steers the ship of state into an iceberg.
The ROY EDROSO BREAKS IT DOWN free issues for this week predate the tariff ruling but touch upon the logic I discuss: There’s this one about the vandal mentality of Trump and his crew -- how positive results for his supporters are not anywhere near as important as punishment of his, and the conservative movement’s, longtime enemies -- and here’s another, a little more optimistic, on how that nihilism is affecting a lot of voters who were heretofore happy to go along with the gag.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
