It's funny, I'm old enough to remember when conservatives would reflexively laugh at liberals for expressing sympathy toward killers who snapped under psychological or societal pressure. This goes back at least to Clarence Darrow and the Leopold and Loeb case -- though I'm sure some historians here will have earlier cites -- and got ugly when sociologists and psychologists suggested keeping people in ghettos was bound to result in despair, addiction, and violence. This was portrayed by the Right as mere perversity among effete leftists who cared more for the murderers than the murdered, and eventually spawned such weird reactionary bloodlust symptoms as the 1994 Crime Bill and courtroom "victim statements" (which have always seemed repulsive to me, as if what the criminal justice system needed was a little more Maury Povich sensationalism).
Things have changed a bit. More white Americans have come to notice and disapprove of the systematic oppression of minorities in their own country. The conservative response has mostly been denialism -- witness their attempts to ban any mention of it in our education system, not to mention every conservative editorial on race ever. But they've also been trying a funhouse-mirror version of liberal perp sympathy. What else is the now-familiar trope of "economically anxious" honkies whose Trump support is medicalized as a psychological reaction to the presidency of the Kenyan pretender Obama and all the breaks those people had been given? Now instead of blacks in tenements doing heroin and crack, we are urged to sympathize with whites in hollers doing meth and opioids. The central irony -- that, for all its reforms, this country is still obviously fixed on behalf of white people, though the growing voracity of the rich is eating away at even their share of the wealth -- is large enough to be safely ignored.
Weird as this anti-military trend is among top wingnuts, it's even weirder down in the fever swamps. Radio buffoon Wayne Dupree (warning: memory-hogging, possibly-bitcoin-mining link) headlines, "Don Jr Delivers Dire Warning To The Newly 'Woke' US Military…And They Better Listen." Imagine the troops hearkening to the greasy Trump scion! "No need for that 10-mile hike to keep fit, fellas -- a few rails of this will get your heart pumping like mad!"
UPDATE. But it's crazy at the top too, with the venerable National Review outraged that the U.S. Navy has included Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist, Jason Pierceson’s Sexual Minorities and Politics, andMichelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow. among its "suggested readings." Not exactly indoctrination, but the author, a "practicing attorney with previous military experience located in Salt Lake City, Utah," affects to believe this means the U.S. military is now "yet another institution that seems to have succumbed to the political persuasions of the day — a great and historic institution marred by a woke ideology that never builds, and only destroys." Better you should put your sons (not your daughters, they're just for breeding patriots) in the Proud Boys -- they're not contaminated by this left-wing book-l'arnin'!
That wasn’t just a high-charged celebrity interview that everyone talked about and then it went away. Oprah Winfrey’s conversation last weekend with the duke and duchess of Sussex will reverberate and last. It was history, a full-bore assault on an institution, the British monarchy, that has endured more than 1,000 years.
To me, it was this week's stupid tabloid bullshit, which will be replaced by next week's, but I don't absolutely have to fill this space every week, and my audience is not largely comprised of gossip-addicted fossils for whom the doings of Lord Bollocks and Lady Hammerhead are of intrinsic interest. After some snide cracks (“That must be a comfort to them") to let the punters know she's with the Dear Old Queen on this one, Noonan does some deepthink:
Public life has gotten extremely, unrelentingly performative. Have you noticed you keep hearing that word? It means everyone is always performing—the politician, the news anchor, the angry activist. This gives natural actors an edge, and leaves those who aren’t by nature actors at a disadvantage.
I would say the Royal Family are actors by training, indeed by heredity, like the Flying Wallendas. They're in the paper and on the telly all the time, and they don't have any function or skills rather than to Play Royal. Maybe Noonan refers instead to her preference of performance style?
Meghan was a professional actress.
Both Meghan and Harry speak a kind of woke-corporate communications language that is smooth and calming but also slippery and opaque.
Ahhh I see the problem now -- Meghan and Harry are part of the wokemob cancelculture all the senior citizens are snarling over! Noonan is even moved to do some sleuthing on behalf of the House of Windsor:
Some of what was said beggared belief. Meghan claimed that going in she didn’t really have any idea what the royal family was, didn’t Google or do any research... [Princess Diana's] funeral was watched by 2.5 billion people. Meghan Markle, home in California, was 16, presumably loved media, and went on to study acting. Is it believable she didn’t know this story, follow it, see who had the starring role?
What little girl didn't obsess over the People's Princess? Noonan obviously did, and she was 47 years old when Diana snuffed it.
Why should an American care about any of this?
Ugh here it comes.
I suppose we shouldn’t. In a practical way we’re interested in the royal family because we don’t have one, don’t want one, and think it’s great that you do.
We do?
...But I think there’s something deeper, more mystical in our interest, a sense that however messy the monarchy, it embodies a nation, the one we long ago came from and broke with. The high purpose of monarchy is to lend its mystique and authority to the ideas of stability and continuance.
It's bells and smells for Proddys!
Henry VIII, Mad King George, Victoria—these names still echo. It is rare and wonderful when you can say of a small old woman entering a large reception area, “England has entered the room.”
I cannot, as the kids say, even.
Someday Elizabeth II will leave us and the world will honestly mourn, not only because of what she represented but because she was old-style. She performed but wasn’t performative
When my avatar steps out of her castle and does her jar-opening gesture to the crowd, it is performance; when yours does it, it's performative. I really think this is more in the realm of nostalgia and perhaps senile dementia than the realm of politics, but the worship of these living totems whose long-running show only serves to slightly distract from the clownish chaos that is Britain today does seem very conservative.
“People know the difference between playing politics, bowing to cancel culture and the truth. Let the review proceed, I’m not going to resign, I was not elected by the politicians, I was elected by the people.”
This is yet another proof point for the position that crying "cancel culture" was always the last refuge of a scoundrel or a Substack (except mine! Subscribe, cheap!). As in most other much-blubbered-over cancellations, the putative victim is a powerful man accused by liberals of an "unwoke" offense such as molesting subordinates. Cuomo obviously expects some wingnuts to rush to his defense on those grounds -- and he may be right, because if there's one thing conservatives believe, it's that a white man accused of crimes against the lesser breeds should always have the benefit of the doubt.
That's why conservative propagandists like Bethany Mandel are rushing out the message that "They're Trying to Impeach Andrew Cuomo for the Wrong Thing" -- because getting Cuomo for a nursing-home cover up would further the Republican talking point that Democrats really killed those half-million COVID victims while Tubby heroically held superspreader events to try and protect them with herd immunity. Whereas getting him for groping girls -- now, who does that help, I ask you?
The difference, of course, is that Democrats have the muscle in New York to bring Cuomo down, and history shows they're willing to expel even one of their own for such offenses -- something you can under no circumstances say about Republicans.
You may forget over time how awful Megan McArdle is, especially since she took her perch as Peggy-Noonan-successor-in-waiting at the Washington Post and could be safely ignored while she pupates. You scan the column titles and they seem anodyne enough -- for example, "The looming disasters we don’t prepare for." Then you read the thing and you realize it's McArdle defending Texas' decision not to winterize its electrical grid (or make arrangements to share the load with other states during heavy use periods or protect consumers from massive emergency charges) because what if the same thing happened to your liberal states, not winter storms because obviously you do have those and so you plan for them but what if it was something unexpected like "climate change or asteroids or supervolcanoes," aha, then you'd be the laughingstock because your voters don't like to spend money to prepare for these things, that is they don't like to pay taxes because, like McArdle, they haven't changed since Reagan.
Ugh. Then you perversely check more recent columns to see if they, too, stink. The title "I get the indignation. But where are the ideas, Republicans?" suggests a gentle tsk-you-Trumpers thing, but since it's McArdle she starts out beating up a liberal state -- again on behalf of Texas!
It happened again last week: Blue America unleashed a storm of media attention and righteous fury when Texas and Mississippi announced they were lifting all their COVID-19 restrictions, including their mask mandates — only to be embarrassed when true-blue Connecticut announced that it, too, would be lifting most of its restrictions, though the mask mandates would stay. Connecticut, predictably, got a bit less attention, and a lot fewer epithets like “reckless.”
It's like the Cuomo thing: Much if not most of "Blue America" thinks Cuomo's a dick and wanted Cynthia Nixon to kick his ass and not only a bunch of Democrats and even the Democratic state senate majority leader are now demanding his resignation, yet conservatives act as if we all love him and are trying to prop him up. Similarly McArdle thinks we're all fronting for Connecticut, the Shame of the Blue States. Number one, show me anyone who is; number two, unlike Texas, which Abbott opened and unmasked universally and immediately, Connecticut is only opening select facilities (churches, gyms, libraries etc.) on March 19, and is still calling for restaurants to maintain an 8-person table capacity and bars to stay closed, and 25/100-person caps at private/commercial indoor facilities. And everyone's required to wear a mask -- a universal precaution which conservatives still think is better handled by the private sector on a voluntary what-about-my-rights basis rather than by meddlesome public health officials.
After that cock-up McArdle passive-aggressively tries to reason with the Trumpkins. "Arguments and indignation are starting to define the limits of conservative ideas," she says, "and defiant gestures are increasingly what the party has in place of policy." You don't say! But it turns out she's mainly mad because these guys are devoting energy to culture war that she'd rather they spent on denouncing the Democrats' COVID-19 relief bill -- about the most popular legislation of the past 10 years -- because it "bails out bankrupt union pension funds, offers blue states a federal piggy bank," and other such offenses to McArdlehood. Shit, if I were handing out free advice I'd say the GOP might expect better returns from their cancelculture crybaby shtick than from talking down a relief effort with a 70% approval rating.
I don’t say, of course, that no one will be helped by getting a $1,400 check. But the same can be said of almost any policy you can imagine, including leaving fully loaded Lamborghinis at randomly selected intersections with the doors unlocked and the keys inside. Giving away sports cars would still be a poor use of government funds; it would cost far more than any conceivable benefit to the car recipients, and the help most likely wouldn’t go to those who need it most.
Tee hee, Lamborghinis are for makers, not takers! (I wonder if she had "Cadillacs" in the first draft.)
Upshot: The stimulus won't stimulate, because "the people who are out of work are home largely because we want them to be" and "giving money to someone who still has their job doesn’t make them more likely to go out to dinner if the reason they’ve stopped going out is that they’re afraid of the deadly virus." So they're just going to invest those checks in stocks or mutual funds rather than spending it on food, clothing, etc. Finally, she warns, the stimulus "may well do more to seed the next economic crisis than to fix the current one."
Which is hilarious as McArdle is also the author of "No stimulus makes no sense" from October 2020, when Republicans were offering a gigantic program and she thought "there are good reasons for even a deficit hawk such as myself to support an aggressive stimulus." Looks like the deficit hawk has spread its long-folded wings once more!
Let's check back in a year or when Noonan clears her perch for her, whichever comes first.
Even dumber than the Mr. Potato Head and Dr. Seuss bullshit, for my money, was the scandalette these guys tried to cook up about Biden calling the latest anti-masking crazes -- like Greg Abbott's transparent attempt to distract from his Texas power disaster -- "Neanderthal thinking." Wingnuts raised such a stink about it Biden had to send Jen Psaki out to explain it as if the complaint had been made in good faith rather than as howlingly obvious victimization shtick:
Asked whether it was productive to compare governors to Neanderthals while trying to convince state officials to get on board with the White House public health message, Psaki clarified the president was likening the decision to Neanderthal "behavior."
"The behavior of a Neanderthal, just to be very clear, the behavior of," she said, adding that it was a "reflection of his frustration and exasperation" over some people flouting COVID-19 guidance to help curb the spread of the virus.
"Whether is was productive to compare governors to Neanderthals" -- get the fuck out of here, less than two months ago your shock-troops were trying to murder Democratic office-holders in the Capitol; "Neanderthal" is about the most polite thing one could call your cynical and potentially lethal stunts. Yet, at Forbes:
Then candidate Joe Biden ran on a campaign to bring back civility to politics, and in his inauguration speech called for unity and an end to our nation's "uncivil war." Yet, President Biden's tone and more importantly the words he used on Wednesday were in stark contrast.
Author Peter Suciu then reproduces a series of incredibly stupid rightwing reactors, some of whom even attempt to make "Neanderthal" the new "deplorable," an insult in which they take pride, as if it were the name of their prison gang. If only Biden had called them douchebags!
The worst of the lot is Noah Rothman at Commentary. He starts out with standard-issue So Much For The Tolerant Left ordnance ("But the president was never the 'good cop' he pretended to be"). Then he tries to defend Abbott's mask-free decree:
It would have been foolish if, for example, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott told his constituents that “everything’s fine” and Texans should “take off your mask” and “forget” about the pandemic. But that wasn’t what he said, nor is that likely to be the outcome of his state’s policies.
What Abbott announced was that “all businesses of any type are allowed to open 100 percent.” The executive orders put in place during the pandemic, including masking requirements, would be rescinded because “people and businesses don’t need the state telling them how to operate.” It would have been a premature declaration of victory over the pandemic if Abbott had stopped there. But he didn’t.
Abbott also urged Texans to exercise “personal vigilance.” “Removing statewide mandates does not end personal responsibility,” the governor added. While his orders will foreclose on criminal penalties for people who do not wear masks, businesses can still impose masking requirements on their patrons and deny them service if they do not comply...
I am confident of two things: First, that thanks to COVID-19, most normal people understand (as polls show that they do) that government has to take a major role in combating epidemics; and second, that as soon as the curse is seen to have lifted, conservatives will get busy trying to portray government's role as a total disaster and saying that everything would have been hunky dory in March 2020 if only the Free Market and Trump had been allowed to kill even more people so that the survivors could have instant herd immunity -- you know, the same way they talk about the New Deal.
In fact the latter half of Rothman's column is devoted to groundwork for such an effort: He cites people who think Abbott's making a big mistake, and shrugs "They might be right, and it would be terrible if they were. But..."
...the way is littered with predictions about how this virus would operate that mercifully failed to materialize. The innumerable “super spreader events” that weren’t and unfounded fears that states without masking mandates, like Florida, would be overrun with pestilence should lead Texas’ critics to be more cautious. Likewise, the suboptimal performance of states with onerous restrictions on individuals and enterprise alike, including New York and California, have led even the most zealous COVID hawks to throw up their hands in confusion. Uncertainty is the lesson here.
But there is certainty about one thing: Lifting restrictions now undermines what seems to be the Biden administration’s central objective, which is to assume credit for the pandemic’s decline.
I see the rightwing word of the day is "cancelculture." Erick Erickson:
Last week Hasbro announced it was getting rid of Mr. Potato Head, except not really. Hasbro decided to rebrand as “Potato Head” because they sell a Mr and a Mrs. Potato Head. They have predetermined the genders of the potatoes instead of just sticking all the various genders up the backside of a single potato and letting individuals decide for themselves. Hasbro was trying to balance between the wokes and the non-wokes.
Yeah I can see why anyone on the planet earth gives a shit, Mr. Ham Face.
First, they came for Mr. Potato head. Now they're coming for Dr. Seuss.
The actual casus bellow here is that the Dr. Seuss Enterprises, the foundation that maintains Ted Geisel's literary estate, has decided that the portrayals of black people in some of the Doctor's pages are kind of gross and, rather than bowdlerize the deceased author's work, they just won't release new editions of the books.
You'd think conservatives, who are usually very it's-mine-I-can-do-what-I-want-with-it when it comes to property, would understand, but what they understand better is that the Cancel Culture Scam is a great way to make themselves look like sympathetic victims rather than the psychopathic Capitol-storming, voter-suppressing monsters they are, so they're all Bari Weiss about it. Ham-Face is dumber than most, so he goes for the stretch: Since Obama said he liked Dr. Seuss books is he racist now HUH LIBS ("Does Barack Obama have to be canceled, for four years ago saying you can learn all of life's lessons on how to treat people well by reading Dr. Seuss?").
We've been over this a million times, guys. If someone doesn't like your portrayal of other human beings, and they decide not to patronize it, you are not being censored; if someone has second thoughts about their own portrayals of other human being, or those found in the properties they're in charge of (like the Disney executors who thought, you know what, maybe put Song of the South back in the vault), they are not violating your (non-existent) right to their work. Cancel culture crybabies can fuck right off.
• I'm against the strike on whatever-it-is in Syria for the same reason I'm always against these things no matter who's in charge -- our record in the Middle East is a serial clusterfuck that, it's fair to assume, every new assault will simply painfully prolong. (And at least Obama had the excuse that he was black and if he'd failed to do any war-on-terror and there happened to be any 9/11ness stateside, he would have been lynched.) I could be persuaded by a good argument but one never emerges.
I see that, as usual when a Democrat is in office, conservatives are also denouncing Biden's attack -- some with a twist: Here's a Twitter thread with video of an Assad speech, purportedly against "neoliberalism" on the grounds that it promotes "degeneracy" like "gay marriage," offered as a defense of Syria against Biden:
My favorite response: "he's right except for the marijuana part. There is lots of scientific evidence that points to it being very safe for consumption, and even less psychoactive than alcohol." Come let us horseshoe together! I suppose this could all be a hoax (though Assad has in fact used gay marriage as a distraction, so there is some U.S. Republican overlap there), but how would we be able to tell?
• Speaking of Rod Dreher, this is great:
I went somewhere I wasn't wanted and talked a lot of shit, and people had the nerve to complain -- CANCELCULTURE!
• Wondering what the intamallectual conservatives are up to? Let's see, here's an article by Jack Fowler at National Review about the Hoover Institution at Stanford. Finally, something about the pre-eminent conservative research and policy institute -- I guess not everything on the Right is about Trumpian chest-beating and culture war. Let's read:
Stanford Lefties Must Swallow Their Hoover Hate — for Now
It gnaws away at Stanford University’s woke faculty: Harbored in their midst is that nominally conservative outfit, the Hoover Institution, which more than a few professors hold as an infestation of the liberal citadel. It is, after all, named after a Republican president — never mind being home to the likes of Thomas Sowell and Victor Davis Hanson and H. R. McMaster (and yes, plenty of establishment GOP types, and even a lefty or two). And there’s this: The campus is visually dominated by the striking eleven-story Hoover Tower, which scrapes the Palo Alto sky like some right-hand middle finger. Housing vast and important archives (much of the contents are about the evils of Marxist-Leninism), the tower is crowned by a 48-bell carillon that no doubt triggers faculty and students with the occasional auditory reminder of Hoover’s confounding and unwelcome presence.
OK, scratch that, it really is all Owning The Libs, even if it comes in academic robes.
I mean even J.D. Vance has given up on his "outreach" pretense -- remember when his "Barack Obama and Me" thing was published by the easy marks at the New York Times? "Here was the president of the United States, a man whose history looked something like mine but whose future contained something I wanted... For at a pivotal time in my life, Barack Obama gave me hope that a boy who grew up like me could still achieve the most important of my dreams..."
Yep, J.D.'s hitting that cancel-culture-war grift hard. No wonder: There's an Ohio Senate nomination race in the offing and, as NBC News puts it, "Competition for 'Trump lane' heats up" -- to win, Vance will have to beat Jane Timken, who NBC says is "offering herself as a 'conservative disrupter' who helped sweep out moderate allies of Ohio’s anti-Trump former governor, John Kasich," and Josh Mandel, who "tweeted an old photo of [Timken] embracing Kasich, signaling how he will move aggressively to frame her as insufficiently loyal to the Trump cause." Vance is gonna have to put on a heap of war paint to obscure the stigma of having once spoken warmly of the Kenyan Pretender!
The example of January 6 at the Capitol has perhaps added salience to these fantasies. While conservatives have been trying to downplay the attempted coup as a celebration of freedom that just got a little out of hand, portraying the violence as insignificant and even suggesting the attackers didn't really kill Officer Sicknick, they're also beginning to use the attack as a warning of how far their goons may be willing to go if they don't get their way.
But the Court should have decided this case now, if not earlier. This issue will not go away, and it may return next time surrounded by the same sorts of popular rage that led to the Capitol riot. This was the time for cooler heads to say what the law is.
The description of the Capitol coup crew's rage as "popular" may seem weird to you, considering how badly the thing polls, until you realize that it only has to be popular among conservatives for McLaughlin to credit it as such. It's like old-time Southern Democrats and the KKK -- they don't want their prints on it, but they definitely want you scared enough to do what they say.
For years I abjured this kind of 70s rock but I'm kinda getting back into it.
Special kudos to Dee Murray; sometimes hyperactive bass is actually cool.
Not only have we had a good laugh about Ted Cruz's Cancun Adventure, it seems the whole world has. Even conservatives seem to realize it's too perfectly on-brand, for Cruz and their own movement, to defend, and dummies like Dinesh D'Souza and Ben Shapiro have been reduced to bizarre, "Hey, it's not like Ted Cruz is any use at all in a crisis anyway" arguments -- as usual not likely to convince anyone but, unusually, not apparently designed to appease the yahoos who bay at their troughs either, just pro-forma ass-covering bullshit.
I'm not starry-eyed about this apparent consensus on Cruz. First, no one actually likes him; Texans are simply unable to vote for Democrats, lest they question the unreasoning belligerence that passes for manhood there. Cruz was so unloved by national Republicans in 2016 that, despite his muscling to the front of the line, they nominated an ignorant New York grifter rather than let themselves be represented by him. Genital warts aren't a "bipartisan issue" just because no one wants them. And the Cancun story plays to the simplest kind of American resentments -- people who were unmoved by Cruz's many political outrages, including his support for a fascist insurrection, are pissed that he left his poodle home in the cold.
Apart from the outright apparatchiks blubbering over his catafalque, have you noticed how many credentialed conservatives like Michael Brendan Dougherty seem to either want to get past the subject quickly or feel obliged to admit that yes, much of what El Rushbo said went a bit too far? Peggy Noonan today, after briefly praising Limbaugh's influence ("There was a joy to it. His patriotism was real"), said this:
To have a show such as his you had to be The Guy With the View, and knock down others’ views. In the past 15 years my views on important issues diverged from his; he came to see me as an apostate and attacked me for my criticisms of Iraq policy, Sarah Palin, George W. Bush and Donald Trump. His attacks turned personal: I was an elite fancy person, an establishment character of rarefied background who looked down on honest people like him and his listeners. His criticisms were at odds with the facts of our lives, and he knew it; for one thing he was damning me from his vast Palm Beach, Fla., estate. Like many male conservative media figures he made a game of pretending to class sensitivity and implying he’d had to scrap his way up. The radio station where he got his start was co-owned by his father.
Now, Noonan remains utter shit, and her complaint is of course animated by personal grievance. But this is one of those cases where "the personal is the political" really applies: How many American women, or men for that matter, noticed over the years with what cold contempt the yahoos for whom Limbaugh spoke had come to regard them? For a moment at least Noonan grasped that her years of service to The Cause counted for nothing if some other Reaganite goon, one whom she doubtless considered less talented that she, condemned her as a rich bitch, accent on the bitch, and got over with it because he had a penis. (It apparently shook her no much she no longer believes repealing the Fairness Doctrine was a good idea!)
It's like they all had been insisting since childhood that Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In was the height of sophisticated comedy and then someone made them watch it again.
Christgau steered me right again with this soundtrack.
There are already so many Substack newsletters devoted to cancelculture crybabies blubbering that someone changed the name of a high school or some shit, yet here comes ham-faced Jesus freak Erick Erickson – who refers to himself as “Erick-Woods Erickson” for some reason; maybe it’s a Puritan thing, like Praise-God Barebone – who today shook his fist on the subject in not one but two newsletter issues. In the first he declares “The Union is fraying and cancel culture is radicalizing otherwise reasonable people… One bad word choice, one misunderstanding, and often one false accusation can lead the mob to your employer or even to your door.” Wow, I just checked my door – all clear so far! So how’s this cancelculture thing work?
We see this with Black Lives Matter, the organization, declaring itself against the traditional nuclear family. We see it with its activists attacking anyone who points out that Black Lives Matter maintains this position.
Erickson offers no examples, but when I think of Black Lives Matter and cancellation, I think of Colin Kaepernick, and I doubt that was what Erickson intended. Maybe he meant all the cops who were briefly subject to disapprobation when videos showed them beating up BLM protestors, before they were cleared of all charges. What else?
The Christian baker must bake the cake, but the cultural, secular left gets to opt-out when it disagrees. One side gets to impose its will on the other.
Bake the cake? But the Supreme Court backed the gay-hating baker. He and his ilk can say "we don't make cakes for fags here" and get away with it, which is freedom! Erickson’s actually citing examples that disprove his case, sparing me the effort. But let me add another:
Jeep trots out a rabid partisan with a history of disparaging remarks towards the right and they place him in a church declaring we need the middle. If anyone objects, they’re the bad person.
Oh brother. As with most of these yahoos, the most realistic concern is that people will criticize their opinions, which colicky conservatives cannot abide. And no such rant is complete without the obligatory Look What You Made Me Do bit:
The disparity in cancellations is going to boil over to violence. We are, frankly, getting our first early tastes of this…
The seething over the disparity caused a lot of people to support Donald Trump and a great many of them were and are willing to turn a blind eye to what people did on January 6th because they know what much of the left and the press won’t admit — that side really does want to silence Trump supporters…
If the right cannot voice its views and people of the right can be punished for things the left is spared from, there will come greater antagonism that will ultimately lead to violence.
As cancel culture is a thing and the Woke-o Haram terrorists continue to silence the right, your subscription to my daily emails makes it harder for them to cancel my voice, both in print and on radio.
I assume there are enough people who think “Woke-o Haram” is hilarious to keep his fat ass in clover. You good people, I'm sure, would prefer Roy Edroso Breaks It Down, the only Substack newsletter devoid of boo-hooing over big bad cancelculture, offering instead five (5) days a week of quality content – here, free to non-subscribers, are two recent examples: my transcript of a Trump impeachment lawyer’s opening statement, and my reaction to the prosecution’s new video of the insurrectionists’ depredations. Go on, have a subscription – they make great Valentine’s Day gifts!
Adding to the serious but vague accusation in the impeachment article, the Democratic House impeachment managers, who are the prosecutors in the Senate trial, elaborated in their publicly filed pretrial memo (at p. 28): “The insurrectionists killed a Capitol Police officer by striking him in the head with a fire extinguisher.”
It is noteworthy that the Democrats’ pretrial memo was filed on February 2, nearly four weeks after Officer Sicknick’s death. Yet, during those four weeks, significant questions about the impeachment managers’ murder allegation have arisen. It has been a bedrock principle of American due process for over half a century that if prosecutors are aware of evidence that would tend to show an allegation they made is false, inaccurate, or at least incapable of being proved, they have an obligation to disclose that fact to the accused.
So what is the Democrats’ proof that Trump supporters murdered Officer Sicknick by bashing him over the head with a fire extinguisher?
I mean he could have just keeled over -- he was 43 years old, practically at death's door. Or maybe Antifa killed him -- an Antifa operative could have been hiding in a closet or a big vase or something and, as the Trump insurrectionists were assaulting cops (non-lethally, Your Honor! You can't pin that on them), might have popped out, el-Kabonged Sicknick, and gone back into hiding, like in a Three Stooges two-reeler, leaving the Trump fans to take the rap!
Or maybe Sicknick is still alive, held incommunicado on George Soros' private island, and his alleged coffin actually contains Kyle Rittenhouse. Anything's possible.
This is in National Review, folks -- once the most respected magazine in American conservatism. Aw, who am I kidding -- it's still the most respected; it's just that it doesn't take a lot of respect to qualify anymore.
I actually watched the Super Bowl through the halftime show, and peeked in during the more than three hours of pre-game guff, and I have to say I got an enormous kick out of all the woke effusions, not only in the ads but also in Viola Davis' pissed-off DGAF narration on the de-integration and re-integration of the NFL and inaugural poet Amanda Gorman enlisted to introduce the COIN-TOSS (which was performed by "COVID-19 nurse manager" Suzie Dorner after being thanked for her service by the referee). It may have all been bullshit -- particularly the ads from soulless corporations professing an interest in social justice -- but it was American bullshit and thus perfect for the occasion. Sucks that Tom Brady didn't get his ass kicked, but nothing in this world is perfect and I'll take what I can get.
Part of the fun was imagining the rage of pinheads and klansmen at this grossly pro-minority entertainment. I bet Tubby was mad he couldn't vomit his rage through his customary social-media puke-funnels, though his boy Sniffy stepped up ("One comercial in and it’s already woketopia. 🙄 #SuperBowlLV").
We who have free souls, it touches us not. The Super Bowl spectacle outside the game itself has always been ridiculous, and what people think of as its "great moments" are actually pathetic -- like the kneeling Clydesdales commercial in the post-9/11 Super Bowl. Remember that shit? Jesus Christ, people fell for it! I was disappointed Budweiser didn't follow up over the next few years with Clydesdales invading Iraq, then piling naked prisoners of war into human pyramids (maybe they couldn't figure out out how to make a Clydesdale do a thumbs-up).
Mollie Hemingway starts by calling Springsteen a "left-wing political activist," which I'm sure is how he's best known in the caves and klaverns of wingnutdom, and announcing that his commercial "fell flat and faced mockery and opposition from many viewers." (Ever notice that the people who whine the most about cancel culture always sound like old Soviet propagandists when they approach any subject having anything to do with the arts?)
Hemingway, after briefly admitting that "many Americans love Springsteen’s music," denounces The Boss for several paragraphs because "like so many other wealthy celebrities, [he] regularly speaks ill of Republican voters and politicians," unlike real populists such as Kevin Sorbo and the guy who drinks his own piss on YouTube. Then she complains that the ad was fake -- that's right, an ad on TV! Fake! -- because though this Springsteen fellow is "extremely well known for being from New Jersey" he was shown "wearing a cowboy hat and boots" (and "small earrings in each ear," woo woo). Also, "The Argument For Unity Was Not Made Well," because duh, what about the "74 million Trump-voting Americans who lived through four years of epithets and refusal by elites such as Springsteen to treat the president of the United States as legitimate"? And then Springsteen and his 81 million co-conspirators had the nerve to vote against Trump, resulting in Joe Biden's so-called "election"? Where's the healing?
Hemingway closes:
Jeep sales will not heal the fabric of the country. Jeep ads can’t even help toward that goal so long as they are using dishonest and manipulative partisan framing in service of car sales.
"Manipulative partisan framing in service of car sales" -- forbid it, almighty God! You sell cars by flattering the shit out of the customer, hornswaggling him with phony price points, then making him feel like he owes you something for your time -- everybody knows that!
Well, we all did a little drinking during the Super Bowl, though some of us waited until we sobered up to write about it. Clearly the NFL is part of the Deep State and must be countered. Get ready for USFL II!
I've unlocked two of this week's Roy Edroso Breaks It Down issues for non-subscribers: A meeting between the President of Mar-a-Lago and one of his more famous supporters, and a rundown of young Republican up-and-comers.
I might say it's horrible that the other major political party in the United States is being taken over by psychotic freaks, but, really, it's not that big of a shift; it's more like the party's adherents have just begun to act out the fantasies conservatives have been promulgating all along, and are moving up the chain from "useful idiots" to "elected representatives." Government is the enemy? Check. Science, indeed any type of expertise, is suspect, even nefarious? Check. White people are the only constituency worth addressing? Check and triple check! Marjorie Taylor Greene's videotaped claim that black people are not held back by racism but by “gangs [and] dealing drugs" is just conservative boilerplate, and from there it's not a huge leap to believing in Democratic pedo rings and all the other shit that clogs her skull.
Maine White Nationalist Charged in Capitol Attack Shares Racist Views of State GOP Leaders
...The Great Replacement theory has been promoted for years by former Republican state legislator Larry Lockman, who also opposed the bill to fund the jobs center in Lewiston. “The sad truth is, open-borders Leftists at the swamp want to welcome, educate and retail everyone but Mainers!” Lockman wrote in a January 2018 e-mail to supporters. “There is too much at stake to let identity politics and the Left’s War on Whites rule the day.”
In a 2019 column, Portland Press Herald editorial-page editor Greg Kesich called out a host of Maine GOP leaders for promoting tenets of the White Genocide theory, including former Gov. Paul LePage, who endorsed Lockman’s bid for a Maine Senate seat last year and is threatening to run for the Blaine House again next year; Maine Republican Party Executive Director Jason Savage, who ran a racist fake-news website called The Maine Examiner; and former Waterville Mayor Nick Isgro, who relinquished his position as Vice Chairman of the state party last month shortly after Mainer published an article linking him to another Republican official with direct ties to neo-Nazis.
More recently, Isgro and other Maine GOP leaders cheered the Jan. 6 insurrection on social media and spread racists lies about Chinese interference in last fall’s election. For example, the liberal online news outlet Beacon reported last month that state GOP Chairwoman Demi Kouzounas told a radio station the Chinese government created COVID-19 to weaken the U.S. economy, “because they knew if the economy stayed strong … our President Trump would be reelected with huge numbers,” she said. “I believe that for sure.”
So, apparently, did [charged insurrectionist Kyle] Fitzsimons...
One of many reasons to be glad about the new administration is that it appears to take seriously the threat of rightwing lunatics, and is less likely than the Obama administration was to fold on its domestic terror investigations when conservatives and libertarians (but I repeat myself) pitch a bitch fit. These nuts have been terrorizing and murdering people for years, and a huge part of the reason why they got as far as they did on January 6 was because Republicans have been acting for years as if even taking notice of this public menace was cancelculture, who's the fascist now libs, etc. I'm glad the insurrectionists are getting charged -- it's about these fuckers got some negative feedback.
--it's Rich Lowry, so if anything it's self-parody (though really, don't you have to have style to be parodied? The closest thing to a style hallmark Lowry has is "bad"). Just three months ago, Lowry endorsed Trump's reelection as "The Only Middle Finger Available... a gigantic rude gesture directed at the commanding heights of American culture." But he couldn't get enough people to go along with Presidency as Fuck You, so now he's offended by the Communist Insurgency of Sleepy Joe Biden.
Joe Biden is off to the most left-wing start of any Democratic president in recent memory.
Just two weeks later, the dulcet tones of Biden’s inaugural address already seem an artifact of a bygone era.
Ah, the "unity" thing. At this very moment Biden is engaged in negotiations with the Republicn party -- which does not hold a majority in either house, nor the Presidency -- in pursuit of bipartisan consensus. Many of us think he's a sap to do so. What no one beside Lowry thinks is that it's divisive.
But Lowry claims Biden is governing "further to the left of any Democrat who made his career prior to the ascendency of the cultural left" -- which date I don't see in my political timeline: Was it the birth of the Frankfurt School in 1918? The manumission of slaves? Between the end of the "Chatterley" ban/And the Beatles' first LP? (Lowry clearly stuck this in to ward off anyone who remembered FDR.)
It isn’t new for Democratic presidents to want to tax, spend and regulate, even if Biden seeks to do more of all three than his immediate predecessors. Biden layers on top of this a cultural agenda that represents a new dimension of radicalism that would be alien and baffling to bygone Democrats, who may have wanted to extend the New Deal but never sought to transcend the gender binary.
Those old-time Democrats might have cursed America with Social Security and Medicare, but they never would have countenanced homos and he-shes! Hell, some of them didn't even like the colored. You could talk to a Democrat in them days!
Thereafter Lowry gives a rightwing pocket history of evil-but-no-Biden Democrat Presidents, culminating in this howler:
Bill Clinton and Obama were both ambitious but also cared about the budget deficit and allowed it to restrain their agenda in a way that the Biden Democrats now totally reject.
That's a new way of saying "We got Democrats trained to clean up Republican presidents' deficits, and here comes this Biden guy who still wants to give money to the suckers instead!" (Missing from Lowry's column: the words "COVID" and "coronavirus." He refers to the $1.9 trillion package simply as a "relief bill," no doubt hoping to conjure in his readership visions of welfare queens and strapping young bucks instead of virus-infected millions.)
Lowry's also mad at Biden's climate change agenda, which he says "speaks of an overwhelming hostility to fossil fuels." See, Biden talks unity, but then gives Exxon Mobil the back of his hand! Also:
There will also be a continual focus on what Biden’s chief-of-staff calls “a racial-equity crisis,” which will be a warrant for a new, more aggressive identity politics.
People already treat racism as something undesirable -- as Biden gets "aggressive" about identity politics, people may begin to think it's unforgivable, and then how will Republicans ever get elected?
There are other, better reasons to root for Biden's barely-adequate package to pass, but it would also be nice to read Lowry's "Joe Manchin: Mountain State Marxist" column.
Robert Christgau informed me these guys are still at it!
Time has been kind.
• Republicans are so accustomed to minority rule, and so encouraged by their conspiracy-addled looney fringe (and by the customary feebleness of Democratic resistance) to believe it can never be broken, that even after they lost a presidential election by seven million votes and were disgraced by their leader's attempt to overthrow the government they can't acknowledge that they fucked up. For example: Now that the world is seeing more of QAnon Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene's loony beliefs, ham-faced pundit Erick Erickson tells his Twitter followers it's the fault of poor Republican opposition research during the primaries:
Can't be that voters in a district where Erickson and others have been vomiting rightwing poison on the radiio for years found a far-right conspiracy theorist palatable -- nah! They just didn't know what QAnon was, maybe they thought it was like a Sesame Street spelling thing or a brand of athletic shoe. At this rate I expect Vermin Supreme to cross over -- except he's probably too benign for this bunch.
[Tom] Maraffa says that both Obama and former President Donald Trump were equally divisive — Obama was just more elegant in his delivery. The reporters who covered him missed it because they shared his cultural values.
What cultural values does he mean? Gay marriage, apparently:
"Lighting the White House up with rainbow colors — in a way, that was just sticking a thumb in the eyes of people who disagreed rather than using it as a moment to say the Supreme Court's made its decision, we don't all agree, but this is the law, and we have to move forward together" [Maraffa says].
By celebrating gay marriage Obama was being mean to people who hate gays -- just like Biden is being mean to people who show their patriotism by storming the Capitol. Oh, and Obama gets a pass because he's black: "These reporters and Democrats instantly viewed people who did not like Obama as racists because what else could it be?"
Then Maraffa and Zito blubber over how what's wanted is "unity" and the Democrats have to meet the gay marriage opponents halfway. Thing is, polls show 70% of Americans approve of gay marriage. And I'll bet if you made a Venn diagram of the 30% who dispprove of gay marriage and the 39% who still approve of Trump, the overlap would be nearly complete. So tell me: Why should we meet these people halfway when they're nowhere near half the people?
• Seriously, though, this shit goes on and on and the mainstream aka "liberal" media do nothing but enable it. The New York Times has extended its Cletus safaris into the post-Trump era -- once they were all "Let these simple souls tell us why they gave Trump an almost-majority of the votes" and now they're all "Let these simple souls tell us why it's mean to hold Trump to account for sending lunatics to murder Congress." Axios invites Tucker Carlson and Ben Shapiro to predict/threaten mayhem ("'Not a sustainable moment,' Carlson added. 'Something will break'").
And the Washington Post has former GOP Majority Leader Eric Cantor in to decry what his successors are doing to the country -- but adding (I assume this was part of the deal) a bothsider bit: sure, Republicans are spreading conspiracy theories to dangerously derange our politics but whatabout The Squad --
And to my Democratic friends who think this is a Republican problem, I say be careful. The same pattern is already unfolding on your side as progressive activists — joined by elected officeholders, including Reps. Pramila Jayapal (Wash.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.) and “the Squad,” with aspirations of higher office — tell tales of what Democrats could accomplish if only they were willing to fight and use their power.
By "fight and use their power," they mean "vote for things their constituents want," which is pretty much the same thing as sending one's goons to kill Mike Pence -- it's a form of electoral insurrection against Republican rule, without which there can be no true civility!
Well, we always knew we couldn't count of these idiots to save us. Put your faith in Roy Edroso Break It Down instead -- one of the only Substack newsletters that's not about how its proprietor has been cancelcultured! We have a couple freebies up from this week: A Twitter beef between two Republican up-and-comers, and the real readout from Kevin McCarthy's visit to Mar-a-Lago. Enjoy, and then subscribe (cheap!).
One might despair of pointing out the insanity of this, as those who would most benefit from the information are obviously impervious to it and to pretty much any form of reason and logic. (Many of them are apparently training their children to resist it, too.) But we must keep a record for the sake of our own sanity, and whatever posterity there may be.
Goya Foods has voted to silence its pro-Trump CEO Robert Unanue following his recent television appearances questioning the results of the presidential election, The Post has learned.
The Hispanic foods giant on Friday agreed to censure Unanue, 67, for controversial remarks in the wake of the deadly Jan. 6 invasion of the US Capitol building, including on Jan. 20 when he called Biden’s election “unverified” during an appearance on Fox Business.
You could read the whole thing and get the impression that this is all just over a difference of opinion over the extent of voter fraud -- Some say it's a lot! Some say it's a little! -- rather than the casus belli behind the attempted coup on January 6, the widespread support of which among Republicans shows that it's not nearly so benign.
There's censorship around the world. This cardinal, Mexican cardinal Juan Sandoval Íñiguez was censored for — by Facebook, for denouncing a new world order. So you know, Big Tech, social media is not looking just for the big prize of the United States, this is a world order.
But who's to say, right? The only way we can test this Mark of the Beast theory out is in the marketplace of ideas -- that is, bullying private media companies into publishing it against their will. (If only we'd been this enlightened in the old Procter & Gamble satanism panic days -- we could have gotten the TV networks to address it, and that would have been the end of Tide and Bounty!)
No wonder the Goya board doesn't want this nut representing them. As I have been pointing out for years, employers fire employees for embarrassing them all the time -- only you don't hear about most of them because they're not rich rightwing crackpots with a vested interest in portraying their situation as censorship (or, to be au courant, muzzling).
I'd be happy to see legislation that allows employees as well as executives to mouth off whatever nonsense they like without getting fired for it -- I got a list of grievances like you wouldn't believe, myself! -- but I guarantee you that none of the people proclaiming the victimhood of Hawley and Unanue or any of these assholes would ever support such a law, because their real interest is not free speech but the further mesmerization of their rubes. Unlike the COVID-19 vaccine, their bullshit really does turn people into zombies.
The formation of a totalitarian state is just about complete in America as the most powerful public and private sector actors unify behind the idea that actions to stamp out dissent can be justified, according to several experts on modern totalitarian ideologies.
(The "experts" actually cited by author Petr "Not A Typo" Svab, BTW, are "Michael Rectenwald, a retired liberal arts professor at New York University" mainly famous for promoting Milo Yiannopoulos and his own r-u-triggered @antipcnyuprof account, and James Lindsay, another from an apparently inexhaustible supply of "gay people are oppressing us" types.)
So Tubby's only been out of office for a day and already we're Hitler's Germany! I'm not kidding either -- several grafs in the thing refer to "Adolf Hitler, leader of the National Socialist Workers Party in Nazi Germany." ("Socialist," you'll be saddened to learn, was not in boldface type.) For instance:
Hitler initially didn’t control the spread of information via government censorship but rather through his brigades of street thugs, the “brown shirts,” who would intimidate and physically prevent his opponents from speaking publicly.
The tactic parallels the often successful efforts to “cancel” and “shut down” public speakers by activists and violent actors, such as Antifa.
Dissenting media in America haven’t been silenced by the government directly as of yet. But they are stymied in other ways.
In the digital age, media largely rely on reaching and growing their audience through social media and web search engines, which are dominated by Facebook and Google. Both companies have in place mechanisms to crack down on dissenting media.
Google gives preference in its search results to sources it deems “authoritative.” Search results indicate the company tends to consider media ideologically close to it to be more authoritative. Such media can then produce hit pieces on their competitors, giving Google justification to slash the “authoritativeness” of the dissenters.
See? Google considers the New York Times "more authoritative" than QAnon Catturd Infect Your Computer News -- clearly librulmedia BIAS.
It goes on and on like this -- they marvel that "Alex Stamos recently labeled the widespread questioning of the 2020 election results as 'violent extremism,'" as if the Capitol siege were a hundred years ago instead of two weeks -- and who needs it, but you should understand what ET is peddling is right in line with what a lot of these guys are focused on -- not only the usual pencil-necks like Rod Dreher but also now-former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who I am told to my astonishment is prepping for a Presidential run with material like this:
Stands to reason, I guess: You can't run against the disastrous mishandling of the pandemic, unemployment, racism etc. the day after you were in charge of them all. Maybe in a month they'll try it! But till then and in any case, the conservative cri de boor will be Liberal Fascism.
UPDATE. Also what all the wingnut kids are into: transphobia! From Holy Rod Dreher:
And so, on the first full day of a Biden presidency, female school athletics is sacrificed to wokeness.
???
From an executive order sent down from on high today:
Every person should be treated with respect and dignity and should be able to live without fear, no matter who they are or whom they love. Children should be able to learn without worrying about whether they will be denied access to the restroom, the locker room, or school sports. [Emphasis mine — RD]...
Gasp!
This means that schools that get federal funding have to treat biological males who identify as female as if they were female. With this order, the federal government declares that the biological advantage that male bodies have over female bodies, in terms of strength and endurance, does not matter — at least not in schools that receive federal funding.
I can easily imagine Rod squinting at LSU women's basketball games, trying to figure out which ones used to be a dude so he knows who not to beat off to. (Ha, just joking -- Dreher and 99% of these guys never gave a shit about women's sports until it became something liberal to blubber over.)
• It's been a hell of a 2021 so far, eh? Well, the upside of seeing the neighborhood overrun by National Guard is that I strongly doubt under the circumstances even the most committed Nazi/Proud Boy fucks are going to try it this weekend or on the 20th. Lauren Boebert (R.-Crazyland) or some other Qball Rep may whip out a gun in an effort to fulfill the Nutcake Prophecy, but I expect the feds have a couple marksmen properly assigned.
And it seems Tubby's approval rating has sunk considerably -- which, to me, doesn't necessarily mean his hardcore minority of yahoos has shrunk too much: rather, it means some of them are getting less of a kick professing their love for him than they used to. Which is still good, even though they've begged off less out of shame and more because the one thing they could never admit has become incontrovertible -- that Trump is a loser. It still saps his power. It's fun for some people to back a bully when he's beating up nerds, but when he finally gets his ass kicked who's gonna sympathize with him?
All he was able to do in the last ditch was try a putsch and come up with a figurative bloody nose. Hitler came back from a putsch, true. So the Democrats have gotta start acting like they know that: give the people their two grand (I know I know), whip this vaccine delivery into shape, and in general govern like they want people to vote them back in, not like they want their donors to keep it coming.
The National Rifle Association on Friday filed petitions with a U.S. bankruptcy court seeking protection from creditors by restructuring, the gun rights advocacy group announced.
The NRA filed the Chapter 11 petitions in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Dallas, it said in a news release.
The NRA said it would restructure as a Texas nonprofit to exit what it said was a “a corrupt political and regulatory environment in New York” state, where it is currently registered.
The “corrupt political and regulatory environment in New York” to which they refer is one in which they apparently got caught doing massive fraud by New York Attorney General Letitia James. From August 6:
Sean Delany, a former head of the charities bureau in the office of the attorney general — the same division now handling the case — said, “I think the facts are very strong, but I think the remedy of dissolution is a stretch, because the A.G. would have to prove that the organization is so rife with fraud that there isn’t anything sufficiently substantial in the organization’s charitable programs to make it worth saving.”
