Today’s issue of Roy Edroso Breaks It Down, released to the general public, is inspired by the latest hilarious symptom of prestige media’s accelerating degeneracy: Jonah Goldberg hired by CNN.
Over this period I have come to consider Goldberg not merely a bad writer and worse thinker, but also one of my great literary creations -- an overfed momma’s boy who, thrust (still dribbling Cheetos) onto the public stage, tries to charm his audience with horseplay and, failing that, claps a mortarboard on his head and proceeds to launch ludicrous syllogisms, fretfully farting as they range out of control. Seeing him rise to CNN, I feel a little as I imagine Jaroslav Hašek would have felt seeing his Good Soldier Schweik elected to the Austrian parliament.
When Goldberg noisily left Fox News I figured he'd join the New York Times' stable of rightwing gasbags; it would be easy to pretend people who know how to read can abide him. Putting his sputtering ass on TV seems like a mistake -- like when 60 Minutes created a pundit bank of P.J. O'Rourke, Molly Ivins, and Stanley Crouch, and viewers begged them to desist. Well, it's their money!
Sometimes I just have to put something here to save it for, I don't know, future generations maybe, or as a reminder for when I get senile as to when America really lost it:
The Wallethub ranking that Bongino inverted is here. (You will notice that, in their eagerness, the Fox News staff mistook Irvine, California for Irving, Texas. Wonder if they'll apologize!)
It's kind of a refreshing in a way: For years we've been dealing with their half-truths, bad faith, whataboutism, etc., and sometimes it takes so much effort to explain what they're doing even I lose interest, but when they just plain declare black is white and vice-versa, it makes things clearer and easier.
• I’ve got two Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebies for those of you who, unaccountably, have yet to subscribe. First is Monday’s item on all the Neil Young/Joe Rogan bullshit. (There’s also a review of Barn in there.) The general inability of rightwing dummies -- and though they often call themselves “libertarians” or “skeptics” or “free thinkers,” upon inspection they always turn out to be rightwing dummies -- to distinguish between “deciding not to do business with a disinformation vendor” and “censorship” continues. Bari Weiss offloaded her cancelculture belly-aching to the ex-banjo player from Mumford & Sons, and it’s a testament to her shitty writing that I thought at first it was her own work. After ominously talking about Soviet repression for three paragraphs, Banjo Guy says, “I’m not suggesting the music scene of the West today, or the creative industries more broadly, resembles this top-down authoritarian dystopia.” Then why bring it up, one might wonder. Then he talks awhile about how Ice-T swore at Tipper Gore -- possibly to stoke the crowd -- until finally:
But in 2022, the censors are not in charge of governments. Something resembling a bottom-up authoritarianism has become the norm. Or perhaps one could call it lateral censorship. It’s artists shutting down other artists—or trying to.
The absurdity of the phrase “bottom-up authoritarianism,” which makes as much sense as “diet lard,” to one side, Banjo Guy seems to miss that artists do indeed oppose and even refuse to work with other artists all the time. How many theaters have rung with cries of “either he goes or I go” throughout the ages? Yet before our low, mean age, no one thought to pretend it was a First Amendment violation. To use an example from popular music, some players got mad enough at Eric Clapton in the 70s to form Rock Against Racism; I suppose by the standards of Bari Weiss and Banjo Guy, that, too, was censorship. Anyway I can report that the thing never gets any better, but it does contain plenty of gripes like "the producer insisted that the orchestra be racially diverse” and -- notwithstanding the beg-off on Soviet parallels -- a citation of The Gulag Archipelago and an assertion that “maybe a return to Soviet-style censorship is well on the way. Apparently banjo isn’t the only thing this guy knows how to play.
• Now where was I? Oh yeah, second freebie, about the rightwing college that other Bari Weiss Special Guest Star went to. I hope America survives, and if it does I wonder what our descendants will think when they look back on this phenomenon of rightwingers pretending to have been leftwingers so they can write about their conversion experience. Going to Hillsdale for "diversity of thought" is like going to Golden Corral for diet options.
I have released to gen pop my Roy Edroso Breaks It Downessay on the Neil Young/Spotify thing, which controversy has some interesting (and by interesting I mean stupid) political facets but is mainly significant as a reminder that for conservatives “culture war” is actually a war on culture.
It is something to see rightwingers (and other idiots) attack Young, first on the ridiculous grounds that he is somehow “censoring” Joe Rogan, and then, in the manner of old Superman TV show villains ineffectually emptying their guns on Superman and then throwing the guns at him, claiming he’s a shitty musician. Even worse than the Twitter morons who say he sucks because [citation needed] are wingnut enforcers like Armond White in National Review who claim Young is inferior to, I shit you not, Kid Rock because the latter is more authentically anti-establishment (i.e. worships Trump):
Yes, a brief time between culture wars produced the lovely, singular Americana Are You Passionate? and Greendale, but now it’s disappointingly clear that Young’s facile politics often lacked moral foundation.
“Young’s facile politics often lacked moral foundation” -- barring a few translation issues, Andrei Zhdanov couldn’t have put it better himself. For White music as such doesn't even exist except as a vehicle for appropriate propaganda. In this war I’ll stay on the side of culture, thanks.
Yair Rosenberg, who is the author of one of the dumbest essays on film and TV criticism ever written, takes a look-on-the-bright-side angle on the Maus controversy: surveys suggest Americans know more about the Holocaust than they do about their own democratic processes! For obvious reasons, that’s certainly not unmixed good news; also, just because students know the Holocaust happened and who the major players were doesn’t mean they’ve grasped its full significance, and the rise and spread of eliminationist rhetoric in the United States as directed toward other minorities -- for example, the Latino immigrants whom Fox News sturmers call “poison” -- suggests that not enough of them do. It may be that, as the kids have been encouraged to think of racism as something that's over and done with (because to suggest otherwise is critical race double-plus-ungood), so they consider genocide something that was knocked out when the camps were liberated.
Also, Maus is not the only book yahoos are currently banning or looking to ban, thanks to the CRT scare and related pathologies -- see here and here just for starters. Conservatives have been freaks about culture war for decades, but the Trump metastasis has upped the ante; once they were content to snarl every once in a while about Tinky Winky or some shit, but now they’re rampaging through reading lists and erasing anything that might give their kids a different way of looking at the world than what they try to beat into them. And heads up, because they never stop at schoolbooks.
• Rod Dreher, prestige media’s favorite religious maniac, just gets better and better. Here’s the header on my favorite Dreher post of the week:
Mouthy darkskin pussy-hat GRRRRR splurt! But what’s this about “some of her generation are choosing sterilization, because of wokeness”? Turns out this refers to a single alleged instance in the Dreher “Reader” “Mail” that constitutes most of the post, the author of which Dreher has thoughtfully anonymized lest the Woke Mob come after him, sure that’s it wink wink.
Author’s assistant “Annie” moonlights as a bus driver, see, and she says she knows a family with three college-age girls, one of whom “graduated third in her class of thirteen hundred and was given a scholarship to attend an Ivy League university.” If you’ve ever read a rightwing column, I bet you can already hear the sinister background music! Sure enough:
The other day, Annie told me that there was a family argument because the daughter was going to schedule an appointment at the gynecologist to get her tubes tied. She is twenty-two years old! Her rationale was that the world is too awful and that no more children should be brought into this hellhole.
[Organ sting!]
I have known her daughter since she was eight years old, and for the past fourteen years her mother has told me about her increasingly radical, Leftist views. Starting in high school, the cause was environmentalism, and then being at that Ivy League university, especially during these last two years, the cause has also grown to include the usual diversity, equity, inclusion, social justice and destroy-Western-Civilization bullshit.
Wow -- if she goes to grad school, I reckon she’ll kill herself for Gaia! But wait, there’s more psychosexual just-so storytelling:
Last year, the same daughter made an appointment at Planned Parenthood to have an IUD implanted. Her mother threw a fit, as they have good health insurance; she lamented to me that if she wanted an IUD she could go to any gynecologist in the suburbs for a more hygienic and safer procedure.
You know how dirty those Planned Parenthoods are, on account of the abortion germs.
And what’s even more troubling is that the daughter isn’t even sexually active according to her mother (knowing the mother and the daughter, I believe it). Therefore, it wasn’t even for preventing pregnancy but rather for making a statement of solidarity with her “Black” and “Brown” sisters.
We’ve all been to the marches and seen the “PESSARY SOLIDARITY” banners, haven’t we? (I would love to hear this cowboy explain why "Black" and "Brown" are in quotes, too.)
Two years ago, none of the three daughters wished their mother a Happy Mother’s Day, as they considered it an antiquated custom.
Wow, if only I’d thought of that one whenever I forgot to mail a card! “Sorry I missed your birthday, but you know how I feel about annualism.”
These kids are becoming evil. At least one consolation is that if the daughter gets her tubes tied, that’s the end of that bloodline.
“They’ll know we are Christians by our love.” ‘member that joke?
Now on a more optimistic note, I have attached a Christmas photo from one of my neighbors. The father is the pastor of a local Mennonite church. They have eleven children (they had twelve, but one died shortly after childbirth). They have all been homeschooled, and they are all very sweet and pleasant…
WHICH WAY, WESTERN MAN? Will it be the false god of IUD, or Daddy’s Little Brood Sow? If these clowns ever Benedict Opt out of the internet, I have to say I’ll miss the laughs.
Justice Breyer’s retirement from the Supreme Court reminds conservatives that Biden had pledged to nominate a black woman, and the results are as expected. From the libertarian* (*conservative with crippling social anxieties) Ilya Shapiro:
There are all kinds of hypocrisy involved here -- for example, as noted by Melissa Murray, Amy Coney Barrett, no one’s idea of a legal genius, was transparently pushed to the Court by conservative brain-trusters so there’d be a female on board when they banned abortion. Not to mention the Republican stunt casting of Clarence Thomas.
But hypocrisy is always a bit subtle at least, since of its nature it involves some masking to achieve its effect; their racism is full-blown, out and proud. What we now see is what they are, in fact what they always were, but in their Trump degeneracy they have no need to conceal it.
UPDATE. Also, it's instructive to see what kind of people would rather listen to a weed-and-'roid-addled dumbass than to "On The Beach" or "Live Rust": Who-Moved-My-Cheeseballs and ragequeens. I'm very much a chacun à son goût guy and if someone prefers noise to lovely melodies I'm all for it, but this kind of willful perversity challenges my equanimity.
Been listening to Jimmy Driftwood lately and -- man, he's strange, ain't he?
• Every so often I go among the Twitter morons and waste time talking back. It's interesting to see which subjects draw the dumbest respondents -- in this case, it's the removal of the Teddy-Roosevelt-and-the-lesser-races statue from in front of the American Museum of Natural History. Even the TR Presidential Library in North Dakota, to which the statue is being removed, finds the thing "problematic in its composition," and it always seemed kind of gross to me, but apparently its disassembly, which began this week, has got the MAGA types raging about wokeness and cancelculture and all that bullshit. As usual there were respondents who think statues are the only way to learn history and those who think taking out statues of famous racists is totalitarianism. None of the brethren seemed to grasp that it was not their statue to dispose of, and this is something I've noticed about their hot-button issues concerning statues and movies and advertising and other forms of intellectual property: that to them free speech is based on other people doing things with their own property that they don't like. It's an idea of free speech, in other words, that's not about their own right to express themselves, but anger at how other people do. As you might imagine they really didn't like my suggestion that they make their own Rough Rider statues out of Play-Doh and put them up on their front lawns.
I see Patron Pseud of Anti-Wokeism Jordan Peterson has pulled a BariWeiss -- that is, not having succeeded by obnoxious behavior in getting himself martyred by defenestration, he has quit his academic sinecure while blubbering over the unfairness with which he has been treated, hoping for the same effect. At the Ezra Levant Post the professor explains:
First, my qualified and supremely trained heterosexual white male graduate students (and I’ve had many others, by the way) face a negligible chance of being offered university research positions, despite stellar scientific dossiers. This is partly because of Diversity, Inclusivity and Equity mandates (my preferred acronym: DIE). These have been imposed universally in academia, despite the fact that university hiring committees had already done everything reasonable for all the years of my career, and then some, to ensure that no qualified “minority” candidates were ever overlooked. My students are also partly unacceptable precisely because they are my students. I am academic persona non grata, because of my unacceptable philosophical positions....
By "unacceptable philosophical positions" Peterson seems to mean "status as a public laughing stock." The rest of his lament resembles your average Rod Dreher column: Lots of sweeping and hysterical claims with thin or non-existent documentary evidence, e.g. "there simply is not enough qualified BIPOC people in the pipeline to meet diversity targets quickly enough... This has been common knowledge among any remotely truthful academic who has served on a hiring committee for the last three decades." Peterson also says his colleagues "all lie (excepting the minority of true believers) and they teach their students to do the same," which ought to really set the tone for his U of Toronto going-away party (and excite his future Substack readers!). I especially liked this bit denouncing a well-known implicit-bias test, about which I am fully prepared to entertain doubts if they are expressed via coherent analysis, as opposed to whatever this is:
The much-vaunted IAT, which purports to objectively diagnose implicit bias (that’s automatic racism and the like) is by no means powerful enough — valid and reliable enough — to do what it purports to do. Two of the original designers of that test, Anthony Greenwald and Brian Nosek, have said as much, publicly. [Cite please - Ed.] The third, Professor Mahzarin Banaji of Harvard, remains recalcitrant. Much of this can be attributed to her overtly leftist political agenda, as well as to her embeddedness within a sub-discipline of psychology, social psychology, so corrupt that it denied the existence of left-wing authoritarianism for six decades after World War II....
Is this guy still on the all-meat-coma diet? He seems to have missed a few OS patches.
You can see how this is meant to work: the casual reader may see the length of the thing and catch some keywords, but be put off by the poor writing and painfully aggrieved tone from reading too much of it, and think, "Well, he has a long list of complaints, some of them must be justified." That's how the whole cancelculture/CRT scam gets over; when it wears out, they'll move on to the next grift.
I used to post here way more often than I do now. That was partly because I was young, dumb, and full of rage. Also I had fewer outlets then, whereas now I have Twitter and the daily newsletter Roy Edroso Breaks It Down (subscribe, cheap!).
But every so often I see something that I really worry will be overlooked if I don't say something. (I know, hubris -- but in a good cause!) So in this public forum I would like to call your attention to a detail from Tubby's Saturday lie-fest in Arizona.
In recent weeks many people who should know better have been giving Trump credit for saying nice things about vaccines. It's a hangover from the old bothsider trope: Of course we should encourage Trump to push vaccines! If he wants to take credit and make political capital from it, let him! It's fine if it will get people to vaccinate!
Well, Trump has spoken up for vaccination publicly a few times. I'm sure the moderates and milquetoasts are thrilled, notwithstanding that his yokels booed him for it.
Like the trimmers, I knew when Trump pushed vaccines it would not be out of a suddenly spasm of altruism. But unlike them, I was not deceived that it would cause Republicans to vaccinate, or favor vaccination, or take any other public health precautions against COVID whatsoever,
So de facto Republican policy is, obviously, to make it as easy as possible for COVID to rampage through the country and then complain about how Biden isn't stopping the pandemic. And in Arizona last night, Trump made clear what his yeah-sure vaccine endorsement was all about:
The left is now rationing lifesaving therapeutics based on race, discriminating against and denigrating, just denigrating, white people to determine who lives and who dies. If you’re white, you don’t get the vaccine, or if you’re white, you don’t get therapeutics.
Claiming liberals are taking vaccines belonging by right to white people and giving them to the dusky hordes -- that's guaranteed to cause something, but it ain't vaccination.
I don't know how many times I have to tell you: This guy is not going to help America even if it appears to be in his interest to do so -- because he finds it much more rewarding to make everything worse. He's not a recalcitrant public servant who has to be prodded to do the right thing; he's a sociopath and a public menace and he really has to be stopped.
About how many bands can you say you're always glad to see them?
• It is, along with everything else, strange to say Terry Teachout has died. As you can see from his About Last Night blog, he was busy as a drama critic for the Wall Street Journal -- as well as a playwright, librettist, and biographer -- when death swooped in and took him. He was no spring chicken, but he was sufficiently buoyant to make you think he was, so his death feels even more untimely than it is. Terry was good at paying attention, which was part of his arsenal as a critic but also his charm as a human being; whether he agreed with you or not, he took account -- generous account -- of what you were saying and doing, and you knew it. I’m very bad at taking advice or criticism, but I didn’t mind it from him, for that reason. And though he was a man of strong (and, I often felt, wrong) beliefs, he had admirable perspective and a very good sense of humor about them. He knew that there was more to life than meets the eye, and I like to think he’s currently following up on that insight.
• The Supreme Court, allegedly a politically neutral body, has decided to kill us slowly in order to make it look less like they’re killing us. No other explanation makes allowing the CMS mandate and killing the OSHA mandate look coherent. I mean, if I were forced to come up with a rationale, I hope I could do better than Neil Gorsuch:
…[OSHA] directs us to 29 U. S. C. § 655(c)(1). In that statutory subsection, Congress authorized OSHA to issue “emergency” regulations upon determining that “employees are exposed to grave danger from exposure to substances or agents determined to be toxic or physically harmful” and “that such emergency standard[s] [are] necessary to protect employees from such danger[s]”…
The Court rightly applies the major questions doctrine and concludes that this lone statutory subsection does not clearly authorize OSHA’s mandate. See ante, at 5–6. Section 655(c)(1) was not adopted in response to the pandemic, but some 50 years ago at the time of OSHA’s creation. Since then, OSHA has relied on it to issue only comparatively modest rules addressing dangers uniquely prevalent inside the workplace, like asbestos and rare chemicals... As the agency itself explained to a federal court less than two years ago, the statute does “not authorize OSHA to issue sweeping health standards” that affect workers’ lives outside the workplace… Yet that is precisely what the agency seeks to do now—regulate not just what happens inside the workplace but induce individuals to undertake a medical procedure that affects their lives outside the workplace.
If only there were some way workers could “clock out” of the onerous requirement that they be vaccinated against a deadly disease when their shifts end! But they can’t, so undue burden, everyone go get sick and spread it at work for freedom.
If the right wing killed the health care worker vaccine mandate as well, it would have made the death-cultism too obvious, so they got Kavanaugh to take the bullet and vote with the liberals. It was truly gruesome to see, when “Kavanaugh” was trending on Twitter last night, how many of those tweets were from conservatives enraged that he let hospitals require what would seem to any sane person an elementary health precaution. (Jesus, I hope Pete Hegseth doesn’t get any more popular or we’ll soon be waiting on pins and needles for SCOTUS to decide whether hospitals have the right to demand doctors scrub in before surgery.)
The American conservative movement is objectively pro-COVID -- and that goes not only for the lunatics with their crackpot theories and tubes of horse paste, but also for the politicians and conservative justices who flatter those nuts and cause their madness to be enacted in law and practice, in hopes that the continued spread of the disease will sabotage their opponents. Weird way to live!
New York (CNNBusiness) -- Grocery store shelves across America are wiped clean, and they're staying empty as stores struggle to quickly restock everyday necessities such as milk, bread, meat, canned soups and cleaning products.
Disgruntled shoppers have unleashed their frustration on social media over the last several days, posting photos on Twitter of bare shelves at Trader Joe's locations, Giant Foods and Publix stores, among many others.
By “disgruntled shoppers” on “social media” I assume they mean the people working the #BareShelvesBiden tag -- which is as obvious a coordinated campaign as it gets. (Sometimes they use foreign grocery shelves to illustrate their point.)
The other day my wife went to the Eastern Market Trader Joe’s and found many of the shelves empty. There was a note explain the situation, pictured below:
Makes sense. She went to a Whole Foods a mile away and got everything we needed. Also TJ’s was stocked back up the next time she went in.
Temporary shortages during a snowy winter and a freaking pandemic are neither new nor a big deal, and it may seem puzzling at first that operatives are telling Americans who are in absolutely no danger of running out of food or even missing a meal that somewhere in this favored land we’re experiencing Soviet shortages. Wouldn’t they go to their own grocery stores and see the disconnect?
But these days propaganda is often about the Other who are portrayed as suffering or depraved; the message is that you better watch out or else their suffering or depravity will be visited on you. The best example is all those rightwing stories about how crime is out of control in the cities and you can’t walk down the street without getting shot (which I recall was an actual line from one of Trump’s 2016 debate yammerings). Many Americans (and certainly most Republicans) don’t live in cities and have little experience of them, so they may be easily persuaded that urban life is one big prison-yard smorgasbord of violence punctuated by BLM “riots,” and that the evil Democrats who run these hellholes will try to drag you good non-city folk down with them via their drive to “abolish the suburbs.”
The idea is to portray people who live differently from you as not only deprived but depraved, and thus a threat to your way of life -- and that’s why, the reasoning seamlessly goes, we have to keep them from doing “election fraud,” i.e. voting.
I noticed a bunch of liberals objecting on Twitter to this John F. Harris/Politico story, “We Are In a New Civil War … About What Exactly?” Sample:
If this is a 21st century version of 19th century disunion, shouldn’t it be more obvious what the war, at bottom, is all about?...
Only in recent years have we seen foundation-shaking political conflict — both sides believing the other would turn the United States into something unrecognizable — with no obvious and easily summarized root cause. What is the fundamental question that hangs in the balance between the people who hate Trump and what he stands for and the people who love Trump and hate those who hate him? This is less an ideological conflict than a psychological one.
Now, this is Politico so I guess one has to be sensitive to its bothsidesing agenda (“the Trump phenomenon defies explanation,” Harris says -- ha, yeah, if your first acquaintance with the GOP was Romney 2012!) But I take his point to this extent: that all the yap about civil war -- and despite all claims to the contrary, including Harris’, as I have written before “civil war” really is overwhelmingly a rightwing thing -- it’s just ridiculous.
And I’m not calling it ridiculous because I don’t think these guys wouldn’t do it if they could -- on the contrary, as polling and experience show, conservatives are now extremely comfortable with violence against liberals. I call it ridiculous because they have no actual complaint even remotely worth having a civil war over. Here’s the top of an email I got from one of the many rightwing mailing lists to which I subscribe:
Now, I ask you: What normal American would read something like that without wondering: What the fuck is this guy talking about, America is a "dystopian, tyrannical state"?
It’s like when Rod Dreher goes on about “soft totalitarianism” and constantly invokes non-soft totalitarianism when talking about it (e.g., “There is no Stalin of the Social Justice Warriors, but that in no way means they are not dangerous”), but when someone (someone who’s not a mark, I mean) takes him to mean what he seems to mean, he weasels, “do I say that the libs are ‘just like’ the Bolsheviks? No, not at all,” and then explains that the liberalism “seeks domination and conformity not by imposing pain and terror on people, but rather by manipulating their access to status and comfort.” Which sounds like a pretty weak kind of “totalitarianism” in the first place, and when explicated it turns out to mean a bunch of just-so stories about how everyone’s too scared to say trans women are men because they might lose their jobs -- which is 99 44/100% Pure Bullshit -- or that a racist getting kicked off a social media platform for flouting its terms of service is the Coming of the Camps.
The next time one of these nuts tells you about the intolerable tyranny under which Americans live, ask him what he means, specifically. Watch his hands, though.
While some old-time Republicans like Karl Rove have apparently decided they have nothing to lose by truthfully saying the MAGA mob “violently attempted to overturn the election,” those still on the payroll are trying to blow it off. At the Washington Examiner, Byron York scoffs at “Jan. 6 week”:
…the House Democrats who created the [January 6] committee want to use it to get Trump -- either by ensuring that he is legally prohibited from running for president in 2024 or, failing that, by damaging him so much politically that he will lose if he does manage to run.
This is rather like saying, “Having failed to convince the American people that Hitler poses a threat to America, FDR’s Democrats have resorted to war on Germany.” York also suggests that Trump was actually trying to reverse the attack he launched throughout the afternoon by tweeting messages like “No violence! Remember, WE are the Party of Law & Order” etc., because “at the time perhaps Trump's main mode of communication.”
Cut to QAnon Shaman Jacob Chansley looking at his phone mid-pillage, then holding up a hand: “Hang on, guys!” he cries. “Trump says WE are the Party of Law & Order!” Everyone stops smashing down doors, shitting on the floor, and hunting Nancy Pelosi; they rub their chins and murmur, “never thought of it that way before. Could we have misunderstood him when he told us to march on the Capitol and ‘fight like hell’?”
Yeah, you know it’s bullshit. Thereafter York offers legal counsel for the insurrectionist Trump (“Dereliction of duty is not a crime”) and does his best to signal to the goons and mouth-breathers in his readership that he, too, considers the investigation of the attack on Congress a mere political stunt:
You can count on [Democratic lawyer Marc] Elias to follow through. After all, his party reaped enormous political benefits from the dossier caper, and he is always looking for new ways, legitimate or not, to roil the system in favor of Democrats.
This is a little slicker than your buddies on Facebook yelling about false flags, but the intention is the same: to make it look like the attempted overthrow of your government was nothing so serious as to require consequences.
UPDATE. York has more January 6 bullshit today. The gist is that the coup wasn't a big deal because it was unsuccessful. It then devolves to a new mutant strain of bullshit:
It is still not entirely clear why so many House Republicans chose to support the challenges, given that all the states had certified their results...
Some Republicans felt they stood on a precedent already established by Democrats. After all, some House Democrats objected to the certification of Electoral College results in the last three presidential elections won by Republicans...
York does not mention that those scattered and speedily voted-down Democratic objections did not come after a concerted attempt by supporters of the Democratic candidate to nullify the election and murder elected officials.
For those of you wondering why Jesus wouldn’t want you to be vaccinated, the decision lists the various grounds for the plaintiffs’ objections: “(1) opposition to abortion and the use of aborted fetal cell lines in development of the vaccine; (2) belief that modifying one’s body is an af[f]ront to the Creator; (3) direct, divine instruction not to receive the vaccine; and (4) opposition to injecting trace amounts of animal cells into one’s body.”
But I especially like #3, which seems like a really convenient get-out-of-obeying-orders card. Don’t like the duty? “I have received direct, divine instruction not to peel potatoes in the service of Mammon.”
The people celebrating this, you will not be surprised to learn, hate that gay and trans people are allowed to serve, but approve servicemembers blowing off orders to receive just one in a series of mandated vaccinations because that specific vaccine has become a rightwing hate object. It’s really a drag, constantly having to accommodate a relatively small but politically powerful pro-COVID party in this country.
For this final week of 2021, I have only one freebie to offer from my premium newsletter Roy Edroso Breaks It Down, but it’s a good one: A New York Times Cletus Safari on Let’s Go Brandon Guy. Since I wrote it I see the LGB guy, the unfortunately named Jared Schmeck, has floated running for office, which absolutely tracks, as does his making the announcement that he will “pray about [running and] see what God has for me” on the radio show of “Christian broadcaster Todd Starnes”; there’s nothing more Modern Christian than building a public career off saying a disguised swear to the President.
(You could be getting this kind of material on a daily basis -- 5x a week! Just like a newspaper! -- with a subscription. It’s super-cheap -- $7/mo., $70/yr. -- and from now through Monday I’ll make it even cheaper for you with this 10% off deal if you sign up via https://edroso.substack.com/newyear. If you want to sample the material first, here’s a good guide.)
OK, that’s enough hard sell! I certainly don’t want to turn into something like Matt Walsh, who’s pushing his own creepy trans-hate children’s book (!) Johnny the Walrus by calling it his “literary treasure,” “magnum opus,” “masterpiece” etc. (and, a quick Google search reveals, by promoting bulk sales to wingnut orgs and pulling the old boo-hoo-they-cancelcultured me bit). Lord knows the rightwing grift is easy and profitable, as Glenn Greenwald and Matt Tabbi have apparently learned, but I’m drawing near enough to St. Peter’s Gate that I have to think about how I’ll explain myself and I don’t want something like that among my ledger entries.
EXCLUSIVE: AOC Spotted in Miami Beach as NYC Reports Record Covid Cases
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was spotted dining in Miami Beach, Fla., on Thursday, according to a tip received by National Review, on the same day that her native New York City reported a record number of Covid-19 cases.
This is also being pushed by trolls with a hashtag. The punchline is that while AOC’s presence in Florida is verified, that of its Governor Ron DeSantis is not -- as COVID infections spike in the Sunshine State, he hasn’t been heard from for more than a week, and his press shop is circulating old photos of him and claiming they're from yesterday. I keep saying it, but it keeps proving true: With conservatives, every accusation is a confession.
With that I bid you a Happy New Year. I hope however you celebrate it doesn’t make you sick (though a hangover is acceptable). I’ve been changing up my holiday songs but I’m sticking another year with the Loudon Wainwright III one up top, because I love it even with the smooth jazz arrangement and because it so speaks to our place and time:
Last year was a fiasco
A real disaster, so full of sorrow
This year will be a great year
I just can’t wait, dear, until tomorrow
Keep a few fingers twined in the kite-strings of hope, friends; in the cold and dark keep the embers alive. See you next year.
Or maybe you’ve had enough of politics. I must admit the first thing I thought of when Biden did a pleasant Christmas call with some guy’s kids and the guy went “Let’s Go Brandon” was: It’s been a long slide to this from Eartha Kitt spoiling Lady Bird Johnson‘s party by honestly answering her question about “juvenile delinquency”:
"Boys I know across the nation feel it doesn't pay to be a good guy," Kitt said. "They figure with a record they don't have to go off to Vietnam. You send the best of this country off to be shot and maimed. They rebel in the street. They will take pot and they will get high. They don’t want to go to school because they’re going to be snatched off from their mothers to be shot in Vietnam.”
Kitt continued: "Mrs. Johnson, you are a mother too, although you have had daughters and not sons. I am a mother and I know the feeling of having a baby come out of my guts. I have a baby and then you send him off to war. No wonder the kids rebel and take pot. And, Mrs. Johnson, in case you don't understand the lingo that's marijuana."
I understand LGB guy didn’t have the time for anything like that, and that’s too bad, but I’m sure if he had any specific policy he felt strongly about advancing, he could have found a quick way to do that rather than just saying a childishly disguised fuck you. But I’m guessing Let’s Go Brandon is about as advanced as his thinking gets.
I'm seeing a depressing number of people -- probably the same people who keep telling us that unregenerate (but anti-Trump) Republican monsters like Max Boot are our allies now -- giving Tubby credit for "pushing back" on the anti-vaccine rap Candace Owens was dishing out:
During an interview with right-wing provocateur Candace Owens this week, former President Donald Trump actually pushed back on anti-vaccine talking points and encouraged viewers to get their shots. (Yes, you read that correctly.) After Trump boasted of his efforts in facilitating the COVID-19 vaccination, an obsequious Owens replied, “Yet more people have died under COVID this year, by the way, under Joe Biden than under you and more people took the vaccine this year. So people are questioning how—” but the ex-president interrupted her to firmly declare: “Oh no, the vaccines work, but... the ones who get very sick and go to the hospital are the ones that don’t take the vaccine. But it’s still their choice. And if you take the vaccine, you’re protected... Look, the results of the vaccine are very good, and if you do get it, it’s a very minor form. People aren’t dying when they take the vaccine.”
What the Daily Beast doesn't tell you, and what you only see much further down in other accounts, is that Trump reiterated that he's against vaccine mandates -- which are tied up in the courts and now headed to SCOTUS. He also bitched about masks!
In other words, Trump is still against the closest thing to a magic bullet we've got -- like, we didn't eradicate polio with a do-your-own-thing policy, we made it mandatory for kids to take before they could go to school.
What he's clearly not doing is trying to get his people to vaccinate. You think the kind of hardcore MAGA people who watch Candace Owens videos are going to be swayed by this? We've seen the rubes booing him when he pimps vaccines. They're not going to take it on his say-so. They'll just double up on the horse paste.
In other words, Trump only approved the vaccines because they happened while he was president, and he wants to world to know that if anything causes the pandemic to diminish -- whether it's the new pills or the clearance of the mandates or anything else -- it's to his credit; and if it rages on (and without a serious "big government" intervention, it will), it's not his fault.
When I see centrist types giving him attaboys I have to wonder whether they're simple-minded. I mean, Trump and Owens are con artists. Haven't they been paying attention?
That's right, Tubby's planning a "news conference" to commemorate his goons' attempted murder of Congress on his behalf. Now that's what I call nerve! The apparent idea is counter-programming against what promises to be a solemn observance on Capitol Hill, so I assume there'll be a cash bar and maybe some lounge acts.
(BTW a subscription to REBID makes a wonderful last-minute gift.)
At this point I'm posting these things like a castaway writing on the walls of his cave in case people discover it after he dies:
The push to ban books in Texas schools spreads to public libraries
When the Llano County Library shuts down for thre-e days this week, starting Tuesday, it won’t be for the holidays.
Instead, a group of six librarians in this small Central Texas county will be conducting a “thorough review” of every children’s book in the library, at the behest of the Llano County Commissioners Court. Their mission will be to make sure all of the reading material for younger readers includes subjects that are age-appropriate. A new “young adults plus” section will be added to separate books written for an older teen audience from those geared toward younger readers.
This isn't a school library, by the way -- it's a public library. I'm trying to imagine local busybodies muscling in on the North End branch of the Bridgeport Public Library when I was growing up and forbidding young me to read Esquire magazine or the works of H. Rap Brown and Philip Roth. It makes me feel sorry for the kids in this stupid Bumfuck town, but mostly it makes me damn mad.
Oh, here's the hot part:
[Amy] Garvel, who describes herself as a conservative and has a 9-year-old son and 13-year-old daughter, said she’s been very careful about what content they consume.
“My goal is really to protect the children in our community in general, not just my own children,” said Garvel, 43. “I’m hoping that [the library] sees that we’re not trying to censor books that we’re trying to protect our children. I mean, the library was one of the last places that we could feel safe.”
You miserable fool, "censor" is EXACTLY WHAT YOU'RE DOING. LOOK IT UP IN A DICTIONARY. FORCING LIBRARIES TO WITHDRAW BOOKS FROM CIRCULATION IS LITERAL CENSORSHIP.
I bet Amy Garvel is dead set against "cancel culture" and perhaps even bitches about it while she's rummaging the stacks of the Llano County Library for books to ban.
