FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

As often, I feel like something spare and angular!

•  If you missed it yesterday, here's the first Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebie of the week, a report on the truckers and their grifts (as Jan Němec might have put it). No longer content to drive in circles on the beltway, some of the Rush-Hour Reenactors have invaded the area are going into town and honking their horns to general bemusement and middle fingers. Here's what the brain trust has planned for today:

Real Braveheart material there. Wonder how long before they realize their leaders have pocketed most of the donations? 

•  And for funsies, and as I am in the giving vein, a fanciful look at Fox News' attempt to damage-control Tucker Carlson's Putinphilia. It's hilarious, to me anyway, that the Russians are running Carlson's broadcasts as propaganda -- which, come to think of it, is what Fox has been doing, but the context really makes it obvious. And he's not the only one -- here's a good thread on Brexit conman Nigel Farage's Putin advocacy. Remember how Kevin McCarthy, before he was brought to heel, said he thought there were two people Putin paid, Dana Rohrabacher and Trump? He was really lowballing it. 

•  I could not let the day pass without observing the latest high-profile cancelculture crybabies -- and this time it's not just one of the New York Times' several rightwing symps, present or past, but the entire Times editorial board itself:

For all the tolerance and enlightenment that modern society claims, Americans are losing hold of a fundamental right as citizens of a free country: the right to speak their minds and voice their opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned.

This social silencing...

Time out. What's the shaming and shunning? Someone talked back? People stopped hanging out with you?

Also, the Times has a poll that shows most Americans have been cancelcultured:

Consider this finding from our poll: 55 percent of respondents said that they had personally held their tongue over the past year because they were concerned about retaliation or harsh criticism.

I know how they feel. More than once I've had a strong urge to say, "You don't know what you're talking about, you stupid fucking asshole," or "Jesus Christ, that is one ugly bitch," and held my tongue. I'm a victim too! And if it's like that for me, a prominent Substack author, imagine how it is for racists and neo-Nazis! 

The thing's full of lulus like this:

Roy Block, 76, from San Antonio, described himself as conservative and said he has been alarmed by scenes of parents being silenced at school board meetings over the past year. 

Parents being silenced? I thought the big thing was parents raging at school board meetings and loudly demanding schools ban teaching the history of racism. I wonder whether the Times asked Block for a citation. But maybe that would be cancelculture too. 

“I think it’s mostly conservatives that are being silenced,” he said.

You do, huh. 

“But regardless, I think it should be a two-way street. Everybody should have an opportunity to speak and especially in open gathering and open forum.”  

I'd really like to know what open gatherings and forums are preventing him or anyone else from speaking. Maybe the Times could have asked... but there I go again, suppressing speech by asking impertinent questions.  

I broke down this shit a long time ago. "Cancel culture" is a propaganda ploy, and the working people whose speech is actually suppressed by economic need and at-will employment will gain nothing by the proposed remedy -- which, as near as I can tell from every single goddamn article these people put out about it, is to kiss the asses of blowhards who never stopped talking in the first place.

THE RUSH-HOUR REENACTORS: STILL HERE, STILL DOUCHEBAGS.

Today’s Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebie (and there’s plenty more where it came from, and cheap, so subscribe today!) is an update on the Freedom Convoy that’s become a minor nuisance in the city of Washington but major fantasy object for wingnut crackpots across America. 

The convoy is, as I’ve mentioned previously, political cosplay on the order of the Hard Hats, the Tea Party, Duck Dynasty, and Joe the Plumber, meant to make a bunch of well-funded political operatives look like the Voice of the People -- or, rather, of people who are more salt-of-the-earth than you because they dress like Sons of Anarchy extras. 

Normal people don’t seem to be going for it, though, which has led some of the brethren to claim the Deep State killed their spotlight by making Russia invade Ukraine, like this bluecheck clown with 18.5K followers:

This delusional level of self-regard is, as you'll see in the report, general among convoy participants and supporters alike.

It just gets more surreal: In its latest report, the Washington Post talks to a convoy guy who came into town to stroll around the Mall with his granddaughter, who was wearing a Let’s Go Brandon shirt to “spread the word.” That's doing your part, citizen! (The Post mentions that this cowboy "drives a F-150 four-wheel-drive pickup truck" -- you may have missed that the majority of the convoyers are not big rigs at all.)

The Post also had this from the nightly peroration from one of the Head Cosplayers In Charge:

At the group’s evening rally Tuesday night, co-organizer Mike Landis referenced Washington residents in saying the group will “keep going back every day and just annoying the crap out of them.” 

The convoy people really think their hatred of “Washington” as a synecdoche for Big Gummint gives them cause and the right to play “I’m Not Touching You” with normal people going to work and living their lives. If a bunch of art directors camped out in Alabama and went into Mobile every day to “annoy the crap” out of the residents, of course, you’d hear the screams of outrage in Antarctica.  

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

This motherfucker rocked the Apollo
INTRODUCING THE BAND.

•   Another busy damn week! Time and tide and all that. You saw the Emma Camp installment of Roy Edroso Breaks It Down I comped you all in on a few days back. Hope you liked it and if you haven't seen it, it's news to you -- go look, it's still open. 

Now here's another, sort of an alt-history joint: If present-day conservatives were around at the start of WWII. It's amazing to me, as someone who knew the Iraq war was bullshit from jump, to see a lot of the brethren -- many of whom were hollering for war in 2003 -- telling us that maybe Zelensky is faking it and how about we give Putin the benefit of the doubt. I mean, back in W Days we had grainy photos at the U.N. and solemn assurances and that was good enough for them, but now the Russians invade right in front of our eyes and a lot of conservatives are like, this is clearly the Democrats trying to suck us into war to distract from Hunter Biden. Their stories are getting loonier -- that America is covering up for Fauci's bioweapons in Ukraine (Glenn Greenwald, Tucker Carlson) and that the Ukrainians tricked Russia into bombing an empty hospital for the clicks (Rod Dreher). 

This isn't prudence or even contrarianism -- it's just holy shit, the guy our Führer worships is making us look like chumps, we better double down! Like the lady said, when they tell you who they are the first time, believe them. 

•   Oh, and if you were wondering, the People's Freedom Convoy of Rush Hour Reenactors are still in Hagerstown, Maryland shaking their fists at us DC commies and driving in circles. They got Ted Cruz to ride with them the other day, which may have perked up some spirits, but the end grows nigh for their grift and DC drivers flipping them off seems to be getting to them:

Looks like when you live in a closed universe of delusions of grandeur, and come to believe your butch cosplay and rightwing money supply makes you the Boss of America, any little slight will blow your trip and drive you to lash out. 

Well, they've won the admiration of Matt Taibbi, anyway. He tells a tale of mean MSM elitists who made fun of the convoy for blowing their initial State of the Union deadline, but who came roaring back to show everybody who's boss by camping out in Maryland and doing loops on the Beltway and telling interviewers how much they hate Joe Biden (which, face it, is really what lights up Taibbi about this travesty). “We are right now on the precipice of losing our collective asses," one Tribune of the People tells Taibbi's crew. "You cannot run a truck on six dollars a gallon.” Good thing they have donors so they can still afford driving in circles without ever delivering loads of anything except bullshit. 

CHILD SOLDIERS.

 I have unlocked today's Roy Edroso Breaks It Down, recording a meeting of the University of Northern Virginia at Condo Corners First Amendment Therapy Group. 

I'm going to flip over all the cards, as they used to say on "What's My Line," and tell you that the episode is partly inspired by the latest cancelculture atrocity: A guest essay in the New York Times by one Emma Camp, a senior at the University of Virginia and a Reason magazine contributor, who tells us that she and all the UVA kids are horribly cancelcultured -- that is to say, they are sometimes criticized by other students, or else they get a vibe that they're being disagreed with, and so they "self-censor," which apparently differs from other-censorship in that it sometimes leads to guest essays in the New York Times. The solutions she offers are so amorphous ("encourage professors to reward intellectual diversity and nonconformism in classroom discussions") that I assume in practice they would amount to treating rightwing white kids as a protected class (just like they did in the old days!). 

As we saw with Jane Kitchen back in January, the Cancelcultured Student Essay is by now a familiar grift, and Camp's is no exception. But its defenders have learned a new trick! When people made fun of Camp's essay, pointing out, reasonably, that having an essay published in the Times is the opposite of censorship, self- or otherwise, her defenders cried how dare you, can't you see she's just a lit-tle girl: 

I seem to remember rightwingers beating the shit out of David Hogg and X née Emma González, survivors of an actual violent attack at their school, when they became gun control advocates. But in the land of IOKIYAR, I guess it's only conservative columnists who get the Kids Fly Free treatment. I can't wait until they publish a seven-year-old's "How Come They Can Say the N-Word and I Can't" and denounce its critics as child-haters (or pedophile groomers, as seems to be their latest shtick). 

IT'S THE FREEDOM PEOPLE'S RUSH-HOUR REENACTMENT CONVOY!

That COVID Convoy that was supposed to invade Washington during the Statue of the Union (but didn't) and then on Saturday (but didn't) came up with a cunning plan on Sunday: They would do two loops around the Beltway to "show them how large we are." ("Them" being the rest of us who think they're idiots, I guess.)

Afternoon reports indicate they're not doing so hot: 

Pig Pen and the Rubber Duck now say they'll circle the Beltway every day until their demands are met. This inflated self of self-importance is fairly typical of rightwing "grassroots" movements: No one voted for them, few of us support their cause (which near as I can figure is to lift some non-existent "mandates"), but they act like a mighty sovereign power treating with the enemy. 

I suppose the plan is to get as many donations via their many pledge pages as they can, then split with the proceeds. (That seems to be the MO of at least one of the leaders.) If they can make a nuisance of themselves before collapsing, so much the better -- because being a pain in the ass in the heart of conservatism anymore. 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Hope Fat Tuesday was good to ya.

•   Yesterday I released the Roy Edroso Breaks It Down issue about the Freedom Convoy fantasy and the credulous reporting that makes it look like a military invasion of the capital. There is little evidence that such a display of might is actually pending, however. Here’s a fun clip Patriot Takes found on Twitter of some Indiana insurrectionists looking at some trucks -- not big rigs, mind you, but pick-up trucks and some SUVs -- and declaring that the feds don’t stand a chance. 

Bottom-feeder websites like The Patriot Chronicles (warning: site is pop-up-spam-riddled) make similar claims:

Liberals must be losing their minds. We already know that the Biden administration has been afraid of this day—Just look at the fence they built around the Capitol, but the time has come. 

I think the reporter, “Daphne Moon” (guess this one’s not going in anyone’s clip file!), is talking about the fence that went up for the State of the Union address and has already been taken down -- but forget it, she’s rolling:

[Another website] observed the convoy in Missouri Monday, using the state’s traffic cameras. We estimated at least 500 participating vehicles, although it was hard to distinguish non-convoy trucks and other vehicles from those with drivers participating in the convoy… 

So, in other words, they saw a bunch of trucks on the highway. But here’s the main thing:

Online, the convoy’s following has grown. Aniano said the convoy’s followings on various social media platforms have moved from the hundreds to the thousands in the past few days…

Online -- that’s where I’m a Viking! They’ll keep this up until such fools as try it are hauled away, and then they’ll come up with another Army of Butch Stereotypes that will take over the government -- perhaps multiple editions of Joe the Plumber (remember him?) to clog the sewer pipes of the Swamp.  Got to have a dream/ If you don’t have a dream/ How you gonna make a dream come true? 

•   Oh, I also freed one of my REBID vaudeville sketches, this one about a Russian spam farm hit hard by economic sanctions. Of course, the joke's on us because Putin has plenty of spammers in the U.S., though I don’t know how much they’re getting paid. As you may have seen from my Twitter feed, Rod Dreher’s been very helpful to the subject of his famous 2016 “Putin: Our Tsar-Protector?” column. His current shtick is to cry UNDERSTAND, I AM VERY SORRY RUSSIA IS DOING THIS! at intervals while defending Russia. For example:

I can’t see where the West had any choice other than to have imposed harsh sanctions on the Russian government, but Westerners delighted by the punishment we are inflicting on the Russian people (as opposed to seeing it as a tragic necessity) are fools. We are in the process of immiserating an entire nation, and turning its people against us for a generation or more. 

We’re immiserating a nation! Boy, wait’ll Dreher finds out what Russia's doing to Ukranians! 

We are driving that nation, which we needed to help the West contain China, right into China’s arms. There may well have been no alternative here — at this point, I can’t think of one — but this has been a massive strategic defeat for us. 

I wonder who’s responsible for this massive strategic defeat? Maybe it’s the transsexuals Dreher’s always on the warpath against. Next Dreher approvingly quotes John Mearsheimer’s Ukraine Got What It Asked For POV and, as if he sees the Springtime For Hitler shock on his readers’ faces, rushes to explain:

I know, I know: we aren’t supposed to say these things. We are supposed to stay focused on the evilness of the Putin regime. 

Just like we’re not supposed to say the N-word! And we're supposed to say Orange Man Bad! It’s all soft totalitarianism, see.

Any introduction of complexity into the narrative cuts the purity of moral clarity. But facts don’t disappear because they are inconvenient to the story we want to believe. I’ve seen tweets in the past day or two from people saying that yes, the Ghost of Kyiv legend wasn’t true, nor are some of the other heroic pro-Ukrainian myths passed around this past week … but so what (they say): what’s important is keeping up Ukrainian morale.

To openly prefer a manipulative lie to the complicated truth is corrupt.

One million Ukranians have been made refugees by the Russian invasion. Dreher doesn’t dare call that a lie, yet, so he paints the corners. 

I’m taking some criticism in the comments section for spending more time talking about the way we in the West are responding to Russia’s aggression than I am talking about the aggression itself.

LOL no comment.

TRUCK NUTS.

I have un-paywalled an issue of Roy Edroso Breaks It Down about two aspects of the Freedom Convoy thing: 1.) How the press has been talking up their alleged truck invasion of Washington, D.C. for weeks, but only a few alleged Freedom Convoyeurs have as yet visited our nation's capital, and 2.) the fondness of conservatives for protest movement that are basically cosplay -- the Tea Party, the Hardhats, the Bundys, etc. (The dress-up is always hyper-masculine, though they make occasional exceptions such as the Brooks Brothers Riot.)

At this writing the Washington Post, which has been flogging the thing at least as much as any other media outlet, reports that 

Despite organizers touting numbers in the thousands, Indiana State Police spokesman Captain Ron Galaviz said the convoy amounted to fewer than 300 vehicles when it was in Indiana this week, and a majority were passenger vehicles, not large trucks.

Now, as a normal American, you might look at that and think the thing is not so much brave Pigpen and the Rubber Duck running a Breaker 1-9 Braveheart juggernaut of big rigs to smash through the toll gate into the DC Swamp and kick some libtard ass, and more like convoy of campers coming to act like assholes for a few hours and take in the Air & Space Museum. 

But rightwing sites want you to think it's clobberin' time: "ON THE HIGHWAY, Okla.," datelines the wingnut Epoch Times, "—The largest truck convoy in the United States has grown in size since departing California and is attracting thousands of supporters as it makes its way toward the East Coast." "Liberals thought the U.S Trucker convoy is going nowhere," snarls 2020 Conservative (warning: site is mostly pop-ups), "well, they just got pranked. 'The People’s Convoy' is getting big and the D.C. swamp continues to struggle with their plans to counter the convoy." 

"Struggle with their plans" apparently means "put the National Guard on standby," so if any of these cowboys has been hypnotized by the hype into trying Jan. 6 II they're going to be hilariously disappointed. I expect some light MAGA tourist action and then the usual Great Forgotting -- just like after the "Ride For The Constitution" convoy that wingnuts claimed was going the paralyze the capital during the budget shutdown fight in 2013, and which also turned out to be bullshit. As I reported at the time: 

Anyway the Ride was breathlessly covered by rightbloggers such as Susan Duclos, who informed readers that “already one report has come out about cops pulling over portions of the convoy” and ran a picture of trucks on a highway as evidence that the protest was in full effect.

The great thing about Ride for the Constitution, Moonbattery said, was that “you don’t have to drive a truck to take part.” This was apparently how the overwhelming majority of supporters chose to participate.

Plus ça change, huh?

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Fave Wray.

Rushed again! Just a couple freebies from Roy Edroso Breaks It Down to hand out: 

First, today’s issue, with extra added CPAC sessions. I’m not at the real event, thank God -- others like Laura Jedeed are there and you can follow them if you dare. Jedeed reports on a session in which “several prosecutors [are] discussing the need for solutions that go beyond incarceration and actually rehabilitates people.” Funnily enough, last time I attended, in 2014, they had a session on the subject starring Bernard Kerik. Maybe they do it every year -- wonder why, since sympathy for the incarcerated doesn’t fit the psychological profile of your average CPAC attendee. Maybe focus groups told them to leaven the sadism? Anyway, the real agenda looks nuts enough that my additions should fit right in.

And the second freebie is my backgrounder on American conservatives’ Putin love -- which, as I mentioned yesterday, got an airing when Vlad the Chad invaded Ukraine. Most of them seem to have gotten the message to cool it, but I gotta say, I’m trying to imagine liberals in the Iraq War run-up talking about Saddam Hussein the way conservatives are talking about Putin, and coming up empty.

AID & COMFORT CONSERVATIVES.

Back after 9/11, when America itself was attacked, conservatives demanded we invade a country that had nothing to do with it and called those of us who said “hey, wait a minute” traitors. 

This memory adds piquancy to the roll call of prominent conservatives who, in the wake of his unconscionable invasion of Ukraine, are loving up Vladimir Putin. Tucker Carlson:

Tulsi Gabbard:

Glenn Greenwald:

Steve Bannon:

And the leader of the opposition:

A former president praising a foreign dictator's invasion. Well, you get old enough, you live to see it all. 

And this is just a partial list. Some of it's based on the longstanding Putinphilia of the American Right, but there's even weirder stuff behind it. Rod Dreher, "mainstream" conservatism's favorite religious maniac, has utterly flipped; while dropping in "I don't approve" every so often (his primitive idea of ass-covering), Dreher explains Putin's invasion: 

So, when I read these days that much-quoted line Vladimir Putin uttered some years back, in which he lamented the tragedy of the USSR’s demise, I think of Trianon and the Hungarians. Though he was a KGB man, I don’t think Putin is a nostalgist for Bolshevism. He’s a nostalgist for Greater Russia — a Russia that was bigger, more powerful, and prouder on the world stage. If I had not come to Hungary last year and learned about Trianon, I am sure I would not have been able to grasp what this means to people whose countries have been dismantled or disempowered by war and historical fate.

Similarly, it has helped me to understand why so many Southerners feel so bitter about the Civil War and its latest iteration — the demonization of Confederate monuments and Southern culture.

So, see, this invasion isn't just imperialism or psychosis -- like Dreher's hero Viktor Orban, Putin just wants a return to the Old Order, which when you think about it is true conservatism. More than that, it reminds Dreher of the nostalgia for the Confederacy in his neck of the woods. Talk about bringing it all back home!

Another aspect of today’s news that we Americans should consider, but rarely do: the role of Ukraine, especially Kiev, in the Russian religious imagination. We simply have nothing to compare it to.

It's religious, people. And we have to stretch our concept of "freedom" and "right and wrong" to accommodate it, because as we all know religion can't have any bad consequences. 

As has also become his habit, Dreher reminds us that the West is rotten and Putin at least has Christian values (i.e., persecutes minorities):

But what about the Western empire today? To my eyes, we are decadent, and ruled by an elite that despises our own history, traditions, and the unwoke deplorables among us. We are ruled by an elite who think of many of us as savages: racist, transphobic bigots who must be brought to heel...

Putin is an authoritarian who uses Western decadence in the same way the Soviet regime did: to justify its own repression. Nevertheless, that decadence really is there!

 I'll only add this bit from a post Dreher put up the night before:

Now, if you think the US can funnel military supplies to the Ukraine resistance without suffering any consequences from Russia, you are being a fool. Russia’s cyberwarriors would devastate American institutions. We are not nearly as strong as we think.

When, as I said, conservatives (including Dreher) were denouncing those of us who opposed America's invasion of another country as un-American, if any citizen had talked about how the United States had better not tangle with Saddam Hussein because we were sure to be "devastated," that person would probably have been spirited away to a black site. Things sure have changed. 

UPDATE. Just wanted to get this in here: 

Now she's blaming it on Hunter Biden. Jesus. I can imagine if she were starving or her family were in danger, but otherwise there's really no excuse for sinking this low except an absolute lack of human decency. 

UPDATE 2. This cannot be an exhaustive list but just wanted to get this fuckface in here:

MR. CONSERVATIVE.

Unlocked here is today’s Roy Edroso Breaks It Down item on the now-traditional lovefest between American conservatives and Vladmir Putin and how I expect it to inform the Ukraine discourse. And since it came out it looks like I called it:

The first of the high-circulation wingnuts to rise fully to Russia’s defense is Candace Owens (“NATO [under direction from the United States] is violating previous agreements and expanding eastward. WE are at fault”). I expect there will be more. (Charlie Kirk is playing with it.) 

I'd say this is an instinct, if not a legacy. The double backflip will be “Russia is justified and it’s Biden’s fault,” as Donald Trump’s Gotta Hand It To ‘Em remarks suggest.

My position is the same as it was in 2003, when I was no fan of Saddam Hussein but didn’t see a reason for the U.S. to fight him. It would never have occurred to me, though, to defend my position by saying what a great, godly, manly leader Saddam was. 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

As fresh as when he cut it 96 years ago.

Busy week! I must be brief. Got two Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebies for you: First, today’s edition on the current high tide in conservative victim-claiming. Sadly this came out before I could include Brother Rod’s latest:

I wonder how many people wander over to Dreher’s tent show, having heard from The New Yorker and David Brooks about how he’s one of America’s real intellectual conservatives, get a load of this kind of thing and do a Duck Tracy Meets Mouseman (“Go… back… in again…”). The latest evidence that liberals are going to tyrannize your godly Republican family is Canada finally clearing the Parking Convoy off the streets of Ottawa, which Dreher describes as “the government crushing dissent under the guise of keeping Canada ‘safe’ from haters and deplorables” and “a prelude of what’s to come here.” When the Liberal Fascists take over you won’t be able to block city streets for days on end! Of course, when protestors were “spilling into the street and blocking traffic” to denounce Donald Trump, Dreher felt very differently about it: “That deranged Latino mob in San Jose just convinced a hell of a lot of people to buy tickets to the Trump train,” he snarled.  And when some red states made it legal to run over protestors when they block traffic -- which was clearly aimed at Black Lives Matter protests -- Dreher never made a peep. Like I say in the REBID item: Their whole identity is victimhood now. 

Second, and relatedly: An analysis of the Canadian Parking Convoy situation by a couple of experts! 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Made an album, couple of EPs, then stopped (except for a brief reunion).
Gotta respect that.

•   I'm just gonna give ya one more Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebie for the week: Trump appointing a Rubber Duck for his Convoy. It was obvious from the start that this Canadian truck fiasco was designed to travel south, and now that Rand Paul, Tucker Carlson and other stateside assholes are pushing it, I’m sure it will -- notwithstanding the cause and the tactics are extremely unpopular among the citizens who are suffering through them. As we’ve seen in Russia, Hungary, and elsewhere, neofascism is an international movement, and the American Bund has been working its chops with the Bundys and other homegrown honky insurgencies for years, knowing they can count on getting away with the kind of shit black and leftwing protestors get beaten and killed for. Like the Bundy’s Marlboro Man shtick, the Manly White Trucker routine will play great on Fox News and inspire legions of dotards to buy more Trump coins. I doubt Merrick Garland has the balls to Koresh these clowns, so get ready for weeks of interstate bullshit before the spring thaw. 

•   As Alex Chilton said, Pretty soon we're all gonna get it/ It's time to buy some stuff on credit. I see a lot of people who should know better saying well, we tried (not really) and going commando on COVID because masks are a drag. I'm used to it from the morons, but the alleged smart guys who are picking it up as a form of popularism -- i.e. the polls show people are getting antsy so abandon ship -- really burn my ass. Steven Thrasher tells 'em off good, but there are too many that need telling, like Yair Rosenberg, who hauls aboard esteemed science historian Steven Shapin to tell us that the Establishment is just not talking the (rightwing) People's language, man, and that's why they love Joe Rogan and think vaccines are poison, so when you think about it this is all the Establishment's fault. Shapin:

It needs a face, it needs PowerPoints, it needs metaphors, it needs analogies. It needs a face of sympathy, and a face that says, “I am caring about you and we are all in this together.” Because America is so divided, it’s very difficult to talk about that. But if you want to ask people to believe something, and to do something based on that belief, you’ve got to show that you care.

Maybe Fauci and those guys should have dressed up like Care Bears or something. I know -- they should have gotten stoned and done a podcast! Jesus Christ. Pretty clearly our Betters have decided there's no hope, and are counting on the high ticket and menu prices of the places they hang out at to protect them from the infected hordes. Oh, well, I've had a full life. 

TODAY IN CAREER ADVANCEMENT.

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. 

Longtime readers will know that I have followed The Man They Call Pantload with interest since 2003, or five short years after his mom and a sploogey blue dress bought him a media career, from his early Bad Boy/Moral Scold act through the publication his magnum opus Liberal Fascism or I Know You Are But What Am I, during years of terrible, terrible columns at National Review, occasionally with fart jokes and catchphrases, and into his half-assed apostasy as he realized his South Park Republican shtick had been rendered useless even among conservatives by the mouthbreathing mobs of Trumperdom. 

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! 

MEMENTO MORON.

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.  

FRIDAY ‘ROUND-THE-HORN.

Are you mesmerized?

•  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.  

WINGNUTS VS. ARTIST, PART 453,409.

I have released to gen pop my Roy Edroso Breaks It Down essay 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. 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

It's good, and sort of new!

•  Got a hot-off-the-press Roy Edroso Breaks It Down issue inspired by the McMinn County Board of Ed pulling Art Spiegelman’s Maus from its schools on the grounds that the rudeness of its depictions of the Holocaust and its fallout are unsuitable to its students. 

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.  

•  Actually there’s a bumper crop of freebies at REBID, including this one about Joe Biden calling that stupid son of a bitch a stupid son of a bitch, so go look around and, if the spirit moves you, subscribe so you can get it all on an ongoing basis. It’s cheap!

•  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.

THE SUPREME COURT NOMINEE IS A NI[CLANG]!

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:

Screenshotted here, because Shapiro's careerism coach told him to delete it.  Others among the brethren are also going for the reverse-racism angle (“I mean, what kind of qualification is that, being a Black woman?” -- Maria Bartiromo).  But then there's Tucker Carlson laughing that Biden should nominate “George Floyd’s sister,” and Half-Pint Shapiro suggesting Cardi B -- straight-up old-school T-bone-steaks-and-Cadillacs stuff, and plenty more where it came from.

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. 

(ALMOST) NO COMMENT.

GG's wrongness factor has officially gone off the charts. Next he's gonna tell us that a hot dog is a sandwich. 

UPDATE. Here's how StupidSonofaBitch-gate should have gone down. It's not too late! As for GG and that lot, commenter redoubtagain makes an excellent point: I don't recall them saying anything when Trump threw Jorge Ramos out of a press conference. 

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.  

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

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. 

•  Busy day, not much time to do more than pass you some Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebies! Here's one on Monday's crop of bizarre rightwing tributes to Martin Luther King, and another with the minutes of a development meeting of the University of Austin Board of Advisors Starring Wari Beiss.  That's just two of the five weekly installments -- if you don't subscribe (cheap!) you're missing out!