Tag: MAGA

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Politics Politics Feature

The Bleat Goes On

A widely disputed graph posted by Lee Mills (Photo: ZeroHedge)

If, in the aftermath of a decisive (if narrow) victory for Donald Trump in the just concluded presidential election, anybody expected Republican-minded folks to put aside their “stop-the-steal” concerns from 2020, that was a premature hope.

It turns out that numerous believers in a stolen 2020 election still believe in it, and a fairly significant controversy regarding the matter continues to fester on social media.

One local believer is former Shelby County Republican chairman Lee Mills, who has carried on a brisk online conversation about it on Facebook.

“Now that it’s officially over,” Mills wrote on his page last week, “can we revisit 2020 for a moment?”

Whereupon he reproduced a dubiously sourced bar graph that’s been making the rounds in MAGA circles.

Crude and simplistic, employing blue and red bars, respectively, to indicate Democratic and Republican vote totals, it purports to compare the results for both parties in the presidential elections of 2012, 2016, 2020, and 2024. Strikingly, it seems to show the Democratic vote holding to virtually identical levels in 2012, 2016, and 2024, while the Republican vote is represented graphically as steadily rising through the respective campaign years, finally out-distancing the Democratic vote total this year.

The year 2020 is seen as an anomaly, with the blue bar representing the Democratic vote vaulting high above the red bar representing the GOP presidential total. Both bars show an increase over previous years. 

The blue bar is depicted as coming back to “normal” for 2024. The red bar is somewhat lower as well.

Mills feels emboldened to comment: “This is a rhetorical question, but who can explain this anomaly?”

And he supplies some numbers, after a fashion. “So l’m not misconstrued by the Trump haters: The 2020 election saw a huge turnout spike — 159 million people voted, with Democrats getting nearly 80 million votes, which is a massive 23% jump from previous years. Statistically, that’s a total outlier. 

“A big factor was the sudden expansion of mail-in voting, which went from 21 percent in 2016 to 46 percent in 2020.

“Here’s the issue: A lot of these changes were made by unelected officials, bypassing the state legislatures. When you change the rules to allow massive non-in-person voting [sic], it opens the door for fraud to run rampant. 

“While this doesn’t flat-out prove fraud, it definitely raises red flags about how secure the process was with all these last-minute changes.”

Response on Facebook was forthcoming. William Albert Mannecke agreed: “They learned to cheat on an industrial level.”

As did Ellen Ferrara. “They stole 2020, 100 percent.”

Randy Higdon probed a little further: “We will find out he [presumably Trump] won all 50 states. Only states she [Kamala Harris] won were ones that didn’t require voter ID. Then this goes back to 2020. Many, many heads are gonna roll.”

But a demurrer would come from Cole Perry, a local statistician with both solidly Republican bona fides and a well-earned reputation for accurate analyses of election results: “Harris is going to end up with somewhere near 76.5 million votes, and Trump will end up [with] close to 78.5 million. That’s almost exactly the same total turnout as 2020. If they really did cheat in 2020, why did they suddenly forget how to do it?”  

A telling point. Another one is this, apropos the effects, such as it was, of write-in votes, which were disparaged by a suspicious Trump in 2020, the Covid year, but actively encouraged by him for his supporters in 2024.

That might be as good an explanation as any for the supposed “anomaly” of the 2020 electoral outcome. 

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

Captain Chaos

Donald J. Trump (Photo: Gints Ivuskans | Dreamstime.com)

For me, Donald J. Trump died as a public figure in November 2015, the day he mocked a reporter for a physical disability. During a campaign rally. No one that morally bankrupt — clearly with an empathy tank running on empty — belongs in a CEO’s office, much less the White House. Everything that’s happened around Trump over the nine years since has been kicking a dead horse. And there’s not room on this page to review the impeachments (multiple), indictments (multiple), and improprieties (myriad) that make Trump the most dangerous candidate for president in this country’s history.

Yet here we are. A lying, racist felon is the best the Republican Party can do. And if seven “battleground” states shake down in Trump’s electoral-college favor, the 45th president of the United States will become the 47th. Should he win, make note, Donald Trump will be inaugurated on Martin Luther King Day next January. Thinking back to the public mocking of that reporter, such a coincidence is unsettling and appalling to consider. 

The question that keeps me in twists: Why? In the age of #MeToo, how has a man like Trump managed not to get canceled? What kind of standard do men see in him? And how can a solitary woman consider him an agent for their interests? The closest I’ve come to an answer: They love to break things.

Millions of Americans today don’t just dislike organized federal government, they resent it. The three branches our founding fathers drew up create a structure that has, in the minds of millions, restricted their freedoms instead of creating those freedoms in the first place. (Challenge a Trump supporter to name the three branches. It’s a cringe-worthy bar trick.) After generations of one Democrat after another, then one Republican after another, simply steering the federal ship forward — fair weather or foul — millions of Americans want that ship at least rocked, if not sunk. Donald Trump is Captain Chaos. (My apologies to the late Dom DeLuise and a very fun character in The Cannonball Run.) 

The trouble with chaos in our system, though, is that people get hurt. And people die. Whether it’s outlawing abortion, dividing immigrant families at the border, or slicing FEMA funding, human beings get caught in Trump’s ongoing performance art. (Ask the Republican nominee what FEMA stands for and wait for the head tilt.) And when he takes the lies up a notch — “They’re eating the dogs!” — human beings become targets for hate and violence. Those millions of Americans supporting Trump feel they’ve been targeted long enough. It’s time to target them. Time to target others. And yes, it’s pure racism. If you deny the notion that you’re racist, but you support a racist candidate for public office, guess what?

What would happen in a second Trump presidency? I have a prediction: Within a year of resuming office, Trump would step down or “retire.” (He’d never use the word “resign.” That suggests quitting, and he’s no loser.) This is a man who was incompetent on his best day as president and now shows decline in his faculties and whatever might have passed for mental acuity. Sharks, batteries, and Pennsylvania windmills. Those behind Project 2025 will find a way to make President Vance America’s new problem. Stormy seas be damned.

I remain a believer in decency, and I feel like our better instincts as a people will prevail. But over the last nine years I’ve learned how long, in fact, it will take to achieve that form of normalcy, how challenging it is to go from “us” and “them” to “we.” A con man managed to convert a political party into a cult, here in 21st century America. Until a liar’s again called a liar, tension will be part of this country’s political oxygen. And yes, so will chaos. 

Frank Murtaugh is the managing editor of Memphis Magazine. He writes the columns “From My Seat” and “Tiger Blue” for the Flyer.

Categories
At Large Opinion

A New Forecast

Another day begins. I make a lovingly handcrafted cortado on my $450 espresso machine and pull up a chair in my all-electric kitchen with its artisanal subway tile and granite countertops. I take a sip. Mmm, frothy and smooth. Life is lovely. I open the New York Times app on my new iPhone 16 Pro, and like all good liberal elites, I play Wordle (got it in three, natch), the Mini Crossword, and Connections. 

Morning brain exercises done, I scan the weekly forecast on my weather app before checking in with headquarters. Things look great for Memphis and most of the South for the next few days — sunny and mild — and I’m guessing our leaders in the Democrat Weather Manipulation System (DWMS) will let it stay that way, at least, for now. We don’t want to raise any more suspicions, especially since so many MAGAs appear to be catching on to us. 

Fortunately for us, it’s too late for them to do much about it. We kicked their clueless butts big-time a couple weeks ago with hurricanes Helene and Milton, and they never saw it coming, except for that cursed Marjorie Taylor Greene. She’s been on the case ever since we used our space lasers to ignite the California wildfires a few years back. Thankfully, we’ve managed to marginalize her enough — using our allies in the liberal media — that most Americans still think she’s a moron. Mission accomplished! So far. 

We can’t afford to get complacent, though. Taking control of the weather was a tremendous feat, but there’s only so much bad weather you can inflict on red states before everyone figures it out. It all comes down to getting Comrade Kamala into office. Once that’s done, then we’ll be free to establish the rest of our agenda. Mwah-ha-ha! 

First, we’ll invite brown- and black-skinned countries to send us all the inmates in their prisons. Then we’ll give them weapons and all the pets they can eat as soon as they cross the open border. Have fun, MAGA-troids.

Once that’s done, we’ll mandate that all cars and trucks be electric-powered and limit them to a 50-mile limit. Boats will have to use electric batteries that will be so large they won’t be able to float, thereby exposing passengers to sharks. Let’s see you try that MAGA boat parade now, you nimrods.  

Then, of course, federal agents of the Deep State will begin confiscating all gas stoves and requiring that kitchen appliances be run on solar power. If it’s a cloudy day, no cooking for you, Bubba! Have a salad. It’s better for you anyway. Airplanes will also be required to use solar power. Better stay above the clouds if weather moves in. Just sayin’. 

And we progressives will begin quickly implementing our Big Wind initiative by requiring utilities use only windmills to power our homes. Sure, when the wind’s not blowing, you won’t be able to watch TV, but so what? Read a book, preferably one by Ellen DeGeneres or Oprah Winfrey. Or, if you’re really bored, go out to the nearest windmill and pick up some dead eagles. They taste like chicken. 

Okay, you’ve probably figured out by now that I’m being sarcastic, riffing on the absurd fears being pushed by Republican candidates — from the top of the ticket to the bottom — during the current campaign. Enough humor. Here’s what they’re really afraid of:

That Democrats will pass a law outlawing gerrymandering, so that politicians can’t geographically design their districts and stay in office indefinitely. That Democrats will ban assault weapons and begin enacting real gun reform. That Democrats will expand the Supreme Court to 13 justices, establish an enforceable code of judicial ethics, and install 15-year term limits. That Democrats will overturn Citizens United, the decision that allowed big money into our politics. That Democrats will recognize that climate change is real and institute substantive environmental protections. That a Democratic president will appoint an attorney general that actually goes after the former president for his crimes. And finally, that Democrats will guarantee a woman’s right to choose what she does with her own body.

That’s it. That’s what they fear. Well, that, and the fact that we now control the weather. Mwah-ha-ha! Have a nice day. For now. Heh. 

Categories
At Large Opinion

A New Season

Photo: Bruce VanWyngarden

“All the months are crude experiments,
out of which the perfect September is made.” — Virginia Woolf

We began September in Memphis with our annual holiday. No, not Labor Day. Sure, we celebrate that, but so does the rest of the country. I’m talking about the fact that here in the Bluff City we have in recent years begun celebrating “901 Day” on September 1st, a riff on our 901 area code. It’s grown to include a great many celebrations around town, from Beale Street to breweries to parks and music venues. One presumes a good time was had by all this year, even if there was a bit of intermittent rain to dodge. 

September also marks the end of summer here in the 901. Even though we’re still a few weeks away from the true end of the heat, the signs of autumn are there if you look. On my morning walk in the Old Forest of Overton Park on Monday, leaves were beginning to fill the wooded trails, wet and soft underfoot — the gold palms of the tulip poplars, the brown-fingered oak fall — their presence no doubt triggered by the recent dry spell, but unmistakable harbingers of the change to come, nonetheless. 

Summer’s end always brings mixed feelings. And the seasons change faster now, or so it seems as I blossom into codger-hood. But everything is faster for everybody these days. According to folks who study such things, we’re wiring ourselves that way. I listened to a podcast last week about the decline of the human attention span. The average person checks the internet more than 100 times a day — scanning emails, various websites, news sources, and social media feeds. I’ve never counted, but I suspect I’m in that neighborhood, at least. 

I’m trying to be conscious about my internet addiction, but it’s so difficult, especially when the source of our distraction — our phone — is always close at hand. Looking around the optometrist’s office the other day, I noted there were 19 people, 18 of whom were looking at their phone. The other guy was probably blind.

The problem is that we’ve learned that there is always a reward of sorts waiting for us when we swipe open our dinging little pocket pals: “likes” on our social media posts, a fresh email from a friend, a nudge from our favorite news app, a game to finish, and, of course, the sweet, cocaine-like buzz of confirmation bias and righteous indignation.

We progressives savor the latest absurdities from MAGA-land like gooey chocolate-chip cookies, fresh from the oven: Did you read that Donald Trump changed his stance on abortion four times in 48 hours? Did you see that he reposted vile, misogynistic, sexual tweets about Kamala Harris and Hillary Clinton?! Did you read that he had the nerve to announce that his administration will be the “greatest ever” for women?! OMG!

And then there’s Trump’s running mate, J.D. Vance. What a piece of anti-feminine work this guy is. Seldom does a day pass when he is not saying something more Neanderthal-ish about women than he did the day before. The creepy would-be veep has made it clear, over and over again, that he thinks women are put here on Earth only to have children until they can’t anymore. And when they reach menopause, their role is to help raise their grandchildren. It’s their biological destiny, don’t you know? Childless career women are frustrated and angry because “they passed the biological period when it was possible to have children.” They are “miserable people who have no real value system,” and “struggle to find meaning in their lives.” Also, they have cats. Also, childless people shouldn’t be allowed to be teachers. 

And on it goes, day after day. Thirty days hath September, and 31 hath October, and five hath November until the Day of Reckoning. “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,” wrote English playwright William Congreve in 1697. There’s a reason that saying has stayed in the English language lexicon for 327 years, and methinks Donald Trump and J.D. Vance and the rest of their clueless GOP enablers are about to find out why. 

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At Large Opinion

Commie!

Mikhail Gorbachev in 1992 (Photo: Konstantin Gushcha | Dreamstime)

Look, comrades, I grew up at a time in this country when the thing we kids were taught to fear more than anything else in our little Midwestern lives was COMMUNISM! 

Communist Russia — the USSR — was the big, scary enemy, a country led by authoritarian leaders like Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev, who were attempting to take over the world and destroy democracy and the American way of life. They were the commies, the pinkos, the red menace — a nuclear-armed adversary who was also our rival in space, with their cursed Sputnik satellites. The Russians were so bold they even propped up Fidel Castro in a communist state 90 miles away from Miami. Russia, we were told by our teachers and parents, was determined to force everyone in the world to live in a commune and toil under communism, a fate presumably worse than death. 

In our schools, we had two kinds of drills: fire drills, in which at the sound of a long bell, every student high-tailed it “single file” down the stairs and out the doors onto the schoolyard lawn, goose-assing and laughing all the way. (If you were lucky, you attended a school that had one of those cool fire-escape slides out a third-story window, which livened up the process.) But the real serious stuff took place during the air-raid drills, where, at the sound of a keening siren, we had to “duck and cover” under our desks, which, as everyone knows, will protect you against nuclear holocaust. Mainly, of course, it just scared the crap out of us and traumatized a couple generations.

This went on through the 1980s, at which point, President Reagan had turned standing up to Russia into performance art (“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”). It turned out to be a surprisingly effective gambit, or at the worst, Reagan’s timing was spot-on. The Soviet Union’s economy was collapsing during the 1980s, leading to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and lending a measure of stature to Reagan’s latter years in office.

If there was one benefit of this strange, decades-long international game of Russian roulette, it was the fact that we were actually taught what communism is. We learned most of Karl Marx’s greatest one-liners, including the scariest one: “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs,” which we Americans were taught to see as the mantra of a system that destroyed ambition and the drive to succeed that American capitalism was built upon. I think that’s simplistic, but it’s also mostly true. Living on the dole is living on the dole. All communism does is narrow economic opportunity to oligarchs. Everyone else? Pass the beans and borscht and keep your head down, comrade.

The fact is that communism has proven to be a horrible system of government, one that concentrates power under an authoritarian rule, censors books and newspapers, offers only rudimentary education for the poor, discriminates on the basis of gender and race, and controls healthcare. In communist countries, posters of the authoritarian Dear Leader are plastered on every open space. Flags with his image are flown in every public square. 

That’s why it seems so absurd to me to hear MAGA types — and Donald Trump himself — call Kamala Harris and Democrats “communists.” It sounds like you’re being tough when you call someone a communist, but they literally appear to have no idea what a communist is. 

Think of the two major American political parties: When it comes to a cult of personality, one that features posters of Dear Leader, flags, religious iconography, clothes, and even tattoos, which party comes to mind? Which party has come out in support of banning books? Which party wants to give public tax dollars to private schools? Which party openly demonizes LGBTQ Americans and people of color? Which party wants to centralize power and give it to an authoritarian who will “be a dictator on day one”? Which party wants to control the healthcare decisions of the country’s females? Which party literally rejected democracy in 2020? 

If your answer to those questions is anything other than the Republican Party, you’ve gone down into a scary rabbit hole, a place where the light of the obvious won’t penetrate. It’s like you’re in a permanent duck-and-cover drill. 

Categories
At Large Opinion

Paris Is Smirking

Photo: Romolo Tavani | Dreamstime.com

“Last night’s mockery of the Last Supper was shocking and insulting to Christian people around the world who watched the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games. The war on our faith and traditional values knows no bounds today. But we know that truth and virtue will always prevail.”

That was Speaker of the House (and cosplaying Christian) Mike Johnson responding to the Paris Olympics’ opening ceremony, which featured drag queens and maybe a naked Jesus? I dunno. To be outraged, you really had to be paying close attention, and I wasn’t. But Johnson wasn’t alone in his outrage. Here is a sampling of the reactions on X from folks proclaiming themselves Christians:

“A complete mockery of Christianity. This was by far the most satanic and disgusting ceremony I have ever seen. Do not defy Jesus Christ.”

“The radical left is a greater threat than Iran, China, or Russia will ever be to the United States.”

“A serious POTUS would send our athletes home.”

It went on for two or three days. Elon Musk (who is a Christian now?) unfollowed the Olympics account on X. That will show them.

But here’s my favorite reaction: “France literally gathered its planners and made a list of EVERYTHING that would get under the skin of conservatives and said, ‘Let’s open with ALL of it!’”

To be fair, this last guy was actually onto something. As someone who is married to a French woman and who has spent a lot of time with her family and friends, I can say, without fear of contradiction, that that is precisely how the French would have approached this project. They love pissing off the unsophisticated, tightly wound knobs of the world, i.e. MAGA-Americans.

Don’t believe me? Here’s the artistic director of the opening festivities, Thomas Jolly: “We wanted to include everyone, as simple as that,” he said. “In France, we have freedom of creation, artistic freedom. We are lucky in France to live in a free country. I didn’t have any specific messages that I wanted to deliver. In France, we are a republic; we have the right to love whom we want, we have the right not to be worshippers, we have a lot of rights in France, and this is what I wanted to convey.”

And it makes the joke even funnier when those who are outraged are, well, just ignorant fools. The opening ceremony had nothing to do with Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper but was intended to be a (very) loose recreation of The Feast of the Gods, a 17th-century painting by Dutch artist Jan Hermansz van Bijlert that hangs in the Magnin Museum, in Dijon, France. The painting depicts an assembly of Greek gods, including Dionysus, on Mount Olympus for a banquet to celebrate the marriage of Thetis and Peleus. So no Jesus, no blasphemy, unless you think dressing in drag is satanic, in which case, well, I can’t help you. 

But let’s be clear: There is no war on Christianity. You’re not a victim. You are a member of the U.S.’s largest religious denomination, many times over. It’s also the largest denomination in France. You’re going to be fine. It’s all a matter of perspective: You’re outraged that children were involved in the opening ceremonies. The French, conversely, are outraged that guns are the number-one killer of children in America.

You’re appalled by a headless Marie Antoinette, Lady Gaga, and Celine Dion. The French (and a lot of Americans) were appalled by the appearances of Kid Rock, Amber Rose, Hulk Hogan, and other creeps at the GOP convention two weeks ago. 

You’re upset because you refuse to believe that the French weren’t intentionally blaspheming Jesus Christ and the Last Supper. Yet I’m seeing no outrage from MAGA types over the countless images circulating of Donald Trump being held from behind by a loving blonde Jesus, or even the one that came from a campaign source via email yesterday, of Donald Trump literally hanging on the cross. His loin cloth is an American flag, and Melania is kneeling at his feet. It’s worth a google to see it, if only just to show that blasphemy, like art, is in the eye of the beholder. 

Categories
At Large Opinion

The Devil to Pay

Photo: Adrienne Wallace | Dreamstime.com

We’re hearing a lot about God in politics lately. Maybe not your god, especially if you’re Muslim or Buddhist or Jewish or, I don’t know, Episcopalian. No, the god that’s being shoved into our faces by the United MAGA Church is the American fundamentalist Christian god, the one who doesn’t approve of unmarried sex, homosexuals, abortion, interracial marriage, or even contraception. This god is a real hard-ass, and the MAGAs have attached themselves to him like a barnacle on a tugboat. (We’ll assume His pronoun is Him.)

This god was invented in backwoods American churches, where fast-talking evangelists did their best to guilt their flocks into obeisance and into donating money to “the church” before seducing the prettiest 15-year-old in the congregation and running off to dupe the next group of suckers.

As is often the case with successful small businesses in America, that model got leveraged and eventually morphed into the big mega-churches whose preachers fly private jets, live on palatial estates, and have television shows. The payoff is bigger but the game is the same — guilt and grift: “You poor schmucks are going to fry in eternal hellfire FOREVER if you don’t stop sinning. Here’s a list of stuff that’s bad. Don’t do any of it, even if most of it feels good. Like sex. Sex is really bad unless you’re heterosexually married and only doing it to have babies. Did I mention you need to send me money so we can stop all these other schmucks from sinning? In the name of JAYSUS, amen!” Millions of idiots buy into this.

All of this hustle is theoretically based on Christianity, which, applied properly, is a respectable religion, based on the life and example of one Jesus Christ of Nazareth, a poor man who lived in the Middle East a couple thousand years ago, and who, as far as I’m aware, never asked for money or said a word about abortion, guns, contraception, interracial marriage, or white supremacy (which is a good thing, since Jesus wasn’t white).

Mainly, as I recall from my Methodist raising, Jesus was against materialism (money-changers), for forgiveness — and for treating our fellow humans as we ourselves would like to be treated. If we did this, I was taught, we’d go to Heaven, where we’d see all the people in our lives again and hang out with them forever (which was a concept I spent many a night in my youth trying to get my head around).

But any religion is subject to perversion of its core beliefs, whether in the pursuit of money, power, or both. And make no mistake, nationalistic Evangelicalism is a perversion of Christianity. It has literally nothing to do with the teachings of Jesus. It’s a bizarre cult that believes a 10-year-old should be forced to carry a rapist’s baby to term, that everyone should carry guns, and whose political representatives are now passing laws prohibiting women from crossing a state line to get a medical procedure they disapprove of.

This Christian Taliban thinking led all but eight Republicans in Congress to vote last week against a bill guaranteeing the right to contraception. Think about it: Ninety percent of Congressional Republicans literally voted against guaranteeing people the right to buy condoms.

Also, last week: Georgia Congress-beast Marjorie Taylor Greene said on television: “We need to be the party of nationalism. I say it proudly. I’m a Christian Nationalist!” So were the Nazis, Marge.

Colorado Congress-gun Lauren Boebert said, “We need to get over this idea of the separation of church and state, because we’re a Christian nation.” The Founding Fathers would be surprised to learn that, LB.

And there was Florida Congress-putz Matt Gaetz, who offered the novel theory that women demanding abortion rights shouldn’t worry “because they’re all 5’2” and 300 pounds and no one’s going to want to impregnate them.” So, only hot chicks get abortion rights?

How deep does this crazy go? And more important, how far do we let these dangerous freaks go before we stand up and vote-shame them back into the guano-glutted bat-caves from whence they came? If we don’t take these people seriously — right now — we will regret it for the rest of our lives. They’ve gotten a taste of power (and money) and now they’re coming for our freedoms.

Categories
At Large Opinion

Owned: The MAGAs Have Won

Anthony Fauci

My fellow liberals, it is time to face up to the simple truth: The MAGAs have won. They’ve seen through our charade. The game is up. They have owned the libs.

For 18 months, we’ve attempted to fool them into thinking COVID-19 was real, and for 18 months they’ve resisted. We tried to convince them it was a deadly disease and that only a vaccine would stop it and save all of us from a plague of sickness and death. We reassured them that the vaccine didn’t cause birth defects or contain a microchip, but they were too smart for us. We told them over and over again how important it was to wear a mask, but they saw that scam for what it really was: just another way for us to take away their freedom.

We tried everything: scientific “evidence” from the Centers for Disease Control, terrifying mortality statistics, scary maps of infected areas in red states, tearful and heartfelt testimonies from overworked healthcare providers, and even interviews with dying people saying they wished they’d taken the vaccine. None of it worked. The MAGAs saw through it all like cheap plastic wrap. All that “news” about the vaccine being 90 percent effective, all those crisis actors in nurse uniforms, even “Dr. Fauci” — it was all in vain. (In retrospect, having Fauci rhyme with “ouchy” was a bad move.) 

They didn’t believe us when we told them 35 million unvaccinated (and counting) Americans had gotten COVID. Or when we said more than 625,000 Americans had died from the disease. Or when we pointed out how quickly the disease receded once we started getting millions of Americans vaccinated in January of this year. Or when we tried to explain that there was a new strain that is about to make us go through pandemic hell all over again if we don’t get 70 percent of us vaccinated.

They knew better. Of course, they had help. Republican Party leaders and their friends at Fox News and elsewhere in the right-wing media caught on to the liberal hustle years ago — our secret plan to let Black and brown and queer people take over and turn the country communist and give everybody free healthcare and college tuition. They knew COVID was another liberal hoax, just like climate change, and they raised the alarm.

Now the gory “statistics” on COVID are rising again, but the Republicans and their faithful base are hip to our scam. They’ve figured out it’s just more fake news, another attempt to give the evil communist Democrat Joe Biden more power over the lives of real Americans. 

GOP governors in Texas, Mississippi, Missouri, Florida, and elsewhere in Trumplandia are standing strong, signing executive orders banning schools, businesses, and local governments from issuing mask mandates or vaccine requirements. The courageous Ron DeSantis of Florida, whose state was averaging more new infections a day than the entire country of France last week (if you believe those “statistics”), issued the following statement on Friday while banning mask mandates for schools: “For more than a year our freedom has been under a constant assault by the radical left. Now they’re coming for your freedom again.”

It’s time for liberals to admit defeat. MAGAs and others are not going to take the vaccine or wear masks, and there is simply nothing we can do about it. We tried to take away their freedom but they stopped us. 

Perhaps it would help if we started to accept that the vaccine is like a comfort blanket for us liberals. We get it because it makes us feel safer. And since we’re not hurting anybody by getting that silly jab, let’s keep doing it. In fact, if the Republicans don’t want it, maybe we can start using the country’s remaining vaccine supply for boosters for us snow-flakey creatures who would take some solace from it. 

And I think we liberals should keep wearing masks in public indoor spaces for a while longer. It’ll be a cool way for us to recognize each other. 

That and the fact that we’re not dying on a ventilator. 

Categories
Fly On The Wall Blog Opinion

MAGA Bro Pens Love Letter to MAGA CAP: Dammit Gannett

“Nonpartisan” and “fair and balanced” journalism sound like great ideas. But they probably aren’t what you think they are. They’ve been made to sound like best practices for ethical news gathering. But historically these ideas are artifacts of technology and capitalism.

I bring this stuff up because getting beyond all the usual ideological mess and straight bullshit like this tone-deaf nonsense from The Tennessean, is crucial to understanding why “writer and social media personality” Ryan Moore’s weird love letter to his Make America Great Again (MAGA) hat appeared in Gannett newspapers including The Commercial Appeal.

A screen shot/excerpt from The Commercial Appeal.

America’s partisan-funded press came skidding to a halt in the last quarter of the 19th century when new, high-speed printing made it possible for newspapers with enough up-front investment capital to distribute their products farther than ever before. Lots of attention is paid to the idea that “a biased news medium is bad for a self-governing people.” But the thing is, at scale, it was also bad for business. Politically neutral papers could reach bigger markets becoming valuable to local interests and emerging national brands wanting less partisan places to advertise.  Economic realities forged the new journalistic ideals regarding what makes appropriate news content, not idealistic struggles for better information and freer reporting. And they still do.

A similar technological disruption bent the modern media mythos away from big-market “objectivity” toward a more useful narrative for an exploded economy: “fair and balanced.” This works in a crowded field because you can’t know the truth until you’ve heard every [hardline ideological] side, right?  When cable news blew up and America went from having only three major news networks to having so many choices you could no longer get by without a remote control, the basic idea of what constitutes respectable market shares reduced considerably. Niche marketing and partisan reporting made sense again. This is where Fox News comes from and with it the logical fallacy that all tits require right-wing tats. 

So what does any of this have to do with Gannett’s MAGA-Man-crush?

Like I’ve said before, markets determine content and Tennessee remains a solid red patch on the political map. Gannett’s earnings are in the shitter and its products, deformed as they are by a loss of local autonomy and investment, waste like plague victims. So much reporting and media opinion following the infamous MAGA-Teen‘s 15-minutes in the barrel, cast MAGA caps in a bad light, and judging by the color of those electoral maps I’ve linked above, that’s the favored headgear of many if not most Tennesseans. In other words, the news smacked lots of Gannett’s subscribers and potential subscribers right across the brim. 

Market served. “Tat” accomplished.

Moore’s editorial is mostly familiar rhetoric about folks needing to be respectful of other folks and judging people by the content of their character, not the color of their stupid, racist hats. I could do a whole post on irony and the character of Moore’s content, but that’s not my purpose.

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This stuff’s candy — bulked up by outrage-shares and sweetened with hate-clicks.
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If serving readers/viewers/listeners is important it’s probably not a good idea for news-oriented media to be in the business of promoting standard, white-male victimization narratives. If media serves a public good it’s also probably a bad idea to participate in softening symbols that, regardless of what secret, special things they may mean to social media personalities, are also, inarguably, touchstones for white supremacists.

But c’mon! From a commercial POV this stuff’s candy — bulked up by outrage-shares and sweetened with hate-clicks. Win-win for everybody! Unless the consumer was looking for information instead of a daily rise, in which case, not so much there.

Nevertheless, the story went big opening Moore’s complaint up to a wider dialogue.

Top comment, Newsweek

I’ll conclude my rant by answering some rage-posts I’ve seen in my social media feed from folks justifiably wondering why MAGA-bro Moore is fronting all over their social media feeds. The real question is, why are you sharing it? And are you ready for more?

It’s just business; thanks for yours.