Time for a Grab Bag - The Ides of March edition

This morning, I slept late (for me) and my first opening of the news app brought me a cornucopia of awfulness. The NY Times delivered three instant fuckers to my feed.

Without further ado, let's get at it:

#1 - What the fuck is the First Amendment?

Above the fold on today's Times was this gem:

The FCC Chair is not a smart man. But he is a loyal one. And he loooooves to take the clue from the tangerine tyrant (and in this case, the boozy breathed Secdrunk Hegseth) and to then threaten the media franchises.

In this case, he seems to be keying on the rant by Kegseth on Friday the 13th about how all the headlines were mean, and misrepresenting their totally awesome pyrotechnics, and how could they say that Iran was actually inflicting any harm.

Of course, that got the black-handed Trump with the fungal patch on his neck to bleat something unhinged on his Temu/Shein social media site, and that woke Carr the fuck up.

Brendan Carr, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, threatened on Saturday to revoke broadcasters’ licenses over their coverage of the war with Iran, his latest move in a campaign to stomp out what he sees as liberal bias in broadcasts.

As the war entered its third week, Mr. Carr accused broadcasters of “running hoaxes and news distortions” in a social media post and warned them to “correct course before their license renewals come up.”

“Broadcasters must operate in the public interest, and they will lose their licenses if they do not,” he said.

I guess in my high school, mandated civics class, the time we spent studying and understanding the first amendment of the US Constitution were for naught, because we didn't have access to the MAGAfied constitution.

My bad.

But then you have what Kegseth said on Friday that he couldn't wait until David Ellison took over CNN and put a stop to all the accurate reporting.

Poor widdle baby...

Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, said on Friday that he was looking forward to CNN being controlled by the billionaire David Ellison and implied that the channel’s journalism would improve under new leadership.

“The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better,” he said during a briefing at the Pentagon.

'Murica, fuck yeah. Amirite?

This will not go unchallenged:

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which advocates for free-speech rights, said in a statement that Mr. Carr’s tenure as F.C.C. chairman “has been marked by his shameless willingness to bully and threaten our free press.” It called his latest post “shocking — and dangerous.”

Alas, that might come too late.

#2 - The future of the Republican Party

I am going to admit that I do like reading Michelle Goldberg on the Times opinion area. She's pretty fair (but she leans left), and someone who I read a lot because of her perspective on Israel and antisemitism.

But this missive is eye-opening.

Before I get into it, it is necessary to talk about the Groypers. This is the movement driven largely by acolytes of Nick Fuentes, an America First "purist" who just rattles off the worst antisemitism, racist screeds, and is unapologetic in his rhetoric.

The first "Groyper" candidate is James Fishback, a real piece of work, running for the Governor of Florida (this is the validation of the "Florida Man" meme).

Us normal people read something about Fuentes, or Fishback, and recoil in horror, that anyone can be so filled with hate wading in the cess-pool of human filth. Occasionally, the Substack algorithm will try to rotate one of these trash-mongers into your feed (not today Satan).

But when you realize that there's a full ecosystem of this putrid, festering pond-scum, and that they are beginning to get a cohesive coalition, you need to get scared.

Slight and bespectacled, Fishback has a geeky charisma and the verbal dexterity of a former competitive high school debater. His policies are a mishmash of extreme conservatism and economic progressivism; nationalism tinged with socialism, if you will. He believes that Florida’s gun laws are too strict, its abortion laws are too lax and its public teacher pay is too low. He’s called for a 50 percent sin tax on OnlyFans creators and $10,000 grants to high-performing high school graduates to buy homes or start businesses. Though he’s the son of an immigrant — his mother is Colombian — he wants a total immigration moratorium. (emphasis mine)

That Florida gun laws being too strict makes me chuckle. And yes, this dude is really railing on all those "Only Fans" women who are profiting on subs from sad lonely young men.[1]

But the fact that young men in particular are swarming to this garbage is a problem. A big problem.

You hear the pundit class try to dance around this with things like "well, young men are the least likely to vote cohort", but the reality is that Trump activated these people bigly, and while their vote went MAGA last time, there is a belief that MAGA betrayed them by not going fully in on their issues (MAGA is the culimation of a grievience driven politics, and it will not end when Trump shuffles off this mortal coil).

From Ms. Goldberg:

Fuentes’s ideology is a sneering, adolescent sort of Nazism. As he said on his podcast last year: “Jews are running society. Women need to shut the [expletive] up. Blacks need to be imprisoned for the most part.” In Fishback, Fuentes’s followers — often known as groypers — have a candidate who is serious about representing them.

It turns out that there are a lot of Gen Z men who have been waiting for a candidate like Fishback to come along. The Jacksonville event was hosted by the Greater Intracoastal Republican Club, which regularly brings Republican candidates to speak. The group’s president, Laura Collins, seemed somewhat amazed by the turnout. “I was surprised to have so many young people,” she told me. “This is the most people that we’ve had for any candidate.”

This is the danger, the long term legacy of MAGA, and the end state from 50 years of "New Right" movement conservativism, and it is not going to be easy to fix. I do recommend that you read it all for a solid analysis.

The net-net is that Fishback ain't gonna be governor, but it is merely a matter of time before the Tea-Party - MAGA factions evolve into Groyperism.

Chilling.

#3 - David French, again

I know that many of my readers actually like Mr. French, and I could almost get on board with that, because he seems (at times) to be rational for an evangelical Christian. We will always disagree on abortion, and his crusades that religious speech is somehow more important that anything else (he's a lawyer who spent much of his public career pushing for religious freedom (I will concede that it was all religious beliefs, not just his sectarian flavor of Southern Baptists).

In this one, he laments about the hyper-polarization of the American society. He spends a lot of effort to make this a "both sides" issue, completely ignoring that it was his tribe, Republicans, that began the demonification of their opponents of being evil.

We’ve known for a long time that America is deeply polarized, and we’ve known the problem is only getting worse. For example, in a 2022 survey, Pew found that large shares of Democrats and Republicans thought of each other as close-minded, dishonest, immoral and unintelligent, and the measurements were getting worse every year.

Ok, I am sure I could ask ChatGPT for a more detailed review of the timeline, but it would point out a few key points:

1. 1960's, Civil Rights, and the mass outflow of Democrats from the south to the open arms of the Republicans as the parties re-sorted to themselves until the end of the Carter administration
2. The rise of the "Culture Wars", driven by Reagan, his embrace of and the political awakening of the Evangelical Christians. Issues like abortion, religion, and most poignantly feminism became the fulcrums of leverage.
3. The repeal of the Fairness Doctrine (1987 - thanks Reagan...) led to the explosion of partisan (almost exclusively right wing - think Rush Limbaugh) radio, and paved the way for cable news segmentation.
4. The Gingrich revolution. Newton was the first to openly call Democrats illegitimate or corrupt, and that was the central pivot to the partisan world we are in (but it was not the origin of it, the Republicans were well on the way to this long before).
5. The election of Obama. That really broke a large part of the national fabric, and gave rise to the tea party, that softened the electorate for the rise ofd Trump and where we are today.

I could go a LOT deeper, but the way I see it, the Democrats are not equally to blame like French so desperately wants to be the case.

Indeed, he does like to stretch:

Both sides hate each other so much that it’s almost meaningless to ask who hates whom the most. In the morality and ethics survey I mentioned at the start of the column, Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents were more likely to believe that other Americans were unethical or immoral than Republicans. But in the 2022 survey, Republicans were more likely to believe that Democrats were dishonest, immoral and lazy.

What he really wanted to get to though was the ability to carp about the pushback he got from his (admittedly not terrible) column on Talarico in Texas' senatorial campaign.

He got that pushback because he was cherry-picking the deets as the kids these days say. He is glad that a man of obvious faith is cutting through (as though Democrats are completly godless, unchurched heathens), although he quibbled about the "abortion" thing.

French really wants his tribe(s) to go back to the "love thy neighbor" mantra of the Christian faith, but his Evangelical ecosystem is 100% all in for Trump, MAGA, and all the cruelty.

It is both entertaining and sad to see someone who is obviously deeply enmeshed in his religion tie himself in knots to keep the mirage alive. How he has to say that the Dems are just as bad, never admitting that his political tribe was the main motivating factor in where we are today.

The online response to my argument, however, was volcanic. I was accused of legitimizing heresy. Another writer said that I’d suffered an apparent “brain injury.” My appreciation of Talarico’s approach even put the soul of evangelicalism at risk. Once again, I was written entirely out of the Christian faith by angry Trumpist evangelicals.

(I did have to laugh at the Babylon Bee’s joke headline: “David French Praises Satan as ‘Most Christian Person in History.’”)

In their minds, I was elevating “niceness” over justice and righteousness. To this way of thinking, Talarico’s manner makes him more dangerous, not less, and it was my responsibility to warn Christian America away from this dreadful man.

Yet, he still insists that the left is worse.

How his brain doesn't explode is beyond me.

Read the full thing to read about a dissent in a trans-access case to a Korean spa, and David French having the words "swinging dicks" in his column.

Enough for now

I am at about 2k words, plenty long for musing on a Sunday.

1 - I honestly don;t have a problem with Only Fans, it is not my jam, and I've never gone there or even to Pornhub. No shame either way from me.