Ok, So What Did I Miss?

Carlson Santos Durham Debt Ceiling Neely

If you’ve just achieved a major milestone in your life I strongly recommend going to a family reunion in Orlando, Florida, at a mansion that looks like it should be the set of some reality TV show, because it is one of your uncle’s rental properties and he rents it out to Instagram influencers and other similarly confusing people for an absolutely batshit amount of money per night. In this scenario you get to stay there basically for free, on account of he owns it and it’s off season, and also you get to hang out with everyone in your extended family: a bunch of people who do not read The New Republic and are very excited about the Denver Nuggets and God bless them all, obviously, but they are not impressed or particularly curious about the strange salacious nonsense you do for a living. To be clear, your immediate family cares very much and is proud of you. For everyone else, though, it’s Crazy Aunt/Cousin/Neice Laura whomst is Family despite being some kind of goddamn commie lesbian dance theory major who writes about Marx or whatever: unclear, definitely not the kind of thing you discuss at the dinner table.

We are in Orlando which means we are doing exactly what you might expect: a sort of theme park Bataan Death March. The Tyranny of the Mouse looms over me today. I have been snatching time between rides, photo ops, and FBI hostage negotiations re: what we should all do next in order to bring you this quick-fire list of hot takes on cold news:

Tucker Carlson Waits

Big couple of weeks for this asshole. On May 9th, Carlson announced that I was completely wrong about him going to Newsmax and that he was instead going to move his show to Twitter. He has, since then, produced exactly zero shows and one PAC exploring a presidential run.

That’s not quite true; Carlson supposedly has nothing to do with the PAC, and not in the regular nudge-nudge wink-wink sense either. The “Draft Tucker PAC” wants to convince Tucker to run because founder Chris Ekstrom and his wealthy friends are “very concerned that [Trump and DeSantis are] going to not move the debate as far right as it ought to be.”

Carlson distanced himself from the PAC by deploying an anonymous source to tell The Hill that:

“Tucker is not running for president. He’s said that repeatedly on the record. Whoever is running this group is trying to make a quick buck and should be ashamed. No one should donate to this PAC.” 

But Tucker himself didn’t say it. Tucker himself is lurking in his weird 1970s adult movie set and waiting, breathless, for the big man to die. While Trump is alive, Tucker’s odds are slim to none. But if the hamburgers catch up to the former president—well, DeSantis is no longer the heir apparent, and Carlson has plenty of charisma and name recognition, and he’s no longer in the gilded cage of Fox News’ most popular show. We’ll see.

I take the threat of a Tucker Carlson run seriously—not just because I think Mr. Ekstrom is correct about him pulling the debate to the right, but also because Tucker Carlson has an ideology that goes beyond “own the libs,” even if it doesn’t always seem that way. It’s not a good ideology, in fact it is quite bad, but it’s there, and it’s populist, and it threatens to take ground that the left by rights should occupy. Carlson’s explanation for why we ought to ban AI truck drivers remains one of the most profoundly anti-oligarchal, pro-worker things I’ve heard from a mainstream media pundit. National socialism, like socialism, is populist: it aims to make life livable for its citizens. The devil lies in their extremely narrow definition of the word “citizens,” and the moral straitjacket they would like to impose on those citizens, which is why it’s really, really bad if they occupy populism and leave Democrats to take the opposite stance of whatever stance the Republicans are taking, as they almost always do. We could be looking at a future where Carlson is the voice of the [straight white] people and the Democrats are the party of Jeff Bezos. If that day comes, we will be truly boned.

But it’s all hypothetical until Trump dies. So we’ll see.

George Santos Goes to Prison

Well, maybe. It turns out that some lies are illegal, and since Santos is physiologically incapable of telling the truth, it’s not surprising that he told a few of them. Apparently it’s super illegal to take a check intended for campaign donations, cash it, and spend it on “luxury designer clothing.” No efforts to launder the money, just straight conversion from election fund to Versace. How can you even be mad? That’s incredible.

(Other alleged crimes include: acting as his own straw donor by pumping $700k into his campaign despite making $55k last year, obvious book-cooking to keep individual disbursements too low to require receipts, and failing to keep track of donors who contributed more than $200 towards Santos’ Ralph Lauren collection)

Somewhere around the tenth absolutely egregious lie, my hatred and contempt for George Santos horseshoed into awestruck admiration. He is a brute-force huckster, the long-lost love child of a 1800s snake-oil salesman and Cruella DeVille. He is, as NYMag recently observed, New York City’s latest It Girl. When George Santos made a surprise appearance at the sad-sack protest for Trump’s indictment back in April, the press went completely berserk. If I’d fallen, I truly believe they would have trampled me to death.

You know who else likes George Santos? The far right. So, so much.

Theres a pragmatic reason for this nationalist adulation: he has nowhere else to go because no one else will have him. His vote is locked in, guaranteed, certain as the rising and the setting of the sun. Santos doesn't give a shit about politics, any more than he cares about the truth: he is happy to sell out everyone and everything for a nice Burberry sweater vest.

Which brings us to the second, visceral reason the far right adores him: he is a living, breathing indictment of the system that raised him to power in the midterms. He is not a good liar. He didn’t even attempt to launder the campaign money, contradicted himself numerous times on various TV appearances, and spun the kinds of hyper-specific fabrications any journalist who gave even half a damn could have fact checked. George Santos said his mother died on 9/11, for God’s sake—the list of poeple who perished that day is literally chiseled in stone in downtown Manhattan, which is well within subway distance for at least 75% of journalists alive right now.

And we elected him anyway.

The far right likes George Santos because he’s the goddamn Joker—we get what we fucking deserve. He is a living, breathing deepfake, parody beyond Hollywood’s most depraved satirical dreamings, and proof positive that facts truly do not matter here in 2023. He is nihilism. He is rot. He is the all-American antichrist.

Santos lays bare conservative hypocrisy as well, of course. At a time when the right screams and cries and throws up at the mere mention of a drag queen, George “Kitara” Santos is not merely tolerated but celebrated at events by the New York and Washington Young Republican Clubs. The difference is that the far right knows ideas don’t matter right now. The time has come for the destruction of the old world order, and Santos is the sweater-vest tip of that spear. All hail the Lord of Lies.

Durham Durham: Is There Something I Should Know?

After four long years of waiting, The Storm is finally here. Durham released his report on whether the 2016 FBI investigation into Donald Trump’s campaign—the one that was supposed to result in arrests and justice and keelhauling of traitors and whatever the fuck—and it does not appear to have done that.

Or maybe it does, I don’t know—the report is over 300 pages and I refuse to read it. All I know for sure is that Dan Bongino, my least favorite right-wing commentator who’s had an enormous hard-on for Durham for years now, responded to the report by linking to one of the saddest attempt at a declaration of victory I have ever seen. Check it out:

[Durham] stressed that “the answer is not the creation of new rules but a renewed fidelity to the old.” Ultimately, he continued, justice “comes down to the integrity of the people who take an oath to follow the guidelines.” And “the promulgation of additional rules and regulations to be learned in yet more training sessions would likely prove to be a fruitless exercise if the FBI’s guiding principles of ‘Fidelity, Bravery and Integrity’ are not engrained in the hearts and minds of those sworn to meet the FBI’ s mission of ‘Protect[ing] the American People and Uphold[ing] the Constitution of the United States.’”

For the many details that followed — every misstep retraced and every inexplicable and unreasonable action condemned — that conclusion dwarfed them all.

Let us pretend, for a moment, that the author’s conclusion conclusion represents the fair and honest truth. If so, the most powerful accomplishment of the Durham report is a vague finger-wagging in the direction of America’s three-letter agencies. We’re saved, everyone. Behold the Kraken.

Anyway, Lawfare seems to have a pretty good summary of the report if you’re interested—it’s a sort of running commentary, and isn’t finished, but it addresses the various elements I saw brought up across the spectrum in a way I find compelling.

Imminent Debt Apocalypse V

Oh look, it’s that time again. The government needs to raise the debt ceiling to stay solvent. The Republicans don’t want to raise the debt ceiling. The deadline for raising the ceiling draws ever closer with no sign of agreement. A default would, they tell us, unleash economic armageddon. According to the White House’s Council of Economic Advisors, the stock market could lose 45% of its value virtually overnight. Investors are betting on a rise in the volatility index, which is to say they are betting that they are going to bet that the stock market will go down, and if that sentence did not give you instant vertigo then you are part of the problem.

All of this danger might be real, and it might be about to happen. I’ve written about this before: the wolves are at the door. Politics is the art of negotiation, and there is a small but clutch group of people in the United States government who have no desire to negotiate. Lauren Boebert is not a politician in any traditional sense: she has no desire to find a solution. We might be about to default on the debt for the same reason George Santos gets to sit grinning like a cheshire cat in the back of far-right gatherings across the country, resplendent in designer crew-necks and surrounded by adoring fans. Some men just want to watch the world burn.

Trouble is, we’ve been crying wolf on the debt ceiling for…Christ, as long as I’ve been aware of politics. There has been so much pageantry around it, such sturm und such drang, only for the players to reach a last-minute consensus and bring us back to sitcom normal just in time for the end of an episode. I only have so much adrenaline, and I can’t be made to care about this. No doubt I’ll care very much if we default, maybe, who knows; we’ll talk if and when that happens.

First Degree Murder

One of the only headlines that made it through my Kyle Rittenhouse haze over the last month or so was the horrific murder of Jordan Neely on the New York subway by Daniel Penny, an ex-marine who decided to hold a rear naked choke for fifteen minutes. Long after Neely lost consciousness. Long after he shit himself. Long after brain damage. Until he died on the filthy floor of the F train, for the crime of being hungry and scary and scared.

I learned about the rear naked choke where Daniel Penny likely learned about it: in the military, during combatives training. Which means that he knew what I know, what everyone who learns that choke knows: you let go the instant the person in your arms goes limp. The rear naked choke works by cutting off blood flow to the brain. Your brain needs blood more than it needs anything, including air. Brain death begins almost immediately. You never, ever, ever hold that choke unless you want to kill someone.

I’m sickened by this. Everyone should be.

I’ve seen the video of Neely in his last conscious moments and while that particular clip doesn’t look exceptionally terrifying to me, I believe that people were frightened. As a subway rider, it does not strain my imagination to picture a situation in which someone having a mental health episode on the train would need to be restrained, or even choked unconscious. Neely goes limp. Penny immediately releases the choke. The passengers restraining Neely’s arms keep restraining him. At the next station, the conductor calls the cops. The train is delayed. Everyone in New York bitches about the delay. Life goes on. Neely’s life has a chance to go on, too, assuming the cops don’t kill him.

What we have here is first degree murder of the worst possible kind. Shoot someone and it’s over in an instant. Hold someone close to you for fifteen minutes, your arm around their neck, their body limp, knowing that you are doing irreversible damage eery single second you keep your muscles tight, then continuing to do that, second by second, minute by minute, until the warm body in your arms begins to go cold…

But hey. New York City just solved part of its homeless problem.

Oh, I’m sorry—was that shocking? Was that ghoulish? Across the country, police routinely conduct something called “sweeps,” wherein they destroy the rough shelters that serve as housing for those with nowhere else to go. They scatter these people’s few possessions and leave them to scurry and scramble to grab their things and flee before they are beaten or arrested. The state puts spikes anywhere that the unhoused might choose to rest, manufactures benches that make it uncomfortable to lie down, works tirelessly to keep them out of sight. It does these things to solve the homeless problem. To make it disappear.

And what’s the progressive answer? Let people camp. Allow them to remain outside without proper housing or facilities for trash or the bathroom, which makes life horrible for everyone in the area (unhoused people included). Allowing encampments is worlds better than the disappearing act, but it isn’t a solution either. The solution is robust mental health and addiction treament combined with free housing, but try to bring that up in this economy and see how far it gets you. We don’t want to fix the problem. We want the problem to go away.

People are comparing Daniel Penny to Kyle Rittenhouse and I have a lot of issues with that comparison. Nearly every legal analysis I’ve read from across the political spectrum agrees that Rittenhouse had reason to fear for his life every time he pulled the trigger. Some of them believe there are other reasons he should not have been acquitted for the shootings in Kenosha, but regardless: there is a world of difference between shooting someone who poses an active and immediate threat to your physical well-being and holding an unconscious man in a rear naked choke for fifteen minutes as he soils himself and dies. Penny did not fear for his life when he held that choke, and for this he should burn in hell.

In one way, though, the Rittenhouse/Penny comparison fits perfectly: we are once again off-loading serious, foundational systemic problems onto a single individual. We are pretending that Jordan Neely was murdered by Penny in a vacuum. I do not shed a single tear for the bastard: he is a cold-blooded killer and if we have to put our sins onto someone I’m happy for it to be him. But let’s not pretend that the problem ends with Penny. He is simply the purest expression of America’s general attitude towards people with nowhere to live. Maybe we can use this tragedy to change that. Maybe. Please.

Preparing to Launch

One person who won’t be changing any policies—at least not on the national level—is Ronald “Three Fingers” DeSantis, whose botched campaign announcement on Twitter Spaces alongside Elon Musk is already the stuff of legend. Social media failure is never a great idea, but it’s a terrible idea when your primary rival is Donald Trump. The former president is in rare form right now: genuinly hilarious, truly a delight to behold for the sickos amongst us.

It’s been obvious for a while that my Trump obituary late last year was extremely and embarrassingly wrong. I take some solace, however, in my unwavering year-long conviction that DeSantis is an uncharismatic dripless weirdo who will never, ever be president. Of course he would announce his candidacy next to Elon Musk on the technological abortion that is Twitter Dot Com, they’re the same genre of person: good at generating hype, profoundly uncharismatic, and thirsty for approval in a way that becomes more and more off-putting the more closely you look at it.

Anyway, I look forward to more incredible satire from the DeSantis camp as his doomed campaign progresses, as well as Trump’s comedy stylings at his expense. It’s going to be fun.

The Happiest Place on Earth

The power lines are shaped like Mickey Mouse. The solar panels outside the Disney World gate are shaped like Mickey Mouse. I am holding in my hands a small plastic tub with Mickey Mouse on it that is filled with about 3 cups of popcorn: it cost me $12. We have Genie+, we have a Lightning Lane pass, it is raining very hard and every single person in this park has mouse ears on. Some of them are made of black fabric, as is tradition. Some are made of crystal, or flowers, or sequins, or ruffled purple cloth, I don’t even know anymore: the Mouse is everywhere, all at once.

We are on a pilgrimage to the American Mecca. We will circle the Disney castle seven times, we will kiss the stone plinth in front of it—the one that bears a bronze statue of Walt Disney hand in hand with The Mouse. We will watch the Disney parade and feel a strange sense of nostalgia as the characters from the movies of our childhood go by, a candleflame-flicker of whatever we are supposed to feel right now. We have paid hundreds of dollars to be here, chasing the dragons of our youth, wishing for an uncomplicated world where things are just nice. Some people have found it—I can see it on their faces. Others—most, I think—are trying to convince themselves they’re having a truly magical day, a moment to remember. A few of us, sodden and miserable, dream of dry feet, a margarita, and a goddamn newspaper.