Doom Report (Week 10: Searching for Answers)

If I had a lot of money—say, as much as Elon Musk—I don’t think I would spend it on buying state supreme court elections in Wisconsin.  Admittedly, the thought of using their own tactics against them is tempting, but even so I think I’d leave that to other fantasy billionaires.  No, I think what I would do is start a television show (or it could be streaming, for you younger people out there, but I’m old and I still think of it all as television no matter where I’m watching it).  And the name of this television show would be Answer the Fucking Question.  And its gimmick would be simple: we’d have on politicians, and we’d ask them questions.  And when they go off on these idiotic 5 minute tangents that don’t even come close to answering the question, we’d look at them and say, “that’s nice ... now answer the fucking question.”  And then what we’d air is the question, and then the answer, and none of the bullshit in between.  I suspect that a lot of politician interviews would edit down to just the questions and some blank stares from the politicians.  There are a lot of problems with this idea, of course, not the least of which is that a lot of politicians would just refuse to come on the show at all—hey, man, you expect me to actually answer questions? no thanks! I’ve got better things to do with my time (they’d say).  I think that you could fix that by just inviting their competitors onto the show and letting them have more airtime through the dirty trick of ... well, answering the fucking questions.  If I could use my fantasy billions to make the show popular enough, failure to answer questions—whether by refusing to do the show or by doing it and refusing to answer the fucking questions—might actually become disqualifying again.

But this is a fantasy, of course.  For an example of why that is, watch Stephen Colbert’s interview with Chuck Schumer.  Stephen asks “Why can’t they just do this again in September when the next CR has to be passed?” (where “this” was referring to the bulldozing of Schumer’s professed “resistance” to the agenda of President Musk and Trumpy).  Schumer wanders around aimlessly for 30 seconds, getting nowhere, and then Colbert, uncharacteristically, interrupts him: “How do you stop that?” he asks, more pointedly.  This time Schumer talks for more than two minutes, with no answer in sight.  Watch the clip.  You tell me what the answer to Colbert’s question is.  And, if you happen to be Chuck Schumer, Answer the Fucking Question.

Of course, the major news this week was about “Signalgate,” which is where the complete boneheads that are attempting (and mostly failing) to run our government conducted a classified discussion on bombing another country via Signal, a commercial app.  A lot has been made of the fact that Signal is not fit for dissemination of classified information (particularly in light of the fact that nearly every participant in the chat has spent hours of their lives ranting about Hilary Clinton’s private servers which might have had some classified information on them, even though, in the end, they didn’t), and much has been made of the fact that they set the messages to autodelete (despite that fact that that’s a violation of the Presidential Records Act), and much has been made of the fact that they accidentally included a journalist on the chat, and much has been made of their emojis, and their lying about it afterwards, and their mismatched excuses that don’t line up because they can’t get their stories straight.  But not much has been made of the fact that, at the end of all that bungling of classified information, we bombed an entire building to get one guy, and, of course, we ended up killing over 50 innocent people, including children.  Still too incompetent to manage the government, still plenty competent to kill innocent people.  (For a really good summary of Signalgate, Devin from Legal Eagle has you covered.)

Of course, it’s not only people in the Middle East that Trump’s regime hates: it’s also people from the Middle East.  In addition to Palestinian Mahmoud Khalil, still imprisoned without charge in Louisiana (nearly 1,500 miles from where he was arrested), they have now disappeared a second student protester, Turkish student Rumeysa Ozturk.  You may recall that people objected to Rubio claiming that he revoked Khalil’s student visa, on the grounds that Khalil didn’t have a student visa to revoke, so apparently their solution to that was to find someone who did have a student visa and revoke that.  Ozturk’s offense? she wrote an op-ed in her university’s student newspaper.  The video is somehow even more chilling than that of Khalil’s arrest; as one eyewitness put it, “It looked like a kidnapping.  ...  They’re covering their faces. They’re in unmarked vehicles.”  America Unhinged has a pretty good summary of the case, along with guest Stephen Rhode, who has rewritten Martin Niemöller’s “First They Came” poem as “First They Came for Mahmoud Khalil.” (Note that Ozturk is being held in a completely different detention center in Louisiana which is over 1500 miles from where she was arrested, despite the DoJ being ordered by a judge not to remove her from the state of Massachusetts.)

Aside from the typical parade of horribles, I did think there were some interesting points being made this week.  Not necessarily optimistic—I don’t want to get your hopes up—but perspectives that really made me think about things differently.  The first was Jon Stewart’s interview with Ezra Klein on The Weekly Show.  Klein has cowritten a new book called Abundance about how China built 23,000 miles of high-speed rail in the same time California failed to build 500, and how only 3 of the 56 eligible jurisdictions have survived the 4-year, 14-step process to be able to start receiving the money for rural broadband from Biden’s Build Back Better legislation.  Absolutely not hopeful, but it really underscores that the Republicans are not the only problem here, and I think it points us to why the Democrats are losing working class people: they keep promising this utopia of social justice and change, but in the end they can’t deliver.

One last small thing: on Pod Save the UK this week, Nish Kumar said something that I had honestly never considered before.  Remember that Nish is a native-born Brit whose parents are from India; in this clip, he’s talking about Andrew Tate, a piece of human excrement who I’ve been meaning to bring up for a while now, but the flood of news has just drowned it out.  Tate is an influencer in the so-called “manosphere” ... but also a self-proclaimed misogynist who has been indicted in two countries for rape and human trafficking.  But his status as a right-winger and Trump fan was sufficient to get the regime to put pressure on the Romanian government—who of course were not allowing him to leave the country while under investigation—and last month he fled Romania and landed in (where else?) Florida.  Within a month, he added a third country to his sexual assault world tour.  If you need more info on how much of a scumbag Tate is, I would refer you to America Unhinged’s Feb 27th episode, or to the Strict Scrutiny episode from the following Monday.  But this is probably sufficient context to understand Nish’s comments below.

Since I was a young man, I’ve heard this idea that young men can be very easily radicalized, and we need to be very careful about young men being radicalized.  But the young men that that radicalization is being aimed at are young men that look like me, and exclusively young men that look like me.  My whole entire life, since I was a young man, I’m—and now even as I reflect on that time as a very, very old man—there has been a long, protracted conversation about the radicalization of black and brown men: that’s the conversation that we have.  We have no scope in our hearts to have a conversation that white men could also be radicalized.

So, as we look back on Trump’s success with young men during the last election, perhaps we need to think in terms of radicalization.  Just as Muslim extremists have for decades convinced disaffected male youths that suicide by bomb is the answer, so now filth like Andrew Tate and other “manosphere” influencers are radicalizing today’s young men with misogyny, self-aggrandizement, and the death of empathy.  Treat women like property, spit on foreigners, everything you don’t have was taken from you: take it back.  Again, this realization is not a hopeful thought, but I think it’s an important perspective to understand what’s happening, and one I had never even considered before.  This is how diversity saves us: a brown man from Britain can teach me something I was never going to figure out on my own.  This is also why the MAGA regime hates it so much: diversity brings enlightenment, and they really don’t want their base getting any smarter.