Sunday, August 30, 2026

Doom Report (Week 84: No Asterisk after "Neighbor")


I want you to imagine a time in the United States when we have an increasingly unpopular president, we’re staring down the barrel of a war in the Middle East for no good reason, our traditional allies don’t want anything to do with it, and our government has decided that just changing the name of something is going to fix everything.

That’s right: I’m talking about the early 2003 “freedom fries” incident.  (Why? what did you think I was talking about?)  Yes, there once was a time when we got pissed off at France, because they didn’t want to go along with our bullshit reasons for invading Iraq.  And so, naturally, some people in our government decided that obviously the solution was to rename “french fries” to “freedom fries” (and, less publicized, they also tried to rename “french toast” to “freedom toast”).  Sadly, this brilliant scheme turned out to have a few, minor problems.  Namely, the vast majority of the American public thought it was ridiculous.  Specifically, polls showed that ⅔ of Americans thought it was silly, and fully 80% just kept calling them “french fries” anyways.  And, in terms of “that’ll show those French bastards,” they ... didn’t care.  Because: why would they?  How could some dimwits in a Congressional cafeteria an ocean away decide to call something which the French never named in the first place possibly affect their lives in any way whatsoever?  (Plus: french fries originated in Belgium anyhow.)  It was, to put it mildly, an utter failure that made everyone involved seem like a complete moron.

Wait ... sorry.  Getting some déjà vu here ...

Because, here in 2026, our increasingly unpopular president, now hopelessly embroiled in a war just one country over, with (once again) no conceivable logic as to why, and (once again) no support from our allies because they don’t want anything to do with this clusterfuck, has decided the way to fix everything is to (wait for it) rename Lake Ontario to “Lake America”.  And here we see the parallels start to fall apart.  First off, there was at least a thin thread connecting France to the war in Iraq (i.e. that France had threatened to veto any war resolution in the UN Security Council), whereas Canada has nothing whatsoever to do with Iran (and also the idea of going to the UN for approval for war seems a bit quaint nowadays).  Also, the whole “freedom fries” thing at least went through some people in Congress (though it never required nor received a full vote in the House), whereas Trump just did the whole “Lake America” thing all by his lonesome.

If you just want to hear people agree with you on how utterly dumb the Canada trade war is, Runaway Country host Alex Wagner and Hysteria host Erin Ryan have you covered, including discussion of Ontario premier Doug Ford noting that his ass has a lot of real estate, which makes it easy for Trump to kiss it.  If you want to hear people talking about how Trump is just trying to pick on Canada because he’s too scared to mess with Russia or China and he thought Canada wouldn’t put up much of a fight—and just how wrong that turned out to be—you could check out the latest installment of “A Closer Look: Proof of Life” (it’s a longer video, but well worth it, or you could just jump right to the Canada discussion).  Or, if you just want to hear someone lay out all the ridiculosity for you in under 10 minutes, give BTC a shot and listen to Thursday’s installment of “Another Day”.

But the upshot is that, like the French, the Canadians really don’t give a shit.  Because: why would they?

Other things you need to know this week:

  • Seth Meyers is still on hiatus, so their channel is releasing “A Closer Look: Proof of Life”, which features Seth and one of his writers talking about the events they would cover if they were back in the office.  These episodes are a bit longer, but they’re pretty fun.  Two such episodes this week: one we mentioned above covering the trade war with Canada; the other has more info about Natalie Harp, plus covering Abdul El-Sayed’s Fox “News” interview where he completely crushes Jesse Watters.
  • Like Meyers, The Daily Show is also still on hiatus, but their channel’s strategy has been to celebrate their 30th anniversary (and keep the algorithm fed) by releasing clips from classic shows.  And it just so happens that, this week, they released one of my all-time favorite Daily Show field pieces.  I wish I could tell you it had no relevance to today, but ...  Look, just go watch a much younger John Oliver explore solutions for gun control.  It’ll take 5 minutes of your time, and then you can go back to asking yourself why our politicians are so brain-dead.

Like Meyers and the folks over at The Daily Show (and Colbert, once upon a time, before Trump got him fired), Jimmy Kimmel takes time off during the summer.  But Kimmel does it differently: instead of 2 or 3 extended breaks throughout the summer when there’s no show at all, Kimmel just takes the whole summer off ... and brings in guest hosts.  Each host stays for 1 week, so you’re never without a show altogether.  There’s always a mix of returning guest hosts and brand new faces, and, as you might imagine, the quality of the guests (and their utility for these Doom Reports) varies considerably.  This summer, Colman Domingo was fabulous but not overly political; Rosie O’Donnell was surprisingly apolitical (though she got her jabs in: speaking directly to Trump one night, she said “it’s time to hang up your wig and let Natalie tuck you in; time to go nighty-night”); Anthony Anderson was exactly as political as you’d expect; and Tiffany Haddish was fairly vicious.

This week was Jelly Roll.  The Grammy-winning country music singer surprised some of the rightwing nutjobs by getting in a few zingers at Trump’s expense: apparently, as a straight white country singer, devout Christian, and fan of professional wrestling—who even had nice things to say about the MMA fight on the White House lawn—he was supposed to be a Trump supporter, and the critics took advantage of the opportunity to decide he was selling out, or “going Hollywood”, or any number of other derogatory phrases.  But Jelly himself took advantage of his final monologue of the week to address his critics and to disabuse them of the notion that he could be reduced to anything so simplistic as a political party.  I’d advise you to listen to the whole thing, but let me offer you a taste; when speaking about his regrets at not using his Grammy speech to deliver a more powerful message, he notes:

And I want y’all to know that, despite the fact that I cuss and I tell jokes, I truly am a man of faith.  And I can’t read the Gospels without being confronted by the words of Jesus himself when he said, “When I was hungry, you gave me food.  When I was thirsty, you gave me a drink.  When I was a stranger, you welcomed me in.”  That’s what Jesus said.

He also gave us two commandments: love God with all your heart, and love your neighbor as yourself.  And that’s what I should have said that night.  There wasn’t an asterisk after “neighbor.”  There wasn’t a political party exemption.  It did not require us to know what country you were born in.  There wasn’t a sentence afterward that said, “unless you’re afraid of them.”  It just said, “Love. Your. Neighbor.”

I really do encourage you to watch the whole thing.  It was moving, and inspiring, and it serves as yet another reminder that, as much as the rightwing nutjobs—and the corporate Democrats—keep trying to tell us that we’re oh so different ... we’re not.  We’re just not.  And that, even if you’re a white country boy from Nashville, a son of a Marine who grew up in the church, you can still see everyone as human, regardless of race, religion, or anything else that our “leaders” tell us is important, or dangerous, or divisive.  Those “others” are neither poisoning the blood of our country, nor are they a basket of deplorables.  They’re just regular folks.

Jelly also discussed why he shook Trump’s hand, and said it came down to his veteran father.

This might be a hot take, but out of respect for him and everybody who has ever served and continues to serve this country, I will always shake the hand of the sitting president of the United States when asked; my father would have been disappointed had I done anything other than that.  I’m proud that I was able to shake the president of the United States’ hand.  I’m also proud that I live in a country where I can make jokes about him.  Ain’t that’s what great about being an American?

And you can’t say fairer than that.









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Sunday, August 23, 2026

Doom Report (Week 83: Novel and Dubious)


This week has been all about Natalie Harp, who has gone from someone that very few of us had ever heard of to the butt of jokes for late-night comedians.  The impetus for all this was twofold.  First, Trump bailed on his “free” Qatari jet (which actually cost you and I and every other American taxpayer around a billion dollars) and snuck out on a catering truck because of a credible threat of attack, leaving the vast majority of his cabinet and staff (not to mention all those expendable reporters) to be living decoys.  (We covered this last week.)  And so you can hardly blame people for wondering who he didn’t leave behind: who was so important to him that they warranted a place on the plane that was actually safe?  Well, three people: Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth (Leah Litman of Strict Scrutiny likes to call him Pete Kegsbreath, which I find quite fun), Walt Nauta, who you may remember as the Mar-A-Lago guy who helped Trump try to cover up the stolen documents in his bathroom, and a “personal assistant” named Natalie Harp, who was, at that time, primarily notable for being yet another of the young blondes that Trump likes to surround himself with.

But the truth is, according to reporting done long ago but now suddenly being paid attention to, much stranger.  Harp is often referred to as the “human printer” because she follows Trump around with a portable printer and prints favorable coverage of him for him to read.  Her devotion to Trump is slavish; she’s written several letters to him that ... well, let’s just say that to call them “creepy” would be an understatement.  One pundit called her Trump’s “human binky.”  And, according to Wikipedia, she’s “a devout, evangelical Christian,” her father “died by suicide in July 2020,” and she suffers from “health issues, particularly chronic pain and complications incurred by a medical error involving intravenous therapy for stage II bone cancer.”  So I feel like she was probably already broken long before she fixated on Trump, but she’s gone all in at this point: speech at the RNC in 2020 comparing Trump to George Bailey from It’s a Wonderful Life, four years on air at OANN, and now ... personal assistant.

The second thing that caused Natalie to leap into the spotlight was an offhand comment by Jon Ossoff.  In the midst of listing the things that Trump would rather be doing than being President, right between building his ballroom and trading stocks, Ossoff said that Trump would rather “travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the Amir of Qatar.”  And that’s literally the only time he refers to her: you can listen to the whole speech if you like—it’s a tight 5½ minutes, so it won’t take much of your time, and it might help you understand why people are now floating Ossoff’s name as a potential presidential candidate for 2028.  The reference to Natalie is near the end; it’s practically a throwaway line.  But it sent the rightwing nutjobs into a rage: they’ve been frothing at the mouth about how Ossoff has “smeared” Harp for days now.  Except ... did he?  He only said that Trump would rather travel with Natalie, and that’s tough to argue with.  He left Marco Rubio on the decoy plane.  He left Scott Bessent on the decoy plane.  But not Natalie.

If you only have 10 minutes to devote to this story, try Takes™ from Jamelle Bouie; it’s the best explanation of who Harp is.  If you’ve got another 10 minutes, try Bouie again: this time he explains why Harp may be the most powerful person in the White House.  And, if you’ve 10 more minutes, perhaps let Brian Tyler Cohen give you a wrap-up (including clips from the truly insane letters) on his “Another Day” segment from Friday.

This deep dive into the life of Natalie Harp reminds me a lot of the one I did into Ghislaine Maxwell back in week 27.  What Maxwell did is undoubtedly worse than what Harp has done—more essentially evil—but, if Bouie’s take on Harp is correct (and I rather think it is), Harp has contributed to a significant amount of pain and suffering over the past two years.  And, like Maxwell, the hardships of Harp’s life are interesting context for her behavior ... but they are not an excuse.  It can be an interesting exercise to wonder if people will one day be haunted by the ghosts of those whose lives they destroyed—in that sense Harp can join the likes of Musk, Stephen Miller, Ted Cruz—but the depressing truth is they likely will never give it a second thought.  The villains of the story never think they are villains in their own minds; they’re just sad, broken people that can never seem to find happiness, regardless of how much money and power they accumulate.  I’m not saying we should feel sorry for them.  But maybe we should be using them as exemplars of why mental health is so important: imagine how much happier a place the world would be right now if, instead of a “small loan” of a million dollars from his father, Trump had received a million dollars in therapy.

Just something to ponder.

Other things you need to know this week:

  • In past Doom Reports, I’ve noted that this or that person is “on fire” that week if they managed to have several noteworthy videos in the same week.  Well, this week, the person on fire is our favorite conservative-who-isn’t-a-right-wing-nutjob, Adam Kinzinger.  If I wanted to be uncharitable, I could note that Colbert is gone, both Meyers and The Daily Show are off this week, and Kimmel’s guest host was Rosie O’Donnell, who (surprisingly) didn’t do much politics other than needling Trump for the fun of it.  So Kinzinger might be standing out just due to the lack of competition.  But I think I’ll be generous and note that he’s really hitting a rhythm with the “Kinzinger Report"s: he’s got a solid blend of outrage and humor, and he doesn’t stumble as much as he used to (although still a little).  Plus, as a conservative, he often notes things that my usual liberal outlets don’t pay much attention to.  This week, every single day was a banger:
  • Pod Save the UK’s full episode this week was a bit too in-the-weeds in British news for most non-Brits, but I enjoyed this clip of Natasha Devon discussing her new book The Nuance Drought.  For this clip, when they talk about Nigel Farage, think of him as the British Trump, but before he’d come to power; when they talk about Zack Polanski, think of him as a sort of British AOC, and when they talk about MAGA ... well, that’s just MAGA.  Lots of trenchant discussion about how “we we exist in a political system where we’re encouraged to vote for what we hate least rather than what we like most.”  Best quote: “So your political identity becomes about what you hate as opposed to what you love.  And that’s bad vibes.”  Amen.  Also, Devon’s description of the experiment involving pain vs uncertainty was particularly illuminating (and a bit depressing).

I know it’s really hard to keep track of all the awful and illegal things this regime has done, but do you remember, back in March of 2025, that there was a pardon attorney who refused to restore gun rights to Mel Gibson after he had been convicted of domestic violence? so then Gibson whined to Trump and Trump fired her?  That was Liz Oyer, and she was a guest host on Strict Scrutiny this week.

There was a good discussion of Trump’s desperate (and ongoing, despite his Supreme Court loss) attempts to fire Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve, which somehow reminded me of my discussion way back in week 7 about the assassination of Garfield and how it led to civil service protections.  Of course, what Trump would prefer is a return to the system of patronage.  There’s also an interesting interview with Julia Angwin and Ami Fields-Meyer about their new book on what it means to be a dissident in today’s political climate.

But the most interesting bit was their discussion of Todd Blanche’s new OLC opinion on executive privilege.  As Oyer characterized it, it “took a really expansive view of the president’s ability to withhold information from public scrutiny”, and she and regular host Kate Shaw theorized that this was an attempt to get a headstart on gumming up the works once the Democrats are in charge.  That is, if the Democrats take control of the House, the first thing they’re going to do is start deposing people, and Todd “I Love You Sir” Blanche wants to give cover for all those people to claim that they can’t talk about what they’ve done, or seen, or participated in, due to “executive privilege”.  As Oyer puts it:

Now, that is not only—just as a legal matter—a novel and dubious interpretation of the privilege, but it is also (as a practical matter) an important signal about what Todd Blanche is planning and preparing for, which is likely a slew of Congressional investigations if the Democrats win the midterm elections.  The purpose of this decision is to be able to insulate as much as possible from scrutiny by Congress if the Democrats start investigating the corruption and misconduct by this administration after the midterms.  So they want—DOJ wants—to be able to respond to congressional subpoenas by saying we can’t give you these documents, or this witness cannot appear to testify, because of executive privilege.

Any my first thought was “novel and dubious interpretation” is a bit of a metaphor for pretty much everything Trump has ever done as president.

But my second thought was: if they’re doing this so as to be prepared for when the Democrats control Congress, that means that they think the Democrats will control Congress.  Their worry is our hope.  And it’s probably the most hope we can hope for this week, so I think we’ll have to be satisfied with that.









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Sunday, August 16, 2026

Doom Report (Week 82: A Toll in the Strait of Hormuz Forever)


This week, a couple of NBA dropouts signed up for the Culture Wars: they’ve announced that, since the WNBA doesn’t currently have any standards on the admission of trans women, they will pronounce themselves female and seek to join the league.  Yes, they are, apparently, attempting to re-enact the plot of that classic comedy, Lady Ballers.  What’s that, you say? never seen that movie?  Good for you: it’s a detestable piece of rightwing nutjob propaganda dressed up as a movie, brought to you by the God-damn-we-wish-we-could-have-made-it-in-Hollywood failures over at The Daily Wire.  (If you really need to know how bad it is, Some More News has you covered.)

There’s good coverage of this from (of course) Even More News—including talking about the even more detestable new movie from Ben Shapiro and the Daily Wire crew—as well as from Brian Tyler Cohen.  To call what these no-names are doing a “stunt” is an insult to people like Evel Knievel and Super Dave Osborne.  Personally, I wish the WNBA would just say “sure!” and then let them try out.  Apparently these men think that (much like the plot of Lady Ballers), they would obviously win if they were playing against women.  But I have a feeling this fantasy might turn ugly once it collides with reality: just ask Bobby Riggs how that worked out for him.*  So make these guys put their money where their mouths are, I say.  After getting relentlessly embarrassed by the women and failing to make the cut, they likely wouldn’t want to talk about this bullshit ever again.

Other things you need to know this week:

  • On this week’s Strict Scrutiny, Melissa and guest Elie Mystal cover Todd Blanche’s confirmation, Jeanine Pirro crashing and burning (yet again), subpoenas for journalists, and more.  I adore Elie; you may recall me mentioning him back in week 6, or my original discovery of him waaay back in December of 2023, when I had a brief discussion of third parties back before the Doom Report was even a thing.  My favorite moment this time was when Elie just goes off on Republicans: “We have to stop thinking that Republicans will ever grow a spine and stand up to this president, right?  Even the ones that the president has humiliated, even the ones that the president has kicked out of his inner circle, even the ones, as in the case of Tillis and Cornyn, that the president has literally taken their jobs away, they’ll never grow a spine.  If they had a spine, if they had a conscience, if they had decency: they wouldn’t be Republicans in the first place, right?  You don’t become a Republican because you have decency.  You don’t become a Republican because you have a spine, because you have commitment to the people.  You become a Republican because you are a spineless coward who lives to lick boots.  And that’s who Cornyn is.  And that’s who Thom Tillis is.  And that is who they will always be regardless of what this particular president does to them.”  Now, is this perhaps too harsh?  My favorite person who proves that “conservative” is not the same as “rightwing nutjob” (i.e. Adam Kinzinger) might say that it is.  But I mainly just admire Elie’s passion: preach on, brother.
  • Whereas in Friday’s “Kinzinger Report”, Adam covers Trump getting shut down on his Harvard lawsuit, the toll the Iran War is having on our sailors,** for a decade longer than he was in Congress, even), and more, including Mamdani’s program to get Broadway tickets into the hands of underprivileged schoolkids.  Like most conservatives, Adam can’t pronounce “Mamdani”, but, the difference is, he keeps trying till he gets it right.  And that’s why we love him.
  • I love it when my streams get crossed.  This week, Hasan Minhaj Doesn’t Know meets More Perfect Union: Hasan interviews John Russell, whom I’ve talked about many times in these Reports, most recently in week 78, where I enumerated all the previous weeks that I mentioned him, so just go look at that one to see all those.  In fact, Hasan brings up most of the pieces I’ve covered in the Doom Reports in this very interview.  A bit of a longer time investment, but well worth it in my opinion.
  • And, speaking of More Perfect Union, this week they had a video exposing the scam that is home insurance.  If you’ve ever wondered why you keep having to pay more for insurance only to get denied more often, this explains it all.

On Tuesday, PBS published an interview with the commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.  Needless to say, this is not a group which grants a lot of interviews, so it was a big deal ... and yet almost no one I watched covered it.

The one exception: this week’s Coffee Klatch.  There’s no Robert Reich this week, but W. Kamau Bell sits in with Heather Lofthouse, and he’s always great.  As he says in this episode: “I never thought I’d quote the Iranian ... Revolutionary Guard: you know, if you check Trump’s pockets and bank accounts, he’s doing great.”  Specifically, the commander was talking about the way Trump is handling the war, and what he said was this:

As soon as the stock market closes, they start hostilities.  When the stock market opens, they send positive messages to raise stock prices.  All the while, they are buying and selling the stocks themselves.  If I was in the place of the American Congress, I would call for an investigative committee to compare the assets of Mr. Trump, his family, and his inner circle before the war to their assets after the war.

Which ... yeah.  Kind of embarrassing that we have to hear it from the “Death to America” folks, but there you have it.  As Kamau also says in this Coffee Klatch episode: “When I was a kid ... there was generally a country that we made fun of for being run ridiculously.  There would be like a country ... that’s the international punchline.  ...  It’s us.  We’re the ridiculous country now.  That even the—like you said—the Republican [sic] Guard guy could be, like: they are really messing up over there.”

Also this week, Election Profit Makers is back, after a 4-month hiatus.  There’s a fair amount of diarrhea talk (which is only to be expected from David Rees), and a fantastic metaphor for the reflecting pool,*** and then they too talk a bit about the war in Iran.  Here’s David’s take on the current situation:

We’re going to pay Iran money to stop making fun of us online, basically, and then we’re going to give them a toll in the Strait of Hormuz forever.  That’s my understanding of the current state of play.

Mild hyperbole, perhaps ... or then again maybe not.  Here’s the Revolutionary Guard commander’s assessment of how we’re doing so far:

The longer this war lasts, the more experience we gain.  We had never seen a real war to gain real experience to learn how to fight with America.  In these five months, we have learned how.  We have also seen how the American military is weaker than what we perceived.

All the Trump flunkies say that Trump is keeping us safe by ensuring that Iran can never have a nuclear weapon.  I think what Iran is demonstrating that they don’t need a nuclear weapon to kick our ass.  Not sure how safe that’s keeping us.

Not sure this counts as a note of hope (unless of course you happen to be Iranian).  But, on the other hand, the chances seem increasingly slim that this war will be over by the midterms, and that may have a distinct impact on the election.  So, as fucked up as it is, maybe we can eke out some positive outcomes from this debacle.  Certainly it would be better if people didn’t have to die for us to get there.  But it seems like reducing the power and influence of the assholes who are prosecuting the war that’s killing all the people—primarily for the purpose of lining their own pockets—maybe that’s about the best we can hope for.



__________

* Fun fact: I’m actually old enough to remember this match, and how upset my dad got over Billie Jean King’s victory.  Kind of a punch to the gut when your deeply held misogyny gets upended in real time.

** Remember: Adam himself was in the armed forces, for a decade longer than he was in Congress, even.  So he has particular empathy for stories that impact our troops.

*** Specifically, David says: “Everybody knows about the Washington Monument, right, because it’s phallic, and it thrusts up into the sky, ...  The pool is sort of the inverse of the Washington Monument; a pool is a receptacle, right? ...  The Washington Monument is the daddy, and the reflecting pool is the mommy, and the Lincoln Memorial is the baby, because Lincoln represented the best of our country.  And there you have the whole nuclear family.”











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Sunday, August 9, 2026

Doom Report (Week 81: Money out of Politics, Money in your Pocket, and Medicare for All)


This week, Michigan held its primaries, and Dr. Abdul El-Sayed won the Democratic nomination for Senator.  He won it despite being a Muslim American (should he defeat his Republican opponent in November, he’ll be the first Muslim American in the Senate); he won it despite his primary opponent ceaselessly running ads showing her with Barack Obama (despite the fact that Obama never endorsed her); and, most of all, he won it despite outside PACs spending nearly 11 times more money on his opponent.  With over $80 million spent on the race, it was the most expensive Senate primary in US history.  Around $54 million of that was spent on his opponent’s behalf, and $30 million of that came from AIPAC, the pro-Israeli lobbying group.  Once upon a time AIPAC throwing money at a race meant the other guy was going down.  Just ask Cori Bush: AIPAC defeated her two years ago for the comparatively economical price tag of $9 million.  But defending the bombing of Palestinian children is more expensive these days.

So El-Sayed said he wouldn’t support sending arms to any state committing genocides, even if it happened to be Israel, and that put the target on his back.  But, this time, the target failed.  So maybe now he’ll be able to stop talking about Gaza and get back to his primary campaign message, which was always: money out of politics; money in your pocket; Medicare for all.  Maybe he will: his opponent has conceded and endorsed him, which is more than a defeated Republican would have done, so that’s something.  But she spent months stirring up people against him and accusing him of antisemitism, so it could well be too little too late at this point.

But I’m not counting El-Sayed out just yet.  He’s a strong progressive who often gets lumped in with the Democratic Socialists, even though he’s not one.  In this respect, he’s a bit like Bernie Sanders, who is often considered the most progressive Democrat in Congress, despite the inconvenient fact that he’s not a Democrat.  But association with Sanders is a big part of what earned El-Sayed the label of “socialist” ... and, just maybe, a big part of what propelled him to an underdog victory.  If you want to hear Bernie talk about El-Sayed’s victory, check out his video on the topic.  But let’s not count out El-Sayed just being a smart, charismatic campaigner: you can watch him convince hesitant voters in a recent More Perfect Union video to see his raw talent and skill.  So the question may just come down to whether AIPAC and its allies are willing to spend money on a Republican to avoid having more Democrats stand up to them.  Let’s hope not.

But it wouldn’t surprise me.

Other things you need to know this week:

  • A really good Even More News this week, covering the El-Sayed win, plus point-by-point dismantling of RFK Jr’s latest round of lies.  Returning guest Kaveh Hoda is the perfect accompaniment for this episode: like El-Sayed, he is a doctor, and an American of Middle Eastern heritage (Hoda is Persian-American where El-Sayed is Egyptian-American, but I suspect they’ve faced many of the same prejudices).
  • And, speaking of Adam Kinzinger, there’s this short video about accountability that he released Monday.  It reads like a campaign ad, but he doesn’t appear to be running for anything: he’s just campaigning for eliminating corruption.  Can’t really argue with that.
  • Gary Stevenson did an interview on PoliticsJOE, where he’s still talking about taxing wealth not work despite saying for the past several weeks that he’s going to take a break from talking about such topics.  Best quote: “There’s nothing more powerful that the rich could ever do to protect themselves and their wealth than to make the poor selfish.  Because the poor are individually incredibly weak.  And the rich are individually incredibly strong.  And the only power that the poor and ordinary people have ever had to protect themselves from the rich is strength in numbers.  And they only use that power if they act collectively.  ...  You know, if the rich can convince the poor to be as selfish as they are, then they will eat you alive.”

If the victory of El-Sayed is not hopeful enough for you, let me also share my favorite news snippet of the week (although if you watched either the Even More News episode or the “Kinzinger Report” linked above, you’ve already gotten a bit of a preview).

One of the first defeats of a Trump-backed candidate of the year happened this week: a Navy veteran who worked in intelligence as well as federal law enforcement, a man born in Michigan to generations of auto-workers, with the full-throated endorsement of Trump, lost ... to a man who had already dropped out of the race, possibly because he couldn’t figure out how to operate the FEC website (it also might have been the fact that he raised less than $2,000 for his campaign).  How on earth did this happen, you might ask?  Well, the dropout was named Tom Smith, and the Trump endorsee was named Amir Hassan.

Now, you might discount the obvious reason that everyone is talking about.  “Oh, poo!” you might say: “surely Trump voters wouldn’t reject someone—that he had endorsed!—just because of his name.”  And you might have a good argument that this is only speculation ... until we get to Laura Loomer’s tweet.

If you don’t remember who Loomer is, first of all: congratulations! I can tell that your news diet is much healthier than mine.  Secondly, if you really want to know who this Queen of All Nutjobs is, I’ll send you back to week 60 where I highlighted a Some More News piece on her.  Short version: of all the crazy, racist, rightwing MAGA nutjobs, she is the craziest, most racist, rightwingiest, and MAGA-ist, and she has the ear of the President, regularly costing people their jobs when she feels they don’t toe the company line well enough to suit her.  So what did this deranged nutjob say about Hassan?  Here’s just a taste:

“Amir Hassan” claims he’s not a Muslim, but it doesn’t matter.  His name sounds like he’s fresh off the boat and MAGA voters reject the Islamic infiltration of our country and party.

This should be an eye opener to Trump’s advisors that we don’t want Muslims, Arabs or anyone who may even sound Arab or Islamic serving in office.  We are done with the Islamic takeover of our country, but they won’t pass this message along to President Trump.

And:

Dude should have changed his name.  If my name was Amir Hassan and I wasn’t a Muslim, I’d be changing my name as soon as I turned 18.

I will never vote for anyone with an Islamic name.  Neither will most of President Trump’s voters.

So, I dunno—maybe there’s something to this name theory after all ...

Look, as Kaveh pointed out on Even More News, when you train your base to just automatically assume anyone with a Muslim-sounding name is bad, you get what you pay for.  Don’t even get me started on why a Black man would seek the endorsement of the White House white supremacist—there’s obviously enough petard-hoisting to go around.  And I love how Loomer is careful to blame Trump’s advisors and not him: she knows wherefrom her crazypants bread derives its crazypants butter.  No, really: the whole thing is just amazingly, poetically justicial, even down to the poor Smith, who I guess now has to figure out how to operate that website after all.  Hopefully this means the Democratic candidate will have an easier time of it.  But, for now ...

For now I’m just happy to have something to chuckle about.









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Sunday, August 2, 2026

Doom Report (Week 80: The Undeserving Others)


While watching the MAGA performance—and there really is no word for it other than “performance”—at the Fauci hearings, I had a bit of a revelation: I think I finally understand the MAGA movement.  It’s the Revenge of the Revenge of the Nerds.

If you don’t know Revenge of the Nerds, it’s a movie from my youth, and, honestly, it has not aged well: realistically, the vast majority of the 80s “raunchy sex comedies” tend to read to modern audiences as “sexual assault”, and I would never try to talk anyone out of that viewpoint.  I’m not here to say that this is a marvel of modern cinema or anything.  But I do think that, if you look at the overall plot and don’t peer too closely at the inherent mysogyny, it has something to say about the changing times.  In the summer of 1984, when Nerds was released, I had just graduated from high school, and the word “nerd” was still a vicious insult.  The movie posits that the nerds, traditionally downtrodden and dismissed, could actually “win”, somehow.  That they could come out on top while the jocks, who have dominated our culture for decades if not centuries, might actually find that brawn doesn’t always beat brains.

And, lo, it is now 42 years later, and I don’t think it’s particularly controversial to say that the nerds have won.  On the most recent Forbes list of billionaires, the top 6 richest people in the world—half of the top twenty, in fact—have “Technology” listed under the “Industry” column.  Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg: even Larry Ellison’s fortune comes from Oracle, which is a fairly nerdy product.  And the dominance of “nerd culture” has been acknowledged by most, in article after article.  And, for every movement, there is a backlash.

And watching rightwing nutjob senators picking on Anthony Fauci, who is certainly a big ol’ immunology nerd, reminded me very forcefully of watching Stan and Ogre picking on Lewis and Gilbert.  They gleefully dissect passages from Fauci’s diary, which he was foolish enough to leave on a government server, and they seem to want us to believe that we should be outraged—outraged, I tell you!—that this gentle nerd was starstruck by his unlikely fame and meeting celebrities such as Julia Roberts.  Oh, the scandal: that a nerdy guy who thought he would spend his life toiling away in obscurity would write cringey sentences in what he thought was a private diary that no one would ever read once he suddenly started meeting movie stars ... what an arrogant prick.

I’m not saying I recommend you watch any of the hearings.  Fauci is an 85-year-old man, so this is not just nerd-baiting, but also elder abuse.  Given that the entire goal of the rightwing nutjobs is to trick him into saying something they can use against him, his counsel has (quite wisely) advised him against saying anything other than taking the Fifth.  So the entirety of it is watching despicable people with no morals relentlessly bullying a little old man, who also happens to be a gentle nerd, and who can’t respond to their mockery.  I mean, I suppose if you get your rocks off watching lunkheads beating the shit out of kids with glasses in the schoolyard and taking their lunch money, maybe you could find it entertaining.  But it really is disgusting, in a visceral, stomach-churning way.  And the way they struggle to score performance points, because they have no actual evidence to present ... almost everything they say presumes that the COVID vaccine was deadly, and that COVID itself wasn’t so bad, and they don’t offer any evidence to support that wild theory—as if they could—they just start with that as a given and start throwing the punches.  Senator Bernie Moreno tries to shame Fauci while remaining utterly silent about his own son-in-law—who has thrown scalding water on the Senator’s daughter and broken his granddaughter’s collarbone—because the son-in-law is part of the Republicans’ very slim majority in the House.  (Note: bare hours before I wrote this, Moreno finally spoke out against his son-in-law.  But I don’t think that story will attract the same attention as his viral clip of yelling at Fauci “Who the fuck do you think you were ...?”)  And, trying to recreate the impactful moment from Pam Bondi’s hearings where she was invited to turn and look at the victims of Jeffrey Epstein, the Senators at this hearing demanded Fauci turn and look at his “victims,” who included members of an anti-vaccine advocacy group and Fox “News” host Laura Ingraham.  It was theatre, but not the entertaining kind.  It was a bunch of people who are seething that the nerds have conquered the culture and taken over the system taking petty shots at one particular nerd to make themselves feel better.  I’m sure it makes them feel strong.

Adam Kinzinger excoriates the Republicans for their performance, and let’s not forget that he knows this system inside and out due to his 12 years as a Congressperson.  The Even More News crew takes an even deeper dive into the ridiculosity, with the added bonus of an interview with the president of the Fair Elections Center afterward.  Or, if the Even More News segment is too long, Jordan Klepper breaks it down for you in just over 10 minutes on this week’s final Daily Show episode.

I find it interesting that most of those rich nerds I mentioned previously are doing all sorts of physical training and makeovers to try to divorce themselves from their origins.  They want to pretend they were never nerds, and now they want to bankroll the aggrieved assholes who are desperately trying to hold on to their place in history by abusing and trying to make small the people who will inevitably supplant them.  It’s pitiful, in some respects, but it’s still nauseating to watch the temporarily powerful beating up on those who were just trying to do the right thing.

Other things you need to know this week:

  • For a bit of a longer discussion, Cory Doctorow is back, this time on The Weekly Show, being interviewed by Jon Stewart.  My favorite quote: when Cory talks about why people end up voting for the “Fascist Party”, he says “You just become a sucker for people who show up and say ‘undeserving others’ are the reason you don’t have what you need.”  And the thing I found the most chilling about that is, we’re assuming that that message is bullshit.  But it’s not.  It’s just that the “undeserving others” are not the immigrants: it’s the billionaires.

For a small measure of hope this week, I’ll point you, yet again, at the swampy morass that is now our national reflecting pool.  Now that it’s become just a clusterfuck of incompetence, the rightwing nutjobs are acting like it’s dumb that liberals are incessantly talking about this issue ... pretending like it wasn’t their incompetent nutjob president who wouldn’t shut the fuck up about it in the first place.  He wouldn’t shut up about how awesome it was going to be, and how cheap it would be, and how he knew all the best people.  Remember “Our Pool Is Bigger Than Skyscrapers”?  And then, as it turns out, it was decidedly less than awesome, cost about 20 times what he said it would, and “the best people” turned out to be rejected Batman villains.  So he immediately pivoted to claiming that vandals had destroyed his pool with a box cutter.  You know: people just traipsing through the 2,000 foot pool using knives to cut things underwater.  Stuff that’s totally plausible.  They even stared arresting people over it.

But a funny thing happens when you arrest someone and have to go to court over it: there’s this annoying thing called “discovery” where the accused (and, better yet: the accused’s lawyers) get a chance to look at all your documents.  So, in the most predictable conclusion ever, the Department of the Interior was forced to admit that the lining of the pool was coming apart long before anyone started sticking their hands into it, and that it was because of shoddy workmanship, and that they knew about it, and that they arrested people anyway.  Could Jeanine Pirro lose her license to practice over this?  Could Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum lose his job over it?  Will it make any difference in regards to the massive damage this regime is doing?  No, probably not.  But it’s fun to watch anyhow.









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