Doom Report (Week 57: Speedrunning Old Yeller)

This week, CBS—now owned by right-wing billionaires—decided to censor Stephen Colbert’s interview with Texas Senatorial candidate James Talarico.  Now, to be clear, this is their right: CBS is a corporation, and corporations are not bound to honor the First Amendment (that only applies to government agencies).  But the fact that they had the right to do is doesn’t make it okay that they did so.  They gave Colbert a bogus reason, laundered through FCC chair Brendan Carr, then told him not to talk about it.  Naturally, he decided to talk about it.  I mean, what are they gonna do? fire him? again?  The interview was also made available on YouTube, where it’s currently sitting at well over 8 million views, on course to break 9 million.  As Colbert joked, that’s easily far more than would have seen it on CBS.  But, to some extent, the point was to show that they could.  And so they did.

Additional coverage by Adam Kinzinger, Brian Tyler Cohen interviewing Kara Swisher, and Jane Coaston on What a Day.

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Other things you need to know this week:

• The Epstein files are still a thing, and, on Assembly Required, Joy Reid breaks down the Epstein Class and what should (but probably won’t) happen to them.  (Note: I love the phrase “Epstein Class,” which apparently Ro Khanna coined back in November, but it was Jon Ossoff’s use of it in a powerful speech delivered on 2/7 that really launched it into the zeitgeist.)

• The Even More News crew covered this week’s Kristi Noem drama.  Extremely hilarious.

• Stephen Colbert interviewed Kaitlan Collins this week, who was the female journalist that asked a question about sex abuse survivors to which Trump responded that she should smile more.  I was pleased to see that she made the same point I did 2 weeks ago: above and beyond the gross misogyny of the remark, it’s really insane to ask people to smile while talking about underage girls who were raped.

• The Supreme Court ruled against Trump on tariffs, and everyone is claiming this as a victory, from Adam Kinzinger to Robert Reich (and that’s a hell of a broad spectrum).  Thankfully, a Strict Scrutiny emergency update explains why it’s not as good as they all say, and why your enthusiasm should be very well tempered.

• On this week’s Coffee Klatch, Robert Reich and Heather Lofthouse talk to David Hogg, Parkland school shooting survivor and, now, political activist.  He’s the founder of Leaders We Deserve, a PAC which supports young candidates standing in primaries to replace older Democrats.  The conversation is well worth watching; note that the link jumps right to the start of the interview, as the beginning discussion wasn’t up to the usual standards (including the aforementioned bad take on the tariff decision).  While I’m not a big fan of the Democrats, what David says here is pretty powerful: “We’re the party that actively works to make government work.  After all, we’re the party that helped to create Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.  And, we also need to acknowledge and be honest with voters and say, ‘Look, our job is a hell of a lot harder than it is for Republicans.’  Because, unlike them, we don’t run on the idea that government is terrible, it never can do anything right, and then get elected and make it terrible and make it not do anything right, and then repeat that cycle every election cycle.  It is always going to be harder to make something work.”  Can’t really argue with that.

• Josh Johnson gives an excellent breakdown of the Bad Bunny superbowl controversy.  As always with Johnson, it’s a longer watch, but well worth it to understand the nuances of the story, and also laugh a lot along the way.

• Brian Tyler Cohen had a great interview with Obama.  Well worth watching.

• Jamelle Bouie did a great video on voter fraud ... or, more accurately, the lack thereof.

• And Hank Green explores why the economy hasn’t crashed yet, despite Trump’s best efforts.

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Since CBS is so anxious to censor Colbert this week, I’ll point you at another of his monologues: this one from Monday, where he covers the fallout from the BTC Obama interview I pointed you at above, and also covers the whole, deeply weird Krist Noem blanket story that I told you to check out on Even More News.  Colbert covers it more quickly, of course, so that’s an advantage, but I really felt the extended discussion by Katy and Cody and Jonathan was the superior take.  And, if you still didn’t have enough, you could even check out the Jane Coaston coverage.

This particular story has struck me for multiple reasons.  First and most obviously, it’s a completely ridiculous story about a completely petty, meaningless thing, so it’s one of the safest things to laugh about: it’s a piece of government incompetence that isn’t hurting anyone other than the morons themselves (although my apologies to the pilot if he ended up coming out of it worse off than before).  So it’s the perfect story to let you roll your eyes and say “these fucking idiots” and move on with your day.  But I think it also struck me as something more, and I’m not sure it’s easy to describe, but let me give it a shot.

You know those movies about serial killers where they show you all the awful abuse they suffered as children?  And the point is not to make you feel sorry for them, because they’re going around killing people and you can never excuse that, but it’s still an interesting poing of view.  You can somehow sympathize with who they used to be, if not what they have become.  And I think I’m feeling the same way about Kristi Noem this week.  The extreme amount of pain she’s caused to people—including the many number of outright murders she’s overseen—can not be excused, or overlooked, or rationalized.  But, at the same time, I can almost see the outline of her origin story: a pretty woman, thinking this is how she needed to change herself to be on an even playing field with the cruel men whose favors she curried.  I’m going to point you all the way back to week 11 when Have I Got News For You did its piece on “Mar-a-Lago face”: go watch that again, and look what Noem did to her own face, thinking it would make her more attractive, more acceptable, to the rightwing nutjobs she thought she needed to court.  Now she’s apparently becoming paranoid, trying to make sure she’s on TV more often than Tom Homan, desperately trying to make sure Trump still likes her, still wants her to be where she is, still sleeping with Corey Lewandowski despite the fact that both are married to other people, perhaps because nothing really matters except whatever tiny bit of pleasure you can manage to eke out to tamp down the pain of living before the cold embrace of Death claims you.  If one day we get a biopic about Noem where she starts off sweet and innocent and suffers a long, slow slide into depravity and madness, I will not be surprised, and I’ll watch the hell out of it.  Not with sympathy—never with sympathy—but with the kind of sick, unable-to-look-away fascination that one reserves for roadside accidents, or for people who shoot their dogs for misbehaving, then grow up to treat human beings like dogs.