Doom Report (Week 3: Being Lied to Unbelievably)

This week, we find out that parts of Pete Hegseth’s defense department will stop celebrating holidays that might be interepreted as DEI, such as Black History Month, MLK Day, Juneteenth, Pride Month, and Holocaust Remembrance Days.  Apparently Hegseth said, “We’re not joking around,” and also “DEI is gone.”

Whew!  I sure am glad that our brave president has stamped out the one thing that was causing all our economic problems.  It’s amusing (a word which here means “horrifying”) to me that the wealthy in this country have been so successful in pitting working class white people against working class people who happen to be not white.  It’s easy to dismiss this as racism—I myself often have.  I grew up in the South, and nearly every working class white person I knew was racist.  So it was easy for me to extrapolate from there.  But that was long ago and far away, and I no longer believe the answer is that simple.  More Perfect Union has many great videos that challenge this preconceived notion, and most of them are by West Virginia white working class man turned activist John Russell.  Russell even appeared at the DNC this year, where he pulled no punches.  But his MPU video this week where he returned to Springfield OH to follow up on the results of the “they’re eating the dogs!” controversy really underscored this divide that shameless people like J.D. Vance have deliberately fostered.  Here’s one exchange with Russell talking to Barron Seelig (a white man) who runs a local homeless shelter, trying to dispel the persistent rumor that the Haitian immigrants have a “magic card” (yes, they literally call it that) that gives them free groceries:

Barron: He, he was getting none of that?
Russell: None of that.  But he was paying into the system.
Barron: He, my friend, is the exception to the rule.
Russell: But what if he isn’t?  What if—
Barron: What if he isn’t the exception to the rule?  Then we’re being lied to unbelievably.

I swear, my heart broke.  This is not a man who is racist.  This is a compassionate man who has devoted his life to helping people: it’s his full time job.  This is a man who has been fed the most bald-faced lies—fairy tales so ridiculous that the rich assholes who invented them couldn’t be bothered to come up with a more believable phrase than “magic card”—by people with no respect for his intelligence wanting to take advantage of his compassion.  And the fact that he didn’t try to hold on to the lie, to cling to it desperately because to let it go would crumble the foundations of his worldview, the fact that he leapt to the real truth without missing a beat ... that’s what lets me know he’s not a racist.  Real racists can’t abide having their prejudices challenged.  They can’t say, “oh, well, in that case, I’ve been lied to my whole life.” They just can’t.

We’ve also learned far more than we ever wanted to know about the DOGE Boys (on this week’s Coffee Klatch, Robert Reich proposed calling them “the Muskrats,” which I quite like), those 19 – 24 (or 25, or 26) year old mostly white (plus a few Asian-American) “men” who have been set loose by President Musk and are now “evaluating” career government workers as to whether they should keep their jobs.  Much attention has been paid to Edward Coristine, for having the ... well, big balls ... to adopt the online moniker “bigballs,” and apparently a few people find his hair cut amusing.  But I say, go back and look at that picture again: the suit jacket and shorts is really the pièce de résistance.  And also Marko Elez, who actually resigned after blatantly racist tweets were uncovered ... but also don’t forget that President Musk says he will be reinstated after J.D. Vance posted that “We shouldn’t reward journalists who try to destroy people.” (And, if you want to hear someone rant about the irony of Vance standing up for a guy who wrote “normalize Indian hate” while married to an Indian-American woman and being father to Indian-American children, BTC has you covered.  It was a bit over the top for me personally, but I can’t deny he made some good points.)  I even saw a few random Internet denizens asking “how could these guys even get security clearance?” Silly rabbit: security clearances are for government employees.  The Muskrats (like the security people locking Democrats out of governemnt buildings) work for President Musk, who is acccountable to no one.  Security clearance? Schmecurity clearance!

But it makes sense that Democrats would not be allowed into our government.  On this week’s Scrict Scrutiny, Leah Littman quoted a post from President Musk:

In a tweet, he said, quote, very important to vote Republican for the Wisconsin Supreme Court to prevent voting fraud, exclamation.

I can’t decide if this means only votes for Democrats can be fraudulent, or all votes for Republican must be valid.  Probably both.

But, to quote British journalist Lewis Goodall on this week’s Pod Save the UK, this is what it is like “now that we all have to inhabit, don’t we, the burning hedge maze that is Donald Trump’s brain, and try and each day see if we can navigate our way out of it, and always fail.” To give you an idea of the cognitive dissonance under which we live, my father—someone who has been a Republican for as long he’s been alive, as far as I know, and who actually is a racist—even my father pointed out this week that opposition to tarriffs are why we broke away from the British in the first place (remember that whole kerfuffle over tea?).  Meanwhile, I have to listen to Democrats like Hakeem Jeffries on this week’s Weekly Show saying bullshit like “Perhaps we were not speaking as forcefully as necessary” directly after quoting Maya Angelou saying “People won’t remember what you say, they may not even remember what you do, but they will always remember how you make them feel.” So you’re going to fix that by telling people they’re doing fine even harder? or was it by telling them that you “understand the pain that they’ve been in economically”?  That’s just more talk, dude, and people won’t remember what you say.  (Also, I’m not sure he answered a single question Jon posed to him: there was a lot of responding to ‘what specifically will Democrats do?’ with ‘great question Jon: here’s a list of things Democrats did.’ And I was super disappointed that Jon and the producer crew didn’t make note of that in the after-show discussion.)

So the Democrats give me no hope that they are capable of keeping President Musk from running roughshod over our constituional democracy.  And what does Musk want, ultimately?  Well, according to this week’s Some More News:

The wealthiest man on the planet, getting richer every day, is really concerned about lowering birth rates, and thinks that the only indicators for high birth rates are being poor, uneducated, and religious.

And he, and people like him, will trade on those characteristics, repeatedly, to get what they want.  Which is all your money.

Speaking of religion, this week’s Election Profit Makers informs us that failed NC gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson (remember him?) is dropping his lawsuit.  He was suing, you may recall, because various news outlets outed his ... shall we say, interesting ... comments on porn sites.  Robinson said that he decided to drop the suit after consultation with “Our Savior.” To which EPM host David Rees responded:

I wish Jesus would come down and say “Keep my name out of your mouth.” Wouldn’t that be so amazing?  That would go viral on TikTok ...

And I couldn’t think of a better encapsulation of the times we live in than that.