Doom Report (Week 36: Back to Only as Bad as It Was 2 Weeks Ago)

Well, Jimmy Kimmel’s “cancellation” lasted barely a week, and Trump threw fits about the return and threatened to sue Disney (again).  Nearly everyone I follow weighed in on what the cancellation and return means (or doesn’t mean), including John Oliver, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Josh Johnson, Adam Conover, Robert Reich, and Brian Tyler Cohen.  I think the general concensus is that the fight is far from over, but that public outcry snatched victory from the jaws of political intimidation.  Also several of them noted that the consolidation of the media landscape is really not making this easier.  Well, easier for aspiring dictators.  But not for the rest of us.

Other things you need to know this week:

• Adam Kinzinger has another good week in review.

• There was a Charlie Kirk Memorial Rally, apparently.  The Even More News crew breaks it down for you.

• In equally bizarre news, there is apparently such a thing as “Escaltategate” now.  Seriously, what a whiny bitch.  For full details, you can consult Seth Meyers or Jimmy Kimmel.

• On The Daily Show this week, Leslie Jones’ explores systemic racism and how the MAGA crowd is trying to pretend it doesn’t exist.

• Apparently, Trump is sending troops into Portland now.

• And, in other breaking news, the Supreme Court allows Trump to fire an FTC member.  Strict Scrutiny has an emergency video that explains the ramifications pretty clearly.

• I mentioned Steve Burns’ new podcast Alive last week.  The first two episodes weren’t particularly political, but, in the third, he asks Representative Ro Khanna what’s happened to the American Dream?

I suppose our hope for the week is that Kimmel is back on the air.  Now, as I said last week, I’m not the greatest fan of the man, though he has been known to make me chuckle.  But, like most everyone else, I agree that he really knocked it out of the park with his first monologue back.  As I write this, the YouTube version is closing in on 22 million views; if you aren’t yet one of them, you really should check it out.  Trying to be funny after some dark event has occurred is a tricky thing to manage, but I think Kimmel hit all the right notes: he is just as emotional when talking about Kirk’s actual death as he is biting when referring to the right-wing ghouls trying to capitalize on it.  The accolades are all well-deserved.

Doom Report (Week 35: Comedy Is Illegal Again)

Remember when we used to have the First Amendment?  Those were fun times.  Nowadays, the First is joining the Fourth, the Fifth, the Fourteenth, the Twenty-Second ... pretty soon the Second Amendment will just be called “The Amendment” and then we won’t have so much to learn in school.

Because this week, Donald Trump’s FCC forced Jimmy Kimmel off the air.

Now, I’m not a huge fan of Kimmel—I’ve only quoted him twice in these Doom Reports (once in week 21 and once way back in week 1), vs the dozen or so times I’ve referenced Colbert or Seth Meyers.  But I watch him every now and again, and, to quote Hasan Piker:

What do you think of Jimmy Kimmel?  It doesn’t matter, okay?  For all intents and purposes, I am Jimmy Kimmel’s most loyal servant.  I am his fedayeen going forward.  I didn’t give a fuck about Jimmy Kimmel until this very moment.  Now he’s my GOAT.  Do you understand?  Because what is going on here is far more consequential than my own personal distaste for, like, Jimmy Kimmel’s jokes or whatever.  What’s going on here is this administration playing out its agenda of suppressing whatever they see fit.

And, I have to say, I really don’t like it when the news forces me to explain to my children what “McCarthyism” was.  Especially when I have to explain that there is no “have you no decency?” moment coming for us.  All the Republicans have their faces in the dirt because they’ve prostrated themselves to Dear Leader, and all the Democrats are writing sternly worded letters.

And, look: a lot of people misunderstand the First Amendment.  Remember when all the right-wing nutjobs were getting kicked off Twitter and Facebook for lying, back when those platforms actually cared about such things?  They all cried about how the companies were violating their First Amendment rights.  Except that a company can’t violate your First Amendment rights, because the First Amendment doesn’t protect you from companies: it protects you from the government.  If you want to use the service of a company, you have to follow its rules.  And, if the rule is, no blatant lying, and you go around spreading bullshit like it’s going out of style, you get the hook.

So, isn’t this the same thing?  Kimmel wasn’t cancelled—excuse me, indefinitely pre-empted—by the government, but by ABC, which is a company.  No harm, no foul ... right?  One might think so.  But then one would be ignoring the fact that FCC chairman Brendan Carr went on a right-wing podcast and said that Kimmel had to be suspended, and that ABC and its affiliates could “do this the easy way or the hard way.”  That’s not me saying that Carr was acting like a Mafia boss—those were his literal words.  So I guess I am saying that he was acting like a Mafia boss, but please don’t take my word for it.  Read about it in Variety, watch it on The Daily Show, listen to Stephen Colbert discuss it in detail.  You can hear the Even More News crew talk about the aftermath of the firing, or you can even hear them practically predict it in a video from the day before the event.

So this was government action: the head of a government agency threatened affiliates with government retribution if they didn’t comply with his wishes, and one of the biggest affiliate networks needs government approval because they want to own more than 40% of the local TV stations in the country.  So Nexstar condemned Kimmel’s comments as “offensive and insensitive,” and in turn threatened ABC, which is owned by Disney, which has already capitulated to Trump once and apparently had zero problem doing so again.

So! what exactly were these “offensive and insensitive” comments that Kimmel made about Charlie Kirk’s death?  Actually, he didn’t say anything about Charlie Kirk’s death—or indeed about Charlie Kirk at all.  You can see the clip of his show played interminably in any number of those videos I linked above, but, basically, he said that the MAGA crowd was “desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them” and that they were trying to score political points.  Which is, you know: true.  He also played a clip where a reporter asks Trump how he’s doing after the shooting and Trump says “I’m doing great! look at my new ballroom!” to which Kimmel responds: “This is not how an adult grieves the murder of someone he calls a friend.  This is how a four-year-old mourns a goldfish.”

Literally nothing about Kirk.  Not nothing that could be considered offensive, or insensitive—literally nothing at all.  It’s possibly the only time in the history of human discourse where you can take a statement as subjective as calling someone’s comments offensive and insensitive and classify it as categorically false.  He got cancelled because he hurt their feelings, and they didn’t like it.  And, for fuck’s sake: the First Amendment means that even if he had said something offensive and/or insensitive, the government wouldn’t have the right to do anything about it anyway. People could write letters to ABC, executives could take Kimmel aside and have stern words with him, but the fucking chairman of the FCC has to stay the fuck out of it.

Except he didn’t.

So that’s why people are calling this a First Amendment crisis, and pointing out that this is how dictators start.  That’s why, when Jon Stewart interviewed Maria Ressa, she notes that she told him in March that shit was happening much faster here than it had in her native Philippines.  She (somewhat chillingly) says:

I think that was why we spoke in March.  Because I was like, this is happening.  If you do not reclaim your rights—if you don’t stand up—it’s going to be significantly harder to claw them back.

How prescient of her.

And I’m glad that all these stories are coming out and pointing out the hypocrisy.  I’m glad that Stephen Colbert plays the clip of Brendan Carr himself saying that political speech should be protected.  I’m glad that BTC is playing his clip montage of Trump, Musk, Hegseth, RFK Jr, Ramaswamy, Tucker Carlson, JD Vance, and finally Musk again, all saying things like “if we don’t have free speech, we don’t have a country any more” and “free speech only matters when it’s someone you don’t like”—he’s basically been playing it on a loop, and I guess I’m glad for that even though I’m starting to get a bit sick of it.  I’m glad that so many people keep playing that clip of Musk saying “comdey is legal again!”  I’m glad that Colbert resurrected his right-wing nutjob Colbert Report host character to do one more installment of “The Wørd”; today’s word? Shhhhhh!.  I even managed to laugh out loud when, during the report from the Daily Show correspondents, Ronny Chieng is called out because his tie is not “MAGA red” and he responds “Can you calm down?  God, is this your first dictator?”  (He goes on to point out that “They don’t care about the exact shade, OK?  It’s just about being visibly uncomfortable while you praise them like a toddler.”)  But I would be much happier if there was no need for all that commentary.

Other things you need to know this week:

• The main Some More News episode this week contains a good rundown of all the fascisms thus far.

• Legal Eagle has a great video highlighting Jeannine Pirro’s failure to indict ham sandwiches (and everyone else too).

• Another good weekly round-up from Adam Kinzinger.

• Not technically this week, but it took me a few extra days to get around to watching it: Hasan Minhaj Doesn’t Know interviewed Karen Hao about AI, and I think it’s one of the most balanced perspectives on AI I’ve seen in months, if not years.  She doesn’t try to convince us that AI is stupid and useless and overhyped (even though much of it is), but nor does she try to persuade us that it’s going to change our lives forever (even though there’s a bit of truth to that as well).  I especially love the part where Hasan asks her if AI will take people’s jobs and she makes a point that I also often make: AI likely can’t take your job, but that doesn’t mean it won’t take your job.  Or, as she puts it: “So the reason why AI is going to automate jobs is not always going to be because the AI tools are actually up to snuff.  It’s because people are putting the cart before the horse and just getting rid of workers, being pulled into this allure that AI is the solution.  ...  because ultimately it’s not actually AI taking your job: it’s humans.  It’s an executive deciding that your job is now redundant.”

This is quite possibly the least hopeful I’ve been since the very beginning.  Hearing Maria Ressa saying “I warned you!” (I mean, she was much more polite than that, but that’s what it sounded like in my head) ... rereading my own words from week 7:

... maybe, in retrospect, we’ll look back on this moment and say, “no, it was inexorable ... we just didn’t realize it yet.”  Man, I hope not.

and then realizing that even that feeble hope has been dashed ... it’s tough.  Perhaps the best I can do is point you at something that, if you’re a Millennial, or the parent of a Millennial, you might appreciate.  Steve Burns, late of Blues Clues, has a new video podcast called Alive, and it’s encouraging, uplifting, and soothing.  If you never watched Blue’s Clues, you might not appreciate it fully, but give it a try anyway: I think there’s something there for everyone.  Two episodes out so far.

Kimmel may sue, if only for the benefit of his staff and crew.  He may get some money out of it, and I’m sure he’ll use that to make his employees whole, but he won’t get his show back.  Colbert gets to keep going till May—hopefully!—and I suspect he won’t get his show back either.  And Trump has already said that Fallon and Seth Meyers are “next.”  That’ll be four of the Strike Force Five, and John Oliver is a recently naturalized citizen, so I suspect he may be even easier to dispose of than the rest.  So perhaps we’ll be treated to a resurrection: Strike Force Five: AntiFascism Edition.  But where will it air?  YouTube is owned by Google, and their CEO was one of the billionaires given priority seating over the Cabinet members at the inauguration.  So I’m not sure that’s the answer.  Twitch is owned by Amazon, and Bezos has already helped out the regime by hobbling the Washington Post, so there’s no hope there either.  Maybe we’ll get the modern equivalent of The Boat that Rocked, a fictional account of the real-life pirate radio stations that broadcast from ships in international waters off the coast of Britain in the 60s when BBC Radio refused to play that new, evil “rock’n'roll” garbage.  Dunno about you, but I would go to some lengths to tune into a pirate signal that featured a rotating cast of all the comedians suppressed by our current regime.  Sounds like a rockin’ show.

Doom Report (Week 34: Death Comes for All)

The major news this week is that someone shot Charlie Kirk.  If you don’t know who that is ... well, first off, count yourself lucky.  To call him a “right-wing influencer” is a bit of an understatement; some of the things he’s said are truly horrible.  And of course, when someone like this dies—especially by violence, and especially especially by gun violence—some people will be heartbroken and some people will be angry and some will rejoice.  For my part, I’ll say that, exactly as was the case when I talked about Luigi Mangione’s shooting of the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, two things can be true.  His shooting was horrifying; if you managed to avoid watching the video, please continue to do so—personally, I specifically avoided watching anything which might have the full video of the shooting in it, but just seeing the thumbnails of some of those videos in passing was enough to give me disturbing dreams.  It’s a horrible thing, the ultimate tragedy for his wife and two children (all of whom were there and witnessed the event), and I as much as anyone condemn this action or any similar action that ends in such an awful tragedy.

It is also true that Kirk once said:

I think it’s worth it.  I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights.  That is a prudent deal.  It is rational.

(He was, in fact, talking about mass shootings at the moment he was shot.)  He also said that “prowling Blacks” go around targeting white people, that women should submit to their husbands, and that the “great replacement strategy” is happening every day at our southern border.  He was a racist, misogynist, xenophobic, homophobic, self-righteous prick, an absolute shitstain of a human being.  That doesn’t mean I’m glad he’s dead.  But his death doesn’t make him a better person either.  So much of the news has his right-wing nutjob colleagues saying that he only ever tried to have a civil debate, but that’s bullshit: he was fundamentally uncivil, fundamentally radical, deliberately provocative.  He sought to offend the maximum number of people because it pushed his rascist agenda and made him more money.  And, while my sympathy for his widow remains deep, it’s also true that she has stated that she will continue to push that agenda.

And while it’s good for people to call for an end to political violence, it’s also frustrating to hear the MAGA crowd go crazy blaming “the left” for Charlie Kirk’s death when they’ve been ignoring violence against Democrats for years.  Hell, just 3 months ago a Minnesota state representative was murdered and another seriously injured, and the response from Republicans was to make jokes and boost conspiracy theories.  Now they want to “crack down on universities” and treat the Democratic party “as a domestic terror organization,” while completely ignoring the school shooting that happened just a minute later less than 500 miles away.  I’d like to believe that these people really cared about Kirk and they miss their friend, but it’s awfully tempting to believe they’re just using this death as an excuse to go after their political opponents.  But, as I say, I suppose two things can be true.

For a fairly balanced (if longer) take on the shooting, try Even More News; they show a great deal of empathy for him as a human being, while still not forgiving his abhorrent views.  For shorter takes, I’d say it depends on which side of the empahty divide you want to land on: for a more somber, sympathetic view, try Seth Meyers; for a less sympathetic, unabashed, tell-it-like-it-is take, it’s tough to beat Christopher Titus.

Other things you need to know this week:

• Robert Reich has a great Substack article on the looming government shutdown, and what the Democrats should do.  His argument is quite effective—I like how he uses “disappear people from our streets,” reminiscent of my own thoughts in week 8—I thought his “then what?” conclusion was not particularly encouraging.  Adam Kinzinger also addressed this issue, coming to roughly the same conclusions, but also including a good explainer on how the shutdowns work.

• On this week’s Election Profit Makers, starting at around 35:20, you can hear David Rees bemoaning the same thing that another of my friends said to me this week: that Trump doesn’t seem to actually have a plan, or even an ideaology.  But I think David’s ultimate conclusion is correct: at the end of the day, racism is the simplest explanation.  For a guy who seems to particularly hate black women, and who once said that he wished his generals would be more like Hitler’s, Occam’s Razor tells us we should stop looking for complicated reasoning when white supremacy is right there.

• On this Monday’s Daily Show, Jon Stewart compares Trump to the kid from The Twilight Zone who keeps sending people to the cornfield; some of the side-by-side’s of people flattering the two of them are pretty spot-on.  But my favorite bit is around 15:00, where the Newsmax anchor gleefully reports that the Supreme Court has ruled that ICE may take race into consideration when deciding who to arrest, even as her name is clearly printed below her: Bianca de la Garza.

• That decision, among others, is covered by this week’s Strict Scrutiny, although my favorite bit is one of Kate Shaw’s “favorite things” (a segment they do at the end of the show to try to end on a more upbeat note).  Alexandra Petri’s article in The Atlantic entitled “Apologies: You Have Reached the End of Your Free-Trial Period of America!” is very short, and very funny.

Is there much hope this week?  No, sadly, not much.  James Talarico will run for Senate next year; this is not against Ted Cruz, but John Cornyn.  I won’t say Cornyn is just as bad as Cruz—“equally execrable” is not a phrase one uses in conjunction with Ted Cruz—but he’s pretty execrable all right.  And Talarico is a deeply religious Democrat who’s talked about how following the teachings of Jesus makes you necessarily liberal by today’s political standards, so at least he has a fighting chance as a Democrat in Texas.  What else ... Have I Got News for You? (the US version) is back for another season; catch new episodes Saturday on CNN, Sunday on HBO Max, or just watch clips on YouTube.  But, overall, a tough week.  Hopefully things get brighter.

Doom Report (Week 33: Steal Like No One's Watching)

This week, while being interviewed by Jim Acosta, Mehdi Hasan said:

A judge this morning said Donald Trump violated that law by putting the National Guard on the streets of LA against the governor’s recommendation.  So on the same day, literally the same day, that a judge is saying, what you did in LA was illegal, he comes out and says, “Well, I’m going to do it in Chicago, too.”  And he said today, “I may go back into LA.”  What a weird world we live in, Jim ...

He goes on to note:

Most people go, “Oh, I broke the law; hope no one notices.”  He says, “I broke the law, and I’m going to do it again and again.”

And this ties in with something I was pondering last week, but hadn’t yet well formulated.  Once upon a time, when the government did bad shit, you could expose them.  We used to have movies and novels where the heroes just have to get the story to the New York Times or Rolling Stone or Mother Jones, and then the evil politicians won’t be able to continue their evil plans.  In fact, we don’t even need to restrict ourselves to fiction: remember All the President’s Men (book or movie, take your pick), where reporters met informants in dimly-lit underground parking garages?  Just expose the story and that’ll put the brakes on a lawless President.  Seems almost quaint in retrospect.  Now, when the government does something bad, or illegal, or horrifying, they just don’t care who knows.

Other things you need to know this week:

• Josh Johnson has really been the rising star of the making-fun-of-the-news scene this year: if the YouTube clips of his stand-up tour are any indication, he’s doing entirely different routines in every city, keeping up with the frenetic pace of the news while keeping a very sharp edge.  His facility with words calls to mind a fusion of rappers with a complex flow, such as Nas and Lateef the Truthspeaker, with some of the best of the old-school British purveyors of comedic wordplay, such as John Cleese and Stephen Fry.  He has a way of relating the insanity of the Trump regime with personal anecdotes that are extremely relatable, blending it all together until the absurdity is manifest.  This week, he talks about the reasons that people voted for Trump in a way that I hadn’t considered before: that maybe people just “felt like there was no one looking out for them; that slowly everything that was their quality of life and everything that they earned was eroding away piece by piece.  Right?  And that they just needed someone to step up who would stand in the way of all that, and wouldn’t be swayed by it.”  I think what he’s saying is that the Dems and the Repubs are all locked into the status quo, and people just wanted someone who would say “fuck you” to everybody and do whatever the fuck they wanted.  And boy did we get that.  Maybe it’s not quite as good as we hoped it would be.

• Hank Green explains why your electric bill is going to get very, very bad, and how the Republicans will blame green energy for it.

• More Perfect Union is killing it this week.  They have two excellent videos exposing the bad shit that continues to fester behing all the bad shit that Trump is doing: one on Musk’s “self-driving cars” scam, and one on how to make tons of money in the stock market (hint: it’s by buying and selling whenever Congress does).

If you’re only going to watch one thing this week, I encourage you to spend an hour watching Hasan Minhaj interview the former head of USAID.  This is an organization that’s saved over 90 million lives over the last 20 years; now, it’s completely gutted.  Best estimates are over 300,000 lives lost because of this so far this year.  Here’s the stark reality that Dr. Gawande lays out:

You had people in a hundred offices around the world: those are shut down.  The organizations that they worked with that had expertise, local organizations in different countries and large organizations around the world, they’ve terminated their staff.  There’s a bank account that has billions of dollars in it that now has shifted to the State Department; who knows whether that’ll be spent appropriately, but there aren’t the people there anymore to to make this program work.  Sixty years of experience of an agency that’s built up these capabilities.  Now, if you turn that back on, it would take you years, if not decades, to rebuild.

Watch Hasan’s reaction to this pronouncement.

I wish there was a note of hope to leave you on this week, but, to echo Dr. Gawande, “What I am simply trying to do is bear witness to the destruction at at this moment.”  So keep looking ahead to a time when this is over, keep trying to laugh as best you can at the absurdity of it all, but never lose sight of the wanton destruction wrought by the hands of a few capricious and callous billionaires.