Sunday, July 26, 2026

Doom Report (Week 79: Electrify the Pendulum)


This week, The Daily Show celebrated its 30-year anniversary.  Over the course of 30 years—which is longer than any of my children have been alive, longer than any job I’ve ever had, longer than any house I’ve ever lived in, longer than any relationship I’ve ever had outside my family—I’ve seen nearly every episode of the show: most of the Craig Kilborn episodes, all but perhaps a few of the Jon Stewart episodes, every single Trevor Noah episode as far as I know, and almost surely every episode hosted by a guest host or a rotating correspondent.  If Wikipedia is to be believed, the 30th anniversary episode was its 4,134th.  Even if I managed to somehow miss 134 of them (which feels like a very high number to me), 4,000 episodes at roughly 20 minutes per episode (that’s a half-hour broadcast show minus the commercials) is over 1,300 hours of my life devoted to this show.  And it’s still going, and, in my opinion, it’s still as vital as ever, so I don’t mean this to sound like a eulogy, but the retrospective summary of the last 30 years that they put together really got me thinking about what the show has meant to me.

Look, I’ve talked before about the misnomer of “fake news”: sure, in the Kilborn era, it often was (although note that, even then, there was enough for the retrospective to find a clip or two), but then things changed.  The Daily Show doesn’t report fake news.  It reports real news, in a way that some people want to refer to as fake.  They seem to believe that, if you can laugh at the news, that can’t possibly be real.  Or maybe they just need to denigrate it to justify their own lack of humour.  Maybe they’ve been drowning in their own sombriety so long that their fatalism just won’t let them accept that it might even be possible to consider another way.

Well, for me, The Daily Show (and the many other shows, podcasts, and YouTube channels it’s inspired) is the only way I can keep track of what’s going on in the world and stay sane.  I never watched the news as a child, and even throughout the bulk of my adulthood ... right up until the Towers came down, and then I decided I had been foolish and, like many other Americans, started watching the news obsessively.  And you know what I discovered?  It’s just not good for you.  Not conducive to your mental health (and, sometimes, not your physical health either).  Somehow, we’ve designed the news to be depressing, and frightening, and rage-inducing: it imparts a sense of existential dread ... by design.  Surely we can see that there’s something fundamentally wrong with this model.  Surely it can’t be too radical a concept to want to be informed in a way that makes us laugh, even when we have to laugh through our tears.  And study after study after study shows that viewers of “satirical” news shows are better informed than those who watch “real” news.  And the only thing about that that continues to boggle my mind is that anyone is surprised by these findings.  What are you more likely to remember: a barrage of facts spewed at you by a very serious person in a serious suit, or a real zinger that simultaneously taught you something?  Humour invests facts with a “stickiness” that raw regurgitation can never aspire to.

And so, for 30 years, I’ve been watching The Daily Show, along with all its spiritual successors, and it’s a huge part of the information that I gather every week for these Doom Reports.  Every single week I have to restrain myself from exclusively sending you clip after clip from them just to spread the love.  But some weeks, it’s practically impossible.  Here’s just a sampling of what they have for us this week:

Here’s hoping we get another 30 years.

Other things you need to know this week:

  • For another take on the whole communism bullshit, see also this week’s Armageddon Update.
  • The rightwing nutjobs seem to think they can convince America that you should have to show your passport to vote by pointing out that you need your driver’s license to use your Unlimited Pasta Pass at the Olive Garden.  Besides the very real disconnect that a driver’s license is much easier to come by than a passport, Seth Meyers makes the compelling case that “unlimited pasta isn’t a constitutional right, you fucking bozos!” in Wednesday’s “A Closer Look” segment.
  • The Even More News crew covers the pasta pass as well, in addition to the whole bizarre meltdown the nutjobs are having over The Odyssey.  Best quote on that topic comes from SMN head writer Dave Bell (filling in for Katy Stoll), who, when talking about the nutjobs’ prediction that the Christopher Nolan blockbuster wouldn’t make any money going down in flames, notes “It’s like watching them fight the ocean, where you’re like: it doesn’t even know you’re there.”
  • Have you ever wondered why your taxes keep going up but government services keep getting worse?  Well, Garys Economics explains the reason (spoiler: it’s wealth inequality—tax wealth not work!).

Where shall we go for our note of hope this week?  Why, back to The Daily Show, of course.

About a year and a half ago—in other words, just after their disastrous defeat to Trump—the Democratic National Committee announced an election for a new chairperson.  The two candidates were Ken Martin and Ben Wikler.  I watched interviews with both: Martin appeared on Brian Tyler Cohen’s channel, while Wikler sat down with Jon Stewart.  Now, besides the fact that Martin wasn’t bright enough to book The Daily Show, I was strongly rooting for Wikler for more concrete reasons: Wikler had an interesting, coherent vision for the future of the party, while Martin was ... fine.  Nothing particularly wrong with him, he was just ... I dunno, a bit bland.  Didn’t seem like he really wanted to shake things up, and, given the state of the party, that seemed like a bad idea.

Sadly, Martin won, and turned out to be exactly the sort of useless establishment politician that I feared he’d be.  If you need proof, take a look at how badly he bungled the DNC’s “autopsy report” for the 2024 election.  Basically, any time you hear a politician say “we need to keep looking forward,” it means they’re trying to cover up how badly someone fucked up, which you’d instantly realize by looking backwards.  It means that they’ve decided they utterly—and willfully—refuse to learn anything from their mistakes, and fully believe that, if they only continue to do the same thing over and over again, only harder this time, they will surely achieve a different result.  People like Ken Martin are why I don’t put much stock in the idea that the Democrats will save us from the rightwing nutjobs that have body-snatched the Republican party.

But Wikler, rather than taking his defeat lying down, decided to write a book.  His success was in Wisconsin, where he was state party chair.  In 2018, Wisconsin had a Republican governor, a Republican supermajority in the legislature, and a 5-2 conservative state Supreme Court.  Today, they have a Democratic governor, bare Republican majorities in the legislature, and a 4-3 liberal Supreme Court.  And, while Wikler is quick to point out that he was only one member of a larger team, he oversaw that transition.  The national DNC was not ready to win that hard, apparently, but, just in case they’ve changed their minds, his new book This is the Plan: How to End America’s Meltdown and Save Democracy contains the blueprint.

So this week he sat down with Jon once again for another interview.  And I thought he said some really trenchant things: about unrigging the system, about fixing the Supreme Court, about fixing all the gerrymanders.  Perhaps it’s best summed up by this quote:

The pendulum swings in American politics.  But what the right does is, when it swings their way, they catch it, and they grab it.  And they don’t want to let it go.  And you need to electrify the pendulum so that you cannot grab the thing and stop it from moving.

Now if only the Democrats would start listening ...









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Sunday, July 19, 2026

Doom Report (Week 78: What We Want to Show New Yorkers Are Results)


The big story this week was that ICE is back murdering people again.  They seem to think that, as long as they’re not murdering white people, no one will notice.  And I suppose we should be pleased that they have been proven wrong.  Even More News covered the first murder last week, but they clipped just that part of the discussion this week, and then covered the second murder as part of a larger discussion on Monday.  What a Day talked to David Bier, the Director of Immigration Studies at the Cato Institute, while Strict Scrutiny spoke to Andrea R. Flores, founder of Securing America’s Promise.  And Adam Conover, doing his yet-untitled Friday roundup of the news, spoke to American Prospect editor David Dayen and Semafor columnist David Weigel about this, as well as other topics (such as the surprisingly-lack-of-fallout from the Graham Platner situation I mentioned last week).

I don’t have too much to add to all that, except to say this:  Coming into the United States illegally is a Class B federal misdemeanor.  That’s equivalent to shooting a deer on federal land out of season (or without a license), or driving recklessly (or drunk) on a military base.  Imagine that you did one of those things, and then, later—perhaps years later—a van full of masked thugs, in plain black clothes and sunglasses, forced you off the road and started pointing guns at you and yelling at you to get out of your car.  And, under those circumstances, if you panicked and tried to drive away, would it be okay for those people to shoot you dead?  I mean, sure, people will say you shouldn’t have panicked, and you should have complied (with the non-uniformed, armed, masked men), but does that make it okay for them to murder you?  I’m having a lot of trouble buying what the Stephen Millers of the world are selling.

Of course, the other major news is that Lindsey Graham died.  I personally have had a lot of difficulty dealing with this news.  On the one hand, Lindsey was a human being, and I hate for anyone to just die like that, and I also am getting to the age where people dying at the age of 71 seems like they’re gone too soon.  Certainly he was 13 years younger than Mitch McConnell, who everyone swears is still alive, and 9 years younger than Trump, who at the very least is still walking and talking, if not particularly lively.  On the other hand ...  Look, if you want to hear from someone who actually liked Lindsey but still isn’t afraid to call him on his bullshit, Adam Kinzinger has you covered, and if you want to hear from someone who really didn’t like him and is perhaps a bit too joyful to call out his monstrous side, Owen Jones is happy to oblige (and, if you need something a bit more down the middle, What a Day’s Jane Coaston spoke to staff report for The Atlantic Matt Viser).  For me, I just have a very clear memory of Lindsey saying this:

This will stand the test of the time.  This is the last year of a lame duck president, and if Ted Cruz or Donald Trump get to be president, they’ve all asked us not to confirm or take up a selection by President Obama, so if a vacancy occurs in their last year of their first term, guess what? you will use their words against them.  I want you to use my words against me.  If there’s a Republican president in 2016 and a vacancy occurs in the last year of the first term, you can say Lindsey Graham said “let’s let the next president, who whoever it might be, make that nomination” and you could use my words against me and you’d be absolutely right.

But it didn’t stand the test of time.  It didn’t stand the test of four years.  The exact scenario that Graham described actually happened, and when people pointed out that Lindsey Graham said “let’s let the next president, whoever it might be, make that nomination”, he replied “the rules have changed as far as I’m concerned.”  So I’m going to honor Lindsey’s wishes and hold his words against him.  I’m sorry to say that I cannot say I’m sorry to hear of his passing.  (Well, insofar as he may have been a deeply closeted gay man who was also an anti-LGBTQ+ politician, I suppose I’m not even that sorry.  But still a little bit sorry.)

It’s also been an interesting week in that we’ve had a bunch of stories about the economy this week.  I mean, the economy is always a topic for discussion, but it’s rare to see this many stories hit, and all be this good.  If I have a favorite economist, it is surely Gary Stevenson, who I’ve discussed many times throughout this series, most recently in week 72 where I actually used his catchphrase (“tax wealth, not work”) as my post title.  In this week’s episode of Garys Economics, Gary breaks down how the media is helping billionaires steal all our money, and how we need to talk about wealth inequality to actually start doing something about it.  If I had to pick a second favorite economist, I would certainly choose Kyla Scanlon, who I’ve mentioned twice in this series: in week 26, when she spoke to Jon Stewart, and in week 57, when she spoke to Hank Green.  This week finds her on Hasan Minhaj Doesn’t Know, talking to Hasan about why you can’t afford a house (and also, a bit, about how to pronounce the word “housing”).  And, if I had to pick a third favorite economist ... well, I’d probably look at you like you were crazy—who has a third favorite economist?—but, push comes to shove, I guess I’d go with Autsan Goolsbee, for his genial nature and casual style at explaining complex economic matters.  This week, he puts those skills to good use on The Weekly Show by explaining to Jon Stewart how the Federal Reserve works.  And, finally, if we leave the realm of economists and hop over to the domain of economic reporters, I find it hard to beat More Perfect Union’s John Russell, who I’ve mentioned at least 3 times in this series (week 3, where he interviewed people in Springfield Ohio, week 12 when he covered the Bernie/AOC “fight the oligarchy” rallies, and week 47, when he traveled to Italy to figure out how co-ops work).  This week he’s in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, figuring out what happens when the ultrarich make it so no one can afford to live near them.  Spoiler: it ain’t good.

Other things you need to know this week:

  • Another fun story this week (for certain definitions of “fun”) is the explosive diarrhea outbreak.  For more info, Michael Kosta of The Daily Show breaks it down for you.
  • What Adam Kinzinger has now decided to dub the Kinzinger Report had a pretty solid episode on Friday.  He covers Trump’s released “proof” of election fraud after his unhinged speech this week, the betting scandal with Trump’s teleprompter operator, more reflecting pool bullshit, the Todd Blanche confirmation hearing mega-fail, and maybe even one or two other bits and bobs.
  • On LegalEagle, Devin Stone covers Elon Musk’s child genocide denial.  It’s interesting to tackle this from a legal perspective, though of course there’s nothing wrong with simply looking at it from the Elon-is-just-a-whiny-ass-bitch perspective.
  • I hardly ever give you really long videos to watch, but What Now?, which is Trevor Noah’s interview show, had Cory Doctorow on (he of the “enshittification” coinage).  And I love Trevor, and was sad to see him leave The Daily Show, and I also love Cory, and think he’s one of the smartest people talking about technology today, particularly on the topic of AI.  Most AI commentators are either way too pro-AI, or way anti-AI.  Cory, on the other hand, is, as Goldilocks would say, just right.  And, on top of all that, he is very good at explaining how late-stage capitalism is causing the vast majority of our problems.  This interview is hilarious and also terrifying; yes, it’s quite long, but just about every moment is a real banger.

Is there hope this week?  Well, up in New York, Zohran Mamdani has been actually achieving successes for his constituents on a near-daily basis.  The best criticism the rightwing nutjobs have come up for this thus far is to scream “Socialism!” and hope no one responds “yeah ... and?”  Because, when what you’re offering is more of the same old shit that’s made everyone’s lives miserable for decades, and what the other guy is offering is real solutions to the real problems of everyday people, what you call one side vs the other starts to lose all relevance.  BTC interviewed Mamdani about housing this week, but this is just the tip of the iceberg of what New York’s Democratic Socialist mayor has accomplished: he’s lowered crime rates, delivered a rent freeze, announced a new childcare initiative ... hell, he even got 100,000 potholes filled in 100 days, including at least one, apparently, which he filled himself.  I think that people are soon going to start saying, “if this is what socialism means, sign me up.”

And that’s probably a good thing.









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Sunday, July 12, 2026

Doom Report (Week 77: Preaching and Practice)


A lot of the coverage this week has been about Graham Platner.  And I could point you at some of that coverage—oh, I could point you at so much coverage of that—but I’m not going to.  Because this week I’m reminded of something I used to say a lot: opinions are like assholes—everybody has one, they’re all different, and they all stink.  Now, I don’t say that so much any more, and I’ve never said it as part of these Doom Reports, because I’ve always sort of thought that my job here was to filter out those shitty opinions and actually point you at the ones that don’t stink.  But, on this topic, we truly have reached the nadir: none of the takes are any good.

Some people are saying that Platner’s vetting was not sufficient.  Well, no shit, Sherlock.  In other news, water is wet.  Some people are saying that maybe his accuser is a Republican plant, which feels like the epitome of wishful thinking.  Some people are saying that this is a good thing, because he wasn’t as popular as people were saying anyway, which feels like utter bullshit rationalization.  Some people (mostly the rightwing nutjobs) are saying that liberals will elect just any old scum ... isn’t that right, Mr. Grab-em-by-the-pussy-President?  (The aforementioned president, by the way, is not saying that: he’s expressing sympathy for Platner, due to his extensive experience being accused of sexual assault.)  Some people are saying that we should have never gotten behind a guy with a “Nazi tattoo.”  And this particular take is one of the absolute shittiest, because I’m almost positive that none of them have actually seen the tattoo in question and wouldn’t have been able to identify it as being Nazi-related if their lives had depended on it.  Some people are saying that it’s disgusting that people continue to support him while absolutely everyone who ever supported him has called for him to drop out and others have said that they never liked him from the beginning while pretending they weren’t pinning all hope of defeating Susan Collins on him for the past 6 months.  Look, the truth is ...

Actually, none of us really know the truth.  There’s a woman, and she says she really hates to do this because she really wanted to vote for him, but she has to let us know that Platner sexually assaulted her.  And she’s remarkably credible, and Platner’s denials are ... not that ... and at the end of the day it doesn’t even matter whether it’s true or not—well, it absolutely does matter to her, and to him, and to his wife and family, but it doesn’t matter from the perspective of the election.  He has to step down, because he’s not a Republican.  If he were a Republican, of course, he could keep right on running, and probably win.  But he’s not, so he must step down, and he probably should have done it with a bit more alacrity, and his procrastination is quite possibly the most damning evidence of his guilt.  He’s not acting like a guy who is hurt by a false accusation; he’s acting like a white guy that you likely didn’t want to be alone with in a bar even before he was caught doing something really horrible.  So he’ll exit the race, and we’ll get ... shit, I dunno, we’ll get someone else, and maybe they’ll be good, or maybe they won’t, and maybe we’ll end up losing the opportunity to replace one of the least useful Senatorial incumbents (and that’s saying something!), who was also possibly the most vulnerable.  Or maybe it’ll all work out anyway.  That doesn’t matter.

I think what matters is, this guy was a flawed human being, a person who, at the end of the day, we can’t possibly vote for, but that doesn’t change the fact he said some things which were pretty amazing. I talked about him a number of times in these reports—week 31, week 54, week 66, week 67, and week 69—and I even called him an “excellent candidate.”  I have no problem admitting I was wrong (there was, obviously, information that I was lacking).  But that doesn’t change the substance of what he was saying.  That substance is what the people of Maine were voting for, and I certainly hope that whoever replaces him will have the same substance.  What worries me is that people already seem to be trying to learn the wrong lesson from this.  You know how Hollywood works?  There’s a surprise hit, and all of a sudden every movie is a copycat of that one, until we’re all sick of the movies, and finally someone has the balls to make something different, and it becomes a huge new hit, and the lesson that the Hollywood execs learn is: start making rip-offs of the new movie.  Likewise, part of the vetting of Platner was this theory that here is a person who has made some mistakes, but that’s fine: he’s owned up to them, apologized for them, is comfortable talking about them.  That shouldn’t preclude him from ever being able to run for anything, because, if it did, only perfect people would be able to run for office, and those don’t exist.  And now everyone is rushing to learn the “lesson” that we shouldn’t try to run candidates that have problems.  I think this is a remarkably foolish lesson.  I think a better one would be, try harder to find the problems that all candidates, inevitably, have, and then see if any of them are things that are unforgiveable, like it is in Platner’s case.  But let’s don’t demand perfection: that’s a recipe for disappointment.

Other things you need to know this week:

  • Nine months before the first Doom Report, I wrote a short post about the concept of ”vibecession”.  And, regularly throughout the series, I’ve revisited the topic whenever some experts seemed to agree with my theories: from week -9 to week 14 to week 26.  This week Some More News has the best explainer I’ve seen about why the economy feels so terrible even when the traditional numbers seem to be saying we’re all doing great.

On the Weekly Show this week, Jon Stewart interviews special prosecutor Jack Smith (a.k.a. “the deranged Jack Smith”, as Trump is wont to call him), and former Acting FBI Director Brian Driscoll, who had the job before being replaced by very normal person Kash Patel.  The most inspiring thing about these interviews is how utterly ordinary these people are.  They’re hardly deranged at all.  These are men who believe in the law, and aren’t interested in all the political shenanigans that are being foisted on them, and the stories they tell are in many ways heartbreaking: agents persecuted for things they cannot control, pushed into leaving jobs they love because they refuse to bend the rules, cowed into not prosecuting cases for fear of angering the higher powers.

So where is the note of hope?  It is, quite simply, that, despite all those things, those people still want to serve the American public.  The people that have left or been forced out are just biding their time, waiting for this weird political moment to be over so they can rejoin the government agencies that have spat on them, because that’s just how dedicated they are.  And, to cap it all off, Brian tells this story:

Brian: ... so I was riding to work.  Um, and I was going the speed limit: I promise.  It was 50 miles an hour.  Two-way ... street.  Hit a deer.  I had no time, nowhere to go.  And so, at 50 miles hour, I took a short flight and a longer slide and tumble.
Jon: Wow.
Brian: Bike is fine, importantly for me and my my mindset.  Um, but I’m fine, too.
Jon: All right.  Deer—deer is okay (important to me)?
Brian: I don’t—it, surprisingly, ran off: I never saw it again. ...  Um so, but what happened next after I realized that I was okay?  I stood up, and traffic stopped, on both sides of the street, and everybody emptied those cars—it was rush hour in the morning.  The first person to me was an African-American female in her 50s, let’s say.  Second person, young blonde woman in scrubs.  The third, fourth, fifth people were in the car that would have killed me if I went into oncoming traffic, filled with Hispanic laborers.  None of them asked who I voted for, ... my sexual orientation, my religion: they didn’t even ask my name.  All they saw was a dude in America who needed help and they helped me.  And that in that moment—and every moment in the last week and a half—has kind of like cleared the fog for me as far as all of the things I consume responsibly, and I think it is on those consumers—it’s on the communicators as well, in the organizations you talked about, and it’s on us—but it’s also on the consumers to be responsible and don’t just believe the first headline that you see, but read diversely, broadly, and don’t just get sucked in to what the algorithm is telling you how to think.
Jon: Brother: preach—preach.

Preach indeed.









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Sunday, July 5, 2026

Doom Report (Week 76: Happy Birthday, America)


This week the Supreme Court ruled against Trump on birthright citizenship.

And this is a good thing: don’t get me wrong.  But to imagine that we should be praising the Supreme Court for one ruling when their other rulings are doing such damage is ludicrous.  Even on the same day as birthright citizenship, they upheld a ban on trans athletes and struck down a major campaign financing limitation.  Not to mention the other insanities they’ve engaged in throughout the term, such as overturning the precedent that safeguarded independent agencies (well, except for the one that controls their retirement accounts), and gutting the Voting Rights Act (the latter of which I covered three weeks in a row).

And many have been reporting that the decision was 6 – 3.  In fact, the decision that the Constitution guaranteed birthright citizenship was only 5 – 4.  As Melissa Murray of Strict Scrutiny said in their emergency episode:

... this decision means that five people—five fucking people—on the Supreme Court decided that the proposition that the Constitution says what it says is actually meaningful.  That’s it.  Just five people.  Five to four.  We are literally doing constitutional law by a single vote.

As for why that should disturb you, Leah Litman puts it this way a bit later in the video:

So reactions to it being 5 – 4: in my view it should be an absolute scandal.  Rarely does the court do something that surprises me.  I thought, 7 – 2, maybe 6 – 3, and OMG it is 5 – 4.  And that is obviously an invitation to just try it again.

For more good explanations into why this “victory” is still very concerning, including some great analyses of Ketanji Brown Jackson’s excellent response to Clarence Thomas’ insane dissent, try Jamelle Bouie’s Takes™ or Cristian Farias reporting for Legal Eagle.

Other things you need to know this week:

In the realm of hope, I will point you to Mamdani’s Fourth of July speech, to demonstrate the promise of Democratic Socialism, and also to Adam Kinzinger’s Fourth of July reflections, to demonstrate that even some conservatives know the score.  And, from Bernie Sanders, a breakdown of our current political moment, that actually made me feel hopeful for a change.

A happy Independence Day, to my fellow Americans, and a plea to all the rest: we’re not all as dumb, and/or greedy, and/or racist, as the loudest among us are.  Promise.









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