Sunday, August 2, 2026

Doom Report (Week 80: The Undeserving Others)


While watching the MAGA performance—and there really is no other word for it 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 most 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 cringy 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 found 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 came out to speak 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 to make themselves feel better at one particular nerd.  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 ever deeper dive into the ridiculosity, with the added bonus of an interview with the president of the Fair Elections Center afterward.

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”: “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.  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 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 Deparment of the Interior was forced to admit that the whole thing was coming apart long before anyone started sticking their hands into it, 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 lost 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 wach anyhow.









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