With the rise o’ uneducated & illiterate but pragmatic & down-to-earth neofascists & breadtubers my nerdy ass sometimes gets nostalgic for the good ol’ days of out-o’-touch laissy libertarians & so-called liberals — truly hipster atheist & gay conservatives, like the writer of our current subject o’ mockery, Jonathan Rauch, who reject liberalism’s historical radicalism o’ the French Revolution in favor o’ a fanaticism toward the American tradition o’ legalism or “rationalism” founded on slavery & imperialism ( but unlike communism, which is intrinsically tied to its crimes, we can tidily separate slavery & imperialism from the history o’ American liberalism just like that ), who lists Edmund Burke, 1 o’ the most influential conservatives as 1 o’ his biggest inspirations, next to James Madison, 1 o’ the mo’ authoritarian o’ founding fathers largely responsible for the mo’ authoritarian “federalist” aspects o’ the US Constitution. So with a bit o’ youthful giddiness I was feeling like taking a break from the game I’ve been programming for nearly a decade @ this point grinding for bells & junk, like any good capitalist, in the oldest version o’ Animal Crossing to bring out my poisoned pen gainst this article titled, “The Woke Right Stands At the Door”, from a website called Persuasion, a substack with the tagline, “The community for those who believe that a free society is worth fighting for” — ’cept just like the modern leftists they hate as much as neofascists, their idea o’ “fighting” is bitching online gainst strawmen. That use o’ the word “woke” is, embarrassingly, not ironic: as stated, this author conflates the modern right with modern leftists as being equally “illiberal”, while ne’er describing what he means by that because despite constantly begging you to think he’s a rational debater this article is mainly based on emotional ties to vague 18th century “enlightenment” vibes & this author is such a shit debater that he’d get trounced by e’en e’eryone’s favorite equinophiliac debate bro. But let us hear him out:

In November, James Lindsay—an independent scholar, author, and sometime prankster —

If you click that link you will see that Mr. Lindsay’s “pranks” are the cliché troll o’ sending inane articles that throw together progressive buzzwords to journals & being butthurt that they weren’t censored but published & how terrible it is that humanities & social sciences aren’t looking for some imaginary objective truths round famously subjective & complex human societies like one would for hard sciences. So Mr. Lindsay is a social incompetent who can’t distinguish ’tween humans & robots. Good to know. Also, “independent scholar” is a nice way to say “crank”.

He grabbed verbiage from the Communist Manifesto, changed left-wing valences to right-wing, and submitted the result to an online conservative journal. He did not have high confidence in going undetected; after all, his opening sentence (“A rising spirit is haunting America: the spirit of a true Christian Right”) is a blatant rip-off of one of the most famous sentences in world literature

E’eryone knows Marx’s greatest controversies aren’t his influence o’er self-described communist totalitarian regimes or his so-called labor theory o’ value or his theory o’ falling profit under capitalism, but the way he described communists as spooky spectres. Surprisingly, the rightwing journal was unperturbed by this pointless gesture & noted that the new sentence he created lacked any o’ the philosophical aspects o’ Marx’s that rightwingers don’t like & e’en acknowledged Marx’s literary skills. This is apparently a goof on the rightwingers’ part: clearly philosophical meaning is less important than how you phrase things, in the empty void that is these “liberal”’s philosophies.

The MAGA right has strange and sinister qualities which look nothing like the traditional, religious wing of conservatism familiar from the era of William F. Buckley, or the anti-government, libertarian conservatism of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. Its anarchic rejection of truth, its Nietzschean embrace of power as self-justifying, its unashamed anti-liberalism, and its glee in transgressing boundaries and giving offense are something new on the right: an embrace of postmodernism, which until recently was the exclusive property of the illiberal left.

Those who know e’en the basics o’ American history — unlike Rauch here, who is yet another cringe Canadian who is way too interested in the politics o’ a foreign country he clearly knows nothing ’bout — would recognize this as pure childish romanticism. Yes, Ronald Reagan, known as “Teflon Ron” for all the corrupt things his administration did & yet somehow managed to slag off controversy just like is spiritual successor, Donald Trump, including illegally going round a congressional ban gainst military involvement in favor o’ murderous dictators in Nicaragua — who were directly encouraged to commit war crimes by the CIA thru their lovely manual, Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare — by bribing that liberal paradise known as Iran while knowing that those same contras were selling crack in the US & ignoring it @ the same time as “libertarian” Reagan hypocritically unleashed his “War on Drugs” which aimed specifically @ that same crack. & the idea that Barry Goldwater was anything but a kook is just ridiculous: this is the same “libertarian” who infamously talked ’bout nuking any country he didn’t like as casually as Trump talks ’bout invading Canada.

A generation ago, normies in the academy and other elite cultural institutions failed to see the postmodern left for what it was. And so they were run over.

Yes, Hoach was the 1st person to e’ery complain ’bout the vile postmodern left in academia, guys. & the “normies” — yes, Hoach is so pathetic that he unironically self-indentifies as a normie — are losing power not ’cause they sucked ass @ running the US in the last few decades, ¡but ’cause they got tricked by those dastardly lefties! ’Course, ’cause he’s not a disgusting Marxist ( & ’cause he’s an out-o’-touch rich person who knows nothing ’bout the material conditions o’ the vast majority o’ the US, or e’en probably his own country ) he pays no attention to the material conditions like rising economic instability that might be leading to this political instability: clearly it’s just people brainwashed by postmodernism & if ’nough “liberals” like Hoach write substacks then this brain virus will fade & the average worker will go back to happily working increasing hours for stagnant wages & rising costs.

In his 2004 book Explaining Postmodernism, Stephen R.C. Hicks posits three categories of thought about how the world has historically been ordered: premodern, modern, and postmodern. Where premodernism emphasizes faith, hierarchy, and duty to God, modernism emphasizes reason, individualism, and autonomy; postmodernism, in turn, sees reason as a sham, authority as a mask for power, and groups as prior to individuals.

You know the linked book is impressive when it’s given ’way for free as a PDF — almost as if this Stephen R.C. Hicks, a self-described “entrepreneur” ( which is a euphemism for “grifter” ) who hates socialism ’cause it attacks his own class, couldn’t get anyone to buy his book. Sounds like a bad “entrepreneur” to me. Or it could be that ’pon scanning thru this book I can see that it’s the sloppiest attempt @ philosophical critique, basically lumping together e’erything he doesn’t like into “postmodernism” without any sources just like “woke rightist” Jordan Petersen. But these guys insist very hard that they believe in rationalism & truth, so they must not be just as dishonest & incompetent as the “woke right” or “woke left” they hate so much. As a demonstration o’ how illiterate this book is, Hicks compares known totalitarian-loving Foucault, whose main focus was criticizing power, & his dastardly criticism o’ prison ( no discussion on the hilarious hypocrisy o’ “free” liberal societies imprisoning people for several years for daring to disobey government-invented property laws or partaking in non-government-sanctioned drugs ) with Andrea Dworkin, who ne’er called herself a philosopher @ all, much less a postmodernist, but was essentially the 1970s equivalent o’ the “dirtbag left”: an edgelord who spewed vile on men & the things they liked to deliberately trigger them.

E’en mo’ laughably uneducated is this histography that conflates 18th-century enlightenment with 20th-century modernism, the latter o’ which was mainly an art movement, not really a philosophical movement — & the political groups mainly interested in modernism were, ironically, socialists & fascists, not ol’-school liberals who probably still preferred realism. These idiots are so uneducated on their own s’posed ideology that they don’t realize that the enlightenment e’en in its own time wasn’t modern, but was a callback to a time e’en before medieval times: the Roman Empire. ¿Why do they think US government architecture loves Romanesque pillars ( but from people so uneducated ’bout the Roman Empire that they didn’t realize Roman pillars were not white but painted bright colors which had simply faded out by then — so just as much a childish romanticism as these idiots’ romanticism o’ a past American liberalism without all those inconvenient historical truths like slavery & indigenous genocide & the fact that they thought cutting someone to make them bleed out to balance their imaginary “humors” was a good medical procedure )? The claim that postmodernism views “groups as prior to individuals” is absurd, not only due to the hypocrisy o’ how this article is full o’ talking only ’bout vague strawman groups, not real individuals, but also ’cause it seems to, again like Jordan Petersen, conflate Marxism & postmodernism, e’en tho postmodernism was most oft criticized by Marxists as a sign o’ how “decadent” the “western bourgeoisie” had become due to its focus on individual subjective experience clashing with Marxism’s focus on materialist objectivity ( ’cause — ¡surprise! — Marxism, which originated in the 19th century, was inspired by 18th-century liberal rationalism thru Immanuel Kant, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Feuerbach, Proudhon, & Charles Darwin, not postmodernism that would not come for another 100 years ).

It’s also ironic how these 2 criticize postmodernism & Marxism for criticism liberalism for the identities & intentions behind it, not its ideas by themselves, when that is exactly what they’re doing here: they don’t ask whether or not postmodernism is right or wrong ’bout the nature o’ truth, but simply portray it as having s’posedly sinister motives ’hind it. This is particularly goofy when you consider that the postmodernist/Marxist conspiracies make mo’ sense: there is a’least a logic to the idea that powerful classes would push ideologies that keep them in power; ¿why would the rich white people that make up the majority o’ postmodernists & Marxists in academia push ideologies that go against rich white people?

A good way to think about these categories is suggested by Richard Tafel, a pastor and social entrepreneur who uses them to train organizations in what he calls “cultural translation”—helping people communicate and relate better across cultural and political divides. Each of the three worldviews, he argues, is based on a distinctive epistemology; that is, on its own conception of truth.

Crazy how this “rational atheist liberal” is relying on religious authorities & “entrepreneurs” — pastors o’ the market, essentially — instead o’ actual scientists. I guess it’s ’cause academia has been taken o’er by the woke & only random rich people writing pop psychology can be trusted as the harbingers o’ rationalism now. I love when self-described moderates & centrists talk ’bout “relating better across cultural and political divides” while slagging off anyone who steers too far from their comfortable philosophical centers with sloppy strawman attacks, including attacking the idea that anything other than what rich white men say is science. ¿Is not that vile woke “moral relativism” trying to communicate across cultural divides?

Those principles, in and of themselves, do not have a particular political valence. They do not seem to advance any agenda at all. “At its core, postmodernism rejected what it calls metanarratives—broad, cohesive explanations of the world and society,” wrote Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay in their 2020 history of the movement, Cynical Theories. “It rejected Christianity and Marxism. It also rejected science, reason, and the pillars of post-Enlightenment western democracy.” Indeed, “postmodernism raised such radical doubts about the structure of thought and society that it is ultimately a form of cynicism.”

This is hilarious in how much it contradicts the general narrative o’ this article: remember, postmodernism is s’posedly ’hind neofascism, which, ’course, rejects “broad, cohesive explanations of the world and society” & rejects Christianity. It’s almost as if the only commonality is daring to critique in any way possible western democracy, as it does any other society. Crazy that people would be cynical ’bout an ideology that praised liberty while having some o’ the most infamous examples o’ slavery & colonialism — almost as if liberal democracy came from hypocritical slavemasters & white supremacists who put their own material interests o’er their claimed ideals. ¡Damn those cynical woke postmodernists for acknowledging historical reality & not inventing an alternate reality where liberal democracy didn’t do all those bad things!

Radical skepticism is like the acid that eats through every container. And sure enough, postmodernism’s skepticism undermined itself. How could it be for anything if all truth claims, including its own, are masks for power?

Well, if you’re not an idiot who relies on traditional authorities to bequeath unto you “truth”, the answer is that you can accept that you may ne’er know the ultimate truth, but can still try to get as close to truth as possible thru, you know, the scientific method. ¿Do these idiots not know that skepticism is ’hind not just woke postmodernism, but also rationalism — that the scientific method involves questioning & testing hypotheses as much as possible to really know they’re true, & that testing for biases is a part o’ that? It sounds like this postmodern skepticism is a threat to rationalism only if one relies on one’s own ability to scrutinize evidence & not, as I said, traditional authorities who are just as biased as you & me. It’s almost as if just like how this “liberalism” o’ theirs is a ( very weak ) mask for their conservativism, their “rationalism” is just a mask for the traditions that they hold with no evidence whatsoe’er — almost as if their definition o’ “science” is, “all my centrist homies call this science, so it must be science”.

Identity and oppression now took center stage. Society is best understood not as an association of autonomous individuals but as a congeries of groups contending for dominance and organized into hierarchies.

The stupidity is amazing. ¿When has history e’er been ’bout “autonomous individuals” magically free from any social influence & not “groups contending for dominance & organized into hierarchies”? ¿What was the Roman Empire but a group contending for dominance & organized into a hierarchy with a monarch @ the top? ¿Were all the histories o’ the Roman Empire woke? ¿If I acknowledge that the US is a group o’ people with a shared culture is that woke? ¿Should I pretend that there are no countries or social classes & that we’re all just Robinson Crusoes in our own virtual world, unaffected by anyone else? ¿Are you woke for not talking ’bout autonomous individuals thruout this whole article but woke leftists & rightists contending for dominance & organized into hierarchies?

Because some groups dominate and oppress others, not all standpoints are suspect; marginalized groups’ vision is less distorted by the dominant narrative.

“Woke” people don’t e’en think that: ¿have they ne’er heard feminists talk ’bout women being manipulated into being misogynist themselves by the dominant ideology? No citations for any o’ these accusations, by the way: apparently “rationalist liberalism” is just making shit up ’bout people, just like MAGA. ¿Are the postmodernists eating the dogs & cats, too?

Identity thus confers expertise and oppression confers authority.

I will grant them, that this line comes close to a genuine flaw in leftist philosophy, but which these writers are, unfortunately, too incompetent & myopic to see. Leftists, who in contrast to the “cynicism” claim oft fall into karmic romanticism ( think Marx’s promise that the lowerclass would inevitably o’erthrow the upperclass ), oft conflate their sympathy for the downtrodden — their “goodness”, in a moral sense — with competence — their “goodness”, in a skill sense — when the tragic reality is that yet another aspect o’ privilege is better education: it is, in fact, this knowledge discrepancy that can help powerful classes keep control o’ lower classes. This doesn’t contradict the fact that upperclasses could lie to serve their own interests, howe’er: being smarter or mo’ rational does not make one mo’ moral or honest.

Now equipped with a worldview which justified their own claims of epistemic privilege, second-wave activists welded onto the original postmodernist engine an assortment of progressive ideologies, including post-colonial theory, queer theory, critical race theory, and intersectionality.

& now we’re just throwing out “woke” buzzwords that don’t tie in with the 1st part whatsoe’er & have nothing to do with postmodernism. Liberals have no problem with these things, so, again, Rauch outs himself as right-wing, if not outright far-right. Fuck gay people for thinking they deserve to be present in sociology in any way, I guess. I would love to know his preference o’er critical race theory when it comes to race: critical race theory is probably the least anti-western, anti-white o’ theories ’bout the unquestionable fact that European powers enslaved & dehumanized black people on the basis o’ their appearance, arguing that it came from self-interested moral justifications from white people, rather than any inherent evil or irrationality o’ white people. Presumably, Rauch would rather we lie & pretend slavery ne’er happened: that we engage in historical revisionism so we can lie & pretend liberal democracy was all sunshine & rainbows. Sounds a lot like what the so-called woke right is doing. ¿Who is like the neofascists again?

This compound of radical relativism and left-wing ideology, Pluckrose and Lindsay argue, then hardened into its final form, a third wave which asserts, in practice, the absolute truth of postmodern principles and themes. The third wave thus came to embrace exactly the sort of dogmatism and authoritarianism which the first wave of postmodernists had set out to challenge and overthrow. The end result was a bit like a battle rig in a Mad Max movie: a bolted-together, incoherent, yet potently weaponized contraption which eventually became known as Woke.

@ this point I literally can’t understand what makes the “woke right” different from these “liberals”: the unironic use o’ the word “woke”, capitalized, as if ’twas an evil virus; the cringe comparison to a sci-fi movie; the histrionics o’ comparing a bunch o’ dorks in academia being @ worst narrowminded to Stalinism. I’m assuming that this is all just trauma-dumping on Rauch’s part: he said something stupid & some dastardly wokester had the audacity to dunk on his dumb ass & ’cause Rauch is too much o’ an idiotic bitch to argue back, he just hid ’way to his substack to call them names & make shit up ’bout them ’hind their back where he can’t be challenged.

Its incoherence, however, proved to be its secret weapon. Because it was unmoored from any commitment to objectivity or consistency, Woke could work both sides of every street. It was simultaneously egalitarian and authoritarian, skeptical and dogmatic, transgressive and intolerant, cynical and sanctimonious, revolutionary and bureaucratic. Whatever you wanted, it offered.

This is the only accurate thing Rauch e’er says in this article, with the only caveat being that these are attributes applied to a vague, imaginary group by fascists, not self-applied. Yes, paranoid fascists like Rauch do indeed accuse their enemies o’ inconsistent flaws, with no evidence o’ any happening, so they can maximize the power o’ their 2 Minutes Hate program gainst the enemy Emmanuel Goldsteins: the “woke” are both moral relativists who dare to question traditional narratives & also dogmatic in that they only believe in their beliefs & think other beliefs are stupid, just like e’ery other ideology in the universe. “Liberals” like Rauch certainly aren’t dogmatic in their raging hate boner gainst socialism, no… They’re transgressive & intolerant: they transgress traditional sexual norms, like accepting LGBTQ+, but are intolerant o’ pedophilia, just like how the founding fathers transgressed monarchy but were intolerant o’ homosexuality. Clearly if you are tolerant o’ things tradition doesn’t tolerate, you must tolerate e’erything else, too. They’re cynical ’bout the present & sanctimonious ’bout the future… that’s not e’en an inconsistency, dipshit. They’re revolutionary & bureaucratic, unlike the US, which has a bureaucracy & was founded on revolution: again, you can’t revolt gainst an existing government & form a different government, as that’s hypocritical based on my artificially simplistic criteria. Anyone who supports an Iranian revolution that doesn’t lead to pure anarchism is a hypocrite & we should be against them — ¡good point!

Even better, its radical skepticism, rejection of norms, and revolutionary energy made it seemingly impervious to rational arguments and moral objections: a “perfect rhetorical fortress,” as Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott call it in their 2023 book The Cancelling of the American Mind.

Yes, when I hear someone use stale memes like “cancel culture”, I totally take them serious as scholarly experts, not ol’ fogies butthurt ’cause nobody wants to read their shit ’cause it sucks. Yes, clearly it’s that “radical skepticism” that makes them impervious to your “rational arguments”, not the fact that you’re all shit debaters.

Objecting to Woke’s hypocrisy, inconsistency, and empirical shoddiness got you mocked, disqualified, and personally attacked.

¡That’s freedom o’ speech, bitch! Go cry ’bout it some mo’. The audacity o’ this cowardly ho to whine ’bout personal attacks, when this article is full o’ nothing but that. Also, audacious to talk ’bout “empirical shoddiness”, when this article has barely any sources, & what sources do exist are just entire books that are pop nonfiction books by random “entrepreneurs”, nothing actually academic. If this bitch turned this article in as a paper to any college I’ve seen, he’d get an F, & then blame it on the woke & not the fact that he’s a lazy, illiterate hack.

So where does the right come in?

“O, yeah, I was s’posed to be criticizing the right, who I am totally against, which is why most o’ this article is blaming the left, who are really to blame for e’erything”.

Rauch goes on to argue the right’s lack o’ interest in postmodernism in the 70s to 90s — when the left was s’posedly all ’bout that postmodernism — due to their political successes, especially after the collapse o’ communism, but that they s’posedly developed interest after the disasters o’ the Bush administration leading to widespread disillusionment with conservative politics. So far this is Rauch @ his most coherent & accurate, but their are still obvious inaccuracies.

1, there is still no evidence that the right has any interest in postmodernism; & in fact, whene’er I see the right talk ’bout it, like Jordan Peterson, it’s negative & associating it with the left & Marxism. This is because Rauch’s definition for postmodernism is still idiotic & wrong: it’s the qualitative aspects that he applies to it, not the actual definitive qualities. It makes ’bout as much sense as him calling the Mongolian Empire “Marxist” because he thinks Marxist governments are authoritarian & violent & the Mongolian Empire was authoritarian & violent. Being incoherent & disingenuous long predate postmodernism: the right acted the exact same way under early-20th-century fascism, which is actually the influence, & which was also notoriously incoherent & disingenuous. ¿Has he heard some o’ the “theories” that Hitler spouted ’bout race? Ironically, by making this nonsensical & slanderous conflation o’ postmodernists with neofascists, he is engaging in the same incoherent & disingenuous slop propaganda the neofascists do & he accuses postmodernists o’ doing ( having, ’course, ne’er actually read any postmodernist theory ).

2, he doesn’t explain why conservativism was starting to succeed in the 70s & 80s to being with. The reason is ’cause acknowledging the cause would hurt liberalism: it’s ’cause liberalism had failed in the 70s: the US & UK had started to experience low growth & high inflation, which was blamed on the Keynesian policies o’ the time, which led to the idea that they don’t work, either, from the leftist point o’ view, ’cause not e’en a welfare state could prevent capitalism from its contradictions leading to crisis, or, from the conservative point o’ view, ’cause government intervention in the market is bad. Since the Cold War led the left to be politically subdued & the split ’tween the left & liberals caused by this further weakened liberals, this left conservatives the succeed.

Actually, I’m remembering he did before, ’twas just a very stupid explanation: the dastardly postmodernists tricked people into supporting them instead o’ liberals, & liberals were all weak li’l beans who couldn’t defend themselves. This is stupid & wrong & my explanation makes mo’ sense & is generally accepted by people who don’t have an insane ax to grind like Rauch.

What that might be was foreshadowed in Stephen Hicks’s 2004 book on postmodernism, well before the right’s postmodern turn. Discussing the postmodern frame of mind, he observed that, along with its relativistic and egalitarian themes, “we hear … deep chords of cynicism.” He continued:

Principles of civility and procedural justice simply serve as masks for hypocrisy and oppression born of asymmetrical power relations, masks that must be ripped off by crude verbal and physical weapons: ad hominem argument, in-your-face shock tactics, and equally cynical power plays. Disagreements are met—not with argument, the benefit of the doubt, and the expectation that reason can prevail—but with assertion, animosity, and a willingness to resort to force. … Having rejected reason, we will not expect ourselves or others to behave reasonably.

So this is just the age-ol’ shallow “I just want people to be mo’ civil” take, held by rich people whose only missing privilege is an insecurity that makes them particularly vulnerable to verbal criticism, in contrast to the mo’ dire materialist needs o’ the lowerclasses. “¿Why feed the starving or stop massacring middle-easterners when people could not hurt my feelings instead?” is the rallying cry o’ these people, & it’s obvious why nobody outside their tiny minority takes them seriously. It is also, again, hypocritical: this article is full o’ ad-hominem attacks, judging political orientations based on the s’posed strategies implemented, — none given evidence, by the way — not their truthfulness. Despite Rauch’s claim to caring ’bout truthfulness, he ne’er bothers to test the truthfulness o’ anything he’s criticizing, criticizing them based purely on him not liking them for unexplained reasons. ¿“[I]n-your-face shock tactics? ¿You mean like sending a sentence from Marx rewritten to not have the parts for which Marx was actually controversial sent to conservatives for a cheap gotcha? Meanwhile, this whole article is full o’ assertions & animosity. ( My critique is, too: but I don’t pretend to be civil: fuck this dumbass ).

I shrugged off Gamergate as random online craziness. In reality, it debuted the Joker-like nihilism of the postmodern right.

It’s @ this point that I realize that Rauch’s entire understanding o’ politics — both past & present — is just in the form o’ memes. Neofascism is nothing mo’ than “Joker-like nihilism”, e’en tho there was nothing particularly rightwing ’bout the Joker. Arguably, some o’ his rebellious, anti-cop elements could be mistaken for leftwing if one based their understanding o’ leftism on shallow surface appearances rather than the actual underpinning. This is what annoys me the most: Rauch tries to pretend to be an ol’-fashioned intellectual like William F. Buckley ( the guy who infamously threatened to punch Gore Vidal in the face ’cause he called him a mean word, he was so civil & reasonable ), but clearly doesn’t read any books or have any education & engages in the same brain-rot TikTok politics o’ today — which, as I just showed, isn’t much worse than what passed for “intellectualism” back in the 60s.

He then goes on to s’posedly describe ( I haven’t read it, so he could be making e’erything up ) the esteemed sociological investigation, Kill All Normies, which, if his depiction is accurate, is e’en mo’ infuriatingly slanderous & stupid as Rauch’s article. She has the gall to compare neofascist “nihilists” to Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci was imprisoned up to his death by literal fascists, you lying fuck face. There is no evidence whatsoe’er that Gramsci was nihilistic @ all, nor a postmodernist, I might add: he was a materialist, like all classical Marxists. These fat fucking losers who like to call themselves fighters for individualist freedom would ne’er have the balls to go to prison for the rest o’ their lives by insisting on standing by their principles e’en in the face o’ a regime as brutal as fascist Italy. You lying, lazy sacks o’ shit who would rather pontificate ’bout both-sidesism in the face o’ neofascism are the cynical nihilists.

When I asked James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Rick Sint (a gifted amateur intellectual historian of postmodernism)

Translation: a crank. ¿Why don’t you ask any actual academics, Rauch? ¿Is it ’cause they’ve all been hypnotized by the woke virus? ¿Or is it ’cause you’re too illiterate to understand them? Again, Rauch has no idea what liberalism is: liberals, for better or for worse, tend to side with academia as the form o’ scientific inquiry with the highest standards. Historically, fascists were the ones who invented conspiracies ’bout academia & intellectuals all being in line with the “Jewish bourgeoisie” — or in modern terminology, the (((woke))) — in favor o’ random idiots with forceful assertions with which they already agree ’cause fascists are just as cynical & dishonest as Rauch projects onto his ideology enemies.

In a recent video, Carl Benjamin, a right-wing British YouTuber and commentator who goes by the online pseudonym Sargon of Akkad, explicitly acknowledges the woke right’s debt to postmodernists. “The problem with the woke left wasn’t the woke part, it was the left part,” he said.

So our only example o’ a rightwinger who praises postmodernism ( as well as “wokeness”, which is e’en mo’ absurd ) is some dipshit YouTuber that nobody cares ’bout anymo’. ¿When is the last time anyone’s heard o’ Akkad? ¿During GamerGate? Nowhere does Rauch investigate if Akkad actually knows what postmodernism is or actually studied any postmodernist theorists, ’cause Rauch doesn’t care: his entire politics is aesthetics, not truth. He doesn’t know anything because he doesn’t read anything that isn’t pop yapping that already gels with his vibes, so vibes is all he knows. ¿Does he know or care whether or not these vibes are disingenuous? ¡’Course not! This is why he calls himself a rationalist liberal, but does not exhibit the traits they have: he has no idea what liberalism really is & just likes the vibes. He almost certainly hasn’t e’en read Madison or Burke.

OK, I’m skipping ahead ’cause this article is long & repetitive. The subchapter, “Outdoing the OG”, adds nothing new & reiterates the same sloppy analysis. But the stuff under “Weaker than it looks” stood out to me:

Today’s conservative coalition, however, seems less stable than the Reagan era’s. Woke, while scary to the public, was never as scary as the Soviets, who aimed 40,000 nuclear warheads at the United States and its allies. Moreover, Woke peaked in 2020. The political drubbings it has received since then—the collapse of the Black Lives Matter and Defund the Police movements, the backlash against DEI and radical gender ideology, and Trump’s victory in 2024 and his subsequent governmental assault on every Woke bastion—have left the postmodern left damaged and reeling. As its salience wanes, its power to act as coalitional glue will weaken, too.

1. Rauch is apparently too ignorant to know that the right has mo’ dire conspiracies than just “the woke”, like the “white replacement theory” or Christian eschatology.
2. ¿When did Black Lives Matter collapse? I guess black lives don’t matter anymo’: ¡go ahead & keep killing innocent black civilians, cops! ¿Does Rauch think that caring ’bout black people being killed by cops is “woke” & not serious? ¿Does he not believe George Floyd or Trayvon Martin were killed? ¿Does he believe they deserved it? Like all pathetic cowards, Rauch doesn’t elaborate why he says this — tho he’ll reiterate endlessly in this long trudge o’ an article how irrational those evil postmodernists are, the real threats to livelihood — beyond pithy phrases ’cause doing so would reveal he’s fine with innocent civilians being killed by the law if they’re not rich white people like him. Real liberal o’ him to not oppose state assassination without trial. Liberals ne’er cared ’bout “innocent until proven guilty” or the like. Him handwaving civilian murders isn’t cynical or nihilistic @ all.

Meanwhile, the mutually repellant forces within the contemporary conservative coalition are stronger than they ever were in the Buckley-Reagan era. Christian nationalists, libertarians, and MAGA populists share no common view of the role of government or the common good. Traditionalist conservatives’ call for a Christianized, post-liberal order is thoroughly incompatible with modernist conservatives’ embrace of individualism, freedom, and dynamic entrepreneurship. And both sit crosswise with the postmodern right’s leering nihilism.

Ignoring this “I’m totally a liberal, guys” conservative romanticizing “modernist conservatives” ( “modernist” being from the 80s, which was 40 years ago ) whose idea o’ individualism was suppressing gay behavior & whose idea o’ freedom was supporting fascist dictatorships in Latin America, ¿where are the ( presumably right, since Rauch clearly has no idea what a libertarian socialist is ) libertarians? Libertarians have been irrelevant for o’er a decade @ this point: they are not in the contemporary rightwing coalition @ all. Also, a nitpick: Christian nationalists & MAGA populists are not conservatives; they’re fascists: not all rightwingers are conservatives. Neither o’ these people want to conserve society, but want to radically recreate a fantasy reactionary society, as fascists always do.

The modernist right draws on a tradition dating to the Magna Carta, and the traditionalist right on a tradition dating to Plato. Like them or not, they have been around a long time and will be around a lot longer.

¿Evidence that being ol’ means it will last longer? That’s the opposite o’ how aging works. This is literally “appeal to tradition”, a logical fallacy. & Liberalism also draws from both; lots o’ things do. ¿Why would we need to keep e’ery single idea inspired by ol’ ideas? Again, this idiot is mixing up vague associations with the things themselves: just because the “modernist right” takes inspiration from a really ol’ thing doesn’t mean it’s really ol’ itself — ¡it has “modernist” right in the name, for fuck’s sake! By definition it can’t be ol’: ¡then it wouldn’t be modern! This fuck face is so illiterate. Marx took inspiration from Epicurus, ¡so clearly Marxism has been around since the time o’ Ancient Greece!

By contrast, because right-wing postmodernism is cynical and anti-rational, attempts to theorize it will fail, just as attempts to theorize left-wing postmodernism have failed.

By the way, ¿you know what’s much older than either the Magna Carta or Plato? Cynicism. ¿Why are we assume that it will go away, but not capitalist principles, which are much younger?

The very features which give postmodernism its supernova energy when it bursts upon the scene—its ability to be all things to all people and to bulldoze but not build—require it to win victories quickly, before it falls apart.

It’s funny, because postmodernism has been round for probably longer than Rauch has been alive, & the same could probably be said for predictions that it’s totally going to fall apart, guys; & I can bet that long after Rauch is dead there will still be an identical dipshit who claims that it’s going to collapse, guys, just you wait.

In “Journey to Babel,” an episode of the original Star Trek series, the Enterprise encounters an alien spacecraft whose unprecedented speed of attack the Enterprise cannot match. Eventually, Spock figures out that the enemy ship’s advantage is not technological but tactical: the aliens are on a suicide mission and therefore can use speeds that will destroy their ship. The postmodern right is a bit like that. It can win by doing what no one else in politics will do, but it must win quickly, before its momentum stalls, its coalition ruptures, and its failures become glaring.

Nothing says intelligent like getting your politics from a pop sci-fi where space explorers engage in badly-choreographed fights with alien monsters in cheap rubber suits.

For liberal and traditionalist opponents of the right-postmodern onslaught, the imperative now is to do what liberals and moderates failed to do when the postmodern left rushed academia: recognize the radicalism, nihilism, and revolutionary ruthlessness of the postmodern phenomenon; organize aggressively to stall and then defeat it; and tirelessly expose it as self-serving, parasitic, and hollow. In other words, as postmodernists love to say—unmask it.

This the kind o’ socially-incompetent understanding o’ politics & power only a complete shut-in like Rauch surely is could believe. Yes, the way to stop fascists who stomp on anyone they can is to… talk ’bout how bad they are a lot. ’Cause nobody realized Trump was bad & a liar till Rauch came onto the case.

Also, ¿what is the alternative to Trump? Right now progressives are pushing the Democratic Party further to the left. The biggest Democrats in the media right now are Mamdami & AOC, both o’ whom describe themselves as socialists. But again, Rauch’s idiotic narrative completely ignores materialist issues like stagnant wages & rising prices that caused people to become disillusioned with “modern conservatives” & liberals in the 1st place & bizarrely thinks that liberals lost because they just sat round while postmodernists took o’er academia ( ne’er mind that the public has also become disillusioned with academia in general due to its perceived elitism: MAGA is hardly in love with academia ). I want to reiterate: Rauch thinks liberals having obscure parts o’ academia sniped from them by postmodernists is mo’ important to the average American who ne’er so much as touches academia than economic issues, racial conflicts, immigration, foreign policy… ¿How out o’ touch can you be? So out o’ touch that you’re useless for giving any political answers that don’t sound like they came from an alien, that’s how. Have fun shaking your fists @ the cloud in your shroud o’ obscurity & irrelevance, ol’ conservative man pretending to be a liberal: the fascists & socialists — or “postmodern right” & “postmodern left”, as your alien kind call it — will be out here doing actual politics.

Remember: Persuasion is also the home of American Purpose, Francis Fukuyama’s blog, and the Bookstack podcast! You’ll need to opt in to receive all of this content by email: just click “Email preferences” below and slide the relevant toggles.

& here’s the punchline: we learn that this group also includes Francis Fukuyama, the infamous liberal who proclaimed the late 90s as the “end of history” with liberal democratic capitalism’s victory, only to end up later admitting himself how laughable that was in the face o’ Brexit, Russian invasion o’ Ukraine, & a Trump presidency. But as Marx said ( quoting Hegel ): history repeats itself, 1st as tragedy, then as farce.

On my travels thru the twisted world o’ the internet i managed to stumble ’pon a rabbit hole surrounding some nazi Vtuber ( not surprising ) who calls herself the “Alex Jones of Vtubing”, whate’er that is ( ¿does that mean she’ll end up getting sued to bankruptcy & losing her anime fox girl to the company that owns The Onion, too unfortunately some other bidder, ’cause the judge hates funny trolls? ), & seems to exist as goon material for sad fascists & some Vice article that used to exist on her, but was taken down after she threatened a lawsuit, ’cause Vice came to their senses & realized they were wasting their time writing articles on fucking Vtubers when they could be writing ’bout much mo’ important topics, like… ¿sexy clowns? You know what, ne’er mind.

Anyway, unlike Vice, I’m not interested in or surprised by this edgelord’s racism, transphobia ( which, given her hiding ’hind a fake anime girl, very well may be self-hating projection ’bout her own fetishes from someone a transphobe would insist is a “man” ) or the laughably pathetic keyboard katana-swinging regarding killing communists from someone who, again, cowardly hides ’hind a fake anime girl & would probably be too timid to look a real communist in the eyes outside the bedroom she spends all her time in, much less stab 1; all I care ’bout is the hilarious photo by an apparent fan o’ hers:

Surrounding & ’bove a bunch o’ Nazi literature, including a beautifully hardcovered copy o’ In His Own Words: The Essential Speeches of Adolf Hitler ( tho also, only I noticed, a 1 weird copy o’ The Philosophy of Marx — tho after closer inspection I found it wasn’t the popular 1 by Étienne Balibar, but some goofy woo-filled critique arguing that Hegelian dialectics “was not a mystical, external force, but rather an organic element of life”, whate’er that means, by a guy literally named “Giovanni Gentile” with the words “NO NO NO NO…” repeated all o’er the cover, which sure shows intellectual seriousness — which just goes to show that e’en now the Nationalist Socialists can’t thrive without parasitically stealing from socialists, since they can’t create anything original themselves ) are 2 gooner anime dolls, 1 showing off her pretty pink panty shot, while in the bottom left are Yu-Gi-Oh manga & in the upper left are good ol’ Breaking Benjamin vinyl. Bitch, e’en I don’t have vinyl for Breaking Benjamin: I love this band, but good luck getting anything more out o’ its o’erproduced sound that you couldn’t get thru digital formats. Also, it’s their shitty new albums. That just means you like wasting money.

¿what the hell is this? ¿donuts are illegal now? ¡this isn’t the america trump promised me!

deep in my precambrian tunnels i have heard rumors that someone claiming to be “president” is claiming to have renamed the “gulf of mexico” into the “gulf of america”. as all my readers know, the only valid elections are those in which the englesist magical socialism party wins, in which the only true president is 1 J. J. W. Mezun & the true name o’ this gulf is the “gulf o’ mezunian”. all you readers know too much & will be taken out shortly. have a pleasant last remaining minutes.

( as an american… ¡fuck! )

so, like, i guess they call it the sophomore slump
always crying & always drunk
a few dead, more gone, & the rest, well, on their way

( ¡thanks! ¡i hate it! )

– “Cigarette Ahegao”, Penelope Scott

I don’t e’en know what to say. The rightful kings have taken back their crown from the Russian Communist Party & asserted that, no, nobody loses better than the US Democratic Party. ¡E’en some rando named Allan Lichtman with his eldritch 13 Keys o’ Solomon to the White House failed to predict this outcome with his crystal ball!

Scrawling thru the comments sections o’ places like /r/politics & Daily Kos & Wonkette articles, it’s perturbing how liberals have responded to this upset that is apparently shocking, e’en tho polls have been showing this election as neck-&-neck with an easy possibility o’ consistently spilling ’cross many swing states for years. People had been pessimistic ’bout Harris’s chances for months before they suddenly decided ’twas in the bag, which I accurately predicted was a repeat o’ the 2016 euphoria — but this time without the polls to e’en back it up. I mean, part o’ me can understand: polls have been weird & suspicious for years & are o’erly reliant on assumptions that change too quickly &, despite the “Just World Fallacy” being a well-known logical fallacy, it’s natural to assume that the woman who had no major campaign errors & gainst which Republicans could say nothing beyond calling her laugh weird would win gainst the guy who devolved into babbling ’bout immigrants eating cats & dogs & holding a Madison Square Garden rally deliberately reminiscent o’ the infamous 1939 Nazi rallies & had infamously attempted a coup & had been spewing totalitarian rhetoric for years now. But the US voting public have been smashing incompetency expectations a’least since they elected Cowboy Ronnie Reagan: you’d think liberals would be used to it by now.

But most perturbing was how all these so-called liberals were so quick to eerily evoke The Onion’s joke ’bout rushing to find what minority group to scapegoat & bragging with sociopathic glee how fun it’ll be to see minority groups suffer the consequences o’ a Trump presidency as punishment for certain bunches o’ minorities voting for Trump, like Texan Latinos — ’cause Texas going blue was really on the cards.

( The latter is under the article, “The Coming Death of Hispanic-Owned Businesses” ).

This, ’course, includes mocking Muslims whose family might’ve been annihilated in Gaza in the most edgelord fashion:

That being said, I do like the person who replied with the ol’ saying, “Scratch a ( fake ) liberal, a fascist bleeds”:

As one would expect, these belligerent unhinged rants you’d expect from Republicans has not encouraged people to be mo’ supportive to the Democratic Party, but has done the opposite:

Just a reminder that “centrists” & “moderates” can be just as unhinged as the left & the right: that the “Horseshoe Theory” is outdated, replaced by the “Fork Theory”.

The irony is that minority groups have been experiencing this shit fore’er; — just look @ the immigration cages built under Obama or the destruction o’ Gaza happening under the Biden administration — the main change with Trumpian fascism is that now white liberals are @ risk, & that is why these white liberals are reacting with such alarm when before they were a lot mo’ calm when the violence was attacking groups o’ which they were not a part ( &, spoilers, we will see these people jumping to sacrifice minority groups to save their own skins soon ’nough ). They’re not wrong that it’s irrational to vote gainst Trump, since minorities do get less harm under the Democrats; but given how fast they are to hate on entire groups for what some members did, while giving themselves as individuals that are part o’ the white race that supported Trump the most, gives away how fake their concern was for nonwhites. It also reveals that none o’ these crackers know any progressive Latinos or Muslims in the real world that they care ’bout, as if they did I can’t imagine that they’d lump them in with those statistics they read; it’s clear that those statistics they read is all Latinos & Muslims are to them.

Now, I expect this kind o’ edgelordism from Reddit, the place that birthed us such cultural accomplishments as the “incel”, but I expected better from the comments o’, say, The Wonkette, especially since the General Secretary o’ the Communist Party o’ The Wonkette Schoenkopt herself wrote 1 o’ the mo’ sober & empathetic articles ’bout the Great American Disaster o’ 2024:

That said, as a proud Seattlite, I do stand by the commenter with what I think is an Arle icon who said, “CASCADIA FOREVER!”, as well as Daily Kos’s call for a west-coast succession — tho I think we should let the northeast join, too.

E’en AOC, the only cool politico, had to take time out o’ leaving comments on Donkey Kong 64 speedruns — ’cause she’s the only politician brave enough to appreciate that game’s genius — to tell these idiots to calm down.

I’m disturbed ( ¡in the house we’re droppin’ plates! ) that someone as cynical as I think these people are being way too nihilistic & misanthropic & it makes me skeptical that any kind o’ political improvement will happen when e’eryone is starting to agree on antisocial nihilism. After all, nobody can do that better than Trump; no Democrat is e’er going to beat him on that, & I’m not sure what use having Democrats who are better than Trump @ that would be. I can understand the tendency to fall into the idea, “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em”, but we must remember that that “’em” is fascists. If one has given up all hope on any reason or goodwill coming from the majority e’er, no matter what Democrats or people on the left do or say, I don’t see how spitting bile on vague lumps o’ people will improve that — & let’s be clear here, these posters aren’t e’en being funny or charismatic when they do so, which is why I have been elected President o’ Political Satire for Life & they are just randos on ancient blogs. ( ¿Who the fuck writes a diary on Daily Kos anymo’? Have some self-respect & get a WordPress account for chrissakes ). The only logical routes to go from there would be to put one’s hope on some kind o’ benign technocratic oligarchy — & I’ve seen no one support this, especially any scientists who could be credible ’nough to lead that technocracy, e’en if we could somehow assure ourselves that they wouldn’t become corrupted & exploit their power for gain — or giving up on politics entirely & just going back to playing video games & watching YouTube videos. Certainly these people would’ve been better served doing so immediately after these election results. If one still supports democracy & still cares ’bout any form o’ progressivism — & if the latter isn’t true, one has no reason to be complaining ’bout the current results — then one has no choice but to put hope on there existing some way out there to make progressive policies electable.

Which is not to say that people haven’t been offering up all matter o’ pet theories for why Harris failed, none o’ which are backed by hard data, & many o’ which are contradictory. Here’s a list o’ ideas I’ve seen:

• Harris should’ve been mo’ left-wing
• Harris should’ve been less left-wing
• Harris should’ve fought back mo’ gainst Israel to avoid losing Muslim voters
• Harris should’ve fought back less gainst Israel to avoid losing Jewish voters
• The Democrats shouldn’t have called Trump & Republicans fascists
• The Democrats should’ve put mo’ emphasis on how fascist Trump & Republicans are

& the solutions that actually would’ve made any sense would’ve been impossible. People complained ’bout how Biden didn’t do ’nough to deal with inflation, but don’t offer any solutions o’ what he could’ve done, ’cause hardly any o’ them have read any economics &, mo’ unnervingly, seem to think that’s irrelevant, as if reality is just what we say it is — which is a disturbingly Orwellian conclusion people on all sides are tending toward, which, no matter what side you’re on, will inevitably lead to irrationality. It’s depressing to see progressives try to offer “solutions” by just shrugging & saying, “I don’t know, I’m not a politician, these guys are — they should have a solution”. If these progressives are so sick o’ elites, ¿why are they themselves treating politicians as elites that apparently have some understanding beyond us, as if we aren’t the ones who choose them, not the other way round. I sure don’t take for granted that Biden knows mo’ ’bout economics than I do; I spent most o’ the 2020 debates getting annoyed @ all the weak statements he made, like “I am the Democratic Party”, or the statements he didn’t make ( ¿why hasn’t any Democrat made fun o’ the hypocrisy o’ Republicans being against “defund the police”, but in favor o’ defunding e’erything else, to try deconstructing antigovernment sentiments & try & make people appreciate government spending again rather than weakly going, “nuh uh”, & moving on? ¿Why haven’t Democrats turned it back around on Republicans & accused them o’ favoring “defund healthcare”? ), e’en while knowing some o’ the “smarter” things Biden could’ve said would fall flat ’cause it would go o’er voters’ heads. That’s why I’m a satirist who can freely call the majority o’ Americans morons & suffer no consequences — as President o’ Political Satire for Life o’ The Mezunian you hicks in Michigan, Wisconsin, & Pennsylvania can’t vote me out — & not a politician who has to pretend not to have disdain for these slobs. Let’s be real: the US has ne’er had genius presidents. No, not e’en Obama: he was charismatic & a great speaker, which is what a good president needs, but I bet he doesn’t e’en know what “Post-Keynesianism” is & how it differs from “New Keynesianism”, & probably doesn’t care. They have career economists who will tell them what they want to hear: that it’s impractical to decrease inflation without attacking employment & wages. ¿Who do these progressives hope will be the intellectual basis for progressive politics? It doesn’t seem to me that any o’ these progressives care: they just care ’bout any vaguely left-wing politicians elected & get mad when those politicians don’t use magic forces to make the economy good. ( Actually, they don’t e’en put much effort into pushing for politicians themselves, but mo’ whine when they get 1 they don’t 100% love ). They engage in the same anti-intellectualist wishful thinking as Trumpists; that’s the only explanation for why the American public was economically miserable under Biden but Democrats couldn’t find a solution. Maybe steady Democratic policies could’ve gradually improved things eventually; but if Democrats can’t go a single cycle without attacking Biden or Harris as garbage ’cause they’re not solving economic problems quick ’nough, ¿why would anyone expect the people who went to Trump this election to be so patient?

As my snide refrain o’ “Moderate Liberals Known for Utter Failure” indicates, I have no qualms with mocking Democrats when they don’t bother, but it’s hard to think o’ any major flaw in Harris’s campaign beyond the fact that she was a Democrat, Democrats were the incumbent, & thanks to inflation, people were mad @ the incumbents. The real world doesn’t operate on the Just World Fallacy & sometimes uneducated people vote on bullshit ’cause they don’t actually understand anything. Nothing else explains the wide turn from Biden’s massive 81-million win in 2020, after which Biden did better than any progressive expected, & did pretty much what any centrist would expect, & his low polling in 2024. & people who bet on racism & sexism — as if the racists & sexists didn’t already have a better candidate than any white male Democrat than the loudly racist & sexist Trump — are forgetting that the whole reason the Democratic Party frantically switched to Harris was ’cause o’ how low Biden’s polling was. ¿Why was Harris’s higher then? While using that rationale may make leftists feel a sense o’ catharsis gainst terrible people — as if it’s healthy for leftists to stew impotently in their nihilism — all this does is punish potential future women & possibly black candidates ( despite Obama still being 1 o’ the most popular recent Democrat candidate disproving the latter ) for indefinite cycles based on the sloppy assumption that “women are unelectable” based on 2 evidence points, both o’ which skewed in many ways. E’en if Harris were to blame for not “communicating well enough” to people who get all their politics from rightwing grifters who have an interest in making up whate’er bullshit they can gainst the Democrats ( how this is done short o’ magical mind-control technology is ne’er elucidated by these self-asserted strategists ) or for being “devoid o’ personality” or “a husk o’ a human”, in contrast to Biden, the world’s most exciting politician, who, ne’ertheless, has the record for winning the most votes o’ any US president ( & which is a suspiciously common critique gainst women candidates ), then progressives have no step to stand on for blaming the “institutional” Democrats: the progressives were all demanding Biden step aside for Harris after his amazing debate where he revealed to the world how he beat medicare; I heard not a single complaint ’bout Harris would lose the racist & sexist vote that progressives surely hold dear. Same goes for the people whining ’bout how primary votes were ignored: I heard not a single complaint about such back in July; ¿now you cowards suddenly pretend like ’twas a problem all along?

None o’ this is a strong defense for the Bidens & Harrises o’ the Democratic Party, for whom any defense or attack from me is meaningless ( making jokes, like calling Biden “Biden His Time”, is a different story, as they bring us laughter, which is very useful ). Tim Kaine isn’t reading my communist stoner blog; institutional Democrats are going to do what they decide to do & what influence this post has on them could only come thru progressives reading this. I’m bored o’ hearing progressives just whine ’bout the Democrats they hold in expectation as being on their team while doing nothing to compel Democrats to do so, as if Tim Kaine & the ilk are going to read their whines & have a change o’ heart.

But what’s weirdest ’bout this fatalism is that it’s tied to some made up permanent swing o’ general sentiments & not, you know, the threat that Trump may seize dictatorial control & end elections, period — or a’least rig them so that de facto Republicans always keep control ( I’m not convinced Trump is competent ’nough — he still can’t figure out how to get the military to not hate him, which is kind o’ important to authoritarian regimes — to be able to seize control o’ the government; Trump likes to think o’ himself as Hitler, but he is not nearly as smart ). But let’s say elections go as normal: ¿why do people keep assuming election results mean permanent swings? Anyone who has paid attention to the last few decades would notice that politics swings back & forth as people get sick o’ 1 party & swing to the other. This especially happens during midterms after a newly elected president — & considering how weak the Republican’s win was this year, especially for the house, I’m going to go far ’nough to outright call that unless Trump seriously rigs the election, Dems are taking the house in 2026. & note that despite what centrists would tell you, these swings don’t go toward the center or as fatalistic leftists would tell you go toward the right, but go outward: e’ery Democratic president since Bill Clinton has inched further to the left as Republicans have gone rightward.

To be fair, there is 1 major criticism one could make gainst the Biden administration: the fact that Trump was allowed to get ’way with 1/6 & his many threats gainst his enemies. In a sense, leftists had a reason to be apathetic ’bout a hypocritical administration that brayed so oft ’bout what a threat to democracy Trump was, but did nothing ’bout it themselves, & surely wouldn’t allow leftists to take matters into their own hands. ¿What, then, would giving Democrats another 4 years accomplish? ¿Did the Democrats expect anyone to hold out the expectation that Trump could’ve been kept out o’ the oval office fore’er by mere elections, with how inevitable party swings are in this climate? If I were to diagnose the failure o’ the Democratic party to inspire ’nough passion to get people out to vote for them, there is a very simple reason: the Democratic party are bitches. Not only leftists, but e’en an increasing # o’ formerly moderate liberals who saw that the time for moderatism is dead, were calling for Democrats to stop being bitches who kowtowed to Republicans’ hypocritical, concern-troll demands & pretended that the same government that had no problem drone-striking any US citizen with a middle-eastern name could do absolutely nothing gainst a clear domestic terrorist, despite being given so many options — the supreme court e’en essentially declared the president invincible to law. @ that point the supreme court already declared the US president a dictator; but Biden, ironically just like the foolish purity-contest leftists who couldn’t vote for Harris due to her support for Israel despite the practical uselessness o’ such a decision, decided to be a foolish purity-content liberal & “protect” liberal republicanism by refusing to use said powers himself, but keeping such an authoritarian state in place for a future would-be dictator to exploit, based on this bizarre idea that the limits o’ government are not enshrined in law, but enshrined in the populace ne’er e’er electing someone who might want to ignore the law. We saw how long that lasted. Anyone with half a brain who truly cared ’bout liberal republicanism would have reacted by exploiting said powers to eliminate said court & replace it with a court that would reinstate the rule o’ law. This was the feckless party that was s’posed to protect republicanism gainst the eternal o’ 1 Republican victory, where e’ery election was the most important election, fore’er. In such a situation, US republicanism’s collapse was already inevitable. Biden was, in fact, the perfect representation o’ the Democratic party & the perfect representation o’ the US republic: a drooling senile man minutes away from death. Plus, we must honestly ask ourselves: ¿how many Americans actually care ’bout the republic, or e’en like it? I mean, I certainly prefer it to a dictatorship; — I definitely don’t look forward to feds getting up my craw ’cause I made fun o’ Emperor Massive Dumps & don’t want to go thru the hassle o’ moving my 5 cats & 500+ books to another country — but just as leftists have been warning that people need to support something positive in the Democratic party, not just vote for “not the Republicans”, leftists & liberals don’t want just “not a dictatorship”, they want a government that is truly responsive to the needs o’ the general public. History has shown that the public is willing to throw out democracy if some charismatic strongman charlatan can convince them that his dictatorship will make the trains run on time.

Now, granted, if Trump fails to destroy our federal election systems, Democrats are open to new leadership: Biden’s obviously out, since he’s basically a potted plant now; Kamala Harris’s career is o’er & she’s be standing on the sidelines like Hilary Clinton; Nancy Pelosi’s retired from house speaker; & nobody remembers that Chuck Schumer exists. The question is, ¿will progressives actually put any effort into trying to take leadership or will they continue to whine impotently on online forums while quoting some soundbyte Bernie Sanders releases from his nursing home & fantasizing ’bout a 2016 when Sanders — the only socialist in existence — became president? You bougie-ass cosplay commies like to reference Lenin & shit; well, as some rando shouted to Lenin: “¡Take power, you son of a bitch, when it is handed to you!”.

’Course there are still some delusional fake liberals — nerdy people who support Republicans ’cause they benefit them materially, but who pretend to be liberal to avoid being associated with the buffoonery that dominates the Republican party & try to fit in with the intellectual leftists who trade their material interests ( or don’t share material interests with rich white men ) for honesty & for some reason think these leftists don’t see thru them & put on a victim complex when leftists snub them — who will spew the ol’ niceties that the Democrats are just too vicious, — you know, the same Democrats who let a domestic terrorist win an election & just make himself a dictator — like Nate Silver, a STEM-lord — & not e’en a good 1, since this so-called “math geek” couldn’t e’en learn ’nough HTML & CSS to make his own website & not rely on Substack to give him a generic site that looks like e’eryone else’s, the coward — known for election polls & being a gambling addict ( running an election gambling site that bases its odds on polls like the 1s he makes, which isn’t a conflict o’ interest @ all ) & who has the delusion that he knows anything ’bout how people think, despite having ne’er talked to anyone in real life. Now, while a normal person on planet earth would consider the presidential candidate who repeatedly talks ’bout wanting to be a dictator; talks ’bout wanting to throw people out o’ the US for having beliefs he doesn’t like, including not believing in fairy tales ’bout an invisible man in the sky whose son/self could walk on water; & uses Nazi language, like saying immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country” to be the epitome o’ toxic, Nate Silver is mo’ concerned with Democrats being so “ruthless” as to… force Biden to give up his re-election campaign after ’twas revealed he’s a vegetable, — e’en tho Nate Silver was 1 o’ the loudest voices calling for it — not going out o’ their way to praise the supreme court for… complaining ’bout affirmative action ’cause it s’posedly hurts Asian Americans ( ¿maybe ’cause you’re the only 1 who cares ’bout this very niche, specific issue, Nate? ), & not letting trans people be excluded from sports to better facilitate gender segregation. Also, they were mean to poor tech startups, who did e’erything for Democrats, like heavily fund Republicans ( as well as Nate Silver, who is funded by Republican Peter Thiel, but is totally a liberal, guys, he just constantly concern-trolls behalf o’ Republicans like those who pay him is all ). Funny enough, he whines ’bout a bunch o’ “unpopular” progressive policies they support & s’posed slow growth o’ blue states, all uncited, & the latter irrelevant ( western countries have slower growth than Africa, so I guess Africa is much better off than the west ), but Silver can’t say what liberal policies he thinks the Democrats should support & for whom. Then again, Silver shows his amazing ignorance o’ economics & not being rich with this hilarious advice:

Doing a better job of making California and New York growth-oriented jurisdictions will naturally make Democrats seem less like a party for rich snobs who don’t mind high taxes and bad services because they’re insulated from the struggles of daily life.

Nate, as someone who actually grew up white trash working poor — e’en living in a trailer @ a certain point in high school & relying on food bank food for a while — in an urban area, let me explain to you what poverty is actually like: we don’t care ’bout high taxes ( namely ’cause “high taxes” is high taxes on rich parasites like Nate Silver, not payroll taxes, which actually affects those o’ use with real jobs ); we are excited ’bout income tax time ’cause we get money back. On the other hand, “growth-oriented” isn’t useful, as rich people just keep all that growth for themselves while wages stagnate. Also I would take the “bad services” o’ actually having buses & trains in the city o’er having to spend thousands o’ $ on a car, maintenance, & gas to travel the miles o’ empty roads filling… whate’er imaginary rural prairie Silver thinks all poor people live on ’cause he watched The Waltons, since this cracker obviously lives in a tacky gated McMansion in Silicon Valley. Please read an economics book for once, Nate.

Honestly, there are so much dumb shit I’ve stumbled ’pon on his blog, including his laughable attempt @ forming his own made-up 3-way political triangle to pretend he isn’t aligned with conservatives based on some bullshit Hayek made up & nothing else, that we would be here all day if I made fun o’ it all. It’s clear that this guy’s understanding o’ politics comes only from doomscrolling Twitter bitch fights rather than actual books, which is why he tries to psychoanalyze the political thought o’ leftists rather than actually studying any real sociology or political scientist ( for example, it explains his confusion regarding the so-called separation o’ Marxism & intersectionality — he has no idea what “class” is, thinking that race, gender, & sexuality are somehow some completely different “identities” ). I would recommend he do actual studying, but that would take effort & time & would distract from his gambling, & I don’t think he’s arguing in good faith, anyway, & as he whines, the Democrats rightfully don’t take seriously any o’ his advice ’cause e’en they think he’s too out-o’-touch. Which is to say, I want to get this article o’er with ’cause I have books I want to read, like The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich — I have no idea why I’ve suddenly developed curiosity on learning the details regarding the transition from democracy to totalitarianism — where I can learn things from people with reading actually scholarly works, not give myself brain cancer reading such eloquent articles as this bitch-ass ho whining ’cause the Big Left Cult won’t admit that they’re all involved in a conspiracy that he made up in his schizophrenic head to force woke “emotionalist” discourse on people & something something Mad Deadly Worldwide Communist Gangster Computer God. Yeah, I would be as dumb as Nate Silver if I read mind vomit like that all the time, too.

There are ’course plenty of other out-o’-touch, irrelevant Boomers & Gen-Xer centrists & Republicans pretending to be Democrats like Matt Yglesias & Morning Joe also jumping on the bandwagon that Democrats’ problem is that they’re not bigoted ’nough gainst trans people ( & aren’t taking seriously racist Republican dogwhistles ) — ’cause I’m sure being bigoted gainst trans people isn’t going to turn off e’en mo’ leftists from the Democrats & would encourage those who are comfortable with being bigoted to stop supporting the candidate for whom the main criticism is his bigotry in favor o’ this potential less-charismatic Democratic bigot. These proclamations only reveal how shallow Yglesias & Scarborough’s politics are: people with self-respect — so not these people — don’t just change their principles so they can fit in with the winning team, but work to try & make their principles win; liberals vote for Democrats on the condition that they support liberal principles; they don’t support liberal principles just ’cause they win. If liberal principles can’t win e’er, then there is no reason for the Democratic Party to exist @ all.

’Course, these people are truly conservatives bitter that the Republican Party has become the fascist party & are trying to twist the Democratic Party from a moderate liberal party into a conservative party, but that’s not going to work, ’cause conservativism is dead, as it always becomes when capitalism goes into crisis after great depressions. The same happened in the 1930s. If Silver, Yglesias & Scarborough knew any history, they’d know that it wasn’t conservatives who defeated fascism: ’twas the ( oft uneasy ) cooperation o’ socialists & liberals; conservatives by & large supported fascism, which is why the Republican Party opposed the US fighting against the Nazis. What the Silver, Yglesias, & Scarboroughs o’ the US are calling for when whining ’bout the left being too mean gainst the Republicans by calling them fascists is appeasement — & history has shown that appeasing fascists ne’er works; the only way to beat them is to crush them.

What they do show for those still in denial is how “It Can Happen to Us”: it shows how many pretend liberals can throw ’way their principles in the name o’ being on the winning team. It makes me wonder if these 3 claiming that calling hateful immigration & trans policy what they are is “extreme” & that we should compromise with fascists would say the same ’bout the kind o’ policies Germany applied gainst Jewish people, which, after all, a majority o’ Germans supported — & as Bret Stephens o’ The New York Times said, “It won’t do to dismiss a majority of the country as biased, ignorant or otherwise basely motivated”, & how many Americans Germans were trans Jewish after all. Much as Suozzi said, “I don’t want to discriminate against anybody, but I don’t think biological boys should be playing in girls’ sports”, I could just as much imagine him saying, “I don’t want to discriminate against anybody, but I don’t think Jewish people should be running German businesses”. As Scarborough said, the opposition to the Nazi Party had a choice: “[Y]ou can support transgender Jewish rights up and down all the categories where the issue comes up, or you can understand that there’s certain things that we just go too far on, that a big bulk of our population does not support”. I’m sure these people feel good ’bout themselves now; but I wouldn’t want to be them 100 years later, given how historians will remember them — if they are unlucky ’nough to be remembered. Personally, I would rather not be eternally remembered as someone who acquiesced to fascists, e’en if it means the Democrats lose some elections.

Ne’ertheless, I’m still a bitter cynic, & I still prefer this bile to USA Today writing a fanfic in which the founding fathers’ ghosts lament the death o’ the US republic with the election o’ Emperor Massive Dumps. Apparently USA Today got the misapprehension that the death o’ the US republic & the fall o’ all political norms mean the death o’ the rules gainst posting cringe. They’re wrong.

You might expect that I’d leave it @ Democrat ( & fake Democrats ) tears, since they are the ones who lost, but no: as it turns out, Republicans are mostly reacting to this win with their own brand o’ self-victimhood whining.

For instance, Trump, rather than be happy @ how lucky he is to get a 2nd chance @ being president & having his charges dropped, would rather spend time whining ’bout policies California is planning in this very coherent post on Bootleg Twitter Bootleg Twitter:

Wait, ¿so is California “beautiful” already or does it still need to be made “great again”? ¿Made great how? ¿By making it like the poorer red states?

As for reactions from ordinary people — or people/bots on Reddit, which is perhaps not quite up to the standard o’ real people — we have women deciding to go celibate for Trump’s presidency in protest to him being a sexist pedophile rapist & the predictable triggered response from incels or young men whining that they have “nothing” ’cause they have no skills & it’s “outside their control” somehow ( somehow despite being a young white working-class man myself, I’ve avoided this tragic circumstance ) & how it’s Democrats’ fault for offering nothing — except subsidized health care, student loan forgiveness, food stamps, infrastructure improvements, assistance for small businesses…

Meanwhile, ¿what’s r/conservative talking ’bout? I bet they must be excited ’bout their unexpected victory & are probably talking ’bout all the exciting ways they think Republicans will improve society for all o’ us. O, wait, no, it’s mostly just focusing on how it effects the Democratic presidential candidate or how minorities feel ’bout it — basically, just spitting bile on their “enemies”, rather than celebrating with fellow friends, as, being a political clan defined purely on beating down others, they have no friends, & probably hate each other, too — especially those who are less pure than themselves. O yeah, & multiple threads o’ conspiracy theories ’bout election fraud because 1 o’ their senate candidates didn’t win, despite already taking the senate, anyway, based purely on “this doesn’t feel right, so it must be wrong”. That’s right: these spoiled babies would rather whine ’bout not getting all the senate seats than be excited ’bout getting a trifecta. This is why you ne’er try compromising with conservatives: they are ne’er happy with what they get.

O yeah, & we have some nice protests with signs showing “WOMEN ARE PROPERTY” & “HOMO SEX IS SIN( FULLY SEXY )”, as well as signs calling slaves property & a sign quoting the Biblical book o’ Romans saying that sodomy is “WORTHY OF DEATH” — to which I agree: such cumful pleasure is worth any risk, e’en death. ( But remember: Christians are so much mo’ tolerant than those dirty Muslims who believe in the same invisible man in the sky ). &, let’s see, fans o’ the neonazi with an AI-generated face, Nick Fuentes, sending messages that say, “your body, my choice”, the incredibly clever “get back to the kitchen”, & calling for repelling the 19th amendment & racist texts being sent to a bunch o’ black people, including children. ¿Do you think the crybaby conservatives who demand intolerant leftists stop being so divisive & doing things like Biden calling Trump & his supporters “garbage” — the meanest o’ insults, if you’re a 6-year-ol’ — & that’s why they had no choice but to vote for the pedophile rapist nazi candidate criticized these people for a bad representation o’ conservatives? ¿Do you think “liberal” Nate Silver who praised Republicans as so much mo’ civil than those doctrinaire Democrats who won’t compromise on whether or not discriminating gainst trans people is acceptable so much as acknowledged such repulsive messages being sent to kids? Nope: they have no problem with it — it’s not a “bad” representative o’ Republicans; it’s an accurate representation. It’s not just what the Republicans support, but also what the Silvers, Yglesias, & Scarboroughs support, which is why they didn’t complain ’bout it.

E’en after this massive win, what will probably the height o’ Republican success & apparent validation, I don’t envy Republicans. If this is how they react when they win, it’s clear that they are just miserable, small people. Contrast when Sleepy Joe, who was a mid candidate whose greatest achievement is still playing Luigi in Mario Kart, won in 2020 the general cheer ’mong liberals & actual hopes for the future. Hell, e’en I, whose job it is to say bad things ’bout people for entertainment, was mo’ positive than these ordinary Republicans. & it’s not as if the left, women, black people, gay people, & trans people won’t survive these 4 years & find better years in the future — much better than the bitter incels who will still be miserable & lonely or e’en Trump himself, who will waste his opportunity to just create messes & whine & spew bile just as much as he did when Biden was president.

To paraphrase a song from a much better battle in 2024:

you lied about the only people who could offer you some help;
fuck an election, you’ve got a long-life battle with yourselves

¡Stop the count! ¡Trump the Massive Dump Truck Trump already has 6 times as many votes as Kamala Haven’t Come Up with an Insulting Name to Give Her! ¡A Big win! ¡E’en the radical Marxist AP admits it! ¡Already the scheming communist Democrats are scheming to manufacture votes from immigrant states trying to jump the border like Alaska & Hawaii!

Anyway, here’s some news I ran into:

“MLK Jr.’s daughter demands MAGA account delete ‘vile’ deepfake”

These crackas ain’t learned from the Great Beef War o’ 2024 when Drake had AI Tupac diss Kendrick.

“DOJ agrees to not send monitors inside polling places after Ken Paxton files last-minute suit”

Republicans fight for electoral integrity by… ¿diminishing o’ersight?

“Proud Boys claim they’ll be at polling places as Trump ups violent rhetoric and election fraud claims”

O, I see: it’s ’cause we don’t need to waste government resources monitoring elections when the certified specialists, the Proud Boys, are on the case.

I sure feel safe voting with these average apple-pie Americans loitering around. If you honkeys are so proud, ¿why are you covering your faces? Have some self-esteem for your physical appearances, guys: I’m sure you’re all very beautiful.

“Kamala Harris Notches Another Big Hollywood Endorsement: Dick Van Dyke”

Hold on: ¿Dick van Dyke’s still alive?

Not gonna lie: seeing so many news articles & posts talking ’bout how Harris is going to SMASH this election like a like button — ¡look @ this poll showing her lead! — especially after all the polls showing Republican leads not that long ago, doesn’t assure me, but just give me Vietnam flashbacks to all the euphoria ’hind the 2016 election.

Tho, I have to say, I’m suspicious o’ some o’ the ( unofficial, I must emphasize ) results I’m seeing from AP, claiming that Trump has already won Utah despite 0 votes being counted & showing the 2 main candidates as Trump & Cornel West. You can’t discount West so early.

Daily Kos

There’s not much interesting from Daily Kos — well, interesting to make fun o’; they have very informative articles on general election odds & expectation & electoral statistical oddities going on in states like Ohio that, granted, may be typical liberal cope.

“State of the Race: We have a long way to go” & “Can we please stop the Dooming? NC, GA not called. No reason to think the Blue Wall won’t hold!”

As always, Daily Kos performs their biannual duty o’ being their readers’ therapist, soothing them that all those red splotches on the map from the impatient vote counters in the southeast doesn’t prove anything, the cities are on their way.

Mark Robinson is now free to ‘perv’ out on porn sites after likely massive loss

I can’t believe the self-described “Black Nazi” who insulted MLK Jr., expressed holocaust denial, & engaged in a bunch of other 4chan-level edgelord antics didn’t win. Maybe he was too woke. If he bit the head off a communist on live television instead o’ lamely just calling for some passive-tense killing o’ communists & socialists — ¡quit being a welfare queen & waiting for the government to do it for you, pull up your own bootstraps, & do it yourself, Robinson! — I’m sure he would’ve done better. I’m also not sure why Daily Kos emphasized the least bad part o’ this candidate: if a politician wants to perv out on porn sites, I believe that’s between them & God.

Anyway, I have much mo’ important updates from a much mo’ vital news source:

SiIvaGunner

Reddit

“/r/Politics’ 2024 US Elections Live Thread, Part 62”

For some reason Redditors on /r/politics are going full doomerism & already assuming the Democrats have lost.

Back to Daily Kos

Uh O: I looked back @ Daily Kos & now see doomerist articles from them.

“State of the Race: Preparing for the worst”

The title sounds very alarming, but the content just says, “This thing won’t be called on Tuesday night”. ¿I guess a bunch o’ liberals expected Harris to absolutely destroy Trump ’cause they don’t like him, despite most polls promising a close election?

This is just like 2016 and 2020. There will be lots of ink spilled over the reality that half this country is totally okay with a racist, insurrectionist, convicted felon. I can’t even fathom how we recover from that, but we must.

¿How many times do you have to relearn this lesson, Kos?

“Even when they win, Republicans are losers—and have been for 20 years”

Ultimate cope: “Well, a’least we did better than Kerry in 2004” & “Yeah, but we won the popular vote again, so that means demographics is destiny still”, the latter o’ which is strange in response to a president who threatens to be a dictator.

Other News

It seems confirmed that Republicans took back control o’ the Senate, which was highly expected & will make it difficult for Democrats to wrench back control o’ the supreme court unless they can take it back in 2026.

The Wonkette, which usually isn’t averse to a bit o’ doomerism, seems much mo’ reserved, tho.

Anyway, we’ve got much mo’ important news from Daily Kos:

O, shit, I’m going to go up & get 1 right now.

Well, it’s that time o’ the quadrennium: time to flip that coin & see if the us’s pseudeodemocracy will hobble on a few mo’ years or whether Massive Dumps Truck Trump will say, “¡You’re fired!” to its electoral system & say “¡Lock her up!” to lady liberty, as well as all o’ his enemies, from Dark Brando Sando to that McDonalds clerk who was a bit snide when taking his order. It’s hard to believe it’s been a decade since I 1st started doing these weird articles in 2014 — that 1st article being, honestly, still the best 1 I’ve written so far.

Let’s start off by rubbing our crystal ball, 538, & seeing what they forecast will be the leader of our impending doom:

Well, given how tiny the difference ’tween 53 & 46, that doesn’t give much o’ a hint — well, other than Joseph Kishore o’ the Socialist Equality Party better prepare himself for a big disappointment. Well, maybe Nate Silver on his baby Substack website has something that will give us a better clue:

¡Damn it! ¡Why can’t you forecasters twist your forecasts so they’re not right on the half-&-half mark instead o’ focusing on silly things like “being accurate”? ( Tho Nate Silver in another article insinuates that many polls are deliberately twisting their #s toward the center to fit in with other polls, making averages less accurate, due to fears o’ underrating Trump’s chances 3 times in a row, while noting that the mo’ consistently accurate polls, like the Ann Selzer polls, show Harris having relatively much better odds. )

But that’s all nugatory; unlike these vacillating cowards, The Mezunian has a forecast that is guaranteed to turn out true:

This is guaranteed to be true, since any vote that is not for the Englesist Magical Socialist™ Party is bourgeois treason, — including those from other socialist parties, which are fake socialism, & therefore they don’t count & are reactionary, too — & therefore invalid. Therefore, ¡stop the count! All those who whine ’bout vote counting not being immediate should rest easy when the Magical Socialists are in power, as you’ll ne’er need to vote ’gain when our warm protection is wrapped round you.

Anyway, I’m not surprised the candidate whose last presidency involved a catastrophic failure to take seriously a pandemic that killed millions & that ended with an attempted coup & being the only president to refuse to work with the next president during transition would be competitive with a woman who, um, changed her mind on fracking & supporting cutting funding to police, I guess. ¿Whate’er happened to Republicans being against high government spending? Funny how they only oppose spending when it involves helping people get fed or shelter & not when it involves violence or environmental destruction — almost like they’re just sociopaths who just make up an arbitrary self-contradictory definition o’ “freedom” to shroud their violent & apocalyptic fetishes.

This would explain why the Conservative Political Action Committee had on its banner the hilariously sarcastic line, “We Are All Domestic Terrorists”, which is, ’course, an absurdly bigoted assumption to make ’bout the party that spent the noughties accusing all Democrats o’ being terrorist lovers ’cause they refused to support didn’t support as ardently Republicans’ war against a middle-eastern country that had nothing to do with al-Qaeda, or why they would make such hilarious jokes, like calling Puerto Rico — whose people make up an important proportion o’ the voting citizenry in vital swing state Pennsylvania — a “floating island of garbage” @ their Madison Square Garden “patriotic” rally, which was, in no way, connecting to a certain other infamous Madison Square Garden rally, no way. ¿Why do you liberals keep accusing Republicans o’ being Nazis just ’cause they can’t stop praising Hitler as “the kind of leader we need today” or running candidates tied to neo-Nazi organizations or stealing lines from Hitler? It sounds like liberals are the ones who love Nazis so much, given how obsessed they are with focusing on Republicans’ propensity for acting like Nazis. ¿Don’t they have less perverse things to focus on? ¿Don’t they realize how bigoted it is to accuse all Republicans o’ being fascists just ’cause they choose to associate with fascists? ( ’Course, it’s perfectly reasonable for Republicans to call all Democrats communists for decades, since that’s just an objectively-proven fact ).

Anyway, Republicans can’t be Nazis ’cause they support Israel… who are currently being investigated by the Genocide Convention for possibly committing genocide gainst Palestinians & whose prime minister defended Hitler & expressed conspiratorial denial o’ Hitler’s contribution toward the Holocaust, — a form o’ Holocaust denial — which signed an agreement with Poland to deny the historical fact o’ Poland’s participation in the Holocaust, — another form o’ Holocaust denial — & whose Diaspora Minister defended antisemitic stereotypes Musk applied to Holocaust-survivor George Soros ’cause Soros dared to not to support Israel’s right-wing government, despite not being against Israel’s existence itself, only supporting its left wing. Netanyahu’s son also made an antisemetic cartoon gainst Soros that won the applaud o’ Neo-Nazi organization The Daily Stormer. That a Holocaust-survivor would be maligned by Israel is no surprise, since Israel actually has a long history o’ denigrating Holocaust-survivors for being weak sheep who just let themselves be slaughtered, rather than the warmongering Israeli revolutionary hero, leading some Holocaust survivors to pretend to be Israeli-born, & e’en now Holocaust survivors face poverty in Israel. So, yeah, Israel cares so deeply ’bout Jewish people — when they’re useful tools for serving their far-right government’s imperialistic ambitions, nothing mo’; & since Republican Nazis who spew conspiracy theories ’bout “Jewish space lasers” & who chant, “Jews will not replace us”, as well as antisemetic Hungarian authoritarian leaders, also serve said far-right government’s imperialistic ambitions, Israel supports them, too. ¿Religious leaders being cynical & hypocritical authoritarians? ¿Who would’ve thought?

Anyway, if Republicans’ “this entire ethnicity o’ people are literally trash” “joke” wasn’t hilarious ’nough — ¿why can’t Democrats take a joke? ¡Such humorless wokes! — then their response to Dark Brando Sando’s ( accurate ) comeback that Trump & his sycophants are, in fact, garbage, which deeply triggered Republicans ( looks like Republicans are the ones who can’t take “jokes” now ) by… dressing in garbage bags, confirming Dark Brando Sando’s claim: “yes, we are in fact garbage, & proud o’ it”. This is just 1 step ’way from my exaggerated joke ’bout Republicans shitting their pants to own the libs who tell them it’s bad to do so, & why The Mezunian won a Pulitzer Prize in “describing those Republican crackers exactly as they be”. & this is why all o’er the US you see despair from those with functioning brains & self-respect: there is no chance o’ teaching sanity to people who proudly dress in garbage bags to extol their rotten inner natures. Luckily, it’s doubtful that these idiots make up mo’ than a very loud minority & the appearance o’ their importance is only due to the highlight given to them by o’eranxious liberals & conservatives desperate to pretend Republicans are still normal — since the alternative is to admit that regular conservatism has become utterly irrelevant & that the only reasonable alternative to fascism in the US is some form o’ leftist.

Anyway, as per tradition, it’s time we take a look @ a bunch o’ blogs & news sources I ignore rest o’ the year:

Counterpunch

This time bitter obscure commie rag Counterpunch has much mo’ interesting articles than the usual ol’ man grumbling o’ “regardless o’ who wins, it’s a victory for capitalism”, which, ’course, isn’t news @ all, but older than time, & was already said decades ago in a much catchier song by Chumbawamba:

“Will Rappers Elect Trump?”

This lists a bunch o’ super fashionable rappers that all the zoomzooms admire like Li’l Pimp, 50 Cent, & Li’l Wayne — just like how my nephew always rocks it to Limp Bizkit & Foo Fighters — &… honestly jumps from simplistic assumption to simplistic assumption, like that black people like Trump — sorry, “a percentage” o’ black people like Trump, which is backed by a source that just lists a bunch o’ anecdotes o’ fake TikTok rhinestone-ass rappers & rap influencers like DJ Akademiks Kendrick Lamar rightfully criticized in “Watch the Party Die”, no real statistics — ’cause he’s under criminal charges ( um… ¿What? ). Let me also say that it’s funny that this writer shames “primarily white media commentators” for “ignoring” this connection while constantly referencing The New York Times talking ’bout this connection: as we all know, The New York Times is the blackest o’ news sources in the US, with such hood alumni that are deep in the culture like DJ David Brooks, Ross “Douthat Boi”, & Thomas “The Funky Stacheman” Friedman. Anyway, this certainly doesn’t mean Republicans or The New York Times are mo’ inline with contemporary hiphop culture than Democrats: back in 2016 Obama rightfully predicted the true top dog o’ rap ’tween Kendrick Lamar & Drake 8 years early. Actual polls show the surprisingly contrary data that the black woman is mo’ popular with young black men than the white supremacist. E’en mo’ surprising, despite writing so many articles ’bout the Israeli-Palestinian War & the US’s role in it, this article makes no mention o’ the Biden administration’s controversial assistance to Israel during their bombardment o’ Gaza playing a role in Gen Z black people’s cooling on the Democrats, which would certainly be a mo’ logical connection than some rando whiteboy named Nicky Jam supporting Trump — especially since he took it back after that “Puerto Rico is an island of trash” “joke”, being Puerto Rican himself. ¡Oops!

Grade: C

“Nuts”

¿What’s Counterpunch’s article, “Nuts”, ’bout? It’s ’bout my nuts in yo’ face — ¡gottem!

Grade: 🥜

“America’s First World Problem: A Crisis of Democracy”

This article offers us the stunning sapphire o’ wisdom that the US should be, like, mo’ democratic & less autocratic.

So in reading the digital tea leaves of social media and the strident voices of pundits, prognosticators and provocateurs — apparently there is an America out there lying in ruins, buried in garbage and now needs a strongman, carrying the flags of hate, fear, fatalism and racism — riding in to save-the-day from the clutches of a degenerate zombie democracy, then dumped in the landfill of history and set on fire.

Really?? America DOES need to become a WAY better democracy — at home and abroad.

Cracka, ¿you couldn’t e’en show any receipts from said social media? & you can’t blame people for wanting zombie democracy: the Halloween season is still in the air. Wait a month or 2 & people’ll be calling for degenerate gingerbread democracy.

Grade: D

“A Terrifying Choice Awaits Us”

A tedious reiteration o’ the moral quagmire ’tween the “lesser o’ evils” Democrat apologists & the faux-revolutionary Jill Steinists that e’ery reader o’ this magazine must be tired o’ reading. Ne’er mind that there are much better 3rd-party alternatives to Stein.

Grade: C

“That’s Entertainment: Popular Alternatives to the Presidential Campaign Circus”

Counterpunch contrasts the few people who want to watch a bunch o’ ol’ politicos spewing stale propaganda @ people vs. the large crowds o’ people who would rather watch bland entertainment like football & some Marvel movie, but makes no mention o’ the people who do actually interesting things, like visiting obscure caves & taking photos o’ rare wildlife.

Grade: C

“Virtuous, Smug and Venal: British Electoral Interference in the US”

This is the best article I found, a look @ various British political groups’ attempts @ influencing US elections, a reverse o’ the usual US-centric focus on how the US influences other countries’ politics. I emphasize “attempts” ’cause it also lists many ways in which it fails, including attempts to convince Americans not to vote for George W. Bush in 2004, to which the nationalistic American conservative, predictably, reacted with trite stereotypical insults gainst said Brits ’bout bad teeth & how tiny their island is. ’Course, other countries trying to influence US elections is well known, such as recent examples o’ information campaigns from Russia, Ukraine, Israel, & Palestine to strengthen or weaken the US’s assistance toward Ukraine & Israel & the mutual spread o’ far right movements ’cross Europe & the US, including Hungarian authoritarian leader Orbán speaking @ US CPAC, & is an inevitability in our interconnected modern world where the internet can make international communication happen in seconds. Notably, the normally normatively-outspoken Counterpunch is ambiguous on whether they consider foreign influence genuinely troubling, but with rarer instances like British influence getting less attention, or if the negative tone applied to British influence is ironic, mocking the way the media hyperventilates o’er the influence o’ nations the media doesn’t like like Russia, Palestine, or China.

Grade: B

“What Venezuelans Think About Their Presidential Election”

If there’s 1 thing I’ve gathered from my years o’ experience studying Venezuelan politics & listening to Venezuelans themselves it’s that one should not trust any English-speaking honkeys like this article writer — or anything any mainstream American media like The New York Times or The Washington Post — say ’bout what Venezuelans think, as it’s usually either capitalists sucking off American stooges or leftists sucking off a clearly corrupt & incompetent authoritarian & it seems that most Venezuelans I’ve heard don’t like any o’ their politicians any mo’ than Americans like theirs. Also, it’s hard not to see that it is a combination o’ the US intentionally sabotaging the Venezuelan economy thru sanctions & Chavez & Maduro’s incompetent handling o’ infrastructure development ( contrast Venezuela’s inability to make much money off their large amount of oil to heavily-sanctioned Russia’s ability to still make money off their oil ).

& indeed, Counterpunch’s defense o’ Maduro’s “victory” in 2024 is farther than e’en most left-wing organizations would go. To put it into perspective, contrast with Democracy Now!, a well-respected left-leaning non-profit news organization that usually defended Venezuela’s government, a’least gainst western media’s prematurely hysterical criticisms, in the past, but whose news article on the 2024 Venezuelan election was damning in how curt it was & how much it focused on Maduro’s authoritarian actions gainst protesters & his electoral rival. Most notably, the left-wing The Guardian, which has also defended Maduro’s democratic cred in the past, in what has to be their best-researched & sourced article I’ve seen from them, links to multiple collections o’ scanned vote tallies. I myself did the math on the proportions & calculated that, yeah, e’en if e’ery single vote not accounted for was for Maduro, it would be impossible for Maduro to have a higher vote count. Unless these collections involved an impressive amount o’ document-doctoring. Contrast this with the Venezuelan electoral authority refusing to release actual voting data, with the only “proof” o’ Maduro’s victory coming from the executive-captured supreme court. Counterpunch handwaves this by pointing out that many countries settle electoral disputes with the court system, including here in the US when Trump challenged Biden’s victory in 2020, while neglecting the mention the fact that US elections still provide publicly-available election results data, which is the actual issue.

Grade: D

“The Ukraine War is Lost. Three Options Remain”

Counterpunch prove themselves to be hypocritical imperialist apologists by spewing Russian propaganda that the US forced Russia to bloodily invade Ukraine to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO, while not e’en going so far as to assert that the US was e’er trying to make Ukraine do so, much less provide any source to back it up, with the closest being the cowardly vague assertion, also without any evidence, that “[v]ery few outside the West, however, share this perspective” ( why non-European opinions should be relevant to European issues is ne’er answered, either; Eastern Europe certainly seems to be taking the west’s side mo’, with e’en Hungary slightly preferring the US o’er Russia ). ’Course, like much Russian apologia, they completely ignore Ukraine’s perspective, treating them as just a pawn relevant only to petty archaic Cold-War squabbles ’tween the US & Russia, not a real country with real people with lives, wants & concerns — just like how Israel apologists treat Palestinians. & much like how Israel has no “right” to have a neighbor that likes them or doesn’t ally themselves with Israeli enemies like Iran or how the US has no “right” to have neighbors like Cuba not be allied with communists they don’t like, Russia has no “right” to have a neighbor that isn’t allied with the west. Maybe Russia should stop threatening violence gainst their fellow Eastern European countries & start actually treating them like allies & Eastern European countries wouldn’t need to desperately turn to Western European powers — who, to be fair, probably do want to exploit them, let’s be real. But Counterpunch, ’course, needs to ignore Eastern Europe, ’cause treating Russia as a poor li’l victim compared to Eastern European countries — most o’ which were former victims o’ the imperialistic Soviet Union — is obviously absurd. I am consistent in treating these countries, ’cause I actually have some semblance o’ principles; Counterpunch just has stale tankie ideology to regurgitate. That Counterpunch is so willing to ignore Ukraine suffering just for the sake o’ getting yet another jab against the US, as if there aren’t already many valid jabs to take gainst the US, is pathetic & shows that they don’t actually care ’bout victims o’ imperialism.

You can tell how unserious Counterpunch is by how vaguely & how evasively they call for the west to “be diplomatic” & “negotiate”, but don’t give any details on what the west should offer. ¿A promise not to allow Ukraine to join NATO? It seems like Counterpunch is the 1 underrating Russia & treating them condescendingly: Putin would have to be an e’en bigger idiot that the kind o’ leader who would sabotage his country’s economy for the sake o’ 1800s-style empire-building to trust the US’s pinky promise. ¿Remember when the US promised protections for Ukraine after they scammed them into giving up their nukes? By the way, if the west is so obsessed with stoking aggression with Russia, ¿why the hell haven’t any o’ them put actual boots in Ukraine? ¿Why is the US, a country that certainly had no fear o’ invading random countries like Iraq, so averse to occupy Ukraine now that they have the perfect excuse? ¿What would be a better time than now? It could be due to nukes; but if nukes prevent the west from invading Russia, ¿what use would having NATO on Russia’s border have? It’s not like NATO being in Ukraine would make Russian nukes less dangerous for the US.

So insistent on defending Russia that this article contradicts itself in the most absurd way. Read this:

Russia’s slow, grinding use of attrition warfare has paid off: the eastern front is buckling before them and the Ukrainian army, which has put up an astonishingly stout and courageous resistance, is increasingly unable to hold the line.

…

George Beebe sees three options. NATO escalates and becomes directly involved in the fighting – action that could have unspeakable consequences. More likely, Ukraine could suffer a collapse – a combination of military and political failure as the ability to put an effective army in the field is lost.

I want to note that the 1st paragraph is pretty much the only time this article admits Ukraine has any role in this war beyond being NPCs, but still, thru vague language, treats the war mo’ like a friendly competition ’tween 2 admirable competitors rather than a 1-sided imperialistic invasion. Replace “Russia” with “The US” & “Ukraine” with “Iraq” & you have an average op-ed from Thomas Friedman in the kind o’ mainstream American media gainst which Counterpunch pretends they have any kind o’ principled distinction.

Anyway, these paragraphs give us BINGO on the Russian propaganda card by indulging in cope claims that Ukraine is going to collapse under Russia’s brilliant military strategy o’ taking a very long time, — in sharp contrast to Russia’s early expectation o’ a quick victory, now that it has clearly failed — but then claims that NATO “escalating” ( unlike Russia, which is merely fighting a defensive war o’ invasion ) “could have unspeakable consequences”, which are that “Ukraine could suffer a collapse” — implying that the latter would be mo’ likely if the former happened, in contrast to the already-existent s’posed inevitable collapse promised in the earlier paragraph. So this article is claiming that extra military power from some o’ the world’s strongest countries would make Ukraine mo’ likely to collapse than not “escalating” & letting Ukraine be alone in what this article just claimed was a s’posed inevitable loss. If this is true, Russia should want Ukraine to join NATO to make Russia safer, as apparently Ukraine getting help from NATO makes Ukraine weaker than Ukraine by themselves. Obviously this article writer didn’t mean this & is just an idiot who didn’t think thru what he wrote.

O, sorry, this is the actual “solution” to preventing Ukrainian collapse:

The third option, and clearly the preferable one for Beebe, is that the West changes course and “picks up the phone”, ending its refusal to negotiate.

¡Just pick up the phone! ¡It’s that simple! You’ll notice that this paragraph doesn’t say what the west should do after picking up said phone or what negotiations the west should offer. Putin certainly hasn’t taken seriously the west’s insistence that they aren’t trying to allow force Ukraine to join NATO, so I can’t imagine promising it 1 mo’ time would convince him. Nowhere does this article acknowledge the possibility that there is nothing the west could promise or offer Russia that would deter Russia from their invasion o’ Ukraine — that Russia wants nothing better than the conquer Ukraine. If they did acknowledge such a possibility, their fantasy that the Russian invasion could be solved by e’eryone just sticking dicks in each other’s bums & just be friends would be dashed to pieces.

But, ¡wait! ¿What’s this?

The Ukrainians face a terrible dilemma. Most seem to realize the war is lost. Any attempt at negotiation with the Russians, however, would unleash internal pressures inside Ukraine that could lead to a coup, assassinations or other upheaval. The US won’t want the war to end before President Biden leaves office in January 2025 – and may prolong the agony, loss of life and the ceding of yet more territory to Russia for US domestic reasons rather than the best interests of Ukraine. Where is all this leading?

OK, so now Counterpunch is claiming that attempts to negotiate would, in fact, make Ukraine mo’ likely to collapse. So it sounds like e’ery option somehow makes Ukraine mo’ likely to collapse, like how all 5 moles in those desert caves in EarthBound are the 3rd strongest mole. ¿Does this article writer — there’s just 1 name attributed — have multiple personality disorder? You can’t e’en defend this as the writer being just pessimistic ’bout any good outcome for Ukraine, — which, to be fair, would make sense e’en if Ukraine manages to defeat Russia, given how much damage Ukraine has already taken — since this article clearly took a chiding tone toward the west for “refusing to negotiate”. ¿Why do you think the west should stop refusing to negotiate if you think that would lead to a coup in Ukraine?

Also, baseless conspiracy theory that doesn’t e’en make any sense & just proves that this article writer is just spewing inane bullshit that’s different from what the lamestream media would say to sound special, no matter how dumb it is. ¿Why would Biden not want the war to end before he leaves office? ¿Because successfully resolving a war would make him look too good?

After having read & critiqued way mo’ than I expected from Counterpunch, I would like to take back my earlier snide remark: maybe Counterpunch should just stick to the trite “regardless o’ the election results, it’s still a victory for capitalism” article. Anyway, I hope your drive for $75,000 goes well, I guess — o’ which you boast comes from only 1% o’ your audience. I guess that means us people who don’t donate — after my recent New York trip I’m broke, sorry — are the true 99%.

Grade: F

The Nation

’Pon seeing the front page o’ The Nation I came up with a new drinking game: take a drink e’ery time I see an article ’long the lines o’ “Here’s why you should vote Democrat despite the whole Gazabombing”. Right @ the top I saw 2:

“In New York, Progressive Values Have a Line on the Ballot”

The 1st article was the basic rigamarole, tho ’twas interesting learning ’bout this “fusion ticket” thing, which we don’t have in Washington State, where we don’t really have political parties, technically: candidates optionally list their “preferred” party, but you don’t need to register for any party beyond checking some box during primaries promising you won’t cheat & vote for a different party for the presidential election during the general election. I was mildly annoyed by the self-aggrandizing way the writer bragged, “I was one of the first public figures to demand that the Biden administration call for a ceasefire”, which is a questionable claim, but whate’er. It’s an o’erall competent article compared to the Counterpunch articles, which felt like they were just hastily typed out in an hour.

Grade: B

“Bernie Sanders: ‘Netanyahu Prefers to Have Donald Trump in Office’”

I couldn’t get past the photo o’ Bern Boi looking like someone’s confused grampa without a free registration banner & I don’t feel like registering.

Grade: 👴

“Scared of E. Coli? Donald Trump Should Terrify You.”

There’s no reason to read the article: anything after this amazing headline will just be a disappointment.

Grade: S

Mo’ to come later tonight…

I was originally planning on avoiding talking ’bout the assassination o’ Trump’s right ear, — ¡typical leftist bias! — so I wouldn’t be put on a list when “Massive Dumps” Trump is coronated as CEO for Life o’ the new Patriotic States of America, or the reveal that Biden had a been an animated vegetable this whole time, or the twist that Biden is stepping down ’cause another Biden vs. Trump election is just cringe & so he can spend mo’ time playing as Luigi in Mario Kart, — ¿& who wouldn’t prefer that to giving missiles to Israel, who aren’t e’en grateful — or whate’er inane soap-opera twist comes up before this article comes out that will ruin my sweet jokes, but I just had to stumble ’pon this dumbass article by The Daily Beast: I shit you not, it’s called, “What Donald Trump’s Abandoned Shoe Reveals About Him and America” with a solemn photo o’ said “abandoned” shoe standing on velvet red carpet — albeit this goofy solemnity is ruined by the subtitle, “Sole Survivor” ( “ahaha, I don’t feel like they get that” ).

Sometimes a shoe is more than a shoe.

I’ll believe that as much as I’ll believe all those bronies trying to tell me that My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic isn’t just a fun cartoon for kids but is a philosophical exploration as deep as Dostoevsky or that e’ery episode o’ the Pokémon anime after the 1st takes place in Ash Ketchum’s coma.

In the mayhem of the assassination attempt on former president Donald Trump at his rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, a single black Oxford shoe was left behind, abandoned on the platform where the former president was wounded by a sniper’s bullet and smothered in a Secret Service protective scrum.

Programmers have ne’er felt as sympathetic toward Trump as during those last few words, shuddering as they imagine the former president having to hold 15-minute stand-up meetings e’ery day to explain the the Secret Service what he’d done the previous day to contribute to that fortnight’s sprint. I am not 1 o’ them & call “fake news”: there is no way the wildly disciplineless Trump could be tamed by e’en the most legendary o’ scrum masters.

Trump, it seems, lost one shoe in the melee on stage.

& this is where this writer publisher/CEO, if the bio is correct, gets led astray by his thesaurus: “melee” is not just a generic synonym for any kind o’ battle, but specifically a hand-to-hand fight, not a gun battle. Perhaps save your flowery language for the poetry you’re still sure any day now will be published in those big journals that don’t exist anymo’ ’cause it’s no longer the 50s & nobody reads poetry anymo’ & stick with just regular-ass words, please. Trump’s fucking shoe is the last thing that deserves poetic prose.

That shoe–a sole survivor–

“¡This pun is so great, I just have to use it again!”

[…] reveals a lot about Trump as a consummate performer who cannily thinks first about himself and then about his audience. Under fire and on camera, the events in Butler offer a remarkable window into Trump’s primal instincts and mastery of political theater.

No, I’m pretty sure that shoe only reveals that Trump probably wears a slightly too-big shoe size, which I guess could say something ’bout his ego & his delusions o’ bigness. I’m pretty sure anyone, if they left their shoe while being led away by the Secret Service, would have left it there. If Trump had somehow o’erpowered the Secret Service agents holding onto him & insisted on getting his shoe back on, that would be mo’ notable.

After some irrelevant details I don’t care ’bout, including the introduction o’ a pointless side character, “Hawkeye”, who I’m going to assume is a M.A.S.H. cosplayer, we finally get something resembling an answer:

The goal, in Secret Service jargon, is to get Trump off the “X” (the target) as fast as possible. But Trump doesn’t sound in any particular hurry.

“Let me get my shoes,” he says, “Let me get my shoes.”

So, ¿Trump leaving his shoe ’hind is indicative o’ his “master of political theater” because… he didn’t want to leave his shoe ’hind, but he was forced to?

A male agent says, “I got you sir, I got you sir.”

Trump repeats: “Let me get my shoes on.”

Another agent suddenly notices the former president has been wounded. “Hold on,” the agent says, “your head is bloody.”

“Sir, we’ve got to move to the car, sir,” an agent says. Trump is wounded and bleeding. Every second counts.

But Trump is undeterred. He insists for a third time in only nine seconds, “Let me get my shoes.”

A female agent says “OK” and another agent says: “We got to move, we got to move.”

This is the worst Tom Clancy book I’ve e’er read.

Making space with his hands in the middle of the phalanx so that he can see the crowd–and the cameras can see him–Trump mouths the words “fight, fight, fight” while pumping his fist.

Trump’s first thought: Himself. He needs his shoes for whatever reason–to run, to stand tall, they’re expensive. But then, his mind turns to his second thought: The crowd and what they really want. A gladiator rising back to his feet, his head bloodied and unbowed, shoes or no shoes.

So what Trump’s abandoned shoe reveals is that… it isn’t important @ all.

In a historic sense, of course, the shoe won’t matter.

As we’ve established, it also doesn’t matter in the symbolic sense, — or any sense — either.

For his supporters, Trump’s well-polished shoe left on the stage surely stands for his invincibility and indestructibility.

Considering the average demographic o’ Trump’s fans, I doubt this. They don’t strike me as the kind who would love to analyze the symbolism o’ Their Eyes Were Watching God in their language arts college class. @ best, they’re the kind who would reply like Flannery O’Connor when she was asked ’bout the symbolism o’ the hat the Misfit wore when asked ’bout the symbolism o’ Trump’s shoe: “it covers a foot”.

In this same moment, his opponent’s shoes may be perceived very differently: signs of President Joseph R. Biden’s potential vulnerability.

This makes no sense: ¿how is Biden, who still has both shoes, weaker than a man who only has 1 shoe now? ¡All Biden has to do is stomp on Trump’s uncovered foot to win!

For a politician who spent a half century in traditional black leather shoes, Biden’s recent footwear choices suggest an older man now focused on stability, steadiness and comfort: black Hoka Transport sneakers with cushioned soles, Sketchers slip-in sneakers, and Cole Haan Brogue Oxfords with rubber soles.

I’m glad to see that pundit hacks have developed their shallow wardrobe critiques from basic tan suits to these elaborate descriptions that seem to come straight from American Psycho.

Yes, shoes matter in politics. In the early 1970s, President Richard Nixon tried to show his casual side with strolls on the San Clemente beach. On the white sand, he wore black wingtip dress shoes. That faux pas confirmed what many suspected about Nixon.

Yes, that is what made Nixon 1 o’ the most hated presidents: not that whole Watergate scandal, but the fucking shoes he wore. That’s why the billions o’ satires ’bout him in various media like Futurama always make sure to make a comment ’bout the shoes he wore — they’re as iconic as Abraham Lincoln’s top hat or George Washington’s “wooden teeth” he scammed off his slaves.

In 2008, the holes in Barack Obama’s shoes reminded voters of Adlai Stevenson soles with holes. Men of the people, those holey shoes proclaimed.

1st, the only people who care ’bout Adlai Stevenson or e’en remember that he existed are Final Fantasy VI conspiracy theorists; 2nd, nobody e’er talked ’bout the holes in Obama’s shoes. The rest o’ the world doesn’t share your foot fetish, sorry.

For Trump, one shoe is a reminder of his moment in crisis. His first impulse was that he needed his Oxfords and didn’t want to leave them behind. But then his second instinct took over, making an even more indelible mark. At this moment in American politics, it seems this enduring image of a raised fist in the midst of chaos and confusion may be winning over stability and comfort.

So the significance o’ Trump’s abandoned shoe is as a red herring in the article: the actually important symbol is his naked fist. In my high school language arts class I once bullshitted that Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House was ’bout the failure o’ German & Italian territories to unite into singular nations till the late 1800s as symbolized by Nora & Torvald Helmer’s breakup, which doesn’t e’en make sense as that play was both published & took place after Germany & Italy finally succeeded in unifying themselves, & yet my 17-year-ol’ self did a better job o’ stretching that idea out than this cracker did with making up any kind o’ symbol for Trump’s shoe. In short, this essay gets an F, see me after class.

Tier: F

Can’t get enough of the Beast?

Unlock unrestricted access to our reporting with a paid subscription.

If this article is a representation o’ what “the Beast” is, ¡then sign me up! Or maybe I’ll just be a dirty pirate & hack thru your clever DRM by just removing the stupid banner you show & changing the CSS so the article can scroll ’gain. ( I realize the irony that just after this post will be asking readers to pay to my Patreon ). I do appreciate how “Can’t get enough of the Beast?” sounds like a nu-metal or post-grunge lyric, tho — probably the best writing I’ve read here so far, & it wasn’t e’en by this publisher/CEO.

Considering The Mezunian rightly predicted Clinton’s victory in 2016 & Trump’s victory in 2020, we know that e’eryone in the US cares deeply ’bout The Mezunian’s coveted presidential election prediction, so using 538’s goofy interactive map maker, I present to you a doubly nice prediction map:

¡Just look @ those elegant land lines surrounded by blue water! Truly the LORD will bless us with beautiful election results.

¿What the fuck is this dumb ass bullshit?

On New Year’s Eve of 2014, I became the subject of a terrifying experiment.

By the end of my stay, I had turned from a happy-go-lucky novelist into a squeaking gerbil of a man, psychologically compromised and barely sure of what constituted reality.

This “terrifying experiment” this melodramatic writer experienced was watching laughably inane state propaganda. The hairs haven’t stood up on my flesh this much since when H. P. Lovecraft described the unspeakable horrors o’ having to stand next to a black person on a New York bus. If they wanted to engage in a truly terrifying experiment they could subject themselves to the kind o’ real torture Russia — & the US — inflicts gainst people who were very naughty rather than the kind o’ shit the average unemployed person watched in the afternoon while bored & on drugs.

On the one hand, the length of my sentence has been commuted to five days from seven; on the other hand, since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the state’s propaganda has become even more loud, brash, and genocidal, making any length of exposure to it psychologically problematic.

Clearly the worst tragedy o’ this invasion aren’t the many, many Ukranian lives lost but this o’erpaid writer’s emotional hardships having to endure this prison sentence that they inflicted on themself o’ sitting on their useless ass & watching TV all day.

Day 1

I arrive at the Public Hotel on the Lower East Side on a cold day this past April. My room has nice views of most of the downtown-Manhattan skyline, which lights up in flashes of pink and purple as the sun begins to set over New Jersey —

O, ¡fuck off! I fucking hate these shitty writers stroking their own hard-on pretending like they’re fucking Tom Wolfe. Nobody fucking cares what the weather was on a day you decided to sit on your fucking ass watching TV you assclown. “My orange Cheetos glowed under the dim light o’ my apartment. Now that my TV was muted during a commercial the only sound that could be heard was the skrit-skrit o’ me scratching my hairy balls”.

The first thing you notice when you switch on Russian TV is its totemic fascination with the swastika, which regularly appears on one of my screens. Sometimes it is taken from footage of the Nazi era, sometimes from purported videos of the Ukrainian far right. Sometimes it is on the news, sometimes in a documentary, sometimes in a TV drama. By my third or fourth swastika of the day, I start to believe that when the symbol is shown this often, it is not done so entirely with disparagement, but with a subconscious appeal to authoritarian power and to the state’s own fascism.

While I don’t disagree that contemporary Russian culture has an affinity for authoritarianism, this thesis o’ his is self-contradictory & absurd. ¿Why would Russia heavily associate the Ukrainian far right, the problem they use as a ’scuse for their invasion, & thus something they want to appear e’en mo’ gainst than Ukraine’s government, with their own culture? Furthermo’, as we will see, Russian propaganda apparently also loves to cater back to WWII & Russia’s fight against the Nazis. ¿Wouldn’t it be the ultimate treason to praise the very organization that tried to obliterate Russia, which literally put Russians in the holocaust? ¿Why not pick a mo’ fitting authoritarian leader, like, you know, Stalin, an actual Russian leader? I don’t want to doubt this writer’s amazing arm-chair theorizing that isn’t totally pulled out o’ his ass, ¿but wouldn’t it make mo’ sense that Russian propaganda is just using the Nazis as an effective Godwin’s rule tying the west in general to the Nazis & to try inducing constant fear gainst the west in their populace that if they don’t support the Ukrainian invasion the west will invade & mass murder them like the Nazis did in the 40s? After all, it’s not just Russian media obsessed with the Nazis: American media, like the History Channel, is notorious for their obsession with Hitler & the Nazis. ( Granted, given that this US election has a candidate who outright admits he’ll become a dictator “[only] for day 1” & is still ’bout half & half in popularity with his opponent, we can’t rule out the US having an affinity for authoritarianism, or Hitler, for that matter, given that candidate’s dogwhistling references to Hitler & the Nazis ).

A lot of time on all three networks is given over to flashy “newsroom” sets populated by older men in blazers who scream about the West. Kto Protiv (“Who Is Against”), on Rossiya 1, is one such program. The subject matter is often akin to what one sees on far-right television in the U.S., the exemplar of which is Fox News.

Fox News has always been known to scream ’bout “the West”.

But Russian state television is several degrees to the right of Fox, or even of its more lunatic competitor, Newsmax, although Tucker Carlson, the onetime king of televised white supremacy, is frequently shown on Russian TV as well—or, at least, he was back in April.

& here this hack writer stumbles o’er himself in contradictions, presumably so as not to offend his American audience. If Russian state television is “several degrees” to the right o’ Fox, ¿why does it regularly have on a former regular Fox white supremacist, — acknowledging that US media regularly has on white supremacists, ¿how can any media be several degrees to the right o’ that? — who is apparently moderate compared to worse US media? It sounds like Russian state television is @ just the level o’ lunatic fascist propaganda as US media — which I would agree is too much.

A panelist mispronounces the term LGBTQ+ to general laughter. (“Is it plus or minus?” another panelist asks.) Afterward, an “economic expert” tells the audience that transgender bodies have begun to fall apart. No evidence is cited for any of this; it’s merely people talking or, as some like to say, “asking questions.”

So it’s just a mo’ surreal The New York Times, then.

Meanwhile, on Channel 1, a black-and-white documentary shows Khrushchev greeting a group of cosmonauts. The glories of the Soviet past on one screen are contrasted with the realities of the present on another.

O’ all the bad propaganda Russian state media surely has defending their dumbass war, the typical nostalgia fuel is the least “terrifying” I could imagine. I know I always hide in pure terror @ the dystopian I live in whene’er I see histories ’bout George Washington. Clearly this is a devious plot by the US to make me like the US mo’. It’s almost as if e’ery country likes to pump up its past accomplishments. Hell, it’s better than Russia pretending they have present accomplishments.

You may ask why a government obsessed with propaganda would be showing programs about broken families. One reason is that audiences of all nations enjoy watching their fellow citizens in pain.

The show is presented by two dapper male hosts who are part of a well-trod Russian-TV theme: Provincials in distress are interviewed by stylish urban hosts, as if they are Chekhovian peasants being judged before the district court in czarist times. Subconsciously, shows like these teach poorer and older Russians (the kind of people who regularly watch state television) that they should be ashamed before their betters and that they cannot expect much from life or their immediate families.

This isn’t really any different from US daytime television, which is also aimed @ unemployed poor & is also infamous for propaganda denigrating toward poor people, especially Cops, literal state propaganda that shows cops as always competent & in the right & the criminals they go after always being incompetent, lazy, sloppy, ( usually ethnic ) & always poor. & if you were to ask my mother @ the time why she watched it, she would say the same thing: it’s comforting to see someone e’en worse off — e’en if clearly fake. Hardly the traumatizing torture that this article writer presents it as. If anything, what’s wrong with this is how boring it sounds compared to US shows like Maury or Jerry Springer, when he was still alive & it was still on.

The old woman crawls on the floor. “Forgive me! Forgive me!” she cries to her children. Now we have left the pages of Chekhov and arrived in Dostoyevsky Land.

This writer must’ve thought himself so clever & well-read for referencing 2 o’ the 3 most well-known Russian writers & not, like, any o’ the thousand other writers mo’ fitting — & my research indicates that this writer came from Russia, so either he barely read anything in his original language or he’s deliberately dumbing down this article for his audience. ¿& how would an ol’ woman crawling on the floor & crying, “Forgive me!”, be out o’ step for Chekhov — especially when you just described “Chekhovian peasants being judged before the district court in czarist times”.

The show about the dysfunctional family cuts to a commercial for a fast-food chain that has replaced McDonald’s after the sanctions for the Russian invasion of Ukraine were imposed.

Truly we see the unbearable hardships Russians now face for their imperialist crimes: ¡being deprived o’ that irresistible American cuisine!

The copycat McDonald’s is offering an unconvincing-looking “beeeeg speshal roast beef,” as an announcer describes it.

To be fair, if the roast beef looks unconvincing, then they did a pretty good job o’ emulating McDonalds.

On Rossiya 1, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov is giving one of his usual bombastic speeches: “They want to cancel our country, as they like to say. They’re trying to cancel our country for pursuing its own politics. The West has long groomed Ukraine … Just like Germany invaded Russia.” The television shows another Nazi parade, a long sea of swastikas and chanting in German.

Again, they’re just Republicans on regular US media. Tho, I find it funny that this The Atlantic article has this, as it’s not as if they haven’t published incoherent rants ’bout “cancel culture”.

It’s only 9 p.m., but I am exhausted. I have drained two glasses of pisco sour and eaten my ceviche from the hotel’s restaurant, and am blindly watching a movie called Razplata (“Payback”), which seems to be about a drunken man who beats his wife. My vision is getting hazy and my eyes can barely see what’s happening on the three monitors, but I can sense that it is a triptych of a nation that has no idea what it is supposed to be.

What I love is that this article is far worse anti-US propaganda than Russia’s weak-ass attempt: nothing makes the Americans look like weak-ass crybabies like getting “exhausted” from sitting on your ass watching TV till 9 PM instead o’ working a real job. For any non-Americans out there reading this: we’re not all that lazy & useless; some o’ us have real, productive jobs & don’t just sit around watching shitty TV all day. Shit, as this blog shows, I read shitty news articles in my free time, & somehow I don’t get exhausted. Maybe this writer should eat better & work out mo’; it sounds like he has health problems.

Day 2

O my god, ¿we’re only @ day 2 out o’ 5? I take back what I said: I’m tired o’ this shitty article.

“Not my King!” The day’s news begins with anti-monarchist demonstrations in the U.K. “At least no one is throwing eggs at him like last time,” the NTV announcer intones as King Charles III is booed.

¡Hell yeah! I agree with this propaganda. ¿Who doesn’t hate filthy monarchs? Obviously only fascist Americans who have rejected e’en the watered-down liberalism on which the US was founded, that’s who. The only person I disagree with is the announcer: I wish they did throw eggs @ him.

Here the Royal Family is criticized for a variety of sins, such as colonialism in Africa and the 3 million pounds King Charles supposedly received from a Qatari sheikh.

Well, it’s cool to hear this white writer simp for colonizing Africa; ¿or is this writer like Kanye West & denies that the west colonized Africa? I dunno, I’m a far-leftist extremist, so I don’t support colonization & slavery, so maybe I’m not a reliable perspective, especially given the aforementioned large American audience hungry for white supremacists, but maybe it’s not a good idea to try attacking Russia by associating them with critics gainst African colonization. I’m sure this writer is implying that Russia is cynical in their criticism; but the west is surely a li’l cynical when they criticize Islamic fundamentalists & their treatment o’ women ( especially when they largely supported those Islamic fundamentalists gainst the Marxists who respected women’s rights better in Afghanistan earlier as part o’ their proxy cold war with the Soviet Union ), & yet it would still be right to call someone who snorts @ criticism, e’en by the west, o’ Islamic fundamentalist oppression as assholes.

Although Russian propaganda normally skews far right, its producers are able to pivot quickly from feigning horror at transgendered people to promoting a kind of Soviet-flavored anti-colonialism.

It’s almost as if Russian propaganda serves its own materialist interest rather than the US’s own made-up abstract ideology groupings. To be fair, I’m sure foreigners find the US supporting left-wing ideas like political democracy, but opposing economic democracy & supporting right-wing economics absurd.

Surely something will appeal to Misha from Murmansk or Vanya from Vladivostok, or any of the more than 100 million viewers who spend an average of almost four hours a day digesting this spicy gruel.

I would say that you could feel the seething disdain this writer has for these filthy foreigners with their weird names, but as stated, this writer came from the Soviet Union, so either he’s just cynically playing on the average American’s seething racism so he can be 1 o’ the “good ones” or is like that Dave Chappelle black KKK member.

After the booing of King Charles, the national weather forecast features temperatures in Donetsk and Melitopol in addition to Yalta, all cities stolen from Ukraine. I note that the city of Kherson, liberated by the Ukrainian army, does not make an appearance.

Clearly the worst thing Russia has done to Ukraine is refuse to tell them what the weather is in their cities. Ukrainians are now rethinking this war thing. “Let’s face it: ¡we are nothing without Russia’s irreplaceable weather-predicting technology!”.

But NTV is skewing younger with a show about women being stalked by ex-lovers. “He’s a professional boxer and he punched me several times,” a woman says of her former boyfriend. “He has a very aggressive nature.” A model is being blackmailed over sex videos by her ex. “Smartphones have made stalking easy,” the announcer intones. “He threatened to knock my teeth out,” another woman says, and we are treated to an array of horrifying bruises. The program notes that stalking of exes by spurned lovers is a problem in the U.S. and Germany as well.

If this article taught me anything — & that’s if this writer isn’t completely making e’erything up, which is possible — it’s that for all Russia’s talk o’ the weak, decadent west, Russia’s media is just as trashy as US media. That’s what happens when you let that capitalism into your country. Lenin wouldn’t have let this happen. ¿Where are Marx & Lenin when we need them, Counter Punch?

This may be true, but after watching Russian television for less than 24 hours, I am starting to see a through line here, which is the consistent presence of violence in Russian shows, usually committed against women and children. The verb meaning “to hit” comes up constantly, which makes sense in a country where men encounter horrific hazing in the military as well as a cruel and violent penal system. In 2017 the Duma even passed a law decriminalizing domestic abuse that does not result in the victim being treated in a hospital.

I would love to hear this writer’s theory on why US media — & media all o’er the world, in fact — is also full o’ violence, especially gainst women. It’s terrible, yes, but not terribly relevant to Russia’s invasion o’ Ukraine or their authoritarian politics. I can’t imagine thinking, { Well, yes, they are making an imperial conquest on Ukraine & have essentially a president for life; but a’least they don’t love to hit women }.

There’s an ad break for a male anti-impotence drug called “the Emperor’s Secret,” supposedly made in China out of various fungi. “The Emperor’s Secret can be mixed with alcohol,” the announcer helpfully advises the Russian male.

¿What is the point o’ this? This shit exists in the US. I’m sorry writer who has ne’er watched TV before & is apparently amazed by this 20th-century technology, but I’m not enthralled by this carnival you’re attempting to exhibit. All you’re telling me is that Russians are just as boring as Americans. ¿Is this meant to make me sympathize with Russians? ’Cause the idea that anti-impotence drug commercials will be the seed to the US’s own fall into fascism doesn’t make me feel better.

Next up, NTV introduces an American named John McIntyre who fought with the Ukrainians but then fled to Russia. He has been described as mentally unstable by fellow soldiers and commanders and was allegedly pushed out of the Ukrainian army for incompetence, but in Russia he is a prized asset, proudly wearing his Che Guevara baseball cap and T-shirt. The program intimates that it was a right-wing Ukrainian battalion that caused the well-known massacres in Bucha and Irpin, and not the Russian soldiers whose campaign of rape, execution, and terror was well documented.

I’m not sure why this writer assumes we’re all ableist assholes like him & think we’re going to naturally hate someone Ukrainians insult for illnesses that are not his fault or ’cause he wears T-shirts. I love how American media is so shitty that it makes me almost sympathize with the opposite side with which they want me to sympathize when I already sympathize with their side. It’s almost as if American culture is repugnant & has a twisted conception o’ what is “good”. We can’t emphasize Russia’s imperialism too much, as imperialism is too popular for Americans to make them hate Russians as we want them to, so let’s bring up neurodivergent people & Che-Guevara-shirt-wearing hipsters: those people Americans hate.

It’s especially ludicrous that they mix that nonsense with a short sentence o’ actual, serious whitewashing @ the end, in the same paragraph, e’en tho it has nothing to do with the sentence before. It’s almost as if this writer is an illiterate hack who doesn’t know how paragraphs work.

“Are there people like you in the States?” the interviewer asks McIntyre. “There are many pro-Russian Americans,” the young man replies. “American intelligence, they own the media machines. Most people watch CNN, but Fox has the most objective positions.”

I mean, if most Americans are watching fucking CNN, that would explain why so many o’ them are stupid ’nough to be pro-Putin.

“Their voices are getting louder!” an announcer on a Rossiya 1 newscast booms as older Germans are shown marching in a pro-Russia demonstration. “NATO out of Ukraine!” they chant. “U.S. and CIA out of Ukraine!” Afterward, an attractive young female correspondent brings cakes to Russian soldiers at the front. The war may be brutal, but, for Misha from Murmansk, it can also be sexy and exciting.

There is nothing mo’ sad than this o’erpaid idiot shaking his fist @ this rando Russian he made up in his head. “¡Damn you, Misha from Murmansk! ¡You were the cause o’ e’erything!”. ¿Can I get a citation proving that this totally-real Misha from Murmansk finds this war sexy & exciting & gives a shit @ all ’bout this woman & isn’t just listening to this program in the background while grinding for shiny Pokémon like most Americans do?

Channel 1 is stepping up its game in the propaganda Olympics with a “documentary” series called The Age of the USSR, which blends animation and old footage. The Russian language, the announcer tells us, has no word for “loser,” but instead has neudachnik, literally “unlucky person.” “The loser is guilty for what he hasn’t achieved,” the announcer explains. “The neudachnik is not guilty of a lack of achievement, just a lack of fortune, and he deserves sympathy.” Hence, Russia, a country of poor roads, decaying houses, and abysmal life expectancy, is not a nation of losers who lack achievement, but simply those upon whom fortune has not smiled. In other words: Don’t blame Putin for the mess we live in.

Yes, Russia should be mo’ like the US, who always blames ourselves for our own failings, which is why we try to blame Russia for magically brainwashing us into electing a white supremacist president in 2016 & not the US voters themselves, who are surely not racist, that’s why they were still lynching black people into the 50s. I’m not sure who this “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” line is aimed @: the Republicans dumb ’nough to believe in it are too far gone down the Russian hole & leftists don’t believe in this right-wing idea o’ shitting on “losers” for not being rich. I guess I’m not sure who this article is aimed @. Presumably a tiny minority o’ self-important people who will have no actual effect on US politics. But I won’t let that burst the bubble o’ this creative-writing-associate-degree dropout from his valiant, hard-hitting work sitting around watching shitty TV while judging the “losers” from his o’erpriced New York apartment. Here’s a propaganda tip for this writer that he could have learned from his “experiment”: propaganda works better if it’s not delivered by an insufferable douche.

And then the genocidal rhetoric is amped up with an animation showing a half-naked drunk Ukrainian in a pigsty (the actual pig is snorting nearby). The Ukrainian is shown with a haircut featuring a long lock of hair. This hair symbolism refers to the khokhol, a slur that Russians use against Ukrainians. It is equivalent to the worst kind of anti-Semitic and racist slurs. The image of the drunken Ukrainian with his khokhol haircut is no less eliminationist than the “hook-nosed Jew controlling the world” imagery of the Third Reich.

Yeah, ¿how would Russians feel ’bout media depicting them all as drunken losers who sit around their decaying homes drinking watching shitty TV all day & making up excuses for why they’re just “unlucky” instead o’ lazy & just let their husbands beat them all day?

O, wait: that’s this entire article. Well, like I said: we know why so many Americans end up pro-Putin — racist fascists tend to flock together. Perhaps this Russian-American writer didn’t intend to feed into that sentiment, but that is 100% the demographic the WASPs who run The Atlantic were aiming @ when they agreed to publish this.

Meanwhile on NTV, more German grannies are chanting “for peace” in a pro-Russia march, participating, whether they realize it or not, in what amounts to their own Nuremberg rally.

O my god, this propaganda is so fucking boring. Go back to the ol’ woman crawling on the floor & begging for forgiveness. Man, I can’t fathom what kind o’ country would have so much propaganda favorable to itself in its media.

As the day continues, NTV presents a documentary entitled I Was Zelensky’s Filth. A young imprisoned woman is accused of trying to bomb Mariupol’s city hall, after the battered city held a sham election in favor of joining Russia. “Mariupol is a place of glory for Russian forces and shame for the Kiev führer,” the announcer declares. That führer, of course, is none other than Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky himself, a Jew whose relatives perished in the Holocaust. The show visits the apartment of the supposed terrorist, which is hilariously staged with an American flag and Nazi memorabilia. Can Sasha from Samara possibly believe this nonsense?

This is pissing me off @ Russian media for a different reason: you can’t name your show “I Was Zelensky’s Filth” & have it be this boring. ¿Where’s the sex? I want to see some bad Zelensky imitator fucking plow 3 women @ a time. I want to see him make ol’ woman beg on the floor.

Meanwhile, on Rossiya 1 news, we learn that German Chancellor Olaf Scholtz has “fully committed himself to America. Germany can’t deal with the rising price of energy. The Greens are to blame. Germany will be turned into Kenya soon.”

This is hilarious propaganda ’cause, other than the Kenya exaggeration, it’s true: if Germany’s dumbass chancellor hadn’t shut down those nuclear power plants Germany wouldn’t need Russia’s climate-killing gas. I’m not sure how this sick burn serves Russia’s political goals, howe’er.

Geopolitics takes up an inordinate amount of airtime on Russian TV. Russian viewers are probably subjected to more images of U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and European Union Commission President Ursula von der Leyen than their American or European counterparts.

It makes sense that western media would want to keep such a warmonger as Blinken from too much scrutiny, which is why only the filthy leftist In These Times wants to bring it up here. Perhaps “journalists”, as they call themselves when they want to feel cute, in both countries should be ashamed @ their lack o’ scrutiny toward their own military leaders.

Day 4

There is a sadness to watching this much Russian television. I have started drinking earlier and have switched from pisco sours to vodka martinis. A part of me wants to die.

I find this writer’s constant moaning & groaning e’en mo’ unbearable ’cause here I am having to read his awful fucking reiteration o’ Russian propaganda. So not only do I get the most dumbed down version o’ what he sees, I have to see it thru his shitty-ass writing. Also, I’m not a money-wasting jackass, so I don’t know what is so inferior ’bout vodka martinis to pisco sours, ’cause I don’t waste thousands o’ $ on shit that’s just going to make me go blackout drunk, anyway. If this fuckface actually cared ’bout Ukraine he would have saved his money on grocery-store beer that’s just as good — or just not have been a degenerate drunk while hypocritically criticizing Russians for being degenerate drunks — & sent that money he saved to Ukraine’s cause. But that would be actually sacrificing himself for someone other than himself, & he only wants to pretend to do so.

But not before I catch Maria Butina’s new show on Channel 1. Butina is famous for being arrested and jailed as an unregistered Russian foreign agent in the United States. Once she was deported from the U.S., she became a member of Russia’s Parliament and, of course, the host of her own TV program. (“Today’s program is brought to you by Erecton Activ. Every woman wants to be near a strong man, strong in every way. Only 2,999 rubles.”)

Yeah, it’s crazy that Russia’s government would reward someone who did work for Russia’s government. It’s almost as if they serve their own interests & not the US’s. Like, that would be crazy if an American spy became a government official or had a show ’bout all the cool spying they did, ¿right? Clearly nobody would take that person seriously, since absolutely nobody likes spies or finds them cool.

Today, the redheaded Butina, wearing an equally red blouse and suit pants, decides to talk about Hillary Clinton. Wait, what? Who still cares about Hillary Clinton? Apparently, Butina and Tanya from Taganrog still do.

Damn, I don’t think Trump has said something so cold ’bout Clinton.

Tense music begins. According to the program, Clinton laughed “hysterically” when she was shown pictures of the death of Muammar Qaddafi. “What kind of monster responds to a person’s death like that?” Butina asks. A “psychiatrist” appears and says, “Yes, she’s a monster. But it’s because she has had to compete with men.”

I love how this writer glides o’er the inconvenient footage o’ Clinton laughing @ someone’s brutal death, which apparently included being sodomized with a bayonet. Whether “hysterical” or not, well-adjusted people don’t laugh @ pictures o’ brutal death, e’en gainst dictators. So while I don’t agree with this so-called psychiatrist’s public psychoanalysis without consent, which violates many psychological ethics, I think a layman would agree that it does make Clinton look like a terrible human being who lacks empathy. Many American liberals think Clinton is a monster: that’s kind o’ why she failed to win an election gainst Donald fucking Trump. Hating on Clinton, 1 o’ the most hateable American politicians, is the most low-hanging fruit e’er. Wake me when Russian propaganda has some shit to say ’bout Jimmy Carter.

But Hillary is just the appetizer to the entrée of evil that really controls the strings of world government. That man is of course George Soros. “He helped the Gestapo arrest his own co-religionists and then take away their own possessions,” an announcer says to chilling background music. “George Soros. The spider.”

I can’t believe Russia would steal Glenn Beck’s best bits.

Of course, the image of Jew as vermin or as a spider holding the world in its web is typical and, frankly, not even very imaginative anti-Semitic propaganda.

I would love to know how this writer thinks imaginative anti-Semitic propaganda would look.

But as I watch Butina’s show, I remember that my own grandfather was a Jew born in Ukraine who died fighting Germany’s fascist armies during the siege of Leningrad. A decade after his death, another fascist named Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin was born in the city my grandfather died defending. Watching Butina and her garden-variety anti-Semitism feels like a terrible desecration of his memory.

If it makes you feel better, Russia was desecrating Ukrainians long before Putin was born. If the Nazis didn’t get him, there was a good chance the famine would’ve. You could say his invasion o’ Ukraine was “typical and, frankly, not even very imaginative”. & honestly, I think the fact that your father begat such a whiny, spoiled buffoon who compares sitting on his ass & watching television to actually fighting a war is a far greater desecration o’ your grandfather’s memory. To paraphrase the wise Kendrick Lamar: “I read this & wish your grandpa would’ve worn a condom”.

Meanwhile, on NTV’s news program, Elon Musk declares in a clip, “All news is propaganda. People have to decide for themselves.” Russian state television could not have said it better.

This is baffling on all accounts. I expect Musk to say something as empty & hypocritical; ¿but is The Atlantic trying to claim that “People have to decide for themselves” is a totalitarian idea & not, what most would consider it, an Orwellian lie that a totalitarian regime pretends to follow while presenting only voices they disagree with as the “real authoritarians”? ¿Is The Atlantic unironically against people deciding for themselves? ¿Why else would they make the absurd statement that “Russian state television could not have said it better”? Liberals would certainly say they could live it better. Also, all news is propaganda, as empty as that is to say: as George Orwell said, all art is propaganda. ¿Or is George Orwell, 1 o’ the western world’s leading critics gainst Soviet Russia, a Russian asset, too? The fact that The Atlantic, a rich, relatively powerful ( which to be fair, still isn’t all that powerful anymo’ ) part o’ the news decided to hammer its readers o’er the head with this digression gainst “the news” certainly doesn’t convince me that The Atlantic isn’t propaganda — & very sloppy, poorly-concealed propaganda, to boot.

Day 5

I can almost taste my freedom. The weather is improving, spring is finally here, and all of New York seems to be beckoning me to escape my luxurious prison cell.

Anyone who uses the term “luxurious prison cell” does not know what a real prison cell is.

But I also feel overwhelming disgust, as if there’s a thick layer of dirt behind my shirt collar.

That’s ’cause you’re a dirty fucking slob who didn’t shower the whole time you were laying there boozing up & watching shitty Russian propaganda. But you’re not a loser who can’t be bothered to take care o’ your fucking self while engaging in the easiest job in the world, you’re just a neudachnik, an unlucky person.

I watch a show called For Men / For Women, in which a woman is attacked on the street by her ex-husband, who, with the aid of his relatives, also kidnaps her little son. “I fell on the asphalt, and he is holding me down and beating me,” the woman says. “I lost my breast milk. I went to the police. The police didn’t do anything.”

O, shit, we’re reading Something Awful’s r/relationship thread. That’s my Jerry Springer.

The poor woman’s lament reminds me of the show I watched a few days prior (it now seems like a lifetime ago) about women being stalked and beaten by their ex-lovers. “He has a very aggressive nature,” a woman said of her former lover, the professional boxer. As does Russia in 2023. So many of the shows I’ve watched during the past five days were obsessed with the West, with our Clintons and Soroses and Von der Leyens. Russia is the spurned lover with the “very aggressive nature” taking out his inhumanity on the innocent neighbor next door. Despite all the posturing and doublespeak, Russian television announces as much to the world. Whether on the airwaves or, perhaps someday, at the Hague, the evidence has been clearly presented.

I sure hope Gary’s middle-school teacher gave him gold stars for this totally-not-corny metaphor. “It’s like, ¿what if Russia was, like, an abusive lover to Ukraine, bro?”.

& as an extra taunt, this article ends with an ad for this writer’s book — ’cause I certainly want more o’ this great writing. Said book is, shockingly, a bunch o’ rich assholes in a rich house & half o’ them are struggling writers & the other half are racist stereotypes, like a “Korean-American app developer” or “Southern flamethrower of an essayist” ( the latter o’ which is both ). Or if you want a real treat, you can read his most recent article @ The Atlantic, titled, “Crying myself to sleep on the biggest cruise ship ever”, which repeats this article’s riveting day-to-day gimmick, almost as if this writer is a 1-trick pony ( & that 1 trick blew ass ). The only article I want to read ’bout some rich asshole crying himself to sleep on the biggest cruise ship e’er is just before he & the ship are burned down by the proletarian uprising, &, spoilers, that badass shit doesn’t happen. Thanks for writing propaganda just as boring as Putin’s lame-ass I Was Zelensky’s Filth yet again.

Fuck The Atlantic for publishing what has got to be the least effective propaganda against Russia’s aggression against Ukraine e’er — & most insufferable writing I’ve read in a while — & fuck Putin for sparking a war that, e’en indirectly, led to it being published. With all the paranoid red-scare conspiracies people drum up, ¿are we sure The Atlantic isn’t infiltrated by Russians & this article isn’t an attempt to delegitimize Putin’s critics as useless morons? If The Atlantic really wants to help Ukraine, they should start writing propaganda for Russia: they’re such unlikable twats that they’d hurt Russia mo’ by association than by antagonism.