April 9, 2023

Trying something new

We’re trying something new! When I first started blogging 100 years ago, I sent out a weekly recap on Fridays. Since Twitter is slowly decaying, I have decided to start that again, but on Sundays — though in the future, I’ll send it out much earlier than 10:30pm (I forgot about Easter). It’s really just going to be whatever I’ve been reading or interested in for the last week, so enjoy a peak into my mind, I guess. I have made this feature separate from my other Substack posts, so if you hate it, you should be able to unsubscribe pretty easily without losing my amazing/rare regular content.

Articles to Read

Clarence Thomas and the Billionaire
by Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott and Alex Mierjeski in ProPublica

Justice Clarence Thomas has been spending a lot of time vacationing with Dallas billionaire Harlan Crow — Crow even has some weird painting of them hanging out together. Plus, “Thomas didn’t report any of the trips ProPublica identified on his annual financial disclosures. Ethics experts said the law clearly requires disclosure for private jet flights and Thomas appears to have violated it.”

The Christian Liberal-Arts School at the Heart of the Culture Wars
by Emma Green in The New Yorker

The far-right Hillsdale College (which welcomes speakers like Andy Ngo) is what DeSantis wants the New College of Florida to be. It’s also trying to take over early education in America: “Hillsdale has ventured outside of higher education, helping to launch K-12 charter schools nationwide.” If you aren’t familiar with Hillsdale, you need to be, and Green’s article is a great primer. Speaking of Hillsdale…

In Michigan, DeSantis describes his enemies: The ‘legacy’ media and the ‘woke’ left
by Anna Gustafson in Michigan Advance

Last week, DeSantis went to Hillsdale to complain about The Wokes and air his grievances with the media to college president Larry Arnn. “To DeSantis, the ‘legacy media’ — a term he never defined but which seemed to mean any news outlet that has written or aired any criticism of the governor who secured a resounding win in November 2022 — amounts to political operatives.”

"Hyenas are communists": Right-wing story hour, part 1 — the banality of celebrity
by Tim Denevi in Salon

Two weeks ago, Tim and I went to a conservative story hour at a DC library. Tim is doing some in-depth coverage of some of the “authors” starting with Jack Posobiec (Poso seems pretty pissed about it, which is always a good sign). “This banality of celebrity, with its distinctive architecture — lackluster real life, set against  rarefied online latticework — is what makes someone like Posobiec, at least in this current moment, inescapable.”

No One Should Be That Shocked by What’s Happening in Tennessee
by Natalie Allison in Politico

Last week, two Black state reps in Tennessee were removed from their positions after participating in a protest against gun violence (a white colleague who joined the protest was able to keep her job). Politico reporter Natalie Allison covered politics in Tennessee for years, and this recap of her time there is fascinating and horrifying. “And then, of course, there was the famous peeing incident, where a legislator’s office chair was urinated on in an act of intraparty retribution over shitposting.”

News to Know

• Turns out that billionaire Harlan Crow is really into Hitler. Not only that, but his brother has been accused of bankrolling a sex trafficking ring. Over on Twitter, people cannot stop defending Crow’s Hitler collection.

• Early Friday afternoon, The New York Times announced that Donald Trump planned to hire Laura Loomer (friend of Nick Fuentes and bigot extraordinaire in her own right) for his campaign. People were rightfully pissed, and by Friday evening it was reported that hiring Loomer was off the table.

• Friday in Texas, a judge suspended the FDA’s approval of mifepristone, an abortion medication that has been FDA approved for over 20 years (AOC called for the Biden administration to ignore the ruling). Later that day, a judge in Washington ruled the opposite, saying that mifepristone is safe (mifepristone remains available in DC and the 17 other states involved in the Washington case).

• Perpetual crybaby billionaire Elon Musk slapped NPR’s Twitter account with a “state affiliated media” label on Wednesday. In an interview with NPR, he seemed to not understand that words actually mean things; on Saturday, he changed the label to “government funded” (NPR receives 1-2% of its funding from the government, totaling far less than the billions Musk’s companies receive).

• Speaking of crybaby bitch fits on Twitter, Mehdi Hasan absolutely destroyed Matt Taibbi’s bunk Twitter Files “reporting.” Shortly after, Musk effectively banned Substack links from Twitter, and threw Taibbi under the bus while doing so.