MONDAY, JUNE 22, 2026
Did he possibly get it right? This morning, we posted some of the lowlights of Saturday morning's three-headed review of the Obama Presidential Center.
We refer to the screeching, screaming, gong-show behavior of the three co-hosts of the Fox & Friends Weekend program. We're inclined to think that Griff Jenkins knows better. The other two, not so much.
In fairness, no one was pictured as an ape this day. No one said that Michelle Obama is a man, or that Barack Obama is gay.
One extremely strange star in the channel's prime time lineup toys with the latter two themes on a semi-regular basis, but no one did that on Fox & Friends Weekend this week.
On the other hand, the dim-witted messaging flowed like the waters of a mighty stream. As we showed you this morning, eternal teen-ager Charlie Hurt was soon dishing this:
JENKINS: ...President Obama's Presidential Center, which opened up on the South Side of Chicago, has been panned as a bit of an ugly structure.
CAMPOS-DUFFY: It would have been like a death star—
JENKINS: What do you call it?
CAMPOS-DUFFY: I call it the North Korean watchtower. Charlie likes to call it a garbage can.
HURT: It does, because it looks like a public park, and it's in a public park. So it looks like one of those trash cans in a public park. You just walk in and shove your entire, all your McDonald's garbage, like right through the panel and then you just drop it.
It looks like a place where you'd shove all your garbage! All in all, it can sometimes seem like it's "garbage in, garbage out" on this tribal messaging program.
As we noted, some or most architecture critics—not all—have panned the external design of the center's main building. But on Fox & Friends Weekend, when Barack Obama's name is mentioned, the Fox News Channel "conservative insult culture" is likely to take instant hold.
The new building looks like a trash can, Hurt later said.
Again—no one was called an ape, and no one was called a man! Also, is it possible that Charlie Hurt—screaming and yelling, as you can easily see—was actually noting a questionable part of the Blue American political playbook when he screamed and screeched in the manner shown below?
JENKINS (6/20/26): You know, it's interesting, by the way—the whole ceremony began with Valerie Jarrett, Obama's senior adviser, and she started the whole ceremony by recognizing stolen land.
Charlie?
HURT (shouting): Why'd they build it there, then, if it's on stolen land? Give it baaaack! [Briefly inaudible] the building is already there! And you can't tear the building down!
You literally built it on land that you're crying about being stolen! Give it baaaaaack!
And so on from there. It was quite a "journalistic" performance.
The co-host was unmistakably screeching. It ought to be a national emergency when news clowns behave like that on major "cable news" shows. On the other hand, is it possible that Hurt might be arguably possibly somewhat right?
We noticed several analysts cringe when Jarrett delivered the "land acknowledgement." They told us that "land acknowledgements" are empty gestures performed in bad faith from which there's only one result:
Every time we Blues deliver a land acknowledgement, these fiery young analysts cried, another ten thousand Trump voters are said to get their wings,
We'll admit that we were surprised to see Jarrfett deliver the acknowledgment. We'd like to see more attention paid to the histories and the present circumstances of indigenous / native / first people tribes.
That said, these gestures do strike us as blatantly phony, pretty much all the way down. "You can only imagine how these gestures look to Others," one young analyst cried.
The friends seemed to think that the youngster was right! Hurt screeched and screamed as he and Campos-Duffy mocked the gesture.
Could it be that we the Blues sometimes defeat ourselves?
The key for "the Blues" is to never say anything that might somehow be construed as an affront to the sensibilities of straight white people, who are presumably so empty-headed and easily triggered that they'll jump into Trump's lap to punish said affront.
ReplyDeleteMeanwhile, far-right parties are gaining traction throughout the Western world, even in places where they have no "indigenous populations" or "stolen lands" to use as an excuse.
Here’s the incongruity of Somerby: if we “blues” fail to discuss Gutfeld’s latest misogynistic pronouncements, that means we “blues” tolerate said misogyny.* But if we note and call out the obvious racism going on, that’s bad and offends right wingers. It looks like some sort of double standard.
ReplyDelete*Talarico was all over MSNOW responding to charges he is “effeminate”; also, the “Michelle Obama is a man” comment was also dealt with by, among others, Warnock. But damn, he might have said something about “racism” during the course of that interview, so I guess he is or will be contributing to our election problems.
Land recognition statements are not empty gestures performed in bad faith by those who care about getting along with indigenous people, which includes all of us who live in states with large Indian populations, tribes with recognized rights, and places with a history of past atrocities. For us, those statements are routine but they are also important to all of us.
ReplyDeleteThis is the inclusivity part of DEI. It recognizes that we wouldn't be able to build presidential libraries on Chicago land had there not been a sacrifice by the original occupants (residents) of that land. When I lived in Chicago, I lived in Uptown. There was a nearby urban Indian center for those members of the local tribes who were living in the city instead of on their reservation. They were part of the community in that neighborhood. The center helped relocating Indians find jobs and provided a support system for those who were away from their families.
Right wingers may not see indigenous people as real people, descendents of those killed in Indian wars by men like Sherman (the name of a street in Chicago), just as Obama represents black people descended from slaves brought from Africa to America to work on plantations, ultimately fleeing their enslavement and moving to Chicago to avoid Jim Crow laws and find jobs,. Chicago works as a major city because it respects and includes all people regardless of ethnicity and national origin (Polish, German, Greek, Irish, Hispanics settling out of the migrant farmworking stream).
Somerby's fatuous conceit that these land ceremonies are "performative" reflects the poverty of his own view of America as a land of many people, built by many hands. For some of us, that land ceremony is a reassurance by our local Indian tribes that we are forgiven and invited to participate upon the land as part of a collective. We don't sleep through such ceremonies, the way Trump sleeps through everything important to our nation these days. Somerby's vague attempt to mock the ceremony shows disrespect for Indians but also those who care about our history together. Not only do many Western states perform such ceremonies, but so does Canada.