THURSDAY, AUGUST 27, 2026
...our Blue stars refuse to respond: This morning, we posted a key part of Michelle Goldberg's column from Sunday's New York Times.
We're big fans of Goldberg's work. In this passage, she's portraying what we would regard as a dangerous state of affairs:
Why Do We Keep Imagining a New Civil War?
[...]
For at least the last decade, a florid, aggressive contempt has been a constant in our politics. Donald Trump, after all, doesn’t just shower liberal cities and states with insults (and, in a demented A.I. video he posted, with excrement). His presidency has been devoted to punishing the places that didn’t vote for him, including by withholding health care and disaster funding. One of the things his voters have long loved about him is the humiliation and despair he causes their fellow citizens.
Many of those Trump partisans are still smarting over Hillary Clinton calling some of them “deplorables.” For decades they’ve been seething at the disrespect they feel emanating from America’s cultural capitals. It seems obvious to me that blue America is more abused than abuser, but that doesn’t really matter; the impossibility of coming to any agreement about the commensurability of our grievances just underlines the toxicity of the relationship.
According to that presentation, "an aggressive contempt has been [and remains] a constant in our politics." We agree with her assessment that, at the present time, Red America is more the abuser.
The toxicity is peddled for sport on such Fox News Channel programs as Jesse Watters Primetime and Gutfeld!. They're the second and third most watched programs in American "cable news."
Last night, on the inane yet noxious Gutfeld! show, the toxicity and the ugly expressions of contempt got started with the opening "joke" by host Greg Gutfeld.
(The program opens with a handful of jokes, then proceeds to four or five pseudo-discussions.)
Onscreen, the "joke" was sourced to Earth.com. It was delivered at 10 o'clock sharp:
GUTFELD (8/26/26): Good evening, everyone. Scientists recorded 420 human screams and discovered they can have many different meanings.
The main ones are pain, fear and waking up next to this:
PHOTO: Kathy Griffin
AUDIENCE: Laughter
It's an extremely unflattering photo of Griffin. Gutfeld uses it on a regular basis to subject Griffin to ugly braindead ridicule.
New York Times "feminist" Kat Timpf gazes on at moments like this; the blowhard "Tyrus" sits by her side. Last night, their benefactor's third joke went like this:
GUTFELD: Yesterday, Dick's Sporting Goods stock dropped 28 percent.
The last time dicks went down that fast was when these five hit the nude beach.
PHOTO: The women of The View
AUDIENCE: Laughter, cheers, applause
The star of the show was rolling along—and yes, he would have another:
GUTFELD (continuing directly): As the trade war escalates, Canada is responding with stiff new tariffs on lipstick, mascara and pedicure kits—
in a move vigorously opposed by ugly chicks.
And no, it didn't stop there.
This garbage is spilled on the stage each night as the feminist Timpf laughs along. The silence is deafening from Goldberg and from everyone else in the Blue American guild—from everyone at the New York Times; from everyone at The Atlantic; from all the deeply principled millionaires working for MS NOW.
Aggressive toxicity pours from this source. Blue America's guardians refuse to speak, notice or care.
It's time for Goldberg to explain why this situation exists. It's silly to think that a modern nation can survive such relentless dumps of toxicity, whether from a sitting president or from a person like Gutfeld, met by such measures of cowardice.
We're big fans of Goldberg's work; it's time for her to speak. It's clear that no one else ever will. As it says in a very old book, this is the gruesome societal breakdown our self-admiration has chosen.
Note that Somerby’s usual “blue America“ has today suddenly become “blue America’s guardians.”
ReplyDeleteAside from the fact that I would hesitate to call Goldberg any kind of “guardian”, it’s an important distinction, because in other posts Somerby simply attacks “liberals” without any qualifications.
Goldberg is alright with Somerby because she is less bombastic and more demure about her centrist, neoliberal stances.
DeleteAaaaaaa that darn Gutfeld, he's bad for Republican branding.
ReplyDeleteWe need to go back to the days when corporate media met with Republicans behind closed doors to get their marching orders and hid Republican boorishness from the public.
I have never imagined a civil war (what a weird thing to imagine) but I do recall briefly learning about the US Civil War in history class in high school.
ReplyDeleteWasn’t that war about how the states were defending their sacred rights against a tyrannical federal government?
DeleteIt was about protecting the right to have slaves.
DeleteThese moronic attacks on Gutfeld are like trying to get Andrew Dice Clay to clean up his act. This is what Gutfeld does. He isn't going to stop or get better. This is what he is paid to do, so that men who have hostility toward women (especially famous ones) can feel justified in their own dislike of women. This is why men tune in to Gutfeld and it is also probably why Somerby watches him. (This is like the court justice who watched endless amounts of kiddie porn in order to be able to rule on its illegality in an informed way.)
ReplyDeleteKat Timpf is not a feminist (whether Somerby uses scare quotes or omits them -- he does both). She is critical of feminism and mocks feminists in her shows on college campuses and progressive venues. She says she is not a feminist. She considers herself a libertarian and doesn't want to be affiliated with any group, not even women. So, why does Somerby keep calling her feminist and expecting her to defend the ladies on The View? Timpf is not any kind of liberal but is a conservative. She is not going to stick up for other women simply because she is female. And she is anti-woke, so she doesn't represent anyone on the left who is interested in sexism or misogyny.
So why does Somerby do this? I think it is his covert, snide way of attacking feminists himself. He is trying to suggest that women are hypocrites when they don't address Gutfeld's crude substitute for humor. And then he generalizes that to all women, when the ones on Fox are there because they are OK with what Fox does.
"Aggressive toxicity pours from this source. Blue America's guardians refuse to speak, notice or care."
On what basis does Somerby say that Blue America doesn't care about the things Gutfeld says? Of course we care, but we can't do anything about it. Complaining is not the best use of our time -- we have elections to win.
"As it says in a very old book, this is the gruesome societal breakdown our self-admiration has chosen."
I suppose Somerby is referring to The Iliad with this sentence, but first, Troy did not have a societal breakdown -- they got sacked by the Greeks on the beach. Second, how did anyone's self-admiration lead to that result? Somerby is not making any sense at all.
I assume he gets his influencer stipend whether he makes sense or not. He got to kick feminists, which is a right wing talking point. He got to repeat all of those Gutfeld jokes about women being ugly, thereby advancing Gutfeld's show via his recommendation to other cranky men without women in their lives. He has said very little else here except to call blues bad for refusing to respond to Gutfeld's stupid non-jokes. Everything in this essay reflects a right wing talking point. He's not even trying to appear vaguely liberal.
This is Somerby’s reaction to Kathy Griffin’s photo of herself with Trump’s head:
ReplyDelete“Needless to say, the liberal world can't exactly be blamed for the behavior of self-dealing multimillionaire celebrity hounds like Griffin. That said, the liberal world has constantly been harmed, down through the years, by the ridiculous conduct of the vapid, know-nothing, tone-deaf stars we can't seem to quit.”
“DOWNWARD SPIRAL: Dissembling and victimization is Us!
TUESDAY, AUGUST 29, 2017”
https://dailyhowler.blogspot.com/2017/08/downward-spiral-dissembling-and.html?m=1
note also that he says not “victimization is Kathy Griffin”, but “victimization is us”, even when other liberals had criticized her.
And suddenly he’s defending her, upset that liberal pundits won’t defend her from ridicule.