the daily howler: January 2025

FLYWEIGHTS: The flyweights eat at the infrastructure...

TUESDAY, JANUARY 14, 2025

...of our failing nation: We awoke today to what we'd call a stumblebum conversation.

It occurred in the first half hour of this morning's Morning Joe. At issue was the FBI background check—or the lack of same—which has been conducted—or possibly not—on the poverty-stricken Pete Hegseth.

(To appreciate the depth of Hegseth's impoverishment, see yesterday afternoon's report.)

How thorough was the FBI's alleged background check? Possibly not that thorough! The conversation to which we refer turned on this news report in the New York Times:

Democrats Say F.B.I. Did Not Interview Critical Witnesses About Pete Hegseth
Senate Democrats on Monday said that an F.B.I. background check on Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald J. Trump’s pick to lead the Pentagon, omitted key details on major allegations against him, in part because it did not include interviews with critical witnesses.
One missed opportunity came when the bureau did not interview one of Mr. Hegseth’s ex-wives before its findings were presented to senators last week, according to people familiar with the bureau’s investigation.
The clamor comes on the eve of Mr. Hegseth’s confirmation hearing...
“There are significant gaps and inadequacies in the report, including the failure to interview some of the key potential witnesses with personal knowledge of improprieties or abuse,” Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut and a member of the committee, said in an interview.

NBC News has posted a similar report. To read that report (no paywall), you can just click here.

Should the FBI have interviewed Hegseth's (two) ex-wives? More to the point, who sets the parameters for such a background check? Who decides what issues the FBI will pursue in producing some such report?

During this morning's first half hour, Joe and Mika spoke with NBC's Ali Vitali about these important questions. Most charitably put, Vitali was completely unable to explain the basics of this matter.

A stumblebum conversation ensued, of a familiar type. NBC's Ken Dilanian arrived on the scene in the program's second half hour, providing much needed clarification.

Early in the 7 o'clock hour, NBC's David Rohde (currently, NBC News) seemed to make the basic facts even a bit more clear.

During the program's first half hour, Vitali seemed to have no ability to explain the basics of the matter under review. Viewers forced to watch as Mika said somethign very much like this:

"A background check isn't a background check unless it's a background check."

So true! But why had the FBI proceeded in the way it did? What are the basic facts concerning the way these background checks get conducted?

Vitali didn't seem to know. Neither did Joe or Mika. This produced a stumblebum convo involving three vastly-paid media figures. "Democracy dies" in such ways.

In such ways, the American discourse continues to burn to the ground. With apologies for the repetition, we thought again of Camus' fictional Oran—a city which was (metaphorically) burning down in the pages of The Plague:

CAMUS: [O]ur townsfolk were like everybody else, wrapped up in themselves; in other words they were humanists: they disbelieved in pestilences. A pestilence isn't a thing made to man's measure; therefore we tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogy of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away. But it doesn't always pass away and, from one bad dream to another, it is men who pass away, and the humanists first of all, because they haven't taken their precautions.
Our townsfolk were not more to blame than others; they forgot to be modest, that was all, and thought that everything still was possible for them; which presupposed that pestilences were impossible. They went on doing business, arranged for journeys, and formed views. How should they have given a thought to anything like plague, which rules out any future, cancels journeys, silences the exchange of views. They fancied themselves free, and no one will ever be free so long as there are pestilences.

The citizens of Oran were ordinary people; they weren't a collection of intellectual or moral Einsteins. The same is true of us the American people—and that's nowhere more true than when our nation's failing discourse is massacred by the flyweights.

As we noted yesterday, David Wallace-Wells is (almost surely) no sane person's idea of a flyweight. He has written extensively on climate change. At this link from NYU, you can see his lengthy colloquy with Professor Michael Mann about this major topic.

Wallace-Wells is no sane person's flyweight. That doesn't mean that every assessment he offers is automatically right.

We say that because he offered a fairly substantial list of assessments in Saturday's lengthy opinion column for the New York Times. Below, you see the passage in which an array of assessments appeared:

You Don’t Get Disasters Like the Palisades Fire Without Human Failure
[...]
“The city burning is Los Angeles’s deepest image of itself,” Joan Didion wrote way back in the 1960s. And on X and Truth Social and, indeed, Fox News, they were playing the hits, too—the fires were not the result of climate change or an extraordinary wind event meeting an extraordinary drought but the responsibility of Gov. Gavin Newsom of California and Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles and the city’s fire chief, until this point anonymous nationally, who had the audacity to be a woman.
It was a remarkable reversal, conservatives demagoguing California fire disaster, but after the conspiratorial deluge of Hurricane Helene, it need not have been surprising. Had the Los Angeles Fire Department’s budget really been cut? The fire hydrants were dry primarily because of the demand from the fires themselves, it turned out. There had been no political showdown about a fish called a smelt, and the California supply of water did not hang on its fate...

And so on from there. Remarkably, Wallace-Wells was willing to say the name of a major news org; he said the name "Fox News." He seemed to say that that major news org has been demagoguing the fires.

MONDAY: Hegseth was working for weekend rates!

MONDAY, JANUARY 13, 2025

Also, a touch of the labyrinthitis: As it turns out, Pete Hegseth was a team player at the Fox News Channel. As it turns out, he had been working for weekend rates:

Financial Disclosure Reveals How Much Pete Hegseth Was Making at Fox News
The Washington Post’s Jeremy Barr shared a portion of Hegseth’s disclosure on X Monday, which showed his Fox News salary to be just a bit over $4.6 million over a two-year period. Hegseth’s impressive haul came from his role at Fox News as one of three co-hosts on Fox & Friends Weekend as well as his work on Fox Nation.

That's the start of Alex Griffing's report at Mediaite. Instantly, a question arises:

Was Hegseth paid $4.6 million for each of the past two years? Or was he paid $4.6 million for the two years combined?

Based on the disclosure document, we aren't entirely sure. Either way, Hegseth had plainly humbled himself by working for meager weekend pay. He was working a full two mornings per week, but he was only getting paid a bit over two (or four) million per year!

Griffing's report continues as shown below. We can't swear to the accuracy of the O'Donnell numbers, which track to the New York Post. Maddow's numbers have been reported so often that we're inclined to assume they're accurate:

Hegseth’s disclosure means he was earning a little more than half CBS News anchor Norah O’Donnell, who had her annual salary cut by more than half in 2022, from $8 million to less than $4 million.
However, his earnings paled in comparison to Fox’s Sean Hannity, who reportedly earns $25 million a year. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow reportedly took a pay cut recently from $30 million a year to $25 million a year as well while only hosting her show once a week—although she is returning full-time for the first 100 days of Trump’s second administration.

We've long believed, and we've repeatedly said, that we the people should know how much these "cable news" figures get paid. In theory, a lot of devotion to Storyline can be purchased, depending on the amount of money which is changing hands.

Meanwhile, Recurrence of the labyrinthitis! We awoke this morning to our fourth attack of "The Big L" over the past twenty years.

We managed to get this morning's report done, though we wish we'd been able to articulate our basic framework with greater clarity. To wit:

We know of no reason to believe that our society will be able to recover from the longstanding attack of the flyweights—some of whom are probably willing propagandists, some of whom may be mere true believers.

We know of no reason to believe that our failing American culture will be able to recover from the ongoing disorder which now defines our discourse. But we wanted to get off to a better start that we were able to manage.

We badly need to start saying their names! We badly need to develop a journalistic language with which we can describe what these flyweights do.

Calling them "liars" doesn't work; also, it might not be accurate. But we badly need to start saying their names, and we need to describe what they do.

FLYWEIGHTS: The time has come to start saying their names!

MONDAY, JANUARY 13, 2025

Every flyweight a king: We're prepared to assume that the fellow in question actually isn't a flyweight. We're even going to say his name:

David Wallace-Wells

Right there, that's the gentleman's name—the name of the person in question.

You may not recognize that name, but almost surely, the gentleman isn't a flyweight. This is the way the leading authority on his life and his ongoing work starts its profile of same:

David Wallace-Wells
David Wallace-Wells (born 1982) is an American journalist known for his writings on climate change. He wrote the 2017 essay "The Uninhabitable Earth;" the essay was published in New York as a long-form article and was the most-read article in the history of the magazine.
Wells later expanded the article into a 2019 book of the same title. At the time, he was the Deputy Editor of New York Magazine and covered the climate crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic extensively. He was hired in March 2022 by The New York Times to write a weekly newsletter and contribute to The New York Times Magazine.

So the profile begins.

Briefly, let's state the obvious. Nothing you've read so far means that Wallace-Wells is always perfectly right in every single assessment.

As far as we know, no one is ever perfectly right in every single assessment. On that basis, it's safe to assume that Wallace-Wells probably isn't necessarily right every single time.

Even so, we're willing to guess that he isn't a flyweight. That said, please note this:

Concerning his work on climate change, it has on occasion been challenged, including by prominent figures. Here's more of what the authority writes about his ongoing career.

Climate writing
His best-known work is "The Uninhabitable Earth," an article published July 9, 2017 in New York magazine. Although the essay received mixed to negative criticism from many scientists, it was considered an impactful work by some reviewers.
Wallace-Wells later turned the work into a full-length book of the same name, published in 2019. Both works are characterized by speculation regarding climate change's potential to dramatically impact human life, which Wallace-Wells describes in "meticulous and terrifying detail."
Writing in The Guardian in 2021, Wallace‑Wells argues that the scale of climate change adaptation required globally is unprecedented, and Wallace‑Wells opines that "the world's vanguard infrastructure is failing in today's climate, which is the most benign we will ever see again."

Say what? His 2017 magazine piece "received mixed to negative criticism from many scientists?"

That seems to be an accurate statement. Back in 2017, certain aspects of the lengthy essay were even challenged by Penn State's Michael Mann, a noted climate scientist.

In July of that year, Chris Mooney's report for the Washington Post offered an overview of that debate. Later that year, NYU hosted a formal discussion of the matters at hand between Wallace-Wells and Mann. The videotape of that event is available online, under this dual heading:

The ‘Doomed Earth’ Controversy (2017)
The author of the controversial New York magazine cover story about worst-case climate scenarios in conversation with a prominent critic

So the process went. When the book by Wallace-Wells appeared in 2019, Mann still felt it was too "doomist." The leading authority on Wallace-Wells' book describes the matter here:

The Uninhabitable Earth (book)
[...]
In The New Climate War, the climatologist Michael Mann dedicates 12 pages to "The Uninhabitable Earth." About the book, he notably writes that "while some of the blatant errors that marked the original article were largely gone, the pessimistic—and, at times, downright doomist—framing remained, as did exaggerated descriptions that fed the doomist narrative.

So the process continued.

No one gets everything perfectly right every time. Presumably, that includes both Wallace-Wells and Mann. That said, Michael Mann is nobody's flyweight, though he's long been a punching bag for the corporate right.

Professor Mann is nobody's flyweight. Neither, we assess, is the aforementioned Wallace-Wells.

We offer this overview today for a pair of reasons. On Saturday, Wallace-Wells authored a lengthy opinion piece in the New York Times.

The column appears online. In it, Wallace-Wells offers an array of assessments about the unfolding situation in Los Angeles. We don't know if every assessment he makes is perfectly accurate—but we do feel fairly sure that the gentleman isn't a nitwit, a hack or a dope.

We feel quite sure that he isn't a flyweight! Elsewhere, though, the flyweights have been buzzing around this important topic and this cataclysmic event.

With this, as with almost every topic, the flyweights were buzzing around with lightning speed last week. Does smoke now fill the air in L.A.? The flyweights are once again filling the air all across the failing American nation's failing attempt at a discourse.

Their names are legion, and they need to be said. Beyond that, the time has come to invent the journalistic language which would let us describe what these flyweights actually are and what it is that they do.

As we've noted in the past, we now live within a media structure which makes "every flyweight a king." We badly need to start saying their names. Also, we need to start identifying them as flyweights, which is what they plainly are.

The time has come to stop accepting the conduct of these flyweights. The time has come for major news orgs in Blue America to stop averting their gaze from the destructive conduct in which these flyweights engage on a daily and nightly basis.

As the fires have spread in L.A., the flyweights have been all over Fox News. In fairness, they've also been buzzing around other media portals.

As a general matter, we can assume that they don't have the slightest idea what they're talking about. What they do know is the corporate and tribal Storyline, along with the mandated talking points.

Presumably, some of these flyweights know what they're doing. Presumably, some of them don't. That said, they've been undermining our failing culture for a very long time. This week, we're going to start saying their names.

High culture has long enjoyed the Flight of the Bumblebees. Our nation is now awash in the recitations of the flyweights.

It's time for orgs like the New York times to start saying their names. It's also time to invent the journalistic language which describes who and what these flyweights actually are.

With apologies for a left-handed compliment, we assess that Wallace-Wells isn't a flyweight. All too plainly, around the clock, a battalion of others are.

Tomorrow: Wallace-Wells names Fox News

BREAKING: The dumbest person who ever lived...

SUNDAY, JANUARY 12, 2025

...is helped by our lack of language: The dumbest person who ever lived has succumbed to his latest brainstorm:

Trump Calls Officials Handling Los Angeles Wildfires ‘Incompetent’
President-elect Donald J. Trump offered fresh criticism early Sunday of the officials in charge of fighting the Los Angeles wildfires, calling them “incompetent” and asking why the blazes were not yet extinguished.
“The fires are still raging in L.A.,” Mr. Trump wrote on his Truth Social site. “The incompetent pols have no idea how to put them out.”

You could always call it a papal bull. But there he has gone again!

The New York Times news report continues along from there. That said:

The dumbest person who ever lived is about to become commander again. Journalistically, we continue to lack an established language for describing this disordered person's endless array of new clothes.

Important note:

"Liar" may not be an accurate term, and it hasn't worked all that well.

SUNDAY: The rough. rude talk of real men is back!

SUNDAY, JANUARY 11, 2025

Though also, in search of Obama: Finally! At long last, the rough, rude talk of real men is back! This very morning, these are the headlines which sit atop the posts at Mediaite:

Trump Spikes the Football After Special Counsel’s Resignation: ‘The Stench of Deranged Jack Smith and His Thugs is GONE!’
Steve Bannon Goes Nuclear on ‘Truly Evil’ and ‘Racist’ Elon Musk, Pledges ‘To Take This Guy Down’

Finally! At long last, the rough, rude, street fight-adjacent talk of the last of the world's real men! Canal Zone, you're up next!

For talk of the stench of the thugs, click this. For Bannon's war welping, click here.

While we're at it, we can't say we disagree with Don Lemon's recent assessment. The headline in question says this:

Don Lemon Blasts Obama’s ‘Cringy’ Cordial Chat with Trump at Carter Funeral: ‘You Can’t Memory Hole Comparing Someone to Hitler’

Sadly, we largely agree with what Lemon is quoted saying (at length). We've rarely seen someone lose his (once formidable) mojo quite as fast as this previous president has.

Time passes quickly down here on the plain! We're hoping he gets it back!

In the meantime, nothing "is wrong" with the incoming chief. Let's all keep pretending that!

SATURDAY: Gutfeld returns from paternity leave!

SATURDAY, JANUARY 11, 2025

Trap of Timpf stays shut: The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin once said. At long last, we can finally say that he seems to have had it wrong.

It's true! A nation's cities can be devoured by flames. But a nation's capacity for intelligent discourse can be swallowed much faster.

As a case in point, we give you the Fox News Channel's Greg Gutfeld, back this week from paternity leave.

For the record, the Fox News star is 60 years old. By most reckonings, that makes him a fully grown person.

In the simple realm of physical appearance, no one has ever mistaken him for George Clooney. In a world aligned with basic decency, that's neither here nor there.

Last month, Gutfeld's wife—she's substantially younger—gave birth to the couple's first child. This week, the "cable news" star returned to the "cable news" wars.

What follows is all the fellow was able to bring to last evening's public discourse. At issue is the way a group of performers pretended to discuss a certain topic on last evening's Gutfeld! show.

Gutfeld! is a prime-time, weeknight "cable news" program. Last night, the panel pretended to discuss a recent statement by Rep. Pamila Jayapal (D-WA).

As it turned out, Rep. Jayapal isn't attractive enough for the Fox News Channel star. For the record, very few (liberal) women ever are.

Below, you see the way the segment in question started. A photo of Jayapal was on the screen as the segment began:

GUTFELD (1/10/25): Our second "Video of the Day": comes to us from a congresswoman in Washington State.

One look at that face, you'll wish it was "Audio of the Day."

To watch this latest opening of the garbage can, you can just click here.

This is very typical behavior from the "cable news" star. We thought we should say the names of the people who stared off into space when this very strange person behaved this way—when he behaved this way for perhaps the ten millionth time:

Panelists, Gutfeld! program, 1/10/25
Tyrus: former professional "wrestler"
Kat Timpf: "best-selling author" of books bought in bulk
Charles Hurt: Fox News contributor
Michael Loftus: flyweight comedian

"What would you give in exchange for your soul?" It's an old American song—a part of Americana.

What would you give in exchange for your soul? In the case of Timpf, she's willing to stare into space—to voice no comment or complaint—when her benefactor behaves in this manner.

People like Tyrus, Hurt and Loftus also know that they must say nothing about this.

Just to be clear, Gutfeld this way on a nightly basis. Here he was on Monday evening—the evening of his return—expressing his displeasure with the physical attractiveness of Mary Trump, a clinical psychologist:

GUTFELD (1/6/25): Can you show a picture of her before I ask Charles [Payne] a question?
[PHOTO APPEARS ON SCREEN]
[Sarcastically] Do you think she's too attractive to do The View?
AUDIENCE: [Laughter, applause]
PAYNE: She might be! She might be!
GUTFELD (sarcastically): Yeah. I would say she needs to put on a few pounds, you know?
PAYNE: Sit on the last chair on the end. Maybe add a chair.
GUTFELD (laughing): The last chair on the end!

This exchange occurred in the midst of a strikingly dim-witted discussion of Mary Trump's criticisms of her uncle. This was Gutfeld's way of saying that she is too unattractive for him, but also that she's too fat.

(Regarding the reference to The View: It's a standard theme on this gruesome "cable news" program that all the women on The View are too ugly and too fat. Joy Behar, who's 82 years old, is the Fox star's principal target.)

This goes on, night after night, on this "cable news" propaganda machine. These were ethe poeple who sat silent on this occasion:

Panelists, Gutfeld! program, 1/6/25
Tyrus: former professional "wrestler"
Kat Timpf: "best-selling author" of books bought in bulk
Charly Arnolt: television personality for OutKick
Charles Payne: host of Fox Business show, Making Money with Charles Payne

Timpf is always prepared to let this conduct go. Arnolt, who is a conventionally telegenic youngish woman, is one of the biggest flyweights in the Fox News empire.

This garbage can is opened each night on the Fox News Channel. We think it's well past time to start saying the names of the people who take part in this assault on this nation's ability to conduct a decent, intelligent discourse.

Gutfeld himself is an unvarnished, bizarre gender throwback. We favor avoiding the use of such terms, but his misogyny-adjacent behavior is undisguised, relentless, overt.

Does democracy die in darkness? Discourse dies when people engaged in "Making Money" behave this way on a nightly basis. In our view, it's time for major American orgs to start reporting this assault on our nation's rapidly failing culture—to start saying the names of the people who agree to light these fires.

Let's be clear! This is just the tiniest part of the assault on discourse being conducted, around the clock, on this imitation of a "cable news" channel.

That said, these are the names of some of the people engaged in this assault on this nation's ability to conduct an intelligent discourse. When will the New York Times (and other orgs) be willing to report this conduct—be willing to say their names?

What would you give in exchange for your soul? We pose that question to Timpf.

It's a part of Americana. Why does her trap stay shut?

FRIDAY: Comandante Elon comes down by half!

FRIDAY, JANUARY 10, 2025

World's richest nutcase relents: Just for the sake of preserving the record, here's the heart of the news report from CNN:

Elon Musk now has a new, lower target number for DOGE’s budget cuts
Elon Musk has walked back his previous claim that he could cut at least $2 trillion from the federal budget, saying Wednesday that half that amount would be “an epic outcome.”
Musk, who has been tasked by President-elect Donald Trump to co-lead the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, called the $2 trillion target “the best-case outcome.”
“If we try for $2 trillion, we’ve got a good shot at getting one,” Musk said in an interview streamed Wednesday evening on X, which he owns. “And if we can drop the budget deficit from $2 trillion to $1 trillion and kind of free up the economy to have additional growth—such that the output of goods and services keeps pace with the increase in the money supply—then there will be no inflation. So that, I think, would be an epic outcome.”
[...]
Musk, the world’s richest person, is looking to downsize the federal budget and operations by slashing spending, curbing regulations and cutting the workforce. However, budget experts have scoffed at his pronouncements, saying that eliminating $2 trillion from a roughly $6.8 trillion budget is unrealistic.

Please ignore the incoherence included in this strange person's new remarks. As for CNN, have "budget experts" really been "saying that eliminating $2 trillion from a roughly $6.8 trillion budget is unrealistic?"

Attempting to do that wouldn't be "unrealistic." As every budget expert knows, that would actually be the budget goal of a fully certified, genuine nutcase. It may be time for our major news orgs to stop being quite so polite.

Questions:

Does this nut-ball know what he's talking about? Does this richest of all nut-balls care?

At any rate, a new battle cry has now fully emerged:

Nut-balls of the world, unite! We'll call it the new federal government!

BLUE RUIN: As flames were devouring the Hollywood hills...

FRIDAY, JANUARY 10, 2025

...Fox News was devouring the discourse: What ever happened to all those drones—to the drones which were swarming all over New Jersey?

We'd been wondering in recent days. Yesterday, somebody asked.

As seen on the Fox News Channel, a reliable Stepford inquired about this forgotten tale. He spoke with a plainly disordered man:

(PETER) DOOCY (1/9/25): A story that kind of disappeared very suddenly—Do you any idea whatever happened to the drones?
TRUMP: What happened to drones?
DOOCY: Well, you said you knew—you thought the government knew what was happening with these drones over New Jersey. There were some by Bedminster?
TRUMP: I don’t know. They’re all over Bedminster a lot, so I can imagine—
I’m going to give you a report on drones about one day into the administration. Because I think it’s ridiculous that they’re not telling you about what’s going on with the drones...

The imitation of an answer continued on from there. Videotape of the full exchange is provided by Mediaite in its brief report on this press event.

According to the incoming president, "they’re not telling you about what’s going on with the drones." In fact, no one's discussing the drone invasion any more—and that includes Fox News!

At Fox, the flames of the drones had raced up a hillside. But then, all of a sudden, just like that, they disappeared over a hill.

They had their fun with the tale for a couple of weeks. At that point, the tale disappeared.

For the record, that was Peter Doocy of the Fox News Channel, speaking with the incoming Donald J. Trump. Full disclosure:

There won't be a report on the drones "about one day into the administration." In all likelihood, that particular wildfire has completely run its course. In all likelihood, it won't flare up again.

It's true! The disordered man in question did say, at one point, that "the government knew what was happening with these drones over New Jersey." In all likelihood, he'd simply been devouring one more hillside within our rapidly failing nation's rapidly failing culture.

In the past few days, Blue Ruin has come to large parts of The City of Angels in the form of runaway fires. A more familiar version of Blue Ruin had come to our tribe in the form of the November 5 election—and yes, we Blues had worked very hard to earn our way out in the years, and in the decades, which preceded that event.

We'd earned our way out by ignoring the (unexplained) apparent craziness of President Biden's (unexplained) policy at the southern border. By ignoring President Biden's refusal (or inability) to speak about that and about other major issues.

By hoping and praying that we could Lock Trump Up. By the endless hours we endlessly spent massaging that tribal dream, even as our tribunes disappeared the topics the electorate was more concerned about.

By the way we've looked down on "the basket of deplorables" over the course of the past sixty years (on our nation's lower breed). By the way we pursued one absurd position after another in the realm which came to be described as "Woke"—by the way we were unable to see, or unwilling to finger, the plain absurdity of so many of those tribal manifestations.

By our refusal to see that something seemed to be wrong with the leader of our own party, with the incumbent President Biden.

Across the nation, the others could see that something seemed to be wrong. Until the night of June 27, we alone couldn't see this apparent problem—and many of our leading figures said he was sharp as a tack.

In such ways, we Blues worked to earn our way out. Our dumbness has been visible to everyone—to everyone except us.

(In fairness, this is one of the ways we humans are wired. It has always worked this way with our species' tribes.)

Today, though, the topic is the form of ruin which has come to large parts of Los Angeles. Also, though, the topic should be the devouring of the American discourse, the devouring of the American intellect, which was being performed again yesterday all over the Fox News Channel.

Flames devoured the hills of Los Angeles; Fox News has devoured the discourse. And as Fox News has executed that form of Blue Ruin, the New York Times has gazed away, refusing to say their names.

We'll go ahead and say them today. These are the "jugglers and clowns" we watched yesterday as they made mincemeat out of the discourse:

Co-hosts on Fox & Friends, 1/9/25
Lawrence Jones
Steve Doocy
Ainsley Earhardt
Brian Kilmeade

Panelists on The Five, 1/9/25
"Kennedy"
Jessica Tarlov
Jesse Watters
Dana Perino
Greg Gutfeld

Panelists on Gutfeld!, 1/9/25
"Tyrus"
Kat Timpf
Greg Gutfeld (host)
Dana Perino
Jamie Lissow

Adam Carolla (very special guest)

We watched those collections of jugglers and clowns they pretended to discuss the Los Angeles fires—as they devoured the possibility of having an actual discourse.

Flames were devouring the Hollywood hills. These flyweights went after the culture.

Since 1965, we Blues have been working very hard to bring ourselves down. As happenstance had it, we ourselves were physically present that year when this effort started.

We hope to describe that historic event next week. For today, we direct you to the eating of the American discourse—to the flames which continue to devour American journalistic and intellectual culture.

(By the way: Where are all the brilliant professors who should be discussing Fox News? Where are the "academics?")

Yesterday, as we watched Fox News, who was the least fair of them all as they pretended to discuss the Los Angeles fires? We'd probably name Kennedy first, but that involves a long-standing bit of personal prejudice.

We'd also name Adam Carolla, who arrived on the scene with the ugly, stupid, gong-show misogyny of The Man Show. That was back in the early days of the never-ending pushback by the masculine children of this type. Pepperidge Farm remembers:

Adam Carolla
[...]
Carolla co-hosted the syndicated radio call-in program Loveline with Drew Pinsky from 1995 to 2005 as well as the show's television incarnation on MTV from 1996 to 2000. He was the co-host and co-creator of the television program The Man Show (1999–2004), and the co-creator and a regular performer on the television show Crank Yankers (2002–2007, 2019–present).

Crank Yankers! This is who, and this is what, these unyielding throwbacks are.

Carolla and Kennedy would be our individual choices for yesterday's worst players. We'd also wonder what's going on with the strangely backsliding Jessica Tarlov at this point in time.

The larger question concerns the way Blue America's journalistic and academic elites have chosen to look the other way as this destruction of the nation's discourse and intellect has continued to roll along on a daily, round-the-clock basis.

Yesterday, the Stepfords were advancing the mandated instant claims about the Los Angeles fires. At Trader Vic's, a werewolf's hair was once said to be perfect.

So were yesterday's "cable news" recitations.

At some point, some clarity may be available concerning the claims these children have been reciting. This very morning, we strongly recommend the preliminary assessments offered in this New York Times news report:

‘Completely Dry’: How Los Angeles Firefighters Ran Out of Water.
[...]
Officials now say the storage tanks that hold water for high-elevation areas like the Highlands, and the pumping systems that feed them, could not keep pace with the demand as the fire raced from one neighborhood to another. That was in part because those who designed the system did not account for the stunning speeds at which multiple fires would race through the Los Angeles area this week.
“We are looking at a situation that is just completely not part of any domestic water system design,” said Marty Adams, a former general manager and chief engineer at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, which is responsible for delivering water to nearly four million residents of Los Angeles.
Municipal water systems are designed for firefighters to tap into multiple hydrants at once, allowing them to maintain a steady flow of water for crews who may be trying to protect a large structure or a handful of homes. But these systems can buckle when wildfires, such as those fueled by the dry brush that surrounds Los Angeles’s hillside communities, rage through entire neighborhoods.
As urban growth spreads into wilderness areas around the country and climate change brings more challenging fire conditions, an increasing number of cities have confronted a sudden loss of water available for firefighting, most recently in Talent, Ore.; Gatlinburg, Tenn.; and Ventura County, Calif.
The problem can be especially acute during high-wind conditions, like those Los Angeles experienced this week, when firefighting aircraft could not safely make their usual aerial drops of water and fire retardant.

There's more to be found in that assessment—in that preliminary assessment. Even one of the stars of the current show is paraphrased saying this:

Rick Caruso, the real estate developer and former candidate for Los Angeles mayor who served two stints as president of the Department of Water and Power, said he had a team of private firefighters deployed in Pacific Palisades on Tuesday night, helping to protect a major outdoor retail space he owns, Palisades Village, as well as some nearby homes.
All night, he said, the team was reporting that water was in short supply. He said it would take time to account for the supply problems, but suggested there appeared to be a shortfall in preparation.

Will it turn out that there actually was some sort of (serious or actionable) "shortfall in preparation?"

As always, everything is possible! That said, even Caruso has been quoted saying that it will take time to account for the supply problems—and of one thing you can be sure:

By the time some such account has been reliably assembled, the wind-whipped flamers on the Fox News Channel will have leaped ahead to some other set of instant tales.

Flames are devouring the hillsides of The City of Angels. The American discourse is being devoured by an endless array of flamers on the Fox News Channel, but also across the podcast dial.

Back in the early 1990s, it was the New York Times and the Washington Post which invented the Whitewater pseudo-scandal. Starting in March 1999, it was those same mainstream orgs which drove the punitive, twenty-month War Against Gore which sent George Bush to the White House.

Today, our discourse is being devoured by life forms like Gutfeld, Carolla and Kennedy, along with the corporate-owned blowhard Tyrus, a former professional "wrestler."

This array of jugglers and clowns is being paid by the corporation to advance the corporation's Storylines and interests. As they strut and recite their claims, Blue America, producing Blue Ruin, agrees to look away.

We've decided to start saying their names. Fuller profiles will follow, but no one's dumber than we Blues are. We've been proving that point, again and again, as we've worked to earn our way out over these past many long years.

We've long been convinced that we're the smart ones. Sadly, no—we aren't!

THURSDAY: Fire can destroy a city!

THURSDAY, JANUARY 9, 2025

Cultures can be destroyed too: It's worth recalling that cities used to burn down fairly often. We were a high school student—in California, no less—when we first heard these lyrics from an old American song:

The Baltimore Fire
[...]

Amid an awful struggle of commotion
The wind blew a gale from the ocean.
Brave firemen struggled with devotion
While their efforts all proved in vain.

"Fire, fire," I heard the cry
From every breeze that passes by.
All the world was one sad cry of pity.

Strong men in anguish prayed
Calling loud to heaven for aid
While the fire in ruin was laying
Fair Baltimore the beautiful city.

We first heard the old song on the Folkways album, The New Lost City Ramblers, Volume 3. It was the first of our many albums by those keepers of Americana.

(The fire in question occurred in 1904. To hear that recording, click here.)

The disaster continues in Los Angeles—and there's still no way of knowing how bad the gale may decide to make it. That said:

Cultures can be burned to the ground too. As the City of Angels continues to burn, so does our own nation's failing culture.

How bad will it get in the City of Angels? We can't tell you that. With respect to the way our culture is burning, we'll offer this handful of signposts.

Claims about mishandling of the fire:

For starters, we'll recommend the new post by Kevin Drum which appears beneath this headline:

Elon Musk is the new emperor of misinformation

Kevin starts with a list of eight claims about the fire which Musk has retweeted. "Every single thing on this list is either badly misleading or flat-out wrong," Kevin writes.

Is Kevin's assessment accurate concerning all eight of those claims? We can't necessarily tell you that, hut his post comes with links to news reports which contradict the various things the vastly disordered Musk is pushing on this particular day.

Here are the first three of those retweeted claims:

They didn't fill the reservoirs.
They cut $17 million from the fire budget.
They sent [fire] supplies to Ukraine.

In his post, Kevin links to actual news reports—actual news reports which contradict those claims. Truly, a claim can move across the world faster than wind-driven flames.

(Such claims can be true or false, though false claims tend to move faster.)

These first three claims moved quickly last night, leaping from Stepford to Stepford. Most specifically, we saw them being repeated all over the Fox News Channel last evening, and then again on this morning's Fox & Friends.

We recommend that you click the links in Kevin's post to see the reporting in question. In fact, the fire budget was increased by $50 million, Politico reports.

Claims about climate:

The last of the eight claims retweeted by Musk was this sarcastic coup de grace:

But yes, this [Los Angeles fire] is all caused by "climate change."

The "scare quotes" are meant to suggest what people are still explicitly told on the Fox News Channel, by such arsonists as the pitiful Greg Gutfeld and Jesse Watters.

Viewers are still told that climate change is a "scam" and a "hoax." That continues to this very day by the well-paid corporate trumpets who appears on the Fox News Channel.

The astonishing RNC:

Our culture is being burned to the ground by the conduct of entities like the Fox News Channel. MSNBC has been bad enough. The Fox News Channel is worse.

Then too, our culture is being burned to the ground by the kinds of flyweights who would issue a press release like the one shown below.

It came from the RNC. As David Gilmour reports at Mediaite, its factual claim is flatly false. Sadly, that's not even what we're talking about at this point in time:

Text of tweet by RNC Research:
California Senator Adam Schiff (aka Pencil Neck) just did a six-minute primetime interview on MSDNC.
He didn’t mention the wildfires currently plaguing his state ONCE—he just ranted about President Trump.
What a scumbag.

Truly, that's astounding. We refer to the way overt name-calling of a certain type is now an established part of American political discourse.

In that tweet, Senator Schiff is given a new nickname, "Pencil Neck." At the end, he's dismissed as "a scumbag." A childish nickname is included for a cable news channel too.

This degraded culture comes to us, live and direct, from the mouth and the mind of the incoming president, who introduced this cartoonization of public speech during the 2016 presidential campaign.

As Gilmour notes, the factual claim in that tweet was flatly bogus. Schiff actually had discussed the Los Angeles fire at substantial length.

It's the braindead name-calling to which we call your attention today, a type of dumbnification which tracks directly to Trump. If a sitting president can be referred to as "Sleepy Joe," why can't a senator be "Pencil Neck," or of course "Shifty Schiff?"

Our culture is being burned to the ground in this dumbnified fashion. For the record, we Blues have played a role in this too. We'll return to that problem tomorrow.

The city of Baltimore burned to the ground. Strong men in anguish prayed as the conflagration continued.

Fair Baltimore, the beautiful city! Within two years, it was largely rebuilt. Rebuilding a culture is harder.

Who knew?: The McGarrigles recorded that old song too. To hear them, just click this.

It basically dates to Charlie Poole. This was the look and the sound of Americana in the old days, way back when.

BLUE RUIN: Can you run a large modern nation this way?

THURSDAY, JANUARY 9, 2025

Bogus claims can spread faster than flames: Here at this incomparable site, we've been trying to address a set of extremely important questions.

As a general matter, those questions are variants on one basic point of incomprehension—on a bit of puzzlement widely voiced here in Blue America:

How in the world did we ever lose to a guy like Donald J. Trump?

We Blues! Quite routinely, we say that we can't imagine a reason why a decent person would ever have voted for someone like Donald J. Trump. In the face of such incomprehension, we tend to fall back on a preferred explanation for our (rather narrow) loss:

Trump's voters must all be racists!

This pleasing assertion is on wide display in Blue America's comment threads. Sometimes, our highest-profile tribal leaders even say such things as this:

BLUE AMERICAN POLITICAL LEADER (9/9/16): You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call "the basket of deplorables."
(Laughter/applause)
Right?
(Laughter/applause)
They're racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people—now have 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks—they are irredeemable, but thankfully, they are not America.

As you can see by clicking here, that's the way these remarks were transcribed by the leading authority on this now-famous assessment.

In fairness, everyone speaks unwisely at some point in time. Unfortunately, that unwise statement went viral.

Over on the Fox News Channel, the statement lingers as part of the national discourse. It may even explain why some people voted for Trump this part year, a full eight years after the fact.

Briefly, let's be fair. In that instance, the speaker said that only half of Trump's supporters were "racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it."

(Were all those people "irredeemable?" It depends on how you parse the last part of that passage.)

At any rate, that was only half of the fellow's supporters! According to the speaker in question, the other half of his supporters were a different kettle of fish:

BLUE AMERICAN LEADER (continuing directly): But the "other" basket—the other basket—and I know, because I look at this crowd, I see friends from all over America here...but that "other" basket of people are people who feel the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures; and they're just desperate for change.
It doesn't really even matter where it comes from. They don't buy everything he says, but—he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won't wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroin, feel like they're in a dead-end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.

Interesting! According to this high-profile leader, fully half of Trump's supporters were in fact redeemable. They actually weren't "racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it," the way the other half were!

According to this political leader, we should empathize with those people. So it was in 2016—and presumably, it was from this second basket of people that we Blues lost votes this last time around.

Some voters for Biden now voted for Trump. Some voters for Biden stayed home this past year. Presumably, those switchers are drawn from the basket of redeemable people, not from the people who are racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it.

According to that political leader, we should try to understand why they did what they did. We lost votes from people who aren't irredeemable. So how did we lose their votes?

For today, we're jus trying to clarify the question we've been attempting to chase. The basic fact remains true, as always:

No one else will ever be as smart or as decent as we Blue Americans are.

We Blues! We're fated to live with the effects of our vast superiority. This past year, we somehow managed to lose some votes from people who are at least redeemable. So how in the world did that ever happen? How did we lose their votes?

In the comments threads of our own Blue nation, some of us continue to "labor under a mistake." We continue to think, and to say, that everyone who isn't just like us is racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it.

According to experts, this is the oldest conceptual framework in all of human affairs. This picture of the world is bred in the bone. It's the way we humans are wired.

Still and all, the question remains. How did we manage to lose those votes? What led the switchers to switch?

Was it something we said or did? Why did some voters leave us?

For today, we just wanted to clarify the reason for the season—the basic rationale behind our current search.

Many of us can't imagine why a decent person would have voted for Candidate Trump—or, perhaps, why a decent person might have decided to vote against a gang of people like us.

In our own view, there quite a few such reasons. Other Blues can see them at all!

In our search, we're trying to address that one small lapse. The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but we Blues are sometimes stuck with this one small bit of angry incomprehension.

Question:

When we admitted geniuses give voice to this massive incomprehension, is it possible that we drive even more voters away?

This afternoon: Can a large modern nation really function this way? Bogus statements can travel faster than the flames from a very large fire!

Tomorrow: We recall what Alberta said

WEDNESDAY: What did Trump know and when did he know it?

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 8, 2025

What did Jack Smith find? Future Supreme Court Justice Aileen Cannon has hauled off and done it again.

That said, it seems that the DOJ still hopes to split the baby in question. Headline included, here's the start of the New York Times' breaking news report:

Justice Dept. to Hold Off Releasing Report on Trump Documents Case
Federal prosecutors said on Wednesday that they planned to hold off on releasing a portion of a report by the special counsel, Jack Smith, detailing his investigation into President-elect Donald J. Trump’s refusal to give back a trove of classified documents he took from the White House after leaving office.
But if the Justice Department can overcome an order blocking the rest of the report from coming out, it plans to release a separate volume concerning Mr. Smith’s other investigation into Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn his loss in the 2020 election, prosecutors said.
The department’s decisions—laid out in a filing to a federal appeals court in Atlanta—brought a measure of clarity to what amounts to the final chapter of Mr. Smith’s work, which began more than two years ago and led to the first federal indictments of a former president in American history.

Overturning the election maybe, mishandling classified documents no? The "measure of clarity" laid out today falls a bit short of overwhelming.

For ourselves, we'd like to see the DOJ release the report about January 6. For the record, specialists seem to agree that there may not be much that's new in some such report. In this passage, Feuer and Savage explain why:

It is possible that even the release of the volume on the election interference charges may not contain much in the way of new or revelatory information. That is because in October, Mr. Smith filed an exhaustive 165-page brief laying out the evidence he planned to offer at trial.

That "exhaustive 165-page brief" was released on October 2. At the time, we the people were badly distracted as we tried to determine whether Haitian migrants were, or perhaps were not, eating a wide array of the state of Ohio's pets.

That, and other such issues! In the face of all that gorilla dust, we're not sure that Smith's specific findings were ever fully discussed

For ourselves, we remain curious about one question concerning the events of January 6, 2021. That question would be this:

On that morning, did President Trump know or believe that violence was going to take place at the Capitol?

Also this:

Had President Trump and/or members of TrumpWorld actively conspired with the organizations which had apparently planned to engage in such violence?

As far as we know, the January 6 committee never produced evidence of such connections. We're not clear concerning what Smith did or didn't find.

What did Trump know (or expect) and when did he know or expect it? We still aren't clear about that matter. Now that our pets are all safely indoors, we'd like to see a full account of what Smith actually found.

BLUE RUIN: Did we lose some votes this way?

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 8, 2025

Was the public lied to? Did we lose some votes this way? Also, was the public lied to?

We'll guess that the answer to the first question is yes. For now, let's return to Clarence Page's column, the one in which he wrote about 2024's "Lie of the Year."

We linked to Page's column in last Friday's report. As you may already know, Clarence Page is a good, decent person who's also smart and experienced.

His emotional IQ is quite high. He started his column like this:

Behind the “Lie of the Year,” some bitter truths
As it has been doing yearly since 2009, the fact-checking organization PolitiFact has chosen the Lie of the Year. There was an abundance of nominees.
And, it turns out, they chose the same whopper I identified as a top contender months ago: President-elect Donald Trump’s unfounded claim that Haitian migrants were eating the household pets of Springfield, Ohio.
“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs,” said the former and now future Republican president during his Sept. 10 debate with his Democratic rival, Vice President Kamala Harris.
“The people that came in,” he continued to a TV audience of an estimated 67 million viewers. “They’re eating the cats. They’re eating, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what’s happening in our country. And it’s a shame.”
Oh, really? An astonished-looking Harris gave an incredulous laugh, but the line was not a new one for Trump and his MAGA movement supporters, including his running mate, Sen. JD Vance, whom Politifact co-credited for the Lie of the Year.

In our view, a fact-checking site should be careful about using a problematic term like "lie."

That said, there's no doubt about it at all—that repulsive claim by Trump and Vance was one of the most repulsive, repeated misstatements of this or any year. Their repulsive and repeated misstatements about Springfield, Ohio's Haitian residents dragged the American discourse down about as far as a nation's discourse can go.

That said, there were many other misstatements in the course of the year now past. In our view, serious fact-checking sites should perhaps avoid the carnival game of picking the one most egregious misstatement.

At any rate, so it went, with PolitiFact voting for the eating of the cats and dogs of Springfield, Ohio. When Candidate Trump and Candidate Vance spread that pile of garbage around, they showed us something unmistakable about their bodies, their selves:

At best, these men are serious nut-balls. At worst, it's worse than that.

Trump and Vance showed us what they currently are when they spread that garbage around. But Clarence Page, a Grade A person all the way down, continued directly as shown:

Yet, before I happily rip into that bone-headed attempt to slander innocent refugees living and working peacefully in Springfield...allow me to note a leading alternative nominee in the eyes of some prominent conservative commentators: Democratic President Joe Biden.
“It’s hard to imagine a more perfect encapsulation of the total rot of American media than this,” huffed Dylan Housman, editor-in-chief of the conservative Daily Caller, in a column decrying Politifact's choice for the dubious award.
Trump's and Vance's lie, Housman offered, “is the equivalent of a speck of dirt sitting at the base of a mountain that is one of the biggest scandals in American political history: the lie that Joe Biden was acting as president in 2024 and was mentally capable of serving another four years.”
Biden’s whopper deserves more attention, wrote Housman, “because it tells us the media has learned nothing. Through all the navel-gazing, post-mortems and autopsies, the corporate media has learned nothing about why Donald Trump is president and nobody trusts them.”
And on and on come the protests from the right. As I often point out when political arguments break out at my own home, everyone is entitled to have their own wrong opinion.

As we noted last Friday, we ate dinner with Page one night at a charity event. As happenstance luckily had it, we did a comedy show with him a few years later.

(Page's set that night was good; ours was perhaps somewhat better. We ruminated on that occasion about our semester, freshman year, in Phil 3: Problems in Philosophy, as taught by the extremely young Robert Nozick, 27 years old at the time.

(How can we know that 7 plus 5 equals 12? That was one of the problems we were asked to untangle in that introductory class. Who is this "problem" a problem for? we asked on the stage that night with a thoughtful Page looking on.)

We're proud to say that we know Clarence Page if just a small, tiny tad. We've never met Dylan Housman—but are you sure that he's totally wrong in what he said, in his own column, about 2024's "Lie of the Year?"

For the record, Page has summarized Housman's column in a perfectly reasonable way. As you can see by clicking here, this is part of what Housman said in his column for the Caller:

HOUSMAN: The Real ‘Lie Of The Year’
[...]
The point is that this [PolitiFact] “Lie of the Year” is the equivalent of a speck of dirt sitting at the base of a mountain that is one of the biggest scandals in American political history: the lie that Joe Biden was acting as president in 2024 and was mentally capable of serving another 4 years.
There is no lie that could have been conjured up by any other person in American politics that could compete with this. The scope of the lie was enormous; the entire corporate media, Democratic Party and executive branch of the federal government conspired to hide the condition of the president. The consequence was historic; Biden cost the Democratic Party any prayer of winning the 2024 election by staying in the race and dropping a live grenade in the lap of Kamala Harris, who was utterly unequipped to handle it. And the stakes were life-or-death; with multiple major wars happening in the world, domestic unrest on college campuses, devastating inflation and declining social trust in the country, we had no president at the wheel.
The glaring obviousness that this is not only the lie of the year, but the lie of the decade and perhaps the lie of the 21st century so far, is why I love this story. The utter delusion it requires any media outlet that pretends to be serious to pick the cat-eating “lie” as the biggest of the year is almost too rich to fully appreciate. It’s the news equivalent of an absurdist Monty Python skit, or trying to stop a nuclear bomb by shooting a spitball at it.

Our view? Typing hard in Red America, Housman is being pretty silly when he downplays the repulsive nature of what Candidates Trump and Vance did.

On the other hand, there it sits, to this very say—the repeated claim, by various people, that President Biden was still sharp as a tack as he ran for re-election.

The claim that he was running circles around his staff, so deep were his wellsprings of energy. The claim that he would be perfectly able to serve for another four years.

For ourselves, we had largely stopped believing such claims as of August 2023. We have one friend—a very good and decent person—who told us that he still believed those claims as of maybe one month ago.

Was President Biden still sharp as a tack? Was he prepared to serve for another four years? As we noted on Monday, this is what happened, on last Sunday's Meet the Press, when Senator Schunmer was asked:

WELKER (1/5/25): Do you feel, as we have this conversation today, that President Biden could serve another four years, had he stayed in the race and potentially won?
SCHUMER: Well, I'm not going to speculate. As I said, I think his record is a stellar one. And he'll go down in history as a really outstanding president.

The fact that Welker asked was striking enough. It seemed to us that Senator Schumer's refusal to answer was in fact a fairly clear reply.

Don't get us wrong! Despite our concerns about his acuity, we were going to vote for Candidate Biden had he stayed in the race. We were going to vote for Candidate Biden because of the massive intellectual and moral disorder put on display by the other candidate (and by his running mate), again and again and again and again, all through the past many years.

We were going to vote for Candidate Biden, but that's not the question we're asking. The question(s) we're asking are substantially different, and they boil down to this:

Is this one of the ways we lost some votes in this year's election? Is that one of the ways we Blues may have earned our way out?

We'd assume that the answer to those questions is yes. We'll continue this rumination tomorrow.

Tomorrow: Housman says that we were lied to. Is there any chance he's right?

Housman says this may be why Candidate Harris lost. Is there any chance that's right?

TUESDAY: While others observed the effects of Blue Ruin...

TUESDAY, JANUARY 7, 2024

We explored an award-winning text: We basically lost the whole day today on this, the latest of our alternate week Medical Mondays Plus One.

Returning to our sprawling campus, we saw that other people had been exposed to the effects of Blue America's loss in November's election.

They'd watched the incoming president offer his latest highly peculiar remarks. For ourselves, we'd been locked away, way across town, exploring a peculiar, though widely honored, text.

Regarding incoming President Trump:

How did we ever lose to this guy? Many of us in Blue America have struggled with that question.

Those of us in Blue America can see the way the other guy's voters got conned and misled by Red America's various teams. We may have a harder time seeing the ways those of us in Blue America may have helped earn our way out.

We'll return to that topic tomorrow, adding this unpleasant question to the pre-existing mix:

Is it possible that those of us in Blue America have also been conned, along the way, by our own tribe's leadership cadres?

We'd say that yes, it's quite possible. We'll return to such matters tomorrow.

On a massively grimier note, Greg Gutfeld has returned to the air at the Fox News Channel after a lengthy paternity leave.

The early results have been ugly. As we've noted in the past, part of the responsibility for that moral and intellectual disgrace lies directly with Our Own Blue Elites.

More on Gutfeld's return tomorrow. For today, this:

During today's Medical Monday Plus One, we perused an interesting, later addition to an honored text. We refer to the preface to this award-winning book:

Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid
A metaphorical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis Carroll.

As we told you on Saturday, the monumentally puzzling book was published in 1979. Perhaps inevitably, it won the National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize.

We've presented its title in bold. Below that, we've presented a puzzling summary which appears on the honored book's cover.

The book was published in 1979. The preface to which we refer was published twenty years later. In it, the author offers a surprising complaint:

He complains about the endless array of people who haven't been able to discern what the book is about!

The preface appeared as part of a twentieth-anniversary edition of the honored book. Title included, the new preface started like this:

Preface to GEB's Twentieth-anniversary Edition
So what is this book, Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid—usually known by its acronym, "GEB"— really all about?
That question has hounded me ever since I was scribbling its first drafts in pen, way back in 1973. Friends would inquire, of course, what I was so gripped by, but I was hard pressed to explain it concisely. A few years later, in 1980, when GEB found itself for a while on the bestseller list of The New York Times, the obligatory one-sentence summary printed underneath the title said the following, for several weeks running: "A scientist argues that reality is a system of interconnected braids." After I protested vehemently about this utter hogwash, they finally substituted something a little better, just barely accurate enough to keep me from howling again.
Many people think the title tells it all: a book about a mathematician, an artist, and a musician. But the most casual look will show that these three individuals per se, august though they undeniably are, play but tiny roles in the book's content. There's no way the book is about those three people!
Well, then, how about describing GEB as "a book that shows how math, art, and music are really all the same thing at their core"? Again, this is a million miles off—and yet I've heard it over and over again, not only from nonreaders but also from readers, even very ardent readers, of the book.

The complaint continues from there, at substantial length. We'll produce additional text at some point in the near future. For right now, let's review:

Twenty years after the book appeared (and was widely hailed), the author was complaining about an unfortunate fact. Basically, no one has been able to explain what the book is about!

At first, the New York Times got it wrong, the author says. In fairness, the summary the author quotes—"A scientist argues that reality is a system of interconnected braids"—makes no apparent sense.

At first, the New York Times got it wrong—but after that, so did almost everyone else. For today, we ask you to consider only this part of the rolling complaint, as voiced in paragraph 3:

Many people dimwittedly thought the book was about Gödel, Escher and Bach! Except, "There's no way the book is about those three people!" the author now complained.

Our reaction would be this:

If "many people" thought some such thing, should that have been surprising? As the author explicitly noted, the title of his book includes those three names! Indeed, that's how the book's title starts:

Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid

That's the title of the book! Could that be where people got the idea that the book was about those three people?

Consider the perfect beauty of this strange presentation:

Twenty years after a major book was published and was massively honored, its author is complaining that no one has been able to explain what the book is about! In that, we'll admit we discern a tiny hint of pomposity on the part of the author in question. But we also find a suggestion of the inability of our academic and journalistic elites to come to terms with a wide array of highly significant manifestations—not excluding the pied piper appeal of our incoming chief executive, who sounded off again today in highly peculiar ways.

In a work upon which GEB is based, Bertrand Russell spent hundreds of pages proving that 1 + 1 = 2 (or something like that). Later, Douglas Hofstadter wrote an impenetrable but award-winning book, then complained, twenty years later, when no one was able to explain what the book was about.

(One thinks, perhaps, of Finnegans Wake. Was this a non-fiction companion?)

Along the way, certain elites alleged that they understood and revered the book. Twenty years later, a petulant author seemed to be complaining that no one has been able to discern what his book was even about.

As he continues, Hofstadter tries to square that circle. Twenty years later, he tries to explain what his book actually is about.

In our view, he tries and he fails. Gaze on the works of our academic elites! Gaze on their works, ye mighty, and despair!

(The later Wittgenstein was all about this. For better or worse, he too had almost no ability to explain what his work was about!)

We Blues won't be saved by our high elites. As January 20 approaches, is it likely that we Blues will be able to save ourselves?

BREAKING: We're losing a large chunk of time today!

TUESDAY, JANUARY 7, 2025

Back to those alternate Tuesdays: We're losing a large chunk of time today. With the holiday season passed, it's back to those alternate Tuesdays.

We won't be posting until mid-afternoon. Frankly, it's always something!

MONDAY: Schumer refuses to speculate!

MONDAY, JANUARY 6, 2024

Sanders-Townsend jumps in: The very fact that the question could have been asked helps define the shape of this potentially disastrous era.

The question was asked on yesterday's Meet the Press. Actually, we refer to a pair of questions:

WELKER (1/5/25): Leader Schumer, what do you say to Americans who feel as though you and other top Democrats misled them about President Biden's mental acuity?
SCHUMER: No. Look, we didn't. And let's—let’s look, let’s look at President Biden. He's had an amazing record. The legislation we passed, one of the most significant groups of legislation since the New Deal—since Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, putting in 235 judges, a record. And he's a patriot. He's a great guy. And when he stepped down, he did it on his own because he thought it was better not only for the Democratic Party, for America. We should all salute him. We should all salute him.
WELKER: Do you feel, as we have this conversation today, that President Biden could serve another four years, had he stayed in the race and potentially won?
SCHUMER: Well, I'm not going to speculate. As I said, I think his record is a stellar one. And he'll go down in history as a really outstanding president.

At that point, Welker moved on.

Could President Biden have served another four years? The simple fact that the question was asked helps define the shape of the political era—and of last year's presidential election, which Blue America narrowly lost

Welker believed it made sense to ask if President Biden could have completed a second term. We were struck by Senator Schumer's answer, in which he didn't say yes.

Schumer said that he and his colleagues didn't mislead the public about the president's mental acuity. He also said he wasn't willing to speculate about the answer to Welker's follow-up question.

Later in that same program, Welker asked Symone Sanders-Townsend about that exchange. We were surprised, but not surprised, by what Sanders-Townsend said:

WELKER: Symone, let's talk about the Democrats. I thought the conversation with Leader Schumer was fascinating. I asked him if he thought President Biden could serve another four years. He kind of pivoted, didn't answer that directly. There's obviously a lot of soul searching going on right now in the Democratic Party. What did you make of what we heard from Leader Schumer?
SANDERS-TOWNSEND: Well, I was very surprised that, when you asked the question about mental acuity, he didn't more forcefully push back. The question on the table is, "Is—is the president all the way there?” And the answer is unequivocally yes. Now, people can say that you feel as though President Biden might be a little too old to do the job, but he is doing the job. And his mental acuity is there. So, I think that there's a conflation of two things here: his mental capacity and serving another four years, as old as he is. But those are two separate things in my opinion. And look, these people that have known Joe Biden their entire political lives, I know Joe Biden is like, "Can you all just please defend me a little more?"

At that point, Welker moved on.

Sanders-Townsend said she was surprised by Schumer's reaction. Turnabout being fair play, we were surprised by hers!

She said she's sure that President Biden "is all the way there." We aren't sure about that ourselves, and we haven't been for some time.

As we'll start discussing tomorrow, this could surely be one of the ways Blue America lost some potential votes during last year's election.

Schumer wasn't willing to say that President Biden could have continued to serve. He said he hadn't misled the public about the president's mental acuity.

(President Biden is "a great guy," he added as he continued.)

This week, we're looking for the various ways we Blues may have lost the last election. We're looking for some of the factors which may have led otherwise persuadable people to vote for Candidate Trump.

On June 27 of last year, President Biden produced a disastrous debate. Four weeks later, he left the race.

Is that one of the ways we lost some votes? Tomorrow, our discussion continues.

BLUE RUIN: This is a story of human discernment!

MONDAY, JANUARY 6, 2024

Ways we earned our way out: This is a story of human discernment—a quality which is often in short supply. More specifically, this is a story concerning the ways we Blues have earned our way out.

You'll note that the key word there is plural. The key word there is "ways."

Human discernment being what it is, we humans are routinely inclined to search for the simplest possible explanation for whatever it is we're trying to explain at some particular point in time. And so it has tended to go as we the people of Blue America have tried to explain why we lost the 2024 presidential election.

(Admittedly, we lost by a bit less than 1.5 points. Among the workers on the Fox News Channel, that's now described as "a landslide.")

Four years earlier, in 2020, we won the presidential election, in that case by roughly 4.5 points. In short, our story goes like this, if only in part:

Over the course of the past four years, we Blues went from +4.5 percentage points to -1.5 percentage points.

On balance, we lost something like six percentage points over the course of four years. And so, an obvious question arises, ripe for explanation:

How did we manage to lose those votes over the course of four years?

How did we manage to lose those votes? Throughout the week, that will be one of our basic questions. But we'll also be asking such questions as these:

Why was the election that close back in 2020? Why didn't we win in 2020 by even more than 4.5 points?

Stated a slightly different way:

Considering the candidate we were running against, why didn't we win that election by a much larger margin?

In short, how did we manage to lose potential votes in the years—indeed, in the five or six decades—before our win in 2020? How have we managed to drive away potential voters over these many long years?

This week, we're finally going to list some of the obvious ways we Blues have managed to earn our way out. We'll be listing some of the ways we earned our way out in the past four years, but also over a longer span of time, dating all the way back to the 1960s.

Briefly, let's be less polite. We're going to list some of the blindingly obvious ways we Blues have managed to throw away votes—and there won't be just one way we did that. As with the Reds, so too with us Blues:

We Blues have managed to drive away voters in a wide assortment of ways.

We've burned away votes in various ways. That said, human discernment can sometimes be quite limited. Among us Blues, as among the Reds, there exists a constant impulse to seek the one lone "answer" to a question—in this case, to seek the one lone explanation for our (rather narrow) defeat in this year's White House race.

We're inclined to present some lone explanation, but we didn't shed potential vote in only one way! Through our incessant human bungling, we Blues have managed to shed potential votes through a wide array of self-defeating behaviors.

That brings us to a starting point for this week's reports. We refer to a recent "news analysis" piece in the New York Times, and to Kevin Drum's reaction to that piece.

Here are the reports in question. with the Times report going first:

NEWS ANALYSIS
How the Democrats Lost the Working Class
The theory seemed sound: Stabilize financial markets, support the poor and promote a more secure, integrated world. But blue-collar workers were left behind.

To peruse that analysis piece, click here. This was the start of Kevin's rebuttal:

The working class story is about culture, not economic anxiety
In the New York Times today, Jonathan Weisman tells the story—well, a story—of how Democrats lost the white working class. It's all about economic anxiety.
Maybe so, but even Weisman himself acknowledges the obvious:
It started in 1968 with "hardhats for Nixon." This was long before de-industrialization. It was all about Vietnam and the counterculture...

Kevin's response continues from there. To peruse it, just click this.

In his essay for the Times, Weisman attempts to explain why the Democratic Party has lost votes among "working class" voters (variously defined) over the course of (however many) years.

As we noted yesterday, Weisman goes all the way back to 1964 to track—or perhaps to pretend to track—the loss of those "working class" votes. At the start of his response, Drum says this shedding of working class votes dates to 1968.

In recent years, there's no question! As we noted yesterday, Democratic Party candidates have plainly lost "working class" votes over the course of the past five White House elections.

In 2008, Candidate Obama won something like 53 percent of such votes, according to (imperfect) exit polls. In last year's election, Candidate Harris won something like 43 percent of those votes.

As such, the loss of working class votes helps explain—is clearly part of—last year's (narrow) defeat. So how did we lose those votes over the course of those sixteen years?

Plainly, that's a decent question. But now, please notice this:

The headline on Kevin's post seems to suggest that there is only one explanation for the loss of those votes. The headline seems to say that we lost those votes for reasons of culture, not for reasons of economics.

That's what the headline seems to suggest. Inevitably, Blue American commenters quickly stepped in, in some cases dumbing things down to the ground.

As we humans are inclined to do, some of those commenters offered single, sweeping explanations for the loss of those votes. That said, Kevin ended his post with this passage:

The working class story is about culture, not economic anxiety
[...]
So I continue to have problems with the economic anxiety story. I'm not dead set against it, since financial anxiety can manifest itself in lots of different ways. Still, the bulk of the evidence really seems to point much more toward cultural issues than economic ones.

Kevin seems to be saying that there might be more than one reason for the loss of those working class votes. "Economic anxiety" could be part of what happened, he seems to say—but so could "cultural issues," which he thinks mattered more.

In closing, full disclosure:

According to the Cook Report, 155.2 million people voted in last year's election. Just over 77.3 million people voted for Candidate Trump.

Candidate Trump was elected by a very large number of people. Also this:

Given the way our exit polls slice and dice the electorate, 27% of this year's voters reported having income of less than $50,000. Also, 57% of this year's voters didn't have a college degree.

Given the ways we slice and dice, those are the numbers analysts may use to define the "working class." Tens of millions of different people are involved—and no, they aren't all the very same person!

They aren't all the same person! Some have to ride their bikes to the grocery story because they can't afford to put gas in their cars. Many others don't have to do that.

They aren't all the same! But in comment threads throughout Blue America, we Blues frequently march off in search of simplification. Along the way, through our rude and undiscerning behavior, we may even play a role in the eternal practice of driving away potential votes.

We insult Others in sweeping ways; we say extremely dumb things. This is the eternal road to perdition, and it's one of the ways we Blues have managed to earn our way out over the course of the past sixty years.

It started with Nixon, Kevin says. We'd say that's basically accurate. It also includes the wide array of stupid things we Blues routinely insisted on doing and saying during the past four years.

There's no cure for human, the experts all say. All this week, we'll try to answer a very important question:

Through our lack of perfect discernment, how did we Blues manage to shed potential votes to such an extent that we actually managed to lose to a guy like Donald J. Trump?

The Donald squeaked out a narrow win. How did we endlessly self-impressed Blues manage to help him do that?

There's more than one answer to that question! In our view, a lot of potential votes were shed in a lot of avoidable ways—and yes, it goes back to the 1960s. We ourselves were physically present on the day it started!

Tomorrow: President Biden