Slimy underbelly #1: Clay Travis

I’m stewing in my own juices here — crippled, homebound, going stir crazy — and one of the things driving me nuts is the state of American media, since I’m stuck watching so much of it. I have noticed that one of the drivers of bad media is these wankers that promote the worst of the underbelly of the country with panel shows, debates, interviews, and far more attention than they deserve, and I could criticize, for example, Piers Morgan, or Joe Rogan, who are constantly dredging up horrible people and propping them up on camera entirely because they have opinions that align with their own ghastly take on the world. I don’t want to waste time on all these horrible people raking in big money by finding equally horrible people to confirm their views.

What I find most appalling are these “experts” who are nothing of the kind, who get paraded about on television for being “authentic,” when they are clearly people prominent for being ignoramuses. I want to take a look at the slimy underbelly, the jumped-up pundits who get prominent airtime for being voices of True America, the dumbasses who are encouraged to express their worthless opinions, and are rewarded with excessive attention in the press.

First up, that extremely punchable face to the right belongs to Clay Travis, a goober I would never have gotten to know if he weren’t being repeatedly consulted as a smart guy on politics. He’s not. He’s a Trump fanatic, through and through.

He’s been frequently quoted for his grading of Trump’s performance.

What is my verdict on the first 100 days of Trump? This is what I voted for. I think if you were arguing, if you voted Trump, and I imagine a lot of you did, some of you did not, that’s fine, if you voted Trump, I can’t imagine you giving him anything other than an A or B. Right? I don’t see C, I don’t see D, I don’t see F.

He never gives specifics — he just gives him an A overall. As someone who professionally grades students on their performance, I am offended. You have to have rubrics and criteria that allow you to judge work, and to give productive guidance on improving it. Travis is a child who thinks a grade is just an arbitrary trophy you hand on someone because you like them.

His “grade” is also indefensible: how can you think a felon who repeatedly tramples on the constitution, who is shredding the social safety net, who is demolishing vital scientific institutions, who wants to destroy public and higher education, is doing good work? A wanna-be autocrat who is arresting and deporting people without due process does not deserve a good grade.

His reasons for supporting Trump are transparently stupid.

“Since we’re talking honestly about politics here, I have a question for you,” McLaughlin said. “My question is, and I want you to be really honest with me here, did you regret voting for Trump after his presidency ended in the January 6th riot?”

“No. I wish I could have voted for Trump ten times in 2020,” Travis replied.

“Really?” McLaughlin reacted.

“I think Joe Biden’s a disaster. And, I think one of the things that’s fascinating, you know, Ronald Reagan said he didn’t leave the Democrat Party. The Democrat Party left him,” Travis said.

Travis went on to explain that the crux of his current political ideology focuses on him being “anti-cancel culture.”

He’s a free speech warrior who supports a man who sues people who criticize him, who uses the power of his office to force conformity, and he doesn’t recognize that he’s a hypocrite. He’s obsessed with Colin Kaepernick, who dared to kneel during the playing of the national anthem at the start of football games, yet now Travis has the gall to claim that he is “anti-cancel culture.”

And now, as a reward, he gets invited to babble on Piers Morgan. He is invited to do an in-person interview with Donald Trump on Airforce One. You might wonder, what are his qualifications to opine on politics or economics or civil rights?

He’s a podcaster.

Nothing wrong with podcasting, but it is not sufficient to make you an authority on pretty much anything. Anyone can get a microphone and start pontificating on the internet.

He’s also sports podcaster, possibly the most useless kind of them all. He has a site called Outkick where he basically makes predictions for sports bettors, leavened with his reactionary takes on politics. Maybe he’s really good at calling the outcomes of football games, I don’t know, but nothing about his profession makes him qualified to talk about much of anything outside sports.

But now, his stupid punchable face and unsupported opinions pop up all the time on the internet.

He’s the kind of negligible, uninteresting slime who happily acts as a useful idiot for conservatives to bounce their bad ideas off of — he’ll just affirm any foolishness, because that’s how he gets paid in money and reputation. The A he gives to Trump is worthless, but audiences will lap it up and ask for more.

That’s our current problem. It’s not just that media will promote bullshit, but that there’s no shortage of people they can find to parrot it, and that the general public lacks the capacity to question anything.

I’m afraid I’ll never run out of these know-nothings to highlight.

Dictator Trump is mad

Using the pretext of one mugging of one of his cronies, Donald Trump is sending 800 National Guard troops to take over Washington DC. This is a gross overreaction on his part, but it’s his first impulse: let’s use unnecessary force in inappropriate ways to punish a blue city. It’s disgusting, it’s undemocratic, it’s un-American, it’s tinpot tyranny.

The defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, who was among officials joining Trump on the podium, said 800 national guard troops would take to the streets of Washington over the coming week. “They will be strong, they will be tough and they will stand with their law enforcement partners,” he said.

Trump, who lost the presidential election in DC to Democrat Kamala Harris by 86 percentage points, added that he may send in the military “if needed”.

By invoking section 740 of the District of Columbia Home Rule Act, the president is federalising DC’s Metropolitan police department for the first time in its history. He said he was declaring a public safety emergency and putting the police under the control of the attorney general, Pam Bondi.

Trump vowed to allow police to “do whatever the hell they want” in the face of provocations. “That’s the only language they [alleged criminals] understand. They like to spit in the face of the police. You spit, and we hit, and they get hit real hard.”

No, you cannot allow the police to do whatever they want. The police are required to be bound by the rule of law. Sending in the military is a criminal act by a lawless, corrupt president.

Washington DC is just his test case. If he is allowed to get away with this, you’re next.

The road to authoritarianism is littered with people telling you you’re overreacting.

Tim Walz knows Trump is itching to send the army in to crush all those cities that voted Democratic — you can bet Minneapolis and Seattle and Portland are also high on his hit list.

This is a fascist takeover. React appropriately.

Does this sound familiar?

A historical analysis reveals something that will probably sound familiar.

“We can’t put a date on Doomsday, but by looking at the 5,000 years of [civilisation], we can understand the trajectories we face today – and self-termination is most likely,” says Dr Luke Kemp at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge.

“I’m pessimistic about the future,” he says. “But I’m optimistic about people.” Kemp’s new book covers the rise and collapse of more than 400 societies over 5,000 years and took seven years to write. The lessons he has drawn are often striking: people are fundamentally egalitarian but are led to collapses by enriched, status-obsessed elites, while past collapses often improved the lives of ordinary citizens.

Today’s global civilisation, however, is deeply interconnected and unequal and could lead to the worst societal collapse yet, he says. The threat is from leaders who are “walking versions of the dark triad” – narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism – in a world menaced by the climate crisis, nuclear weapons, artificial intelligence and killer robots.

Do you know anybody who fits that description? Can you think of maybe a large number of people like that?

“History is best told as a story of organised crime,” Kemp says. “It is one group creating a monopoly on resources through the use of violence over a certain territory and population.”
…
it is the few people high in the dark triad who fall into races for resources, arms and status, he says. “Then as elites extract more wealth from the people and the land, they make societies more fragile, leading to infighting, corruption, immiseration of the masses, less healthy people, overexpansion, environmental degradation and poor decision making by a small oligarchy. The hollowed-out shell of a society is eventually cracked asunder by shocks such as disease, war or climate change.”

Uh-oh.

Kemp says his argument that Goliaths require rulers who are strong in the triad of dark traits is borne out today. “The three most powerful men in the world are a walking version of the dark triad: Trump is a textbook narcissist, Putin is a cold psychopath, and Xi Jinping came to rule [China] by being a master Machiavellian manipulator.”

“Our corporations and, increasingly, our algorithms, also resemble these kinds of people,” he says. “They’re basically amplifying the worst of us.”

Kemp points to these “agents of doom” as the source of the current trajectory towards societal collapse. “These are the large, psychopathic corporations and groups which produce global catastrophic risk,” he says. “Nuclear weapons, climate change, AI, are only produced by a very small number of secretive, highly wealthy, powerful groups, like the military-industrial complex, big tech and the fossil fuel industry.

It’s all a bit on the nose, I think.

Maybe I should take up farming as a hobby.

But maybe our leaders will turn out to be enlightened and kind?

No pierogis for Mr Dershowitz!

This is a pathetic, pitiful performance. Dershowitz is basically begging for a token pierogi to demonstrate that he isn’t despised and ostracized.

Former Jeffrey Epstein lawyer Alan Dershowitz was yelled out of a farmer’s market in Martha’s Vineyard on Wednesday after he again tried to convince a food vendor into selling him pierogies.

One week after he threatened to sue a “bigoted vendor” for refusing to serve him, Dershowitz returned to the scene on Wednesday in a second failed attempt at securing Polish dumplings.

“I’m here in an effort to try to restore community and to ask you to sell me pierogi in the interest of keeping the island together so we don’t have to have two pierogi stands: one for anti-Zionists and one for people who will sell to anybody,” Dershowitz told the vendor. “So I’d ask you to please just sell me any one of your products to show that you’re prepared to sell to anybody and not allow your anti-Zionism to decide which people you’ll sell to.”

That’s a standard bigot approach: you’re not allowed to protest against the Israeli genocide in any way, or that makes you an anti-Zionist (which is OK) or an anti-Semite (gross disgusting bigotry). As it turns out, Dershowitz isn’t just anti-Palestinian and pro-genocide — it’s fine to turn their rhetoric right back at them) but is also pro-sexual assault and anti-LGBTQ.

After Dershowitz then tried to hand the pierogi vendor a signed copy of his book, which was politely refused, the vendor said, “I am very surprised that you’re here because of the things that you’ve been saying about us and the business online… I really do not appreciate what you’ve been sharing in the last week.”

Dershowitz interrupted, “It’s true,” to which the vendor replied, “Is it true? You have proof that I am an anti-Semite?”

The conversation devolved further after Dershowitz used the wrong pronoun in reference to the vendor.

“My pronouns are they/them, and you’ve continued to misgender me,” protested the vendor.

More irony: the vendor, Krem, that Dershowitz claims is anti-Semitic, is Jewish themselves.

* I, Krem, am Jewish. Members of my immediate family live in Israel. I love Shabbat and baking challah. My friends call me “Rabbi Krem”, and I have personal relationships with both Rabbis on-island.
* We are proud co-owners of a Martha’s Vineyard business that deeply values its relationships with its partners, vendors, collaborators, and most importantly, its clientele.
* We are a minority-owned (LGBTQ+) operation. Krem is non-binary and uses they/them pronouns.
* Prior to this incident, Good Pierogi had never refused service to anybody.
* We stand against those who harm or seek to harm others as well as those that would defend them.
* Finally, we don’t back down to bullies – no matter their size.

No one likes you, Alan Dershowitz. You’re a sad desperate creep.

I expect I’ll see her at CPAC next

I wasn’t mad at Sydney Sweeney before — she was just a dumbass ignorant of genetics and making a commercial for money — but now she has lost all benefit of the doubt. She is a registered Republican.

Richard Hanania, who wrote for white supremacist news outlets under a pseudonym before becoming an above-board conservative columnist, took credit for Sweeney’s affiliation.

“It’s been revealed that Sydney Sweeney has been a registered Republican since June 2024, just a few months after I set off the discourse about her being the end of woke,” he wrote on X. “It looks like I memed into reality the biggest Republican celebrity recruit in years.”

I can’t say she was much of a draw for me before, but now I’ll be even more unenthused about her work. I’ll just visualize Jon Voight in her roles.

The Nazis loved kitsch, too

The Department of Homeland Security is now trying to brighten our mornings by posting their vision of America: small towns full of white people, with a church across the street from a little one room schoolhouse, and children gathering around the flagpole to pledge their allegiance.

“Protect the homeland,” it says. But only if a cheesy painting by Thomas Kincade(!) is your idea of a homeland. Turn back time to your imagined glory days of pale schmalz and pastoral pablum.

Unfortunately, the estate of Thomas Kincade (he’s dead, you know — drug abuse and alcoholism did him in) is unhappy that his art was used without authorization. Or without payment, I thought uncharitably, given Kincade’s notorious greed…but no, this is actually a very good statement.

“At The Kinkade Family Foundation, we strongly condemn the sentiment expressed in the post and the deplorable actions that DHS continues to carry out,” the foundation wrote in the statement.

“Like many of you, we were deeply troubled to see this image used to promote division and xenophobia associated with the ideals of DHS, as this is antithetical to our mission,” the statement continued. “We stand firmly with our communities who have been threatened and targeted by DHS, especially our immigrant, BIPOC, undocumented, LGBTQ+, and disabled relatives and neighbors.”

I’m mildly surprised that the heirs of that drunken, selfish sot seem to have turned out to be decent people.

The DHS responded to this rebuke, naturally.

DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin told the Post that the agency is highlighting artwork that celebrates America’s heritage and history.

If the media needs a history lesson on the brave men and women who blazed the trails and forged this republic from the sweat of their brow, we are happy to send them a history textbook, she said in the statement to the Post. This administration is unapologetically proud of American history and American heritage.

What history book would that be? Some sloppy propaganda composed by PragerU?

Israel is not a lawful state

Growing up, did any of you hear some variation of the line, “You have to eat all your [broccoli][peas][lutefisk], there are children starving in [China][India][Africa]!” We were supposed to be grateful for the plenty that we are lucky to have, and feel pity for all the blameless children who weren’t so fortunate. In my case, it didn’t work particularly well (I was well aware that that pile of soggy broccoli on my plate wasn’t going to be scooped up and sent to China), but I did learn to feel guilt that we weren’t sharing with those in need.

Not everyone learned to feel that guilt, I guess. Some seem to think it’s fine to starve children.

Evidence gathered by Amnesty International demonstrates how over a month since the introduction of its militarized aid distribution system, Israel has continued to use starvation of civilians as a weapon of war against Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip and to deliberately impose conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction as part of its ongoing genocide.

Heartbreaking testimonies gathered from medical staff, parents of children hospitalized for malnutrition and displaced Palestinians struggling to survive paint a horrifying picture of acute levels of starvation and desperation in Gaza. Their accounts provide further evidence of the catastrophic suffering caused by Israel’s ongoing restrictions on life-saving aid and its deadly militarized aid scheme coupled with mass forced displacement, relentless bombardment and destruction of life-sustaining infrastructure.

Even worse, the food aid stations are set up as bait, drawing out parents of starving children to be gunned down by Israeli snipers.

Gaza’s Health Ministry reports that as of July 24, Israeli forces have killed 59,587 people and injured 143,498, including 8,363 deaths since a surge in Israeli strikes began in March 2025.

Since May, more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed while trying to access food, most near aid distribution sites run by the U.S.- and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, according to the U.N. Human Rights Office. The GHF has rejected the U.N.’s figures as “false and exaggerated.”

UNICEF estimates that 17,000 children are among those killed since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on Israel, with another 33,000 injured. Speaking at a U.N. Security Council meeting on July 16, UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell said the toll is like “a whole classroom of children killed every day for nearly two years.”

Meanwhile, Israel, with the assistance of the US, is intentionally starving children.

A third of Palestinians in Gaza are going without food for days at a time, Smith said. He said about 100,000 women and children were suffering severe acute malnutrition in the territory.

OCHA, the U.N. humanitarian affairs office, reports that malnutrition has risen among children under age 5 in Gaza. Of more than 56,000 who’ve been screened, 9% were assessed as being “acute malnourished” in the first two weeks of July, up from 6% last month and 2.4% in February. In Gaza City, 16% of 15,000 children were found to suffer from acute malnutrition, quadruple the percentage from February.

Even before the war, an estimated 97% of Gaza’s drinking water was contaminated by the sea, sewage and farm runoff and was therefore considered unsafe. Since October 2023, Israeli airstrikes against critical infrastructure such as wells, desalination units, sewage pumps, tanks and pipelines have caused the system to collapse, according to Human Rights Watch.

I no longer support the right of the Jewish state of Israel to exist. Dismantle that horrible government and turn the entire country over to Palestinians, with independent UN monitoring to prevent retaliation. Although, to be honest, I think some retaliation is necessary for justice to prevail — Netanyahu, for instance, ought to spend the rest of his disgusting life in prison.

Additionally, it’s committing genocide. I don’t care to hear from people who are splitting hairs to deny that Israel is a genocidal monster of a state.

Two leading human rights organisations based in Israel, B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights, say Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and the country’s western allies have a legal and moral duty to stop it.

In reports published on Monday, the two groups said Israel had targeted civilians in Gaza only because of their identity as Palestinians over nearly two years of war, causing severe and in some cases irreparable damage to Palestinian society.

A number of international and Palestinian groups have already described the war as genocidal, but reports from two of Israel-Palestine’s most respected human rights organisations, who have for decades documented systemic abuses, is likely to add to pressure for action.