I don’t normally read the Daily Wire, but they baited me with that title in an email. It’s classic DW: reduce a complex issue to a single point, challenge a group of people with it, and claim victory when they don’t get a simple answer. It’s what they did with the “what is a woman” question, and it was the entirety of Charlie Kirk’s “debate” strategy. So yes, confront people who aren’t expecting a quiz while point cameras and microphones at them, and most will freeze and be more inarticulate. That doesn’t mean you’ve won something, it means you’ve exploited normal human social awkwardness.

I would answer that he’s flouted the constitution, has essentially declared war on states that don’t support his policies, is capricious and arbitrary in his decisions, and is trying to neutralize the checks and balances of the Republic. I’m sure you all could write whole paragraphs citing his self-serving actions.

But DW goes on to point out the horrors of the No Kings protests. Such violence!

Some protests took unsettling turns. A disturbing video from Chicago shows a middle-aged woman making a gun gesture with her hand and pointing to her neck. Towards the end of the D.C. protest, a chant broke out that “Turning Point has got to go.” Many signs featured rhetoric claiming “Trump was a Nazi” and “ICE = Gestapo.” A small fragment of the protest made the event a family affair with children holding signs such as “Stop Kidnapping People.”

Yes? I don’t get what the concern is about pointing finger guns at your own neck, and I agree that TPUSA is toxic and that there is a strong resonance between the Republican party and Nazis. And please, please, please do stop kidnapping people.

I think the right wing is floundering.

JD Vance and Pete Hegseth know how to hurt Californians: on short notice, they shut down I-5 for four hours while the army fired live ammunition over the freeway. Why, I don’t know — it’s a pointless and risky exercise. Then there was a misfire, and a shell detonated prematurely over the freeway, spattering (harmlessly, fortunately) the police blocking the road with shrapnel.

This is insane.

Why do this at all, other than to let Hegseth flaunt his machismo? And maybe intimidate the citizenry a little bit. Have no fear, the military makes excuses.

A spokesperson for the Marine Corps told CBS News that the incident was under investigation.

“We are aware of the report of a possible airborne detonation of a 155mm artillery round outside the designated impact area during the U.S. Marine Corps Amphibious Capabilities Demonstration at Camp Pendleton, CA, Oct. 18,” said a statement from USMC, in part. “The demonstration went through a rigorous safety evaluation, and deliberate layers of redundancy, to ensure the safety of fellow citizens. Following established safety protocols, firing was suspended. No injuries occurred and the demonstration concluded as scheduled. An investigation has been initiated. We are committed to determining the incident’s root cause and applying findings to future missions.”

They did nothing wrong! And they will investigate to find out what happened.

I think what happened is that a pair of incompetent MAGA scoundrels meddled with an exercise to get them to stupidly fire big dangerous guns over the freeway, because they like pushing people around.

The right-wingers are now outraged by the announcement that BadBunny will be doing the Superbowl halftime show — he’s a Puerto Rican! He sings in Spanish! It’s Reggaeton, and as we all know, that ain’t real music! They’re torn up with anguish, that the music during halftime may not be twangy country music about pickup trucks and beer and unfaithful women. It’s very sad for them. TPUSA announced that they would host an alternative halftime show, but they haven’t provided any details and haven’t any specific artist they would include.

So someone posted a fake playbill listing an epic bunch of conservative artists. People fell for it.

That’s a horrible collection of washed-up freaks and fossils, all packed into an imaginary 20 minute show. I like that special guest, which should have given the game away, but I found people actually asking what band Measles was.

It’s all cope. The conservatives are desperate to capture popular culture, but they aren’t popular, and they don’t understand what’s good about music or entertainment.

All of this reflects what is a small ray of hope in our bleak political moment. MAGA’s relationship with pop culture only has two forms: Complete cluelessness and/or resentment that most people think their taste stinks. This matters, because it’s been a truism on the far-right for decades now that capturing the culture is the key to obtaining their larger political goals. MAGA influencers love to repeat, like parrots, Andrew Breitbart’s motto that “politics is downstream from culture.” The Christian right also has a version of this, which Kirk promoted: The “seven mountains mandate,” which holds that is crucial for conservative Christians to control pop culture. Over the years, untold amounts of money have been poured by right-wing donors and investors into remaking the culture in MAGA’s image, in hopes that will turn American hearts toward authoritarianism and evangelical Christianity.

But they are throwing their money to the wind. As I wrote recently, for all the hype around Kirk’s memorial, the actual event didn’t resonate beyond his existing fanbase. Nearly all the performers hailed from the world of worship music; there was nary a nod to what might resonate with people outside white evangelical subculture. This reflects a reality that the mainstream media ignored in the wake of Kirk’s murder. Even though he was widely known on college campuses, due to the ubiquity of his videos falsely promising to dunk on liberal college kids, he wasn’t well-liked. Although 94% of college students said in a recent survey they had heard of Kirk, a full 70% said they didn’t agree with his views.

Their idea of comedy is Joe Rogan and his stable of half-witted hangers-on. The Daily Wire — Ben Shapiro’s company — had a whole entertainment division to make movies and TV shows (remember Lady Ballers?), and it’s disintegrating as we watch. It’s CEO Jeremy Boreing has stepped down, and right now they’re just a money sink for billionaires. They’re coming out with a fantasy series, The Pendragon Cycle, which the teaser trailer reveals to be a series of set pieces of major battles featuring a dozen extras on each side, long slow character portraits, and guys with beards yelling a lot.

I think it’s going to bomb. Boreing decided to trade in the limp humor of his previous effort for taking himself far too seriously, and that doesn’t work.

We had a good turnout, somewhere around 100 people, despite the damp gray morning and intermittent rain. We had one cool cat show up, there was also a dinosaur somewhere in the crowd.

For a gang of anti-American agents of antifa, there was a lot of patriotism on display, with flags everywhere. Mary and I were carrying the new Minnesota flag — a few people asked us what it represented, I guess the update hasn’t gotten to everyone yet.

We also had dogs show up. Everyone despises Trump.

We did have one loudmouthed jerk show up, who raged at us at the top of his lungs, looking positively demented as he screamed about money being spent on foreign countries and the Democratic government shutdown. He was quietly separated from the group and wandered off to die of apoplexy somewhere else, I presume. He apparently worked at the UMM physical plant and was laid off recently, and is very resentful.

Good morning, good crowd, we did our part in the wave of protests sweeping across the country.

Remember: protest march this morning. We atheists have been declared traitors by this administration, so you better get out there and show your commitment.

Greta Thunberg has been released from Israeli captivity, and she talks about her capture. What’s surprising is just how childishly stupid and misogynistic the Israeli soldiers were.

She was not allowed to wear her T-shirt with “Free Palestine” on it and was ordered to change, she explains. She put on an orange one with the text “Decolonize” instead.

– And then I put on my frog hat. When I’m about to get off the boat, there are a bunch of police officers waiting for me. They grab me, pull me to the ground, and throw an Israeli flag over me.

Here, everything goes “from zero to a hundred,” several witnesses describe – the violence escalates.

Greta Thunberg describes how she is dragged to a paved area fenced in with iron fences. This is a protracted scene that lasts for over six hours, according to Greta, and is confirmed by several participants in the flotilla that Aftonbladet talks to.

– It was kind of dystopian. I saw maybe 50 people sitting in a row on their knees with handcuffs and their foreheads against the ground.

Greta gets up from the sofa and lies down, showing the position on the striped living room rug.

– They dragged me to the opposite side from where the others were sitting, and I had the flag around me the whole time. They hit and kicked me.

Greta laughs.

– Then they ripped off my frog hat, threw it on the ground, stomped and kicked it, and kind of threw a tantrum.

– They moved me very brutally to a corner that I was turned towards. ‘A special place for a special lady’, they said. And then they had learned ‘Lilla hora’ (Little whore) and ‘Hora Greta’ (Whore Greta) in Swedish, which they repeated all the time.

Every time someone looked up from the ground, they were knocked back down to the ground, Greta and the other Swedes recount. In the corner where Greta was sitting, the police placed a flag.

– The flag was placed so that it would touch me. When it fluttered and touched me, they shouted ‘Don’t touch the flag’ and kicked me in the side. After a while, my hands were tied with cable ties, very tightly. A bunch of guards lined up to take selfies with me while I was sitting like that.

They’re like spoiled children. Unprofessional and eminently mockable. You might think it’s because these are young soldiers, with the mentality of a college freshman at best, but even the older, unwiser senior politicians are like that.

This smug asshole

Suddenly, the far-right minister Itamar Ben-Gvir entered the area and stood in front of everyone, Greta recounts.

– He shouted, ’You are terrorists. You want to kill Jewish babies.’ Those who shouted back were taken aside and beaten. They were thrown to the ground and beaten. But I could only see it out of the corner of my eye, because every time I lifted my head from the ground, I was kicked by the guard standing next to me.

They were humanitarians, who wanted to deliver aid to Palestinian children.

The US has given over $20 billion in aid to Israel in the last two years. It’s past time to turn off the faucet — no more aid to these immature thugs, ever. Force them to learn how to live with their neighbors in a civilized manner.

It’s my granddaughter’s birthday this weekend, so yesterday we spent 7 hours traveling all across Minnesota and Wisconsin, and boy are my knees sore. We’ve got a party to go to tomorrow.

In more interesting news, David Gorski tears into RFK jr with his teeth — it’s transparently clear that RFK jr is rabidly anti-vax and the he’s definitely coming for all of your vaccines, since he’s now denying that they have any efficacy at all.

Let’s take a look at how RFK Jr. demonstrates beyond reasonable doubt in this video that he is, in fact, antivaccine. I will repeat what I’ve been saying for months now: RFK Jr. is definitely coming for your vaccines; he’s coming for all vaccines, in fact. It’s just that he’s strategic enough to know that he can’t do it all at once, which is why he purged the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices (ACIP) and replace the fired members with antivaxxers and the antivax-adjacent, only one of whom has any significant experience in public health or vaccine policy. Personally, I’ve been saying that the only thing that’s saved us (thus far) is the inexperience and incompetence of RFK Jr.’s ACIP. In the meantime, President Trump has embraced Andrew Wakefield’s old grift about separating the components of the MMR vaccine as somehow being “safer,” even as he talks about adding autism to the list of table injuries for the Vaccine Injury Compensation System, a move that would certainly bankrupt and destroy it.

Yes, things are grim out there.

Fortunately, my granddaughter has responsible parents who have kept her vaccination status up to date, which is why I get to go hang out with her and watch her open presents and celebrate her 7th birthday. It’s absolutely insane that we have a director of health and human services who is committed to killing young children with disease, while our Secretary of War favors more direct execution of children. This really is the death cult coming into fruition in our federal government.

Reminder: we have a podcast this afternoon!

The Oregon GOP posted this image on Twitter.

Oh my goodness. I had no idea the anarchy was so bad.

On all three platforms, the statement was illustrated with an image that seemed designed to support Trump’s false claim that protests against immigration sweeps in Portland are so out of control that the city is “burning to the ground”. On one side of the image, a line of police officers held riot shields; on the other, a crowd of young men held up flares that lit up a night sky filled with red smoke.

Except…the police on the left side of the image are Ecuadorian, and the photo was from 2008.

And the fiery protest is a photo from Brazil in 2017.

Do you realize what this means? South America has invaded the United States! The spearhead has been driving up the West coast for the last 17 years, and we’re only finding out now! MAGA was right all along about the Hispanic invasion.

Or, I suppose, it’s possible that Republicans are terrible liars.