Now we know who owns Tucker Carlson

It’s whoever buys the most commercials for his show. And right now, that’s Mike Lindell, the Minnesota pillow magnate? Wait, what? How do you get so rich shuffling pillows around?

Crap. If only I’d known that spending years in training in biology and spending decades teaching wasn’t a recipe for getting rich. I could have used my one life to buy foam, cut it into rectangles, and stuff it into fabric covers, and then society would have rewarded me with power, influence, and the ability to yell my crazy ideas at old people watching Fox News. I wasted my life, dammit.

Anyway, Tucker Carlson let Mike Lindell freely bellow lunatic conspiracy theories on his show, after the MyPillow guy had been banned from Twitter for being too dangerously wacky for even that medium.

On Tuesday night, pillow salesman Mike Lindell headed to Tucker Carlson Tonight, where his ads routinely kick in more than a third of the show’s advertising budget, to inform the world that he has been canceled. The night before, the MyPillow CEO had been permanently banned from Twitter after what a Twitter spokesperson called “repeated violations of our Civic Integrity Policy” related to misinformation pertaining to the 2020 presidential election.

I did a double-take on that one bit — so ads for pillows from one manufacturer constitute a third of the revenue stream for Tucker Carlson? I guess he would feel some pressure to avoid alienating the wild-eyed ranting buffoon.

He was, of course, on national TV to complain about cancel culture and being silenced. Irony is dead, but at least the corpse has a nice comfy pillow to lie on.

Lindell is also taking advantage of huge ad purchases on OAN and Eric Metaxas’s radio show to go on those programs to whine about how he can’t make himself heard anymore.

All this raises big questions in my head. Are pillows that big a deal for people who tune into Conservative Old People’s Media? I can’t remember when I last bought a pillow — maybe a decade or more ago, and I’m not feeling any pressing need for a new one now. I’m curious about cause and effect. Do people who need a new pillow spontaneously turn to Carlson and Metaxas to shop? Or does watching Carlson and Metaxas suddenly make one desire something soft to lie on? As I get older, will I start seeking pillows? We’re raising lots of flies in the lab right now, and fly larvae go into a wandering phase where they crawl up unto the side of their container to pupate — is this like a hardwired behavioral transition, too?

Lindell isn’t the sole advertiser, though. Other companies pouring money into the conservative trough are weight loss plans, Caribbean vacations, personal EKGs, and restaurant delivery services, which altogether paint an interesting picture of the typical Fox News aficionado.

The Republicans haven’t changed at all

Sure, Trump was dumped, but the prominent Republicans, like Cruz and Rubio, are still defending him, and the majority really don’t want to impeach…and you’d think if they were really unhappy with the lyin’ demagogue, they’d want to make sure he can’t come back and run against a Republican candidate in 2024.

Worst of all, though, they are entirely complacent about have Marjorie Taylor Greene in their ranks. You know, the delusional woman who thinks mass shootings are all false flags to justify taking your guns away.

Also the nutcase who thinks the California wildfires were started by lasers from space.

The fires were part of a conspiracy by Jewish bankers to clear the right of way for their rail project, don’t you know. She just likes to “read a lot.”

Of course, anti-semitism, racism, anti-Muslim bigotry, and white nationalism are her brand. There isn’t a conspiracy theory she hasn’t embraced. She’s a 9-11 truther. She thinks pizzagate was a real thing. She loves the right-wing militias. She thinks Hillary Clinton had her political enemies assassinated. She’s a dangerous loon who worships at the altar of QAnon and the Trump Cult. She thinks the Sandy Hook and Parkland shootings, in which children were murdered, was a staged event with “crisis actors”.

So what does the Republican leadership in the House do?

All of this has provoked House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) to let it be known through a spokesman that he finds her comments “deeply disturbing” and that he “plans to have a conversation with the congresswoman about them.”

In the meantime, McCarthy scheduled a meeting at Mar-a-Lago with Trump. He apparently hopes to smooth over any hard feelings the former president may have about McCarthy’s mild blandishment that Trump “bears responsibility” for the mob that he fed with false claims about a stolen election and then incited to attack the Capitol on Jan. 6.

So it looks like a stern talking-to, followed by a make-up session, is the worst that can happen within the Republican family these days. And should anyone else try to exact a punishment, the party will protect its own, as all but five Senate Republicans proved this week, when they voted against even holding an impeachment trial of Trump.

They they appointed her to the Education Committee. I guess because she “reads a lot”.

The rot runs too deep. The Republican party must be dismantled and destroyed.

Not that the Democrats are flawless! Jonathan Chait, for example, thinks Alexandria Ocasio Cortez is the mirror image of Marjorie Taylor Greene, which is breathtakingly stupid. AOC hasn’t been preaching conspiracy theories and race hatred and the violent overthrow of the government; she’s working within the system to achieve progressive goals.

The leading Democratic mischief-maker is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who advocates some left-wing views I consider simplistic and impractical and, in some cases, poll badly. The top example of a conservative mischief-maker, presented in perfect symmetry, is Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Greene’s views are just a bit more controversial.

“Just a bit”! Because some of AOC’s goals “poll badly”! Fuck these neo-liberal scumbags, too.

I get email…from Portugal

It’s good to get the Portuguese perspective on something I wrote about Portugal.

I am writing to you from Portugal. As you may imagine, this has to do
with your Pharyngula post “We could be another Portugal!”. I thought
that you might find interesting the attached cartoon. It was published
in an underground newspaper in 1934, that is, at a time in which Salazar
had been prime minister for only two years. It shows him teaching Hitler
and Mussolini how to deal with the opposition. One might think that it
happened to be a Communist newspaper, but no; it was a Republican
newspaper (in the sense of Republican values, not in the sense of the
American Republican Party).

That’s the kind of man American conservatives want to run the country. Yikes.

As was brought up in that other thread, we aren’t even talking about Salazar’s terrible colonial abuses yet.

Retailing pillows is not credible training for government

The MyPillow guy is dithering over whether to run for governor of Minnesota — he’s distracted right now, trying to decide whether to overthrow the system by pursuing bogus claims of election fraud, or join the system and run for elected office.

You may laugh now because Mike Lindell is a delusional moron, but I wish to remind everyone that five years we were all looking at each other, saying “No way, this Trump goombah is a delusional moron, he’s going to go down in flames in the primary.” Remember that. Take these ridiculous clowns seriously and slap them down hard early.

We could be another Portugal!

Some on the right are now aware that it was a bad idea to stage an attempted conservative revolution with a bumbling incompetent as a figurehead leading a mob of stupid mooks. Oops. We need to step back. We need to recalculate. We need to look around for better role models. We need a guy who represents true conservative values.

So over on The American Conservative, Michael Warren Davis (he has a book coming out from Regnery so you know exactly how he thinks) has found his hero. It’s Antonio Salazar, the authoritarian dictator of Portugal for 36 years. He was definitely an intelligent person, he oversaw many improvements in Portuguese life, and he definitely made the nation more stable…by ending all political dissent, staging nothing but sham elections, and ruling as an autocrat. If stability is a conservative ideal, he certainly represented that while he was alive. Unfortunately, once he was dead the Portuguese people had the Carnation Revolution in 1974 to enact civil rights and free elections, which was kind of a repudiation of the Salazar situation. So stability for as long as the strong man has his fist clenched, but once it relaxes in death, upheaval.

He also had some strong views: he opposed fascism, and maintained Portugal’s neutrality in WWII, in spite of sharing a lot of ideals with Nazi Germany (“Deus, Pátria e Família“, “God, Fatherland, and Family”, which sounds awfully familiar). He also opposed socialism, communism, and democracy, though, so that’s a bit of a mixed bag.

On the American Conservative, they’re waiting for our Salazar. Trump wasn’t it. In an essay full of praise for a dictator, Davis concludes that we just need a benevolent autocrat.

Yet Salazar’s example offers a different kind of post-liberal order to those offered by left- and right-wing ideologues. Salazarism, if there is such a thing, is a kind of paternalistic traditionalism. Either a weaker or a more “visionary” leader couldn’t have spared Portugal the excesses of totalitarianism. Salazar was, in his own way, a moderate.

Summing up the spirit of Salazarism, Gallagher incisively quotes the Israeli conservative thinker Yoram Hazony: “Where a people is incapable of self-discipline, a mild government will only encourage licentiousness and division, hatred and violence, eventually forcing a choice between civil war and tyranny. This means that the best an undisciplined people can hope for is a benevolent autocrat.”

Events of the last year may prove Hazony right. If we Americans lack the self-discipline necessary for self-government, if liberalism is off the table, the only alternative to a tyrant like Lenin or Hitler may be a man like Salazar: a paternalistic traditionalist, a philosopher-king.

You should find that chilling. The “smart” conservatives in our country think it would be just fine and dandy to get rid of elections if it allows tradition and paternalism to thrive. They aren’t upset with Trump for attempting a coup, they’re mad because he did it in such a half-assed way an bungled the effort to throw out an election. If he’d succeeded, they’d now be rationalizing the wreckage of our democracy as a conservative triumph.

Those guys keep flaunting their brilliance

The arrest stories from the insurrection keep rolling out.

Another person arrested Sunday, Bryan Betancur, was captured on video holding a Confederate battle flag in a restricted section on the west side of the Capitol, the FBI said in court documents.

Betancur, who was on probation for a burglary conviction, was wearing an ankle bracelet, and GPS data showed he was in the area for three hours on Jan. 6, according to the documents.

I wonder if he’s one of those people that think Bill Gates is going to inject everyone with tracking chips?

You know what would make our universities collapse?

If all the faculty announced that we’re only going to work 10 hour days, and we don’t work on weekends anymore. Boom, done. We’d have to hire lots of new faculty and our administrators would all faint and the state government would denounce us all as socialists even worse than the do already and cut off our funding.

It’s not going to happen, of course, because we like our work and we’ve been indoctrinated thoroughly about our responsibilities. I was just thinking about that, though, as I was getting organized for a weekend to be spent completely rewriting a couple of upcoming genetics labs, because of new pandemic restrictions. What is it like for people who get to put down all their tools at 5pm on Friday and go home and just read a book or watch TV or take naps or play with the kids?

It could be worse, though. I could be getting paid minimum wage to do stoop labor or heavy lifting, and my weekend is spent in pain trying to recover so I can go back and do it again on Monday.

We should fix all that and recognize and respect labor of all kinds and maybe rip those profits out of the hands of the parasites who do nothing all week long.

UMM turns out good people, like Joshua Preston

Hey Josh! Good to see you in the news for the right thing!

Joshua Preston was a former student here at UMM, and he’s in the National Guard, and he spoke out against the lackluster response of the military leadership to the attempted insurrection.

A Minnesota National Guard soldier, after being nudged to remove a Facebook post that criticized the Guard for a tepid public response to last week’s insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, is raising questions with leadership about how the organization roots out right-wing extremism within its own ranks.

The soldier is also questioning how the military conflates nonpartisan speech with apolitical speech.

Spc. Joshua Preston of Minneapolis, a 30-year-old attorney and soldier in the Minnesota National Guard’s 2nd Combined Arms Battalion, 136th Infantry, was upset when the first statement to come from leadership after the Jan. 6 violence in Washington, D.C., was a vague reminder that service members “must remain apolitical.” He was particularly upset that leadership referred to the coup attempt only as “the timely events occurring on the national stage.”

He thought the organization should have been more forceful in its stand against the attempted coup.

Preston posted a Facebook response that Guard leadership should root out right-wing extremism in its own ranks. He was later contacted by a commander bringing up concerns about the post, though leadership did not officially order him to take it down.

I am proud to have taught him a little biology here.

I’m not the only person with reservations about Eric Lander

500 women scientists feel the same way.

…we can’t help but notice that the recently announced nomination of presidential science adviser Eric Lander fails to meet the moment. His nomination does not fill us with hope that he will shepherd the kind of transformation in science we need if we are to ensure science delivers equity and justice for all. We had high hopes that the Biden administration would continue its pattern of bold nominations when envisioning a newly elevated cabinet position of science adviser. There was certainly no shortage of options, with a deep bench of qualified women and Black, Indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) whose expertise and experience can transform the place of science as a tool for justice.

Lander, an MIT geneticist and former co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST)—exemplifies the status quo. With this nomination, the opportunity to finally break the long lineage of white male science advisers has been missed. This was a chance to substantively address historical inequalities and transform harmful stereotypes by appointing someone with new perspectives into the top science adviser role. Despite a long list of supremely qualified people that could have held this position and inspired a whole new generation of scientists, the glass ceiling in American science remains intact.

While we can celebrate the Biden-Harris administration’s commitment to science, we must recognize that Lander has a reputation among some scientists for being controversial, and colleagues have criticized him for his “ego without end.” We cannot forget that in 2016, Lander wrote a widely criticized history of the revolutionary technology CRISPR, dubbed the “Heroes of CRISPR,” that erased the contributions of two women colleagues. This conspicuous exclusion is emblematic of the forces in science that hold back women and scientists of color from attaining the level of prominence he enjoys.

They also reminded me of that time Lander toasted James Watson.

Whoops.

The article also has suggestions for how Lander could improve his role as a science advisor.

HE’S GONE!

He gave a farewell speech in which he blamed all the deaths on his watch on China, declared that his administration had given Biden a good foundation (he’s going to claim credit for any good that emerges in the next few years), threatened to be back “in some form” in the future, and then boarded a helicopter and flew away as Fox News played YMCA (???).

LET THE REJOICING BEGIN! No, not you, Joe. Get to work.

By the way, while you might want to sigh with relief that you made it through the last four miserable years, remember that 400,000 didn’t. They weren’t killed by China, either — they were murdered by Republican incompetence. Destroy that party. That’s your new mission.

If you must, here’s a bit of his speech, and that surreal send off to the tune of YMCA.

Now we wait for reality to slap his fans in the face, hard.