Literal Pants on Fire

 

In the midst of the devastation and tragedy in southern California, there are some political animals who adhere to the maxim to let no good crisis go to waste. They're bringing DEI into it (I promise you, the Black person's water is just as wet as the White man's). They are lying about budgets, resources, pointing the finger of blame. Launching conspiracy theories. 

That many people cope with horrific events by just pulling narratives together to make sense of the seemingly senseless is a part of human nature, I guess--but that doesn't make it right. And when people appear to be deliberately lying because of a political agenda trying to capitalize on a tragedy for point-scoring purposes, that's something a bit harsher than opportunistic--it's predatory. It's precisely at times like these when people are least likely to engage their critical thinking mode and instead opt for the torches and pitchforks. 

Triumph of the Swill: TrumpWorld Edition

 

Once a long time ago, I wrote about the Triumph of the Swill.  We are right back here, swilling it again. Did you know that Russia did disinfo HARD on matters regarding anti-vaxx? The exact thing that RFK Jr., who was put up to it by Mike Flynn, would entirely be about if in office? Because I have to know that.--I am letting you know that. Also, did you know that Lil' Miss supposedly anti-war Tulsi Gabbard thinks Russia had to address the lying ass biowarfare sites bullshit that was obviously all made up? 

Of all the things that piss me off about TrumpWorld, it is that too many people stand ready to absorb absolute nonsense shot directly at their faceholes through altogether stupidly transparently dumbass fake news outlets. 

We've been under attack for a good long while. Someone like Elon Musk, who really does not want anyone to consider whether he's got any foreign influence, seems to have spread disinfo to affect the US election. 

Facts STILL Don't Care About Your Feelings

 

My god—Google Search for “what is a tariff” sudden spikes the DAY AFTER ELECTION DAY. 🤦🏻‍♂️ pic.twitter.com/erds7pCqdG

— Eric Feigl-Ding (@DrEricDing) November 9, 2024

I bet there are a lot of small-business people who feel like following Trump makes them more like big-business people. His policies are really going to fuck them up. And the effects of his "promises" are already coming to fruition. Their businesses don't have reserve capital enough to float them through additional costs that they can't calculate yet. I am not sure why so many people didn't check out what they were in for, but I'm still dealing with the thing I completely underrated--

There are a lot of people who simply don't know shit. Like:

This is Not Helping Anyone

There is quite a lot of stupidity on the internet, these days and there's just something about a human tragedy--like a hurricane, to bring out both the best--and the goddamn worst in some people. I guess pictures like the above might seem harmless enough (this was apparently made in response to some AI slop accompanying plaintive disinformation trying to outrage farm folks into believing and possibly acting on the idea that no one is getting assistance after Hurricane Helene). 

It would be great if people had any common sense and just--didn't do that. The same goes for pick-me pygmies who insist that their wife's cousin's ex-husband, a retired brigadier general from the Idaho Coast Guard, went down in his crop duster to deliver a pallet of Diet Mountain Dew but was called a racist and sent home--who knows what motivates people like this?

But when agencies like FEMA, local officials, and the American Red Cross have to fight misinformation as well as do their jobs--that isn't helping anybody.

When elected officials share this kind of thing--it's embarrassing for them, for the most part. When absolute weirdoes like Marjorie Taylor Greene insist there's a mysterious "them" with a weather machine attempting a land grab or election interference, or whatever she's on about, it is dangerous and unfit. It certainly doesn't help that the billionaire owner of a certain social media outfit is happy to distribute false talking points. 

Guiliani and the TrumpWorld Rabbit Hole

 

You know, the Mother Jones piece on Giuliani being the subject of a whistleblower investigation regarding whether he either knowingly or unwittingly became a laundromat for Russian disinformation against Joe Biden really takes me back to exactly when any rational person would have thought this was happening in 2019, when the first impeachment was going on. If you think about TrumpWorld a lot, and I do, you really only find yourself going "Dmitry Firtash or Pavel Fuchs?" 

See, the difference between a Trump fan rabbit hole and a Trump scholar rabbit hole is knowing where the rabbits actually are, having seen the rabbits. The Trump fan rabbit hole is where one just keeps digging. To be a little less circumspect in the discourse, Lev Parnas remembers, and he would know: Giuliani would listen to anyone who would say something bad about Biden, even if it was false. We've known for years now that Giuliani was trying to dig up/create a false impression for Trump's 2020 re-election. He didn't care who it came from.

You know, just like the 2016 Trump campaign didn't care where Wikileaks got their DNC hack stuff from. All fun and games until it becomes a national security issue:

Something Inauthentic Here

 

This is wild. Particularly the part where he says "my friends and I coordinated a bank run" followed by "so then I bought shares of the bank thinking I could profit off the run". pic.twitter.com/67iwCrE6yj

— @chimeracoder@mastodon.social🦦 🏳️‍🌈 (@chimeracoder) March 12, 2023

While I appreciate the idea that people with money in SVB aren't necessarily bad actors who deserve to lose their savings (above the insured amount) and that the majority should be "made whole", there is something that feels inauthentic about the collapse of this bank and Signature Bank (which has a lot of crypto money in it).  I don't trust what I'm looking at because of the people I'm looking at. There are people wealthy enough to lose some portion of their vast fortune and still be fine--a bank run is just an investment in fuckery.

I remember back in December I was snarky about a Russian bank run. These things can be precipitated by rumors. I feel like the bank management and certain investors need to be looked at. This bank run has nothing to do with "wokeness" specifically (how do you even connect the dots on that one? A bank certainly could do woke shit and be responsible enough to have a risk assessment officer--these guys didn't) so much as deregulation and gambling in the old savings establishment again. In the meanwhile, the people who served us junk bonds and the dot com and housing bubbles really don't have anything they need to be telling us about moral hazard right now. 

There is no good reason there should be any "contagion" from this thing. Doom-saying about it...feels inauthentic. 

TWGB: How is Trump Doing Today?

 

If your answer to the titular question is "ready to set fire to the Constitution", then yay! You got it in one. Today's manic post on Truth Social reads:

So, with the revelation of MASSIVE & WIDESPREAD FRAUD & DECEPTION in working closely with Big Tech Companies, the DNC, & the Democrat Party, do you throw the Presidential Election Results of 2020 OUT and declare the RIGHTFUL WINNER, or do you have a NEW ELECTION? A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution. Our great "Founders" did not want, and would not condone, False & Fraudulent Elections!

So, I guess he's unhappy?

Now, far be it for me to put words into the mouths of the "Founders" (what is with Trump and the quotation marks?), but our elected officials swear an oath to the Constitution because without laws, we don't have a government, but anarchy. You might even say, if we throw out the Constitution, we "wouldn't even have a country," to use the refrain uttered by Trump and other "Flight 93 election" folks on the right.

It sounds like. once again, Trump is spouting a little too much "truth". Just as he acknowledged taking classified documents transparently, he is now telling us that he wants laws broken to restore him to office. He knows there's no Constitutional basis for any kind of a do-over. but it doesn't matter--he wants another chance and quickly.

It seems like this post coincides with the "revelation" of supposed Biden campaign-influenced suppression on social media of Hunter Biden stories in the "Twitter files" Elon Musk dropped last night. The funny old thing is--there isn't a there, there. To the extent there was any government influence, this happened during the Trump Administration, so whose government was it?  And many career IC officials felt, from experience, the Hunter Biden laptop story should be distrusted because it looked like disinfo.

Experience like the foreign disinfo campaign that went hard in 2016. In favor of Trump.  

It also coincides with another bad week for Trump in the courts,  As in:

Five members of the Oath Keepers were convicted for serious felonies relating to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection that the former president instigated. The South Carolina Supreme Court ruled that his former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows must testify in Georgia’s criminal investigation into his attempt to overturn the state’s results. And a federal judge denied Trump’s claim that he has absolute immunity from civil suits.

And people are still talking about how his friend Ye is having a very public racist meltdown. And also, Pat Cipolone and Patrick Philbin testified before a grand jury Friday and an appellate court dismissed "Loose" Cannon's Special Master ruling. And the Ways and Means Committee has six years of Trump's tax returns. And the Trump Organization fraud case goes to a jury on Monday...

I'm sure Trump is writing a new Constitution on the Mar-A-Lago walls in ketchup at this point. 

But as the old saw about "taking Trump literally or seriously" goes, we've seen by now--after 1/6? I take him very seriously and literally. He definitely is encouraging the breaking of laws to get him reinstalled in office. That's why he has shown so much solidarity lately with those arrested and tried for their participation in the 1/6 insurrection. 

He still means to do terrible harm to this country, and that people still support him is appalling.

The Dupes Leading the Dopes

 

Greene: I have never seen the CDC coming out and saying you’ve got to get your second Polio shot, you gotta get your third.. pic.twitter.com/KqXjvZpBFt

— Acyn (@Acyn) March 17, 2022

The actual protocol for polio shorts is four. Four polio shots. She has children. If she takes them to the pediatrician, she should be aware about the cycle of vaccinations recommended by doctors. She should have literally seen this in action. I really hope her kids are fully vaccinated for all the things. But I'm using this foolishness as an obvious example for her other foolishness: her disgraceful support of Putin's war, and literal regurgitation of Russian talking points. And there is a relationship between being antivax and pro-Putin. 

I don't think she has the critical thinking capacity to actually ever do a basic fact-check to understand whether her assumptions make any damn sense in the world, and there enlies (as her good friend Lauren Boebert might say) the problem. She doesn't know she's wrong, doesn't care she's wrong, won't even check if she might be.  So if a possibly incendiary viewpoint that will get eyeballs on her exists, she'll perform. And if this seems like I'm denying her having the agency to do any better, what the hell--I am. 

Murc's Law appears to assume that the idea that conservatives lack agency is a frame, but for some of these hopeless assholes, it might actually be a fact. I can't assume that Margarine Tater Grease has a better than potato level of consciousness because she certainly never displays it. She's a potato where every eye is blind. 

And let's look at Candace Owens. 

Gaslighting and Gas Prices

 

The above screenshot from Twitter (because I don't think his account is liable to stay up forever as this situation progresses) shows Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and the following statement: "The goal of Russia's special military operation is to stop any war that could take place on Ukraine territory or that could start from there. "

Great shades of "We had to destroy the village in order to save it." The kids who don't remember the Cold War might not know that one, as well, but they will probably recognize a few bars of what else the Russian narrative is trying to lay down--the potential of a dirty bomb made in Ukraine (if I knew that was coming, I'd have baked you all a yellow cake) and biowarfare labs (but were they dangerously on wheels, I wonder?).  There's even a laptop! (Is it Hunter Biden, secret Burisma NATO undercover spy's laptop? inquiring minds might indeed venture to ask at this idiotic point in time.)

It almost feels like the laziness of the Russian disinfo spree is to throw the US's own war lies back in our face, as if to say, well, why can't we do it as well? To me, it makes no difference. I was as opposed in 2003 to stupid big countries laying waste to smaller countries who didn't deserve it, so they aren't fucking me up, any.  And actually, I kind of did want the Bush Administration to get their feet held to the fire and still do, because of torture and indiscriminate killing of civilians and use of mercs like Blackwater and all that. I still do.

I was a baby during Vietnam and I still feel some kind of way about it. My father's working class neighborhood all went and a lot them had health issues including mental health issues from that. They drank, they got cancer, they lived recklessly sometimes and my dad doesn't have a lot of friends still alive in his early 70's. One of my mom's brothers went and he was a bad alcoholic and died in his 60s and I don't think those things weren't unconnected. I don't like stupid wars. They kill human beings, sometimes for a long time after we are still counting the death toll of them. 

Anyway, it isn't about NATO and it wasn't about WMDs and it isn't about preventing a war because honey, if this isn't a war I don't know what one looks like, and it had nothing to do with denazification because these assholes sent an actual neo-Nazi group into Ukraine. Probably to kill their Jewish president. 

It might make more sense for Putin to activate his deep-rooted sense of imperialism because Ukraine's pipelines exist. I mean, he doesn't have any use for the people. But just like the Iraq/Kuwait issue, there are other equities to consider? 

So with all this disinfo and intentional bullshit in the ether, this obviously one-sided decision to wage actual war by Putin's government and all that, and what are our journalists going to talk about? The gas prices going up like 50 cents over the past week. And isn't that a Biden problem? Let me turn to my bete noir, Sara Carter, for why this is fucking stupid. 

Federal land is already open for drilling, and all the portions of Keystone that bring oil from Canada to the US have already been built (and that oil is low-grade and not even fit for use in fuel anyway.)

Also the U.S. is a net energy exporter.

Learn what you're talking about. https://t.co/YlZvMgDy6R

— Matthew Chapman (@fawfulfan) March 7, 2022

She is literally wrong on every point. US oil companies can drill here, drill now, as conservatives have been saying since the Obama Administration, but they would rather price gouge. They are managing a finite and climate-disruptive resource in its end-stage.  Keystone XL isn't the problem. Whether we sanctioned Nordstream wasn't the Russian problem. Our addiction to fossil fuels on a dying planet and our love of money over human lives is. 

I'm getting sick of the gaslighting. I'm sick of the gaslit foo dogs of war. When you talk about scarcity--talk about renewables and why it didn't have to be this way. When you talk about Putin's invasion and war against Ukraine, talk about how it probably boils down to greed and backfired because Putin and his kleptocrat state never bothered to adapt to the 21st century, but we all have to. 

Every part of this debacle is everything I hate. Lies, greed, death and massive human stupidity. 

Putin isn't Kidding

 

I'm not sure why people think you can negotiate with Putin like he's regular people. I'm not a foreign policy expert, I just read people, and he has the personality of someone who people don't talk to but listen to. So, listen. Because talking to him isn't going to work. There's some men you just can't reach, etc. 

Looking at the Russo-Georgian war or the invasion of Crimea in 2014, it's clear that Putin says whatever he wants and then practices aggression. His security concerns are pretenses (hello--what is Russia, anyway, militarily, etc.) so he can fuck around like he has a reason to do what he wants to do. The only answer to his willingness to fuck around is a policy of assured finding out. You don't look for the thing he "actually wants" when he sniffs around territorially. He wants territory. And the people living on that territory have valid reasons to not want invaded, or a war, or anything but normal unfucked lives.

So why is Putin like this? Bullshit, mostly. Believing in a world that was already rotten and falling apart when he was schooled to try and defend it. That doesn't strike me as a mindset dissimilar to people right here in the US, but there's no use in letting his worldview affect ours: sovereign nations like Ukraine are sovereign. They are a democracy. We, the US, supposedly, are supposed to support free nations. 

I'm in. Here's why: he hasn't just fucked with Ukraine. He's been fucking with the US, the UK, Canada, Italy, France, etc. He's been using influence campaigns wherever he can to destabilize our belief in what it is to be a free nation. We are lousy with disinfo. But what we can know is if Putin has mobilized the sheer amount of troops he has at this moment, it isn't for nothing. He isn't doing it for shits and grins. he means it. 

O Tempora! Omicron!

 

The thing with Covid-19 is that Covid-19 started in 2019 and it's 2021 and we're still going through it, and it does not look like we are getting out of it for real anytime soon. Sure, maybe in the US we didn't think we had a COVID-19 problem until sometime in early 2020, but the thing with a pandemic is, by the time you know you've got one, depending on the rate of transmission, it's already ahead of you. Viruses replicate quickly, which means mutations are just this amazing verification of Darwinian stuff we can watch in real time, and in a kind of entirely unamused anxiety. 

And on news that there was a kind of "Nu" variant, the financial market was already reacting to the fear that we were going to have spikes like we saw with Delta. Which is entirely probable. It appears the mutations with the Omicron variant specifically would relate to the protein spike that vaccines and antibody-based treatments attack, meaning that this variation could be more likely to evade vaccination, and possibly earlier infection. 

So, a couple of things: transmissibility does not equal deadliness. We can't be sure that the Omicron variation is more likely to kill someone than its better-understood kin. Also, less protection against a specific variant isn't the same thing as no protection--it still makes sense to be vaxxed to the max. But with caution, I do think it is interesting that Omicron variant-infected people identified as having traveled from South Africa are represented by at least one person not at all vaxxed (in Europe) and vaxxed plus booster (Israel). This shouldn't tell us vaccination is useless--it should tell us we need to vax harder because we aren't getting "herd immunity" any other way!

And our failures in doing that are partially a capitalist choice, and partially a disinfo failure. In a culture that values free speech, democratic free nations suck at figuring out how to shut down liars and grifters. Also, I have to commend South Africa for identifying this variant, that will be attributed to having developed in SA unfairly. It could have happened anywhere--it was discovered in South Africa because they are a leader in virology science. 

Also, I have to be an entire arse about the name--how we could have had Abbot and Costello fun with the New/Nu variant (ok, it's not that funny, but still!) And it's clearly not funny that the western lettering Xi is the same for the Chinese president and for the Greek letter Xi that the new variant could have been marked by, and that also seems like it had humor potential but no--not very appropriate. 

I like Omicron as a name. It is the Giotto circle simplicity of Greek letters, but it is the 1980s Transformers-level naming for villians. The Omnicron variant. OMG, by Crom!. If a virus was as big as a micron, it would be a very big deal. 

Look, I take my inappropriate humor where I can get it. And I think Pfizer and Merck and them already know how to do a booster for this new development. I'm not actually all that phased because we know the drill by now--mask up, wash your hands. But I always suspect someone will try to politically benefit from disaster. And that is what this COVID set-back represents. And I hate that, because the people who would do that are the actual worst. 

Does It Work on Brain Worms?

 

Hydroxychloroquine is apparently old news, because the real hot new thing going on in Covid Country is taking horse paste, or Ivermectin, as either a preventative (I am aware of no immune-boosting abilities associated with shitting one's brains out) or as a treatment (I am aware of no virus-fighting abilities associated with shitting one's brains out--actually screwing up your intestinal flora sounds pretty goddamn bad). 

Senator Rand Paul, who is board certified eye doctor-adjacent, says people are blocking research into this valuable treatment because they are haters. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who mainstream media but especially conservative media try to make seem smarter and less psychopathic than he actually is, is being advised by an Ivermectin-supporter. And the same kind of idiot anti-vax dumbfucks who gave us the Nuremberg Codes talking point includes this dumbfuck who was testing Ivermectin on actual prisoners. 

Swell. There's a vaccine and some pretty basic hygienic protocols out there, but okay--people are going to take an anti-parasitic  for basically no good reason other than they don't trust the gummit or the pointy headed so-called "experts". And they are basically poisoning themselves to spite "The System".  And supposedly, you should try to talk these people down without implying they are dumbfucks. 

Sorry. That is not going to happen here. I am going to go ahead and call people dumbfucks for engaging in hardcore dumbfuckery. Because straight talk is not always nice. This is a thing called grandmotherly kindness. 

(Consider this the image of what my blog is always for.)

I'm not dancing on the graves of Joe Manning, or Marc Bernier, or Caleb Wallace.  To paraphrase a certain book, they preyed on a street corner and got their reward. And maybe, to compound the tragedy of their deaths, they even believed in the thing--the disinformation, that killed them. And also maybe not, because that's how disinfo works. Wretched people are wretched. They lie for all kinds of reasons, including attention. Social media gives us a very specific and nasty kind of anti-science geek. 

I get that people want to think they can fix themselves up for damn near nothing. There's tons of people out there who want to believe that mechanics and repairmen will fuck you over for the price of like, six bucks you could just get some washers and a gasket and do yourself a job in an afternoon, and why isn't medicine the same way? After all you had a body your whole life and so did cavemen, so why can't a remedy be simple and cheap? 

Why can't you just disinfect yourself with a little bleach or something? And of course people want to believe cleanliness is the end-all and be-all of warding off a plague. Be healthy--don't be  fat or disabled. Don't coddle yourself with masks or limiting yourself, they say--breathe the same fresh air as all the other gaspers and gapers around you. 

It just doesn't work, is all. So people are taking horse paste, and thinking they are passing rope worms when they are actually shitting out part of their own intestines, under the mistaken belief that something in their own digestive system is toxic--just like weirdos who "cleanse" or whatever (expensively) in the mistaken belief that you're just one weird trick from being thin, or young-looking, or knocking boots like you were in your twenties. The kind of hope in a bottle thinking conservative social networks are sadly primed for. 

But nothing is that simple. Things fall apart because entropy increases, but our society is both complex and fragile.  A hurricane happens in the midst of a pandemic, full ICUs and nowhere to evacuate patients. Children are orphaned. The world is untidy and cruel. Get vaccinations, boosters, accept masks and social distancing. Unhaunt your head. We are living in a time of trial and tribulation, but these aren't some fucking end times. They are just bad times, and need good people to step the hell up and do the right things. 

Double-Shot!

 

I got my second Pfizer jab today, and other than a slightly sore arm (only noticeable when I raise it) I feel pretty good. I'm basically glad to be all shotted up, and that I'm not going around all half-vaxxed anymore. I'm not even mad that I might need a booster in 6-12 months, because, welp! Being vaccinated beats the alternative. 

There's a lot of weird misinformation out there and weird people who spread it. I don't really feel like going into what weird shit anti-vaxxers are saying because it's not really an intellectual problem--I think wanting to believe that COVID-19 is not very dangerous and that Big Pharma is out to get folks stems from distrust of, well, everything. News reporting. The idea of expertise. The unknown. As I posted earlier about the "abundance of caution" phrase and why it doesn't set people's mind at ease, people mostly don't assess risk mentally, but with their gut.

And guts don't know stuff. They feel. People live in hope and buy lotto tickets because "any day, now". They live in fear and have a small arsenal in their basements because Armageddon's coming. They convince themselves they drive better after two drinks and no one gets pregnant their first time. They have lucky articles of clothing and avoid intersections where they've had a crash before. 

If the average random person has come to the conclusion that vaccines don't work or are actively harmful or are somehow worse than a virus that has killed 3 million people worldwide and badly whupped the behinds of millions more, it says something about their experiences before COVID-19 ever came around--it tells a story about their opinions of journalism, science, the pharma industry. 

I guess facts can partially help. If someone wants to get stroppy about wearing a mask, you can ask them if they wear a seatbelt. Odds are the answer is "yes", and how odd, only about 37K people die from car crashes a year compared to 500K from COVID in the past year, so.... You can point out that thanks to vaccinations, polio and smallpox have been nearly eradicated, and hardly anyone gets measles or mumps anymore. About 40-something percent of Americans voluntarily get flu shots each year (that number should be higher). 

As for side -effects, nothing's perfect. I'm seeing people doing incredulous post hoc, ergo propter hoc nonsense out there, just breathlessly going around like "This gut died after getting his COVID shot! Sure, he was 90/had cancer/anvil fell on his head, but it just goes to show you!" The drug companies aren't trying to kill you with side effects in much the same way they are not trying to get their whole entire asses sued off. And, like, how does it even benefit them to kill you, a potential future customer of their other fine products in your tottering old age? 

It's just something I've been thinking about, lately. There's a lot in common between responses to COVID-19 and climate change (like denialism, or thinking it's real, but happening to other people, or that it'll pass, or that it--a natural phenomenon--can be bargained with), and in part, there's also a major political component. And I have a lot of venom stored up for people who seem to be intentionally misinforming about the science, too. We need a vaccination against assholism, too.

Tucker Carlson and the Big Box of Nothing

 

Tucker Carlson says 'damning' Hunter Biden documents mysteriously vanish in transit to Los Angeleshttps://t.co/sgQxgDzb8O

— Fox News (@FoxNews) October 29, 2020

So documents were sent by regular mail, with no back-up like a .pdf stored on a hard drive or whatever? And then somehow, some deep state operative or whatever picked this package out of all the other bits of mail and stole the documents, which definitely were not labeled "Damaging Hunter Biden info, Deep State Operatives KEEP OUT." 

And, because the lack of a back-up of any sort would be embarrassing enough in terms of how one would handle stuff you're trying to vet and report on, pretend journalist Tucker Carlson is going to go with "we had incriminating stuff and now it is gone, please believe it existed for realsies" instead of more prudently not mentioning it because the actual story he's giving us is amazingly weak? 

Sigh. Unfortunately, I've been looking at stuff like, well, this, for a long time, and have found this is actually not ineffective. For a certain type of conspiracy-minded person, lack of proof of the conspiracy is proof of a cover-up, which in itself is proof that the conspiracy is way worse and the people running the show are way more devious than you even want to know. If you think "Oh Vixen, that's bollocks" think about how Sean Hannity pimped the Seth Rich conspiracy lie because dead men tell no tales and it made the Clintons into the obvious villians. This is like the decaf latte version of that. 

If the Republicans who like this sort of thing want to know why a lot of people are not biting on this story, it's not because social media is "throttling" it. It has a lot to do with the fact that the people who are promoting it are the sleaziest people alive and the story is rickety. Tucker Carlson right here went from his usual "if Richard Spencer but with a tv job" schtick to some balls-out Alex Jonesery. I genuinely wish that meant his reputation took a hit, but....I do not expect nice things.

 You know, and I know you know, that bleach isn't a fix for COVID. But goddamn, something needs to disinfect the RW media ecosystem.