What You Missed: August 17-21
Here's some of the exclusive content that our subscribers received this week.
Hi again! It’s me, back to share more excerpts from this week’s subscriber-only content.
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In “Steve Bannon Was Never a Genius,” Paul Blest wrote about how Bannon’s supposed evil political mastermind status was largely a myth:
All of this highlights a key point: Steve Bannon was never the genius that he was portrayed as by himself, his allies, the media, and Republicans and Democrats who had no idea what hit them when Trump won. What he was right about was that in 2016, the American political establishment was deeply unpopular because it hadn’t actually done anything for the average person in this country in years.
Like Lee Atwater, Karl Rove, and other Brains Behind the Operations before him, Bannon found a candidate willing to play on racial and ethnic and religious bigotry to convince white people that the source of all of their problems wasn’t a government which takes their money and gives them very little in return—certainly not healthcare or education or livable wages or good air to breathe and water to drink—but rather the vulnerable people they believed were getting that money instead.
In “The System Is Back,” I wrote about the dark side of America’s sudden return to capital-p Politics:
With Kamala Harris in place as Joe Biden’s running mate, with the Democratic National Convention starting tonight, with the debates looming up ahead, we have been plunged right back into the electoral morass. We are done with movement politics, with mass uprisings. It is time for the system to reassert itself.
The message to anyone who might have anything to say about that right now is clear: this is the ticket. This is the only route to change that is available. The time for debate and challenge and pressure is over. The adults have returned to the scene, and they’ll take it from here.
That would be distressing enough, but it is equally head-spinning to watch untold numbers of people who were full #ACAB just a few weeks ago now enthusiastically gear up to run defense for the inspirational pairing of one of the chief architects of American mass incarceration and a career prosecutor. All it took was adding a new character to the storyline, and people who might have surged into the streets in June are now warning any dissenters to shut the hell up.
In our weekly Office Hours subscriber-only chat, we discussed (shudder) next week’s Republican National Convention:
The Republicans have already started stacking their upcoming convention deck with array of litigious monsters and smarmy haircuts depraved enough to make me wonder: How bad can it get? I mean, really, given the murderer’s row of ghoulish kooks and literal war criminals the Trump administration has amplified for the past three-and-a-half years, I have to assume the GOP convention is going to feel like Ayn Rand MC-ing the Jim Rose Circus.
So, I ask: With the RNC on the horizon, what’s the worst that’ll happen? How bad will it get? Whose decrepit corpse will the GOP necromancers exhume to deliver a rousing keynote speech in support of unbridled fascism?
And in his weekly “Man What the Hell?” newsletter, Rafi Schwartz wrote about, among other things…this:
Falwell that ends well
Now that he’s been ignominiously booted from his ultra-conservative Liberty University, let’s take a trip down Jerry Falwell Jr’s truly bizarre Instagram timeline, and revisit the heady days of December 2018. Falwell was riding high on the hog — he had the ear of the president, an entire educational institution at his disposal, and, apparently, the ability to dick-thrust several hundred pounds of virtuous Christian women into the air.
Why would Jerry do, uh, this? Because, as his original Instagram post explains, he just wanted to be like Dwayne the Rock Johnson.
And this:
The (fucker-)upper chamber
Politicians — especially those in the vaulted halls of the United States Senate — are weird, alien creatures whose recognizably human traits have been lobbied out of them. That said, this is about as close to a genuine human moment as I’ve seen from a member of that lofty deliberative body in a long, long time.
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