"I want you to imagine a guy today, if R. Crumb never existed, but he emerged as R. Crumb today and put that work out. He would 100% be labeled in the Andrew Tate camp, right?"

 

Duncan Trussell had sent Joe Rogan an R. Crumb drawing, and it sets Joe off:

"Yet today, How to Be an Antiracist is widely remembered as a self-flagellating manual for bleeding hearts."

"This baffles Kendi, for whom the book’s thesis — that 'racist' is not a pejorative identity, like 'evil,' but a descriptive term that should be applied to policies according to whether they shrink or widen racial disparities — is focused on material effects. 'I don’t know how anyone could read any of my books' and think of them as self-help, Kendi says. But the apparent simplicity of its 'this or that' labeling system proved irresistible to institutions eager to virtue signal their way out of fixing inequality. As antiracism became a corporate DEI buzzword, Kendi was excoriated by criticism across the ideological spectrum. Journalist Tyler Austin Harper accused him of peddling 'self-help for white people that runs interference for corporations and wealthy universities.' The conservative strategist Christopher Rufo branded Kendi the chief exponent of 'critical race theory,' the GOP’s bogeyman for the 2022 midterms...."

From "Ibram X. Kendi Can’t Separate His Fame From How to Be an Antiracist/His new book deserves to be judged on its own terms" (NY Magazine).

Does Kendi regard it as "criticism" to be regarded as a leader in "critical race theory"? When did that happen? I should think that would be a point of pride. But no, conservatives have "branded" Kendi!

"There were forty-three runaways, part of a troop of roughly fifty.... All were rhesus macaques, a species known for its deep communal bonds and larkish intelligence...."

"'Macaques are the marines of monkeys, because they never leave a man behind,' Lisa Jones-Engel, a primatologist and senior science adviser at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (peta), told me. 'They could have followed the woods and ended up in a rhesus nirvana. What kills me is they were crying for their friends and daughters to come with them.'... Groups that oppose animal testing, historically the province of liberals and progressives, were in the process of forging a delicate alliance with the incoming Trump Administration. An estimated third of the forty-eight-billion-dollar budget of the N.I.H. goes toward funding animal research—and animal protectionists, Make America Healthy Again adherents, and anti-establishment libertarians were realizing that they shared a desire to see that budget slashed...."

From "The Runaway Monkeys Upending the Animal-Rights Movement/A troop of macaques escaped one of the largest primate-breeding facilities in America. Now a strange coalition of uncompromising activists and maga loyalists is demanding that all lab animals be set free" (The New Yorker).

"It’s an emotional gas-main explosion, from people who felt unheard, patronized, left behind...."

Writes Michael Hirschorn, explaining why he's voting for Mamdani, in "With Mamdani, the Left Finally Has Its Trump" (NYT).

This is a febrile, statue-toppling time, one with some parallels to the politics of previous moments of authoritarian ascendancy, when hard-left movements sprung up in response to the right. But it’s not quite a “horseshoe” moment, either. That’s the theory that far-left and far-right ideologies often converge around similar ideas in times like these. As we watch Mr. Trump lay waste to multiple generations of conservative dogma, it starts to become clear that ideology of any kind is inadequate to capture what is happening in the electorate.... 

"Overly online social media critics of Swift apparently instantaneously decided the new album is rife with racism and homophobia, as well as..."

"... secret messages of support for the patriarchy, eugenics, and Donald Trump. Forensic 'investigations' have uncovered 'dog-whistles,' but only woke detectives themselves are capable of hearing them. Either Swift is a covert alt-right influencer, or her young critics have been taught to see oppression everywhere, including where it quite clearly is not...."

Writes Rikki Schlott, in "Is Taylor Swift’s album really full of white supremacy and homophobia, or has everyone lost their minds?" (NY Post).

I don't really care, but I still felt engaged enough to listen to one of the songs, and isn't that the point? But how dumb it is to listen to songs and occupy your mind with the question whether the artist might be right wing. I'll just say what I said back in 2005: "To be a great artist is inherently right wing."

The song I listened to from the new album was "Cancelled!," which some listeners say is MAGA propaganda. Lyrics here, at Genius. Key words: "I like my friends cancelled.... At least you know exactly who your friends are/They're the ones with matching scars." Cancelled people make better friends. That could be a right-wing or a left-wing idea... at least if you get your left-wing ideas from half a century ago.

"I'm still mulling the point... about whether or not both parties moved in an individualistic direction and that there were these big solidaristic movements on the left that that began to to fade.... "

"My instinct was it was wrong. And as I think about it, I think it's right, but I think that it's right for possibly a different reason...."

Mulls Ezra Klein, in the new episode of his podcast, "MAHA Is a Bad Answer to a Good Question." I'm jumping you to a spot about half an hour into the discussion:

"I think there's a sense that that politics failed... particularly after 2024... You look around at the way... communal shaming worked. You look at the way people look back on the pandemic. You look at the backlash now to what gets called wokeness, Me Too. And whatever you believe about the underlying arguments being made that the effort to shame your way to a better world was a political failure — not a small political failure, but a political failure that has empowered the absolute worst people, the people you feared the most, like a Murderers' Row of who you did not want to have power.... And the move — I'm not sure if I would call it towards individualism — but away from this heavily enforced solidarity of both action and language — very, very aggressive on speech and info hazards — that that was part of what went wrong....  [T]he left became extremely comfortable with the deployment of state power on behalf of institutions and so on in a way that really radicalized the other side. And the other side didn't become libertarian — in a strange way, they became authoritarian...."

Klein seems to be blaming the left for making the right authoritarian, but isn't he also accusing the left of authoritarianism? What is "heavily enforced solidarity" that's "very, very aggressive on speech and info hazards" — what is it to be "extremely comfortable with the deployment of state power" — if not authoritarianism?

By the way, what is a Murderers' Row? The term goes back to at least 1850, when it referred to a row of prison cells in New York City's Tombs. But most Americans probably think of it in as referring to baseball— especially the 1927 New York Yankees, which had a very intimidating batting lineup. If that's your reference point, Klein sounds like he's expressing awe and admiration for the left's adversaries. Trump is the Babe Ruth of politics.

"Before our eyes, a new generation of leaders is transcending the ancient conflicts and tired divisions of the past..."

"... and forging a future where the Middle East is defined by commerce, not chaos; where it exports technology, not terrorism; and where people of different nations, religions, and creeds are building cities together — not bombing each other out of existence. (Watch) This great transformation has not come from Western interventionists… giving you lectures on how to live or how to govern your own affairs. No, the gleaming marvels of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were not created by the so-called ‘nation-builders,’ ‘neo-cons,’ or ‘liberal non-profits,’ like those who spent trillions failing to develop Kabul and Baghdad, so many other cities. Instead, the birth of a modern Middle East has been brought about by the people of the region themselves … developing your own sovereign countries, pursuing your own unique visions, and charting your own destinies. (Watch) In the end, the so-called ‘nation-builders’ wrecked far more nations than they built — and the interventionists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves. (Watch)..."

From President Trump's speech in Riyadh.

Here's how the NYT covered the tremendously important speech: "Trump’s Pledge to the Middle East: No More ‘Lectures on How to Live’/In Saudi Arabia, the president denounced Western intervention and nation-building, garnering both praise and eye rolls." (Yes, the speech garnered.) Excerpt:

"And what's interesting here is that even people who are skeptical of Trump's tariffs might be in favor of reining in fast fashion for environmental reasons or because they're against overconsumption."

"And you can actually see that playing out online. 'We need to stop filling up our closets and fill up our banks. There's this whole buy less movement.' 'We're not rich enough to afford these tariffs. So let's embrace the idea of under consumption.' 'Maybe we need to start taking responsibility for how much textile waste is in landfills in other countries.' 'Our relationship with consumption is fundamentally unhealthy, and people cannot stop buying stuff.' On TikTok, alongside the massive Shein hauls, you can also see people having conversations about consuming less... and being more intentional about where they're buying things from...."

From today's episode of the NYT "Daily" podcast, "The End of Fast Fashion?" (audio and transcript at Podscribe).

I'm happy to see the NYT devoting some attention to the progressive argument in favor of Trump's tariffs on China.

"If you say 'Keep Austin Weird' to somebody under the age of 40, they would think of that as an antique-y slogan, like Ye Old Shoppe."

"It doesn’t have any resonance for their lived experience of Austin."

Said H.W. Brands, a University of Texas historian, quoted in "Austin Welcomed Musk. Now It’s Weird (in a New Way). The famously liberal bastion of Austin is grappling uneasily with Elon Musk’s rightward turn, which has begun transforming his adopted home into an unlikely hub of right-of-center thinkers" (NYT).

Tie-dyed T-shirts still urge residents to “Keep Austin Weird,” mostly in hotels and tourist shops. But a different kind of counterculture has taken root amid an influx of decidedly right-of-center figures (including Mr. Musk), self-described freethinkers (like the podcasters Joe Rogan and Lex Fridman), and conservative entrepreneurs (like Joe Lonsdale). Already in town was Austin’s resident conspiracy theorist, Alex Jones, and his far-right Infowars. There’s even a new, contrarian institution of higher learning looking to compete with the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Austin. Weird, perhaps, but not in the way of the old bumper-sticker mantra....

Can weirdness fans complain when weirdness gets weirder? Yes, they can and they do. They may prefer a softer, quirkier form of weird. And they may think weirdness is inherently left-wing. But the left got so censorious and repressive... and yet, the left is often weird... in specific, prescribed ways. 

Hey, remember when "weird" was the dominant insult deployed by the Democratic Party? It seemed that they chose their Vice Presidential candidate because he said it just so at the perfect time.

"Until now, arguments for limiting consumption have tended to come from the left rather than the right."

"They date back at least to the economist Thorstein Veblen, who, at the start of the twentieth century, wrote acidly about the 'conspicuous consumption' engaged in by grandees of the Gilded Age. More recently, a 'degrowth' movement has emerged, which aims to decrease consumption and to de-prioritize G.D.P. growth on the grounds that they are harmful to the environment and that, in any case, accumulating more 'stuff' doesn’t really increase the well-being of people.This argument depends on two concepts familiar to economists: the diminishing marginal utility of consumption, which is, roughly speaking, the notion that if you already own nineteen dolls, buying a twentieth won’t give you much pleasure, and competitive consumption, or the idea that many people are trapped in an endless cycle of trying to outshine their friends and neighbors with their purchases.... 'Trump, degrowther,' the leftist journalist Doug Henwood commented online last week.... 'What he is doing is fairly unprecedented: explicitly saying that he is willing to pay an economic price in terms of growth in order to protect something else that he thinks is valuable and important,' Daniel Susskind, an economics professor at King’s College London who is the author of the 2024 book 'Growth: A History and a Reckoning' told me...."

Writes John Cassidy, in "Donald Trump Versus Barbie/Can the Administration retain public support for a trade policy that could force Americans to buy less stuff?" (The New Yorker).

Why don't the anti-consumption lefties embrace Trump? 

My first reaction to Trump's "Maybe the children will have 2 dolls instead of 30" was: "This reminds me of what those on the left used to say to us

"The TV show 'Girls' is a right-wing show.... [That's] some labeling we’re grafting onto this thing after the fact."

"But what these pieces of work are doing is telling the truth about the world in a way that is not compromised by artistic or ideological preferences.... about [what]... society wishes were true about these people. So my thing is that if you are telling the truth about the world, then you are going to make right wing art..."

I'm listening to Jonathan Keeperman on Ross Douthat's podcast in an episode called "The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Offensive":

 

The quote above is Keeperman's. Douthat responds: "Then you’re saying all great art is somehow right wing." He thinks there can be some great art that is "left coded," but he agrees about "Girls," because "it’s a scabrous satire of a particular kind of upper middle class lifestyle in a liberal city."

Keeperman denies that he's saying "if I like it, therefore it’s right wing art, or if it tells the truth [it's right wing art]." Click on the embedded video if you want to hear Keeperman clarify or hear Douthat wedge in the concept of "vitalism" ("a celebration of individuality, strength, excellence, and an anxiety about equality and democracy as... enemies of human greatness").

That reminds me of the time — back in 2005 — I incurred the wrath of lefties by saying "To be a great artist is inherently right wing."

But back to "Girls." Why talk about "Girls" now? The reason for me is that Lena Dunham has a new essay in The New Yorker: "Why I Broke Up with New York/Most people accept the city’s chaos as a toll for an expansive life. It took me several decades to realize that I could go my own way."

"The fallout from the trade disruption will hurt the United States, which relies on China for all sorts of manufactured goods, but will do more damage to China..."

"... aid Wang Yuesheng, the director of the Institute of International Economics at Peking University. 'The impact on China is mainly that Chinese products have nowhere to go,' Mr. Wang said. That will ravage export-oriented companies making things like furniture, clothing, toys and home appliances along China’s eastern seaboard, which largely exist to serve American consumers. 'These companies will be hit very hard,' Mr. Wang said.... Beijing’s strategy now is to push back at the United States and hope that Mr. Trump succumbs to domestic pressure to reverse course, said Evan Medeiros, a professor of Asian studies at Georgetown University who served as an Asia adviser to President Barack Obama. 'They know that if they give in to pressure they will get more pressure,' he said. 'They will resist it with the belief that China can withstand more pain than they can.'"

I'm reading "For U.S. and China, a Risky Game of Chicken With No Off-Ramp in Sight/Neither side wants to look weak by backing down on tariffs. But if their trade relationship collapses, the global consequences could be profound" (NYT).

The off-ramp is free trade!

Until then, it's a test of who "can withstand more pain." I can see thinking Americans will give up first, but the pain is worse for China. They have all this junk they made for us — furniture, clothing, toys and home appliances — and we'd just be saving money and going without a lot of extra items we might be better off without — all that "fast fashion," all the plastic toys, all the home redecorating madness. We may even learn that life is better without so many cheap consumer goods. Less waste. Less damage to our soul from the slave labor.

They need to break before we learn to live without them. But if they don't, we pocket in the money from the tariffs.

Why aren't progressives on Trump's side here?

"Rogan’s descent into far-right politics is instructive for understanding the diminished cultural resistance to Trump."

Writes Brady Brickner-Wood, in "What Happened to the Trump Resistance? If the President’s first term was colored with protests and hashtags, his second has so far been characterized by a lack of dissidence" (The New Yorker).

The comedian and U.F.C. commentator had once come across as an anti-establishment social progressive—he endorsed Sanders for President in 2020—but now he presents himself as having penetrated the lies of the Democratic deep state. His once goofy interest in alien and moon-landing conspiracy theories quickly led to his identifying conspiracies everywhere: immigrants were being bused from blue to red states to swing the electorate in favor of Democrats; eating a beef-only diet could cure arthritis; the care given to transgender children was unethical in a “Dr. Frankenstein sort of way.” His dalliances with the psychedelic drug DMT and his experiments with holistic treatment modalities have mushroomed into anti-vax rhetoric and aggressive scientific skepticism. Establishment Democrats, as he sees it, mask their deceptions with self-righteousness while Trump tells it like it is, exposing the web of lies Rogan suddenly saw in everything....

Was that instructive for understanding the diminished cultural resistance to Trump?

This article caused me to rediscover my old "tired of politics" tag. But I don't know that people are tired of protesting or tired of needing to be upset about one thing or the other out there in the political world every damned day. I think a lot of people who are just keeping quiet actually like what Trump is doing. 

"A dramatic political realignment of the two major parties on foreign and economic policy has Republicans leading the charge on a variety of issue stances that Sanders-style progressives and labor unions continue to support..."

"... even as corporatist Democratic voters abandon them. These include Mr. Trump’s skepticism of free trade and open borders—which may help account for the 10% of Democratic voters who told Monmouth University pollsters last month that they’re optimistic about a second Trump term."

Writes the political cartoonist Ted Rall, in "Optimism About Trump on the Left/His opposition to war and skepticism about corporations and markets make him appealing to some progressives" (Wall Street Journal).

This is not a bad right-wing comedy sketch. This is a scene in the movie "Emilia Pérez," which was honored with 10 Golden Globe nominations.

You can read what the "Top Critics" are saying about it here (on Rotten Tomatoes). For example: "It seems to revel in its contradictions, mixing crassness with tenderness, pastiche with originality, silliness with sincerity. It’s emotionally manipulative. It’s visually over-the-top. It’s a mess, in other words -- a spectacular, operatic one."

Not all critics like it. For example, at Vox, there's "Emilia Pérez is a regressive movie that thinks it’s woke. It will probably win an Oscar. Could a movie musical about a trans Mexican drug lord be this awards season’s Crash?" That is, among those who like wokeness, there's some question whether it is properly woke.

ADDED: Here's the trailer for "Emilia Pérez":

"I think she’s beautiful — very beautiful! I find her very beautiful. I think she’s liberal. She probably doesn’t like Trump. I hear she’s very talented. I think she’s very beautiful, actually — unusually beautiful!"

Said Donald Trump, quoted in "Donald Trump Calls Taylor Swift ‘Unusually Beautiful’ but ‘Liberal’ in New ‘Apprentice’ Book" (Variety).

Also from the book, he says, "She is liberal, or is that just an act? She’s legitimately liberal? It’s not an act? It surprises me that a country star can be successful being liberal." By that time, Swift had transitioned to being a pop star. With pop stars, it would be surprising if they can be successful without being liberal... or just acting liberal. 

"During the N.B.A. finals that began on Thursday, the Biden campaign ran a TV ad titled, 'Flag,' which really mirrors a strategy..."

"... that senior officials described to The New Yorker earlier this year. It’s highly focused on “freedom” conceptually, through the prism of abortion, voting rights and a few other issues. While the issues are definitely longstanding Democratic priorities, if you watch it, the solemn patriotic tone of the ad feels a little old school Republican to me — it’s an interesting artifact of how things have changed. Biden is running to preserve rights and freedoms, or, through another lens, conserve the old ways."

Writes Katherine Miller, in "This Year, It’s Democrats Who Are Waving the Flag of Freedom" (NYT).

This gets my "left-or-right ambiguity" tag. 

Where was I just reading that displaying a flag by your front door was the equivalent of a sign saying We're voting for Trump? 

Here's the ad:

Did you notice how opposition to gun rights fit the rhetoric of freedom? It's "the freedom for our children to be safe from gun violence."

The New Yorker article, from last March, is "Joe Biden’s Last Campaign/Trailing Trump in polls and facing doubts about his age, the President voices defiant confidence in his prospects for reëlection" by Evan Osnos. I started to read it, and when I got to the line "Biden, always a little taller than you expect," I knew I'd blogged it at the time. Here. Before reading my old post, I was getting ready to make a large-boulder-the-size-of-a-small-boulder joke, but then I saw that's what I did at the time:

"Fetterman’s health has improved more and faster than expected, and in what may not be a coincidence..."

"... the more his brain damage recedes, the less he agrees with lefty activists and the Democratic Party’s functionaries. Speaking at Yeshiva University’s commencement, Fetterman dramatically stripped off his Harvard hood and announced he was 'profoundly disappointed' at his alma mater’s refusal to address the antisemitism rampant on its campus, a discontent he extended to the entire antisemitism-enabling Ivy League. Quoth Fetterman: 'As an alum of Harvard — look, I graduated 25 years ago, and of course, it was always a little pinko. But now, I don’t recognize it....' When pro-Palestinian protesters showed up at the senator’s house (no dogpiling in his defense from lefty activists over this) and told him he had 'nowhere to hide,' Fetterman defiantly got on his roof with an Israeli flag....."

Writes Glenn Reynolds, in "Mea culpa, Fetterman: I was wrong about the senator and his illness" (NY Post).

"The perpetrator was not a member of any radicalized group.... He was not left or right — he was interested in politics, that’s all."

"The only group he was a member of was the association of Slovak writers," according to Interior Minister Matus Sutaj-Estok, who said that "the suspect had expressed antigovernment sentiments, including attending protests over the last year, but had been 'radicalized recently, after the presidential election.'"

From "Slovak officials call the shooting suspect a ‘lone wolf’ who had recently been radicalized" in "Suspect Is Charged in Attempted Killing of Slovakia’s Leader/The authorities did not identify the suspect in the shooting of Prime Minister Robert Fico but described him as a 'lone wolf.' Politicians called for calm as Mr. Fico’s condition appeared to stabilize" (NYT).

We're told the suspect was a "71-year-old amateur poet" and he "did not 'agree with current politics.'" But what were the current politics that the suspect did not agree with?

"This is not the first midcentury, middle-America food craze to find new life online: Jell-O molds, 1970s-era desserts and 1970s-themed dinner parties..."

"... have all made unexpected comebacks. That’s all 'packaged-food cuisine' born of the hyper-consumerism of the 1950s.... For some, the box mixes and cans — triumphs of postwar prosperity — are a rosy portal to an imagined 'simpler time' of family dinners and easy living. 'That is nostalgia for America,' she said. 'That is our national comfort food.'"

From "Watergate Salad Makes a Comeback/The 1970s-era dish made with pistachio pudding mix, canned pineapple and mini marshmallows has caught the curious eye of the TikTok generation" (NYT).

It's absurd that something embodying nostalgia for a lost culture should bear the name "Watergate." But the nostalgia is felt by young people today, who don't mind mixing the 50s, 60s, and 70s together, not like us Boomers who think the early 60s, mid-60s, and late 60s were distinctly different eras and have long indulged in the deep, mystic belief that the first few years of the 70s were the real 60s.

And maybe there is nostalgia for the Watergate scandal. Maybe it seems poignant and delicate compared to the scandals of today... and even for Nixon. My son Chris — who is reading a biography of each American President — texted me about Nixon recently — somewhat jocosely — "Nixon is underrated. He was liberal!/Got more done for progressive causes than democrats do today." 

Anyway, the nostalgia for lost mid-century America is about far more than food. There's a sense that people lived more rewarding, warm, and loving lives back then. Here's something I saw on TikTok the other day. Let me know how it made you feel or, better yet, if you are not young, show it to someone young and ask them how it makes them feel: