The "Oh no, not work!" guy is so repulsive that I had to wonder if he is an actor deliberately evoking our disgust.

"Oh no, not work!"pic.twitter.com/RSfBNl90j9

— Stephen Knight 🎙️ (@GSpellchecker) June 12, 2025

The lovely black woman also seems perfectly cast.

But I'll assume they are real people in a real confrontation. Somebody's there with the camera, and they know it, but everything's in front of cameras these days. Human behavior is behavior for the camera now. Is this scene real? It's real in today's terms — real and very viral.

The scene is so perfect: The ordinary person, burdened in her daily life, is so reasonable, so appealing, and the man, cocksure in his cause, is so enragingly and hilariously awful. His cause is, to him, so obviously more important than her work. But what is his cause? It is, ironically, persons of color getting to work in the United States of America.

Joni Ernst serves up death, apology, sarcasm, and Jesus.

Against all odds, Joni Ernst has made it worse pic.twitter.com/aElIudNmZG

— Keith Edwards (@keithedwards) May 31, 2025

I had to go back to this after reading about it because I had clicked it off in disgust thinking it was an genuine effort to make a "sincere" apology.

For background: "Joni Ernst posts sarcastic apology video following comments that 'we all are going to die'" (Des Moines Register): "The Iowa Republican's original comments came at a town hall in Parkersburg on Friday, May 30, while she was answering a question about cuts to Medicaid in President Donald Trump's tax package that the Senate is poised to consider. During Ernst's answer, someone in the audience interrupted her to shout, 'people will die!' Ernst replied by saying, 'People are not — well, we all are going to die. For heaven’s sakes, folks.'"

"When you’re president and you’ve done a good job and you’re popular, you don’t go after them so you can win an election."

"They’ve done indictments in order to win an election. They call it weaponization. But yeah they have done something that allows the next party, I mean if somebody, if I happen to be president and I see somebody who’s doing well and beating me very badly, I say go down and indict them, mostly they would be out of business. They’d be out. They’d be out of the election."

Said Donald Trump, quoted in a Guardian article with a title that seems to have been written by someone pretending not to understand sarcasm: "Trump suggests he would use FBI to go after political rivals if elected in 2024 Trump said: 'If I happen to be president and I see somebody doing well and beating me very badly, I say go down and indict them.'"

"Mr Trump says he will resolve all burning issues within several days, including the Ukrainian crisis. We cannot help but feel happy about it."

Said Vladimir Putin, quoted in "Donald Trump pleased at praise from Putin: 'I like that he said that'/Former US president makes comment in interview with NBC after being told Putin approved of his stance on Russia invasion" (The Guardian).

The headline is — deliberately? — deceptive. What Putin said wasn't "praise." It was sarcasm. 

 

In that light, Trump's response — "I like that he said that. Because that means what I’m saying is right" — doesn't mean he's idiotically soaking up praise. Trump is simply taking the opportunity to restate that he can broker a deal.

Here, consider the tone and the context:

Sarcasm on top of sarcasm.

Here’s Roseanne Barr saying the Holocaust never happened but should’ve because “Jews cause all the world’s problems,” so 6M of us shd be killed! Is that a “true threat” as SCOTUS defined it today in Counterman v. Colorado? Maybe not but It comes close!https://t.co/FOWHtLpUFp

— Laurence Tribe 🇺🇦 ⚖️ (@tribelaw) June 27, 2023

Context:

Impossible things before breakfast.

It’s too bad Twitter ceased to exist several weeks ago when those layoffs happened and everyone shifted to Mastodon; I used to like posting there.

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) December 5, 2022

He's writing in a place he asserts doesn't exist. 

He's also writing badly: "... everyone shifted to Mastodon; I used to like posting there." Don't write it like that unless "there" means Mastodon. You're writing one damned sentence and I have to do the editing work in my head.

You know, if he'd given a link, I'd have checked out his writing on Mastodon. I even tried googling his name and Mastodon, and I couldn't find it. I found the — a? — Mastodon site and searched for his name and got 4 links. I clicked on all 4 and found no content.

Somehow "everyone" is there, but I see no one.

UPDATE: Commenters are telling me it's sarcasm. I don't know why I wasn't more attuned to the kudzu of the internet.

Now, I'm thinking I have 2 kinds of readers: the ones who are saying why should I know or care about the Madison Public Market and...

... the ones who are saying yes, that's the thing that Althouse questioned that one time and Paul Soglin, the Mayor of Madison, instead of engaging respectfully, decided to attack her big time, so she was forced to resort to reason and mockery?

I'm reading "Madison Public Market all but scrapped, as officials make one last plea to alders for funding" (WKOW).

Here's the post I wrote on January 10, 2017:

"But what really wounded me — what really wounded me — was when the Duke of Sussex addressed the United Nations and seemed to compare the decision whose name may not be spoken with the Russian attack on Ukraine."

Said Samuel Alito, quoted in "U.S. Supreme Court Justice Alito mocks foreign critics of abortion ruling" (Reuters, reporting on the contents of the video that is embedded in the previous post).

In Prince Harry's July 18 speech, he spoke of 2022 as "a painful year in a painful decade" before citing the war in Ukraine and "the rolling back of constitutional rights here in the United States," which appeared to reference the abortion ruling.

Did Prince Harry "compare" the 2 things in any way other than listing them as painful things that happened in the past decade? It was a "rolling back" of a constitutional right. What's the point of Alito's sarcasm? It's close to saying, ha, ha, I have power and you don't. 

Why the comedy? Women have lost an important right that we'd thought for decades was guaranteed by constitutional law. Now, Alito snarks that the opinion he wrote is "the decision whose name may not be spoken." Is that funny? 

If people don't want to say the case name — Dobbs — it's because: 1. They don't remember it, 2. Roe is much more familiar and it's easier to say the case that overruled Roe, or 3. They intend to express anger and antagonism toward Dobbs by refusing to acknowledge its existence and envisioning its quick demise.

To jokingly call Dobbs "the decision whose name may not be spoken" is to seem to exult in your power. And that's ironic, considering that the best justification for what the Court did is judicial restraint. 

"Then we hit the 'My Cousin Vinny' point in the cross. For those of you who are sadly unfamiliar with the best law-themed movie ever produced..."

"... two young men find themselves mistaken for murderers. When told by police that they are suspected of having killed someone, one of the men bursts out, in question form, 'I killed someone?' This would later be read in court as if it were a statement of confession, rather than an outburst of bewilderment. In this real-life trial, it turns out that someone had accused Kyle to his face, on the street, of having pointed a gun at him. Knowing that he’d never done that, Kyle responded sarcastically, 'Yeah, I pointed a gun at you,' and immediately turned around and walked away from a situation that could have been escalated. Now, in court, Binder presented this sarcastic remark as if it were a statement of fact, and characterized Kyle’s denial of the statement being made seriously as a lie."

From "Rittenhouse Trial Day 7: Kyle Survives Abusive Cross-Examination" by Andrew Branca (Legal Insurrection)(video of this portion of the trial at the link).

"The first thing that happened to 'woke' was that it was borrowed from Black slang. It first appeared in neither a BuzzFeed article nor a rap but..."

"... a jolly piece on Black vernacular expressions in 1962 in this newspaper called 'If You’re Woke, You Dig It.'...  It was after 2010 that 'woke' jumped the fence into mainstream parlance. Erykah Badu’s 'Master Teacher' seems to have at least planted a seed, and then those 'stay woke' salutes on Twitter in 2012 were in the wake of the Trayvon Martin killing, upon which the expression was truly set in stone.... 'Stay woke' on white people’s T-shirts is a sign of coming together.... But... then why is wokeness now something so many people are more likely to disavow than own? Isn’t that the same old thing, a rejection of Blackness? A rejection, yes — but of a kind too typical of what happens to words all the time to fit a race-specific narrative. We understand this when we see that the real wind behind its wings in the early 2010s was that 'woke' served as a handy, nonpejorative replacement for 'politically correct.'  I remember that term used straight, without dismissal and only a hint of irony, in 1984. A white college friend, very much of the left, used it with a quiet sprinkle of irony, but sincerely. ('Of course, you know this if you’re' — smile and two-millisecond pause, signaling 'you know' — 'politically correct.') He meant that a certain complex of leftist beliefs — i.e., the ones called 'woke' in 2012 — were obviously the proper ones for any reasonable person to have, that they signaled a higher awareness. In a view like that, there is, inevitably, a certain self-satisfaction. And in some of those holding this kind of view, that self-satisfaction will express itself in dismissal and abuse of those ungifted with the third eye in question. The result will be resistance...."

Writes John McWhorter in "How ‘Woke’ Became an Insult" (NYT).

I think 1984 was the year I first heard the expression "politically correct." It's an easy year for me to remember because it was the year I moved to Madison. People who lived east of the state capitol liked to say they lived on "the politically correct east side." They were proud of where they lived and intended a putdown of the presumably more conventional people — more corporate people — who chose the west side. 

McWhorter doesn't come right out and say it, but the answer to the question how woke became an insult is that it was used as an insult: Those who self-indentified as woke meant to insult those who didn't agree with them. That makes people want to insult you in return, and throwing your own word back in your face is the simplest reflex. It's sarcasm. You just say the same thing they were sincere about but you say to be mean. It's low discourse, but it's so easy. 

Scott Adams and Glenn Greenwald punch down at Just Jess.

Just Jess is a woman on Twitter with less than 10,000 followers, but she said something that got a reaction:

So... turns out the new friend I went on vacation with doesn't believe there was an insurrection. So... vacation over 4 days early. Friendship way over. Mind blown.

I can't tell what this "new friend" did. Did she think there was no breach of the Capitol at all or was she getting semantic about the word "insurrection"? 

Anyway... I thought it was interesting that both Scott Adams and Glenn Greenwald reacted.

Adams's reaction is pithy and funny, but he's using a tight definition of "insurrection" that exaggerates the extremism of Just Jess. He tweets:

Never go on vacation with someone who believes you can conquer a superpower by occupying a room in the Capitol.

I admire the humor technique of switching the perspective to that of the new friend. She shouldn't want to be stuck in close quarters with Jess. 

By the way, isn't it always a bad idea to go on a vacation with a new friend — at least if you're going to be stuck in a car or a hotel room with this person for many long hours? You don't know whether you'll bug each other or be any good at navigating around arguments.

Greenwald is not so funny. He barrels straight into the official humor format of the internet, sarcasm — heavy, obvious sarcasm:

Immediately terminate all friendships with anyone who sees the world differently than you see it -- especially politics. Much healthier that way never to have your views questioned or challenged by anyone near you.

What if you had to go on a cross-country road trip with one of these 3 — Glenn, Scott, or Jess? Well, I think the first choice is quite clear, but I'll hold back my response for now and give you a chance to vote:

You must drive cross-country with Glenn Greenwald, Scott Adams, or Just Jess. Assume they're all good drivers. Who do you pick?

Glenn. Second choice: Scott.

Glenn. Second choice: Jess.

Scott. Second choice: Glenn.

Scott. Second choice: Jess.

Jess. Second choice: Glenn.

Jess: Second choice: Scott.

 

pollcode.com free polls

I don't know why I'm convinced I get Mick Jagger, but this...

I’m so looking forward to coming back to an America free of harsh words and name calling and be amongst people who I know have common ground and harmony. It’s a challenge but it can be done!

— Mick Jagger (@MickJagger) November 7, 2020

... this is sarcasm. I got there via Ed Driscoll at Instapundit who doesn't seem to be reading Mick's tweet as humor, but come on.

Liberal comedians have turned away from sarcasm, "because people will momentarily wonder if you’re not on their side," but "the right has embraced it."

"The conservative humorist who has found the most success with this technique is now the President of the United States.... In his love of insults, his penchant for hyperbole and his commitment to shtick — that knowing performance of himself that blurs the line between personality and persona — Trump is unprecedented among American presidents. The most striking feature of his rhetorical style is how much it resembles that of a nightclub comic.... Organizations like The Times and CNN have to take the president seriously. When he says something that isn’t true, they must soberly point out that it isn’t, even when the intent of the untruth is not to deceive but to achieve some rhetorical effect. As a result, news organizations unequipped to cover an ironic president get lumped in with partisans who misconstrue his irony in bad faith. Both groups are cast as humorless scolds, solidifying the loyalty of MAGA types who think of themselves as in on a joke the media does not understand. Ambiguous irony also lets the president hedge his bets. Trump is constantly saying things he doesn’t mean (Jim Acosta is 'a real beauty'), or things he kind of means but goes on to retract (his authority is 'total'), or things he didn’t mean at first but later does ('build the wall'), or things nobody thought he meant that he apparently did ('lock her up'), as well as things he seemingly did mean before he retroactively declared them sarcasm — like his televised claim that injecting bleach might stop the coronavirus. Ambiguous irony opens up space for Trump to revise the meaning of his statements later, when he knows how they have played. This miasma of ill-defined but ever-present irony makes Trump virtually impossible to mock, because that job is taken. The real Donald Trump acts as if he’s doing an impression of some normal-looking, occasionally self-aggrandizing president we don’t know about.... Trump has effectively neutralized political comedy by shifting the place where jokes happen from the soundstage to the White House."

From "How President Trump Ruined Political Comedy/The Trump years created a bumper crop of liberal comedy shows — almost all of which have been canceled. Why is the president so impervious to satire?" by Dan Brooks (NYT).

"Is the joke that... the young woman doesn’t realise the interviewer does not have the same interests as she does and is asking sarcastic questions?"

I honestly don’t understand how this is funny. Is the joke that the interviewer doesn’t like the same things the young woman does? Or that the young woman doesn’t realise the interviewer does not have the same interests as she does and is asking sarcastic questions?

— Andy Young (@andyryoung) September 9, 2020

Racial harmony, circa 1986: Everybody, especially Lou Reed, sings "Soul Man."

I ran across that this morning because the Jessica Krug story (see previous post) got me thinking about the old movie "Soul Man," which I've never seen, but remember very well, because it was about affirmative action in law school, in which a white guy misidentifies himself as black so he can qualify for a black-only scholarship at Harvard Law School. The movie is named after the old Sam and Dave song, and Sam participated in that remake with Lou Reed — known for, among other things, the song "I Wanna Be Black"* — of the already-old song.

The use of blackface in the movie was criticized at the time, most notably by Spike Lee. The actress Rae Dawn Chong, who played the main character's love interest, said: "It was only controversial because Spike Lee made a thing of it. He'd never seen the movie and he just jumped all over it... If you watch the movie, it's really making white people look stupid… I always tried to be an actor who was doing a part that was a character versus what I call 'blackting,' or playing my race, because I knew that I would fail because I was mixed. I was the black actor for sure, but I didn't lead with my epidermis, and that offended people like Spike Lee, I think."

Anyway, it has always been a terrible idea for a white person to adopt a black identity to get ahead within higher education. That was a subject of a Hollywood movie in 1986. It's amazing that real people so recently have attempted this sort of fraud. Jessica Krug has outed herself (perhaps because she would have been outed by others), but it makes you wonder how many other people are out there who've furthered their careers by pretending to be black.

I'm writing this post mostly because I was struck by the racial healing acted out in that music video — as if getting white people to sing "I'm a soul man" could bring us all together. To quote another Lou Reed song: You know, those were different times.
__________________
* Listen to the song "I Wanna Be Black" here. Read the lyrics, here. They're quite shockingly racist, but the key line, for comprehension purposes is, "Oh, I don't wanna be a fucked up/Middle class college student no more." The annotation at the lyrics link says:

"This song [is] described by Ann Powers as 'a proto-rap unspooling of racist stereotypes that makes fun of white hipsters by forcing a deep wallow in ignorance.' Though racist, this song attempts to be a satire of bored young white men in America and their attitudes and beliefs around black men. Whether it passes Poe’s Law or not, is up for debate."

What's Poe's Law? Wikipedia says:

"Poe's law is an adage of Internet culture stating that, without a clear indicator of the author's intent, it is impossible to create a parody of extreme views so obviously exaggerated that it cannot be mistaken by some readers for a sincere expression of the views being parodied." 

I guess you "pass" Poe's Law when you're clear enough that you are not the thing you are parodying. So, Lou Reed was singing all these racist things but then he let us know that he's really making fun of the "fucked-up, middle class [white] college student" who fantasizes about acquiring a black identity.

"I Wanna Be Black" is from the album "Street Hassle," released in 1978.

Sarcasm?

"De Blasio says he didn’t know Democratic National Convention was this week."

Things that are not surprising! Those who get in are the most elite. They got in despite the discrimination. They have a mark of distinction.

I mean whatever you think of the case itself this is a fantastic scoop by the Times, that the Asian kids who did get in don't feel discriminated against pic.twitter.com/pzeM8KVNls

— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) August 16, 2020

Here's the NYT article, "Justice Dept. Says Yale Discriminates. Here’s What Students Think."

ADDED: Immediately upon publishing this post, it became obvious to me that Singal is being sarcastic. So we're on the same page.

"But Friday’s unusually succinct update came a day after Trump ignited another controversy for suggesting that doctors should determine whether an 'injection' of household disinfectants..."

"... such as bleach and isopropyl alcohol, could be used to kill Covid-19 in humans who contract the virus. Trump later claimed he was 'asking a question sarcastically… about disinfectant on the inside.'... Trump has been so eager to deliver good news to the American public, according to a senior administration official, that some White House staffers have presented their boss with upbeat findings that have yet to be vetted.... In an exchange on Thursday, Trump cited 'a very nice rumor' that heat and sunlight can kill the novel coronavirus. At previous briefings, he has also hyped the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine as a potential promising treatment even though its effectiveness against Covid-19 remains inconclusive. Recently, several White House aides began urging the president to make the briefings far shorter and to only approach the podium to deliver announcements or tout victories, while leaving the technical aspects to the numerous health officials who typically join him at the dais.... Trump has resisted such advice for weeks, viewing the daily briefings as an ideal venue for him to connect with his supporters and perform his favorite tricks. In the absence of campaign rallies or other outlets for his message, Trump has used the briefings to needle his political opponents, smack reporters and air grievances.... Even after campaign aides briefed him on a series of unsettling polls about his appearances, Trump continued making the case privately that his sky-high television ratings would help him trounce Biden in November...."

From "Trump grapples with a surprise threat: Too much Trump/Some allies worry the president is damaging his reelection prospects with his dominance of the briefing room during a public health and economic crisis" (Politico).

Perform his favorite tricks.... like sarcasm?

Claiming something is sarcasm when it didn't much strike anybody as sarcasm seems to be a new trick, and I don't think he should be practicing it in front of a gigantic audience of hundreds of millions of people — especially people who are struggling through something serious and hoping for something to feel hopeful about. Even if he'd practiced that particular sarcastic move in small clubs for years and honed the wording and delivery, I don't think it would ever have been right for the White House stage. And I appreciate Trump's spontaneity and rhetoric. You can see that in my posts over the last few years. But not everything works, and sarcasm is a bad choice in the Task Force briefing context. It mixes false statements in with the truth, but you're supposed to get it, because it's  funny. Fortunately, the move backfires.

And that's assuming it he was telling the truth when he called it sarcasm, which I don't think he was. But assuming... Let's assume that when he said, "I see the disinfectant... is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside... it’d be interesting to check that so that you’re going to have to use medical doctors with, but it sounds interesting to me," he could have leaned more heavily into the sarcasm and said "I see the disinfectant kills the virus, so why don't we just inject the disinfection right into the patient?! That sounds like it just might work! How about all you doctors get on my brilliant idea right away and divert resources into experiments?! I'm sure some of these crazy reporters would love to volunteer to have Clorox injected right into them. Come on, you paragons of ethics, roll up your sleeves." Then we'd all see the sarcasm. So is that what Trump meant to do, but in a subtler style?

I don't believe it, but as I said, it backfires. Trump isn't the only one who gets to use humor. Social media blew up with jokes about Trump and the injected disinfectant. And then he drastically shortened the next press briefing. It wasn't so fun anymore. I'm glad that check on his power worked. Freedom of speech is not just for Presidents. And humor coming from a person wielding immense power — taking advantage of a captive audience — is problematic. I think Trump is a fantastic standup comedian. I enjoy his performances. But some jokes fail.

And some things that are not jokes get called jokes after the fact, which is what I think happened here. Trump undercuts his own reputation as a humorist when he labels one of his non-humor statements as humor. So why did he do that? Desperation? I told you yesterday how I thought he'd try to deal with disinfectant-injectiongate.

1. He'll say it's "fake news"... They said I recommended injecting bleach.... Who would say that?...

2. He'll rephrase his idea so it's situated in a context that makes some sense... how feasible is it to kill the virus once it does get inside the body?...

3. He was just asking the question of the expert, drawing him out....

But he didn't do any of those things. He did something I didn't even think of, calling it sarcasm. It's a little demoralizing to those of us who have been giving him a sympathetic listen. Maybe I'm demoralized because I didn't find myself on the inside, with the people who understood the sarcasm. Did anyone understand it as sarcasm?

In March 2019, I went into some detail about Trump's use of sarcasm — laid on very thickly in front of a very sympathetic audience:

Sunday morning sarcasm.

Very surprised, and very disappointed, and more than a little angry, that working-class Nevada voters didn't listen to the urgent and wise advice of Bush/Cheney neocons and DC Third Way corporatist operatives about who they should vote for. https://t.co/fq4jP1RC9t

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) February 23, 2020

The children are the future. Get ready.

My son is 3. He negotiates over everything. Aggressively.

He makes outrageous opening offers.
He reopens settled topics.
He walks away from the bargaining table.

I am so proud.

— Ady Barkan🔥🌹 (@AdyBarkan) January 26, 2020

AdyBarkan's bio reads: "Fighting for social justice + America's democracy. Living with @rachael_scar, Carl, and Willow, in Santa Barbara. Dying of ALS. Author of 'Eyes to the Wind.'"

This is a parent who is no Trump fan, but he's so proud of "Art of the Deal" talent in his own toddler.

And it makes me wonder, what qualities do you love to see developing in your young child that you loathe when you encounter them fully developed in adults?

IN THE COMMENTS: rehajm detects "Sarcasm." And Fernandistein says:

Um (don't you hate it when people write that?), I think he's actually trying to say that Trump acts like a 3-year old because they share some characteristics; they both walk and eat, etc. It's a very clever idea, especially when you consider that it was co-opted by this progressive activist.

I admit I didn't read it as an intentional slap at Trump, but I do think rehajm and Fernandistein are right. I attribute my insensitivity to sarcasm to my recent exposure to TikTok videos featuring toddlers arguing in the manner of an asshole adult. These videos are received as delightful and celebrated on TikTok, and I'm always thinking: You are really making a horrible mistake here.

Note that Ady Barkan does not mention Trump. He's trusting his readers to make the connection. My mistake was to make the connection without giving him credit for expecting me to do that. So let me make up for that by linking to his book, "Eyes to the Wind," about which Booklist wrote, "The book’s primary question is existential: how to live when you are dying? Barkan’s answer is to share, open up, act, and capital-R Resist, and his memoir, clearly and candidly written, establishes a legacy."