Night Owls, a themed open thread, appears at Daily Kos seven days a week
At The Baffler, Rafia Zakaria writes—Mad MAGA Men. Rage against the voting machines and floofy dresses on right-wing radio:
The conservative talk show game is like the Trump presidency, an entertainment enterprise. It follows, then, that the single swansong of a “stolen” election can only be played once every hour. The other material that is being added to the mix is revealing to the extent that it shows how the four horsemen of the Trump base (I’m thinking Limbaugh, Bongino, Ben Shapiro, and Mark Levin) expect to keep their base simmering in rage for the long four years ahead.
It follows that beyond coddling the dying embers of widespread electoral fraud via machines or mysterious foreign servers or dead people voting, they’ve returned to the long tried and always true. Two weeks after the election Ben Shapiro turned to “the attack on masculinity” instead of the election, devoting nearly the whole show to Vogue magazine’s depiction of Harry Styles in a dress. “Anyone who pretends that it is not a referendum for men to don floofy dresses is treating you like a full-on idiot,” Shapiro tweeted angrily, going on to add that the whole point of the shoot was an effort by the left to “feminize masculinity.” On his podcast/radio show, Shapiro insisted that the shoot was a means to delegitimize the structure of American families and of men as providers for their families. The bruised egos of male Trump supporters left in the lurch after truck rallies and boat parades were thus petted and preened by the ennobling assurance that they remained the real men of America despite all of the left’s attempts (with Vogue magazine at the ramparts) to put them in dresses.
The same day Shapiro raved about dresses, radio host Mark Levin turned to talking about the American Revolution and the colonialists’ refusal to pay taxes to the British and their decision to sink the tea that the British wanted them to drink. The subsequently passed Coercive Acts, through which the British used to force payment for restitution for the sunk tea, had contemporary parallels. On November 12, Levin had intoned with solemnity that “we’ve mayors that are cancelling Thanksgiving” or that “you will not meet in your own homes in groups greater than ten” or “you will not go to church.” Trump (who later cancelled his own Thanksgiving trip to Mar-a-Lago) had fallen a few rungs in the lineup (he reappears as the show goes on), his place surrendered thus to the War on Thanksgiving. The media, that beloved fallback omnipresent enemy, Levin declared, had joined in with the tyrants. The right had capitulated too much; demands for hand washing and masks and social distancing were superfluous; the reprieve would not come from them but from “true” science. That “true” science was the science supported by Donald Trump.
Levin’s “Thanksgiving as resistance” and “mask-wearing as capitulation” are terribly dangerous prescriptions but not new ones. For the entire duration of the Covid-19 pandemic, these purveyors of right-wing talk show garbage have painted common-sense health regulations as a politically inflected denial of individual liberty. In the aftermath of a lost election whose actual overturning is at best improbable, throwing oneself in the path of Covid-19 is now an even more ennobled performance of resistance against the tyranny of newly elected leaders, even if it does mean dying oneself. [...]
THREE OTHER ARTICLES WORTH READING
“A Korean reporter once asked me, ‘Do you think your Korean parents are ashamed because you talk about what you talk about on stage?’ I said, ‘I don't think they're ashamed because they're Korean. I think any parents would be ashamed’.” ~~Margaret Cho
TWEET OF THE DAY
At Daily Kos on this date in 2008—Obama: Biggest public works investment since Eisenhower planned:
Make public buildings more energy-efficient. Our government now pays the highest energy bill in the world. We need to change that. We need to upgrade our federal buildings by replacing old heating systems and installing efficient light bulbs. That won’t just save you, the American taxpayer, billions of dollars each year. It will put people back to work.
Second, we will create millions of jobs by making the single largest new investment in our national infrastructure since the creation of the federal highway system in the 1950s. We’ll invest your precious tax dollars in new and smarter ways, and we’ll set a simple rule—use it or lose it. If a state doesn’t act quickly to invest in roads and bridges in their communities, they’ll lose the money.
Third, my economic recovery plan will launch the most sweeping effort to modernize and upgrade school buildings that this country has ever seen. We will repair broken schools, make them energy-efficient, and put new computers in our classrooms. Because to help our children compete in a 21st century economy, we need to send them to 21st century schools.