Yesterday we talked about a story that should have been a headliner across a conservative pseudo-media system built to attack liberals and the environment, but because that “media” machine is less “media” and more “propaganda” staffed less by “journalists” and more by “lazy partisan hacks,” nary a peep was made about wildlife groups’ NFT-y new (and short-lived) fundraising scheme.
Instead, they stuck to the classics: College bad! Climate bad! Strong lady scary!
That’s the TL;DR of the Federalist trio on the menu today, the apparent best that hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars of billionaire funding can buy.
First up, let’s take a look at Executive Editor Joy Pullman’s “Young Americans: Leave Those Creepy College Covid Camps And Start Your Careers Now.” Interestingly, the piece’s web title, which appears in your browser’s title bar and is tightly tied to SEO metrics, swaps “Covid” for “Concentration,” and reads “Young People, Leave The College Concentration Camp And Start Life Now,” because who can resist a little “genocide is just like dorm life” joke? It’s a play on “concentration camp” meaning “a place for students to live and study”, and “concentration camp” meaning “where Nazis systematically exterminated eleven million Jewish and other minority peoples.”
Hey-oo! How Swell. Funny stuff. What light-hearted fun! Definitely not the type of joke that would fly on touchy liberal college campuses these days, right folks? Yuck yuck yuck.
As you would be right to assume, Pullman is pro-ignorance, anti-liberal-education, and says “colleges have turned into internment camps.” So she stopped a little short of the webtitle’s “college concentration camp” in the text, only invoking atrocities a step down from the full Nazi tier.
But it still leaves the question of why The Federalist’s editors would put it there in the first place, other than seeking out the clicks of users who have “concentration camp" as one of their key words? (Admittedly, you probably don’t need a college degree to figure that one out!)
Next up, we turn to the climate content, a column claiming that everything from Egypt’s 2011 revolution to the Kazakhstan unrest is really due to pro-climate policies that restrict fossil fuels, taking the “college is for dummies” sort of approach The Federalist loves to the complexities of geopolitics. Think of a bad thing. Got it? Well, turns out it’s bad because of solar power, and it was only ever good because of fossil fuels. Congrats! Now you’re caught up.
Because the real star of the Federalist lineup is a guest post by Christian podcaster Jeff Wright, a “family man, teacher, and pastor” according to his byline, who apparently believes that it is very very bad that a woman in a cartoon is very very strong.
“‘Encanto’s’ Luisa Is Way Too Beefy For A Woman” blares the headline of a piece that is impossible to parody because it’s already even more ridiculous than you could believe. He is Big Mad that “Luisa’s hulky physiology is the most immediate aspect of her characterization” and he really hates that “she has a jawline to rival Dick Tracey” (what a current reference!).
“Scouring the entirety of the internet,” Wright writes, “for a handful of women who can resemble Luisa under special circumstances,” which he definitely didn’t do for three days locked in his office, “is to prove the rule by demonstrating how scarce the exceptions are.”
Ah-hah! Makes sense. By getting the concepts of representation and “cause and effect” exactly 180° backwards, Wright argues that the lack of representation of broad-shouldered women in media is evidence that they don’t exist, not that they simply aren’t represented by an art and animation industry long-dominated by men and their point of view. This, even though he’s responding to the outcry of support from people who have expressed joy and gratitude for finally seeing a new representation of women in animation through Luisa.
(We're waiting with bated breath for the gasket he's going to blow when he finds out about Doc McStuffins and finds out that toys can talk, and also that Black women can be doctors!)
Now we are entirely and unironically positive that Wright did a lot of research to discover that cartoon women might not always have totally realistic body shapes, and are impressed by his dedication to protecting children from women who are portrayed as physically strong and not, as he concludes “wonders of God’s creative goodness and wisdom” which apparently can’t be housed in anything but an exaggerated hourglass figure.
Which, to be fair, does seem to prove Pullman’s anti-college piece wasn't 100% wrong; specifically, the claim that “many employers will take almost any warm body that moves.”
There must be some truth to that — after all, the Federalist published Jeff Wright!
