By A.J. Liebling
Meta-Content Generator
with Isaiah Thomas, Board of Editors
We're locked up. We can't go anywhere. Our nation faces a quadriga of crises, each of which (pandemic, economic, racial justice, and treason) would be enough to galvanize the public by itself, but taken together seem to have pithed the body politic. Just last night, at a taxpayer-funded super-spreading event, the current incumbent spewed forty-five minutes of incoherent rage and racism at a supposedly happy, patriotic, and non-partisan holiday event. At least he didn't set the Black Hills ablaze with his crapcan fireworks.
If this Fourth of July wasn't sh***y enough already, now we have to deal with this f**kin' guy, or, as he is known to all thoughtful media consumers, Bretbug, the pride of the New York Times Op-Ed page. We're not going to link to his pisspoor column, but we will dip into it long enough to understand why our political system has in effect stopped functioning.
Remember the Four Horsemen of the Trumpocalypse – Death, Depression, Division, and Treason? Pretty bad. So what in the invertebrate mind of Bretbug is the greatest threat to freedom today, according to him?
Before we get to his ridiculous answer, let's turn to another columnist for another well-known Op-Ed page, The Washington Post's Catherine Rampell. Today she provided a handy Twitter thread with a curated list of the attacks on free speech launched by President Tiny Toadstool.
Here are the examples she cited in support of her argument, an effective forensic technique that Bretbug would be well advised to learn:
Toe:
Tallie:
Terrio:
Tism:
Tiffany:
That's a pretty impressive list. It doesn't include his filing meritless litigation against Tim O'Brien to intimidate press coverage (it didn't; he lost), demonizing the free press to destroy the public's belief in what is reported by the media, and his ongoing effort to subvert America's international broadcasting operations (like Voice of America) by appointing a hard-right reactionary flack to drive out real journalists.
So on the basis of the evidence she marshaled, not to mention what we remember off the top of our heads, we'd conclude that the greatest threat to freedom of speech today is President Super Spreader and his gang of Republican flacks and enablers.
Speaking of which, here's what Bretbug thought was the greatest threat to free speech today.
Wait for it.
Keep waiting.
It's liberal elites. Also progressives.
Why? We can only work backwards from the pitiful examples Bretbug pushes across the floor with his pincers: The New Yorker cancelled a speaking invitation to notorious racist and crackhead Steve Bannon two years ago after noticing that he was, um, a notorious racist and crackhead. As a result, poor Steve has barely been able to convey his ideas (chiefly, will work for drugs and booze) to the media. A search for his name in The New York Times database since January 1, 2018 returned only 945 results, or about one a day. Poor bastard.
(And speaking of retaliating against free speech, remember when Bretbug ratted out a professor who had the temerity to compare him to a tiny bug?)
Bretbug also tries to palm off advertiser anger at Facebook's endless flogging of hate speech and lies as an attack on speech, although Facebook, being a private company, can choose what to reprint and what not. Bretbug has his thorax in a twist because some folks are upset that Facebook's algorithms are promoting racism, Nazism, and lethal unscientific health information. Here's what
Judd Legum, a real journalist, has to say:
Facebook is allowing sites that specialize in divisive content, like Mad World News and The Daily Wire, to manipulate Facebook's algorithm through undisclosed financial partnerships.
Ten or more times each day, a network of five large Facebook pages controlled by Mad World News publishes the same link to The Daily Wire. Although this appears to violate Facebook's prohibition on undisclosed sponsored content and coordinated inauthentic behavior, Facebook has refused to take action. This has made The Daily Wire — a cesspool of misogyny, bigotry, and misinformation — to outperform every other major publisher on Facebook.
In the words of Emily Litella, that's different.
But Bretbug's bites aren't little irritations. The myth of a “cancel culture”
is part of the larger attack to demean and devalue those who stand against the Bigot-in-Chief:
Jason
Miller, a senior Trump campaign adviser, said “the mainstream media is
never going to give the president the credit he deserves, in terms of
his optimism and his belief in the American spirit.”
He
added, “There is a backlash against this counterculture, this cancel
culture, and Americans are proud we’re a beacon for freedom.”
The only consolation is that even hard-core Republican henchmen like John Kasich are realizing that the President's tee-tolla-tarri-tist tendencies aren't drawing the crowds they once did:
Former
Ohio governor John Kasich, a Republican who ran against Trump in 2016,
said the GOP’s muted and scattered response to the president on race
this week underscores how the party is “in decline” and has become a
vessel for Trumpism — even as polls show Trump losing ground among
seniors and white evangelicals and trailing Biden in every key
battleground state.
“They
coddled this guy the whole time and now it’s like some rats are jumping
off of the sinking ship. It’s just a little late,” Kasich said. “It’s
left this nation with a crescendo of hate not only between politicians
but between citizens. … It started with Charlottesville and people
remained silent then, and we find ourselves in this position now.”
Kasich
added, “I’m glad to see some of these Republicans moving the other way
but it reminds me of Vichy France where they said, ‘Well, I never had
anything to do with that,’” a reference to the French government that
continued during Nazi occupation in the 1940s.
Fortunately, Bretbug is still able, at a time when unemployment among real journalists has reached epidemic proportion, to pocket his winnings.
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