A Tempest Tossed to Me

A Christmas gift for the ages.

Thank you, Santa. You outdid yourself.

I only had a few items on my list: Pez (✓), flying-monkey-demon gargoyle (✓) and a quintessential example of nativist-creep self-own (✓!).

I must have been a very good boy this year.

The last gift came courtesy of X (formerly “solvent”) and the account of Jesse Kelly. He’s a right-wing radio talk show host who says all the odious reactionary shit that comes with that job description. Just for example, in May he offered this gem:

This country needs a dictator. As the great John Adams said, a free country only works for a ‘moral people.’ We are not worthy of freedom. A dictator is coming.

Actually, I’m inclined to agree with him, although more in the way John Adams meant it, not in the way the great Uberblabbenfuhrer Kelly meant it.

Anyway, he’s clearly a keen thinker and extremely learned gentleman who knows what he knows, like Sen. Ron Johnson and Jethro Clampett. Kelly’s particular specialties are the art and architecture of Western Civilization. But — this is very important — not in a phony “intellectual” way, puffed up with annoying pretentiousness and effeminate, disloyal “education.” His artistic aesthetic, if I might condense it to its essence, is “MADE IN THE USA!” Here was his Christmas Eve post:

People love to sound sophisticated and brag about European art and architecture. I’ve seen America’s and I’ve seen what they’ve got. Theirs can’t touch ours.

The sentiment obviously could stand on its own, but, as a professional pundit, Kelly knows that to sell an argument you need an example so eloquent that it will stop any dissenter cold. 

So, you might wonder, what triumph of American art and architecture would he choose? Thomas Kincaid, painter of light? The Astrodome? Big Boy? Can’t find anything like that in Florence or Holland or the Louvre. (I mean, yo, Rembrandt, where were you when our American GIs were saving the Netherlands from the Nazis, you effete, clog-wearing snowflake?) But, come on. Jesse doesn’t just have a reactionary radio show, he also has an unrivaled sense of history, so he made his case with this iconic image.

Oops. Apparently, in spite of his highly cultivated sense of the difference between ours and theirs, he missed the fact that the Statue of Liberty was created in France by the sculptor Auguste Bartholdi and gifted to America by the French Republic in commemoration of our centennial.

Hahahahahaha! What a knob. So, yes, in the annals of self-ownership, this deserves a French chef’s kiss. Not just because it’s a perfect comeuppance for chauvinism, nativism, jingoism, arrogance and — in both senses of the word — idiocy. But also because he has offered as his irrefutable evidence the greatest icon of what used to be a bedrock American value and which he had his fellow stormtroopers daily stomp on and grind with their boot heels. Namely, the uniquely American virtue of welcoming immigrants to our shores for access to the American Dream. The inscription, by poet Emma Lazarus, was, until MAGA came out of the woodwork, our shining credo: 

Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

Kelly’s message to the tired, poor and huddled is more along the lines of, “Go back where you came from.”

The comments pushback was so vast and cruel there were actual stories written about it:

GOP Radio Host Blasted Over Painfully Stupid Statue Of Liberty Post

Republican radio host humiliated after saying Statue of Liberty is American architecture

MAGA pundit ridiculed for saying the Statue of Liberty was American-made

Which only got Jesse higher on his horse. Because these critics, all but wetting their pants with delight, were clearly interfering with his Musk-given right to express himself on X.

“I thought [Elon] taking over,” he wrote, “would let freedom ring on this site.”

I’m confused. Is it censorship to giddily point out that another account holder is illiterate? I think it probably isn’t. More like unapologetic taunting. Also, Jesse seems to be referring there to an altogether different bronze icon: not Lady Liberty but the Liberty Bell — which absolutely wasn’t from France. It was cast by the Lester & Pack Foundry. 

In England.

---

Bully Pulpit Needs You

Thanks for your attention. Please consider supporting our work with a new PAID subscription. As a thank you, we’ll send you an author-signed edition of The Big Truth: Dissecting and Debunking the 9 Most Destructive Lies of the Political Right.

Gift subscriptions? Yes! Do that, too. And after you subscribe, please send an email with your postal address to booksmartstudios@gmail.com. Then we’ll have a place to send both the book and the signed bookplate. And do please, please alert your world to our stubborn, irate existence. Facebook. Insta. Twitter. Mastodon. Threads. Office bulletin board. It matters. Thanks again.