You May Have Missed This
The mainstream media walk into a bar, and someone slips them a mickey.
Did you know that Millie Bobby Brown and Noah Schnapp have been “best friends” since Stranger Things? I didn’t either. Because who the fuck cares?
Yet I am now fully caught up on the subject, because at the top of my various news-aggregation feeds over the weekend was the headline: “Millie Bobby Brown and Noah Schnapp have been ‘best friends’ since Stranger Things.”
I’m not 100% sure who these people are — prominent young actors, I suppose — but I do have a complete timeline of their relationship, because the news gods decided it was something I needed to know. What those gods apparently believed I did not need to know, for two solid days, was that the former President of the United States frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, called for the suspension of the United States Constitution.
And for himself to be installed as dictator. (Because he was unfairly denied reelection as the result of a vast conspiracy between Democrats, the Fake News Media and Big Tech, or because he didn’t get enough votes.)
There is no need whatsoever to examine his rationale, or to rebut it, because it is thoroughly deranged. He’s always been a sociopath, bully, liar, crook, dope, racist and vengeful fool, but he now has finally achieved insanity. Facing the destruction of his business and a looming criminal prosecution liable to land him in jail for years for multiple felonies, including sedition, he has now fallen completely off his rocker — equal parts Captain Hook and Captain Queeg, plus maybe a hint of Russ, the British gent who reports having been abducted by space aliens 60 times. Talk about Stranger Things. It’s not that he’s drunk his own Kool-Aid. He’s drunk his own Clorox. Look into his eyes. All you see is spirals.
And how do I know this? Not from major media outlets, who have all but ignored the story for two days.
In fairness, they didn’t report only on Millie Bobby Brown’s friendship timeline. There was a lot said about the Walker-Warnock runoff, Ye’s Jew-bashing, volcanoes in Hawaii and Java, Iranian morality police and the war in Ukraine. That’s plenty of news, all legit. It simply wasn’t the most momentous. The press didn’t just bury the lede; they buried a major historical episode altogether. Again.
Much as they uniformly shrugged back in September, when Joe Biden addressed the nation to say that the GOP was literally threatening the future of American democracy, the major papers and news networks went missing for 48 hours, and then still failed to recognize that an unprecedented and terrifying chapter of history had taken place. I’ll repeat a line I used about Biden’s speech: “It came and went with barely a ripple, as if Nagasaki got four column inches on World News Roundup, page 18.” This is the toll of depraved politics becoming so normalized — and the frog being boiled so slowly — that the watchdogs of our democracy cannot even summon a snarl.
We are not only in the Post-Truth Age, we are in the Post-Horror Age.
We obviously shouldn’t be surprised that most Republicans were silent on an explicitly seditious pronouncement from a man already facing indictment for sedition and/or conspiracy charges around the 2020 election and January 6. They are such cowards, such amoral opportunists and such, uh, sex workers — and they are already in so deep with their complicit silence — there may be nothing Trump can do to reverse their treacherous course. Instead, all their thoughts and prayers will be for Hunter Biden to be caught in bed with an underage Chinese spy.
My favorite take on the weekend’s events came from The Bulwark, a political analysis site run by Never Trumpers. Their piece is titled “Trump Stands in the Middle of Fifth Avenue and Shoots the Constitution.” Pretty funny, no? And sure enough, his 100 million-strong cult of mouth-breathers won’t be much put off by his latest assault on democracy, which anyway the Fake News probably just invented to take him down.
Now, some folks who might be a bit put off are a New York civil jury, currently in deliberations on the future of The Trump Organization as to whether it is guilty of willfully evading taxes. And the Georgia Grand Jury hearing evidence about his obstruction of the 2020 election, and the Department of Justice, now deciding whether to indict Trump on similar charges, in addition to stealing secrets and hiding documents belonging to the United States Government.
His latest outburst has a disturbing Hitler-in-the-bunker vibe, throwing tantrums at the culmination of his Downfall. It also has all the earmarks of “They ain’t never gonna take me alive!” — aka “suicide by cop.” Except, the cops aren’t going to shoot the former president, on Fifth Avenue or anywhere else. They’re just going to throw the piece of shit in jail. That’ll get some coverage. As for proper attention to the Christofascist movement and QAnon looney bin that will threaten democracy for a generation and may possibly succeed, don’t hold your breath.
Bob, while I agree with much of what you said, I'd like to offer a slightly different perspective: that the news media has made the collective judgment that Trump is yesterday's news, that he's entirely likely to say increasingly outrageous shit to draw attention to himself and perhaps to incite the slack-jaw set to embark on another January 6 freak show, but that they, the media, are not going to bite. From this point forward the more outrageous Trump gets, the further he moves from the nomination. The Republican leadership is a collection of spineless cowards who care nothing for this country but they desperately want relevance and power. They may be dim but they aren't imbeciles and they have certainly figured out that Trump is the path to defeat. Look for a DeSantis/Haley ticket. If we don't get our shit together on messaging starting now, they'll win.