Am I gonna have to protest again?

Thoughts on ICE, Melania, CBS News, Kanye, and more.

Protest

Am I gonna have to protest again?

I mean, I went to a lot of BLM protests, but that was during lockdown. Didn’t take much to get me out of the house back then, y’know?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m 100% opposed to cops killing black people. But also, anything was better than another day of shut-in life revolving around board games, sourdough, and Zoom calls. I mean, we even thought Clubhouse was cool back then.

So pandemic me was ready to activist. You coulda gotten me on the streets for just about anything. “Are you coming to the protest?” “What are we protesting?” “The way improv groups dance around when they come onstage.” “I’ll get my megaphone.”

Still, if they don’t simmer down with this whole “masked paramilitary force with zero accountability out on the streets demanding papers and shooting civilians” stuff, I’m gonna get my glitter pen out and start drawing a sign that says, “Sending Border Patrol to police inner cities is like sending scuba divers to fight fires.”

Speaking of, you know who (allegedly) loves to protest? Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent. On ABC, he said, “I’ve been to a protest. Guess what? I didn’t bring a gun, I brought a billboard.”

For real though? What did this guy ever protest? Did the hotel forget to put a mint on his pillow once? Did the restaurant fail to chill his champagne properly? Did the gardener ask to use the bathroom at his 5th, 10th, or 12th house? Pics or it didn’t happen.

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ICE

🧊 Remember when we thought AI would kill jobs? Nah. Turns out the future is 100% employment with all of us becoming full-time detectives trying to solve the neverending case of “Is this content AI or not?” The latest example: Social media users wasted Bitcoin-mining levels of energy debating whether a video showing Alex Pretti 11 days before he was killed was legit or not. Get ready for the misinformation arms race to keep intensifying. We’re all gonna be Magnum A.I. trying to figure out whether or not some guy in a pic/vid has eleven fingers.

🧊 What’s happening in Minnesota proves the importance of having people who live within (or near) a community be the ones who police it. The further away law enforcement travels, the less they’ll care about the people they’re supposedly there to serve and protect. Instead, you get a Fallujah mindset of us/warriors vs. them/enemy.

🧊 Bovino’s out and Noem’s on the rocks now. Per usual, it was the coverup that sank ‘em. We keep seeing it: Other admin talking heads think they can do the “never apologize and keep lying” thing 🍊 does without realizing he’s been perfecting his voice by doing it for decades. He fills arenas with his shtick while they’re just open mic’ers who don’t have the chops to sell their iffy material.

🧊 Oh, Kristi. It’s like you can’t even trust people who shoot dogs anymore.

🧊 Bovino shouldn’t just leave town. He should melt into howling oblivion like the bad guys at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

🧊 Megyn Kelly:

I know I’m supposed to feel sorry for Alex Pretti, but I don’t. I don’t. Do you know why I wasn’t shot by Border Patrol this weekend? Because I kept my a– inside and out of their operations.

We have monetized shamelessness and it’s a race to the bottom to see which grifters can profit most. We oughta put the grifting decathlon in the next Olympics.

🧊 Been watching both NFL wide receiver and ICE agent video replays on a loop and it’s giving a whole new meaning to “the receiver must survive the ground.”

🧊 More and more, it feels like we’re living a Joker monologue from The Dark Knight.

🧊 Minnesota is filled with people of Scandinavian descent and the way they’re responding feels like it’s got a lot to do with Janteloven (i.e. “an unwritten, culturally ingrained social code in Scandinavia that emphasizes equality, humility, and community).

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Melania

Ya gotta admit: The grifts are downright innovative. “Buy millions of my memecoin and I’ll pardon you!” “Gift me a new Air Force One and I’ll let you control the Venezuelan oil money.” “Let my wife wet her beak too. Give her $30M for a documentary no one wants to see.”

Truly inventive stuff. Imagine if they used this creativity to actually solve America’s problems instead of endlessly enriching themselves.

The premiere of Melania seemed like it was quite the gathering though…

Photo credit: Quentin Tarantino

Idea! Force immigrants to watch the Melania doc before granting asylum. A lot of ‘em will self-deport immediately.

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CBS News

Bari Weiss is back in the news for, well, sabotaging the news. She’s attempting to turn CBS News into the “best capitalized media start-up in the world” by making people like Andrew Huberman a contributor.

However, let’s be real: It’s quite probable that her job isn’t to save CBS News, it’s to destroy it. We gotta learn our lesson on this stuff. Same same with Elon/X, Greenland/NATO, Bezos/WaPo, Ellisons/TikTok, 🍊/Kennedy Center, etc. The goal is destruction. (And that’s true even if she doesn’t know it).

But sure, go ahead and put Huberman on CBS. I mean, how else am I supposed to find out what he thinks?

Related:

How Bari Weiss pushes propaganda to please the powerful

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Podcasters

I’m okay with the “This isn’t what I voted for” set as long as the rest of us are allowed to point out “It’s kinda weird you didn’t even realize what you were voting for…maybe next time you should listen to the people who did.”

Like, remember this? Marc Maron (October 28, 2024): “The anti-woke flank of the new fascism is being driven almost exclusively by comics, my peers. Whether or not they are self-serving or true believers in the new fascism is unimportant. They are of the movement...When comedians with podcasts have shameless, self-proclaimed white supremacists and fascists on their show to joke around like they are just entertainers or even just politicians, all it does is humanize and normalize fascism. When someone uses their platform for that reason they are facilitating anti-American sentiment and promoting violent autocracy.”

Let’s put podcast grifting in the next Olympics…

Podcast Grifting Decathlon Events

1. The mainstream media sucks

2. Dunking on the wokes

3. “I’m just asking questions”

4. Conspiracy theorizing

5. Aliens

6. Was the holocaust really that bad?

7. “We’re the real victims here”

8. Dog whistling

9. Free speech (for me)!

10. Saying something false, getting corrected in real-time, and explaining, “OK, but that doesn’t change my larger point.”

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Miscellaneous

🎯 “It’s none of my business” and “it has nothing to do with me” were useful phrases that no one uses anymore.

🎯 I’m more of a thought pleader.

🎯 “safe, legal, and rare” = how I order steak

🎯 If you put your “Super Bowl ad” out two weeks before the Super Bowl, that’s just an ad.

🎯 Commercials are crazy. Like, I enjoy sports, but I will 100% never ever ask my doctor about Skyrizi. I wish there was some way to let the universe know this so I don’t have to watch another 5 million commercials telling me how to treat a disease I don’t have.

🎯 Pretty slippery how bankers just rebranded as “private equity.”

🎯 Everyone says they want the truth and then you give it to them and they’re like, “Oh, not like that.”

🎯 Of course the economy is doing poorly. Our strategy to save it mostly seems to be weed dispensaries, sports betting, OnlyFans, and ED pills. Sin-enomics doesn’t feel like a legitimate plan.

🎯 That fighting in hockey is still 100% normal is one of the strangest things in sports. It’s like if UFC guys broke into tap dancing in between rounds.

🎯 Service dogs are like the Ivy League of pets because they think they can do whatever they want just because of their pedigree.

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Kanye (behind the paywall)

Kanye has a new album dropping soon so he apologized to the Jews in the Wall Street Journal which is kinda like…