Week of March 1st, 2020

Hello and happy March, I guess. I’m actually writing this from Asheville. I’m back in town this week for Spring Break. I don’t remember when you said your spring break was, but I hope you have enjoyed, will enjoy, or are enjoying it whatever the case may be. I’m trying to lie somewhat low this week, but I have some projects to work on and a movie to edit, so they’re keeping me on my toes. But I have time today, so this one is probably going to be ridiculous in length.

 

This week started with us making a stupid deal with the Taliban that appeals to all the “stop endless wars” people on both sides who do not know anything. Yes, Twitter, please call me a neocon again. I’m so sorry that I think the United States should maintain stability across the world. Nah we should just keep to ourselves and wait for the sequel to 9/11. This is truly a “both sides” problem, and it’s just going to get worse as populism gets a stronger grip on our culture. The week got stupider from here.

 

As we both know, Joe Biden had a remarkable Tuesday, and I revel in the cries of Senator Sanders's base and the accuracy of my prediction. That being said, he exceeded even my expectations, and I'm very, very happy for it. We are watching the Democratic Party crumble even as it appears to unite, and it is so deserved. While a Trump versus Sanders debate would certainly be more entertaining, I am thrilled that we are keeping a socialist populist who is a literal anti-charity activist away from the White House. A right-wing populist has been bad enough. President Trump will mop the floor with Biden on the debate stage. I have not wavered in my opinion since around June of last year. Biden will secure the nomination and lose to President Trump.

Many long campaigns (and one ill-conceived short one) met their bitter end this week. Steyer, Buttigieg, Senator Klobuchar, Bloomberg, Senator Warren, and weirdly not Congresswoman Gabbard, whom I will get to soon, saw their hopes of being Commander in Chief shatter. These, of course, came in two waves: pre- and post-Super Tuesday. For the pre-Tuesday gang, Buttigieg and Senator Klobuchar dropped suddenly and endorsed Biden leading to what Shoe0nHead calls the assembly of “Neoliberal Voltron.” Both Buttigieg's and Klobuchar's withdrawals were remarkably abrupt with some evidence that neither candidate intended to leave the race just hours before he or she endorsed Biden. Biden then almost immediately said that he wants Buttigieg and possibly Senator Klobuchar in his administration, something which Buttigieg—the savviest of the Democrats—needs if he wants any hope of remaining relevant. This has led many to throw the word “conspiracy” around. President Trump used language he's a bit more familiar with, calling the successive suspensions a “quid pro quo.” So, was there a backroom deal here? Well you're not stupid. Obviously there was a backroom deal, and there's nothing unusual, illegal, or unethical about such an agreement. It's utterly moot. In addition to the two leading Democratic “moderates,” Biden also secured the coveted James Comey endorsement, which a Biden campaign PR staffer literally asked to be returned. He was also endorsed by Robert “Beto” “Hell yes we're going to take your AR-15” O'Rourke, and promised that O'Rourke would lead on guns in a Biden administration to which Congressman Buck did the whole “come and take it” routine leading many to lose their fucking minds because they don't understand the legal definition of a threat. Yuck. Fuck 2020 for making me vote for this dude.

Bloomberg joined Neoliberal Voltron after Super Tuesday, taking one final Boomer jab at the President on Twitter, though not before this legend destroyed him on gun control at a Fox News Town Hall. I won't spend too long roasting Bloomberg because everybody has already done it. The guy threw six hundred twenty million of his personal dollars into the trash can in order to win American Samoa. He has now retroactively made Jeb!'s 2016 campaign look reasonable, which is an act of heroism in itself. But rather than continue to bash his face into the pavement, I'll leave you with MSNBC saying that the Bloomberg campaign could have given every American a million dollars.

Nevertheless, she desisted. It's strange yet satisfying to watch the former front-runner become an also-ran. Senator Warren made a grave miscalculation. She'd rightly predicted that Biden would be the more durable candidate, so she ran in Senator Sanders's lane, making his positions a bit more digestible. But she didn't stick the course. She saw Biden falling off and Senator Sanders gaining speed, and she pivoted so quick it was more of a swerve while trying to position herself as a possible Sanders Running mate. This is the shit that happens to people like Senators Harris and Warren who don't actually believe in anything. And on Super Tuesday she crashed. Senator Sanders' base feel as though she stole votes from their king, and they hate her now. Even the President has gotten in on it. Really, 2020 was not Senator Warren's time, 2016 was. It goes to show, you can wait for a Clinton, but the world won't wait for you. Good riddance. President Trump hit the nail on the head in a hilarious SELF-DEPRECATING statement that Twitter libs are pretending not to understand. Like, just admit the President is funny. You'll be okay.

Now that we've finally narrowed to a two-man race in the Democratic Party, many have started asking, “Wait, why is Tulsi Gabbard still here?” That's a wonderful question, and my only answer is that she's a disruptor who wants to burn everything down. I think the only person who fully understands Congresswoman Gabbard is Congresswoman Gabbard, but it's obvious she's out for blood, constantly going on Fox News to tell DNC chair Tom Perez to resign. She hates the Democratic establishment with a fervent passion and never ever holds back. During this campaign she has sued both Hillary Clinton and Google out of what I can only interpret as pure spite. Neither lawsuit is really based in any law, but I guess Congresswoman Gabbard thought pure rage might persuade the court. Congresswoman Gabbard is pretty good at pure rage. This week, Judge Wilson dismissed her lawsuit against Google with palpable contempt. He absolutely dragged her for her nonsensical lawsuit. The dismissal is very much worth reading. For all these reasons, Super Tuesday made me very excited. After Bloomberg, Congresswoman Gabbard won second place in American Samoa, netting two pledged delegates. As a delegate-holder, per DNC rules, which had been loosened to allow Bloomberg to debate, she qualified for the debate next Sunday. I was thrilled. She's a genuine loon who makes everything so much more interesting. But the DNC she hates so much just fucked her over. They changed the rules just to exclude her, and she is rightfully pissed. The Democratic Party needs to be burned to the ground, and I hope Congresswoman Gabbard pulls it off.

Joe Biden got attacked by vegans at an event. That dementia patient is in desperate need of Secret Service right about now. His badass wife literally had to put hands on one of them when they were storming the stage. This is a rare kind of photo in American politics.

In a flash, or perhaps habit, of insanity, Senator Schumer literally threatened Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh and was rightly rebuked by Chief Justice Roberts. I can't believe a Senator would even try this shit.

Here's Glenn Beck being racist!

Here Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez says religious liberty is invoked only for bigotry!

You remember former Congresswoman Katie Hill. She was a young, attractive, bisexual feminist who turned a long-red Californian seat blue. As she campaigned, the breathless praise was really sickening. There was a feature length HBO documentary about her campaign that positioned her as some kind of feminist hero (you know the kind that says you're sexist if you don't vote for a woman). Of course, then there was the scandal. Her nudes leaked (all of which I have avoided looking at) and showed that she had an iron cross tattoo above her vulva and was fucking a female junior member of her campaign staff. And then she was secretly dating the journalist who defended her. So she got into Congress, and got right back out. There were many other weird details and I could write about this story all day if I let myself, but it feels like the plot of a bad erotica novel and not, you know, real life. At the time, I was extremely concerned for Hill's well-being, since she wrote this graphic NYT piece about almost killing herself. She since founded HER Time, a PAC that only promotes female candidates, as well as an organization which supports victims of revenge porn.

I found the messaging around the situation very strange. It seemed all the conversation was about revenge porn and how Hill was a victim held to a higher standard when the conversation should have been about how you're not supposed to fuck your employees whether it's creepy old-man sex or hot lesbian sex. People who sell their labor to you cannot freely choose to have sex with you just for funzies. Welp, New York Magazine did a piece on her this week that got me thinking about this all over again. It tried so damn hard to make her the hero and it failed so spectacularly. That being said, there were a lot of people who surely read the tweet and not a word of the article going “haha yaaass my bisexual kweeen” who can fuck right off. In the interview portion of the piece, Hill explicitly declares her intent to lie about multiple things. There was a remarkably non-credible backstory for the Iron Cross tattoo taken at face value. She uses her mental health as a tool by which to strong-arm the journalist.

But when the narrative shifted from the story she wanted to tell, so did her tone. After letting her know in person that a detail she’d omitted came up in my reporting, she sent me a series of increasingly agitated texts. On the phone, she choked up and yelled, saying that unless I promise her it won’t be included, anxiety would hang over her. “So you should know that,” she said. A week later, even though I told her I couldn’t promise not to include it, she texted to apologize for getting so emotional.

But worst of all was this damning quote:

During her campaign, Hill often tweeted about Me Too issues of harassment and abuse. As the candidate, she was unarguably at the top rung of her campaign team. Yet she said she didn’t feel like she was in charge, not when she was barely 30 and most staffers were in their 20s. “We joked about this a lot. Morgan was way more my boss than I was hers,” said Hill, “because she got me to places on time. So yes, I recognize that I had power, but also it just wasn’t like that at the time … I was a fucking person that was a few years older than her, and we got wrapped up in this movement of trying to do something, and I happened to be the face of it. But to me, she was just as responsible for it, you know?”

No! If the staffer was that essential to her campaign, why was she never promoted from Junior staffer? Hill said Morgan eventually broke up with Heslep but remained on the campaign team in California. “It’s not like I could fire Morgan,” Hill said. “That’s part of why it’s problematic, right? You can’t promote somebody without it being a problem. You can’t give them a raise. You can’t fire them.” 

Oh shit! So the staffer was underpaid because she was in a sexual relationship with her boss! Anyone who can read that shit and not see that it's fucked up has a major problem, and yet so, so many are defending her online. I can't wrap my head around it. Just imagine if an old Republican man was caught fucking a junior staffer with an Iron Cross on his dick. He'd be stoned in the public square. I recommend you read the NYMag article. It's heavily biased in her favor, but it's incredible and very revealing.

Apologies that this upload is presented as a Curb Your Enthusiasm meme, but the upload I’d saved got deleted, and honestly if the meme isn’t appropriate here, it’s not appropriate anywhere. A woman in Halifax County, Virginia lost her sister and her house in a fire. In a local news embarrassment which I pray is not soon forgotten, ABC News 13 made their top story the act of giving this woman a single umbrella “for a rainy day.” It’s baffling and horrifying to watch with indigence after indigence (“Twirl the umbrella. Come on, twirl the umbrella.”), and it is painfully real.

 

The fallout was also amusing as ABC News 13 tried to defend itself on Twitter. It turns out that the story and the tweet neglected to mention that this woman emailed ABC News 13 asking for a new umbrella since her mother lost hers in the fire.

 

Now that's what I call a fucking trap. This woman's mom is about as big of a fan of local newsman George Flickinger as could possibly exist, has been through some real shit, and specifically asked for him to hand deliver the fucking thing. He can't say no, and as a newsman, this must be a story. The fact that I can easily see every single part of the thought process in this flabbergasting video really enhances the cringe comedy for me.

 

Well, that's all. I'll see you Monday.

 

Thanks,

Jacob Morris