The Power of Dumb by Hamilton Nolan

I rewatched All the President’s Men not long before Election Day, and I was struck anew by a famous bit of dialogue intoned by Hal Holbrook, playing the secretive source code-named Deep Throat: “Forget the myths the media’s created about the White House. The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.” Or how about the more recent assessment of the great Fran Lebowitz: “Everyone says he is crazy — which maybe he is — but the scarier thing about him is that he is stupid. You do not know anyone as stupid as Donald Trump. You just don’t.” Writing for In These Times, Hamilton Nolan is properly ruthless in laying out the dismaying idiocy that defines our current era, including all the ways that meeting this moment debases us all. Treating the random, impulsive actions of an amoral, smugly ignorant person as if they are measured political decisions is a sucker’s game.

The Humiliation Ritual Strikes Again by Mike Rothschild

There are so many things about the toxic cult around the current president-elect that I will never understand. Maybe the most perplexing to me is the willingness — eagerness, even! — of individuals to bind themselves to a human being who has repeatedly demonstrated that he doesn’t have an ounce of grace or loyalty in him. These are people of notoriety, wealth, and influence who have the greatest power to simply refuse to participate and yet accept demeaning cruelty as price of entry to a petty man’s ever-shifting circle. Taking the prompt of junk food decrier Robert F. Kennedy Jr. cradling a McDonald’s gut bomb while wearing an expression that suggests he’s dying inside, to the obvious amusement of the putrid man across from him, Mike Rothschild writes about this strange phenomenon. This piece is published on Rotchschild’s own blog.

On Nov. 6 the Girls Cried, and the Boys Played Minecraft. by Naomi Beinart

Naomi Beinart is a sixteen-year-old who was tapped by The New York Times to write through her feelings about this disastrous election. There’s has been loads of post-vote analyses that broke down the ways different demographic groups swung, but Beinart gets past the dry statistics to make the appalling gender gap real. Disproportionate attention has already been given to the young men who saw supporting the vile GOP ticket as an act of empowering defiance. Beinart’s piece suggests that the predominant view of the boys in her school is one of pure indifference and corresponding confusion about why the girls are so upset. Right now, that blithe disinterest, the shocking inability to empathize with those who feel like their most basic rights are now at risk, feels more insidious that the cartoonish villainy of childish men who aggressively gloat online.

And this all makes me think of one of my favorite bits from Taylor Tomlinson’s most recent special.

Trump Is Not an Aberration by Jeffrey C. Isaac

There’s been a regular refrain offered by the hopeful during this past decade-plus of a failson real estate developer poisoning the political well with his narcissistic needs and pathological dishonesty. “This is not who we are,” is said soberly about the U.S. after the latest transgression against taste and decency. To a degree, it’s an understandable bit of rhetoric, the time-honored approach of appealing to the better angels of our nature. It’s also a lie. The incoming president, and really the entire political party he’s affiliated with, is overjoyed expressing their bigotry. In this, they are not an aberration, they are an echo. Jeffrey C. Isaac writes about the whole awful situation for New Lines Magazine.

It's all tied together and don't let them trick you into thinking it's for safety

— Nefarious Filth Bird (@sasquatch.bsky.social) 2024-11-21T18:34:10.305Z

Enough by Roxane Gay

As I sort through all my feelings these days, sometimes I simply want some perfectly rendered exasperation and rage. Roxane Gay is good person to turn to for that. I knew she would be. This article is published by The New York Times.