April 23: Biden condemns protests … Senate military funding … Union victory … Trump’s RFK boomerang …
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Incongruently, I want to start today’s TFN by pointing out that our national journalism outlets are often not good at journalisming, and that White House transcripts are not good at transcribing. And today that’s going to shape, or misshape, American perceptions of what Pres. Joe Biden said yesterday about college protests.
You may see lots of reporting today that Biden said, “I condemn the antisemitic protests.” This was, admittedly, a dumb thing to say on a day when protests have arisen on dozens of college campuses around the country. And by “arisen” I mean “peacefully arisen.”
But what not everyone’s reporting is that Biden got suckered, in a way that should temper our reading of his answer. Because he wasn’t asked about all the college protests.
Someone asked Biden, “Do you condemn the antisemitic protests on college campuses?” In other words, the questioner loaded the question, limiting it to just the subject of “the antisemitic protests.” Well, who wouldn’t condemn those? ASSUMING THERE ARE ANY.
And, yes, there undoubtedly is antisemitic shit at happening at some protests. And that is bad. But people showing up at a protest and saying antisemitic shit doesn’t necessarily mean that the protest itself — the organizers, their messaging, the stated purpose — is antisemitic.
But it’s safe to assume that Biden’s questioner meant to label every single protest out there as antisemitic. This doesn’t mean that Biden necessarily agrees. And there’s a good chance he doesn’t, because, unprompted by any question, he chose to add this: “I also condemn those who don't understand what's going on with the Palestinians.”
In other words, Biden did exactly what the vast majority of protesters are doing: He unilaterally injected Palestinians into the conversation.
And Biden also might have been taking a subtle shot at whoever asked the question. Especially if he recognized them. Was it someone, for instance, who works for Rupert Murdoch? We don’t know because White House transcripts don’t name the questioners, due to being bad transcripts.
And none of the accounts I’ve seen name the questioner, either, even though literally everyone there was ostensibly a journalist. Okay, journalists, so tell us who asked that insanely loaded, deeeeeefinitely not objective question!
And we do know that Biden was in a reporter-snarking mood. From just a minute later, here’s the White House transcript’s last exchange from the gaggle, in which ostensible journalists yell questions that are almost always stupid and/or dumb/stupid:
Q What will your legacy be on abortion?
THE PRESIDENT: (Laughs.) What will your legacy be as a newsperson?
I don’t approve of his answer. It’s a dick thing to say, especially for someone with power. But it is a possible sign Biden wasn’t happy about the questioning at the moment.
And there’s more evidence he wasn’t buying the unnamed questioner’s gotcha framing. Biden also mentioned that he’s got “a program” for that. Well, other, less newsfucking media probably won’t tell you what the hell program Biden was talking about, but I wanted to know.
And it seems he’s referring to this program. From last year. It’s about antisemitism broadly, with a focus on what federal agencies can do. In other words, it’s not a response to what’s happening on campuses now, suggesting Biden wasn’t buying Mystery Questioner’s framing.
It’s hard in fraught times not to jump on every utterance and read into it. That’s why filtering and conveying them with precision and context is so news-fucking important.
Now, the whole point of the protests is to draw attention to what Israel is doing, to make normal societal functioning impossible until complicity ends or is reduced. In other words, it’s to piss people off enough — with information or inconvenience — that they tell their representatives to stop funding what Israel is doing, which is too late because the Senate will likely approve it today.
I don’t talk that much about what Israel is doing because (a) I kind of assume anyone reading The Fucking News already has an operational baseline of sufficient general pissed-offery, (b) I don’t want to tip legitimate opposition to Israel into actual antisemitism by firehosing innocent Newsfuckers with atrocities, (c) I don’t want to worsen anyone’s despair, and (d) I have very few good jokes about genocide. Four, basically.
But since everyone today is talking about what college kids are doing to make us talk about Gaza — instead of actually talking about Gaza — I’m gonna honor the protest spirit and talk a little about Gaza.
The State Department’s annual report on human rights came out yesterday, as required by federal law and the laws of sweet-ass comic timing. And it turns out the State Department’s annual report on human right is even more antisemitic than some college protesters.
The report says that human rights have been violated by Hamas (no doy) and Israel. And that “unlawful killings” have been committed by Hamas (still no doy) and Israel. The State Department is expected soon to announce whether it will antisemitically deny U.S. funding to an Israeli battalion already famous for the death two years ago of a 78-year-old Palestinian American, who would have inspired outrage from other Americans if he hadn’t had “Palestinian” in front of “American.”
There’s more. After the April 7 withdrawal of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) from what’s left of the Nasser Medical Center in Khan Younis, in southern Gaza, a mass grave was discovered.
This morning, the number of bodies discovered so far hit 310. Earlier reports listed 400 people missing since the IDF left.
A Gaza civil defense official told CNN that some of the dead bodies were bound, hand and feet, obviously an IDF anti-zombie precaution since Israel has the unconditional right to defend itself against zombies. Palestinians themselves buried some of the bodies, which were found on the hospital site after the IDF left.
Reportedly, the IDF returned and exhumed some bodies, something they’ve done in the past so they can test the DNA and determine whether they oopsy-killed one of the Hamas hostages they’re not rescuing.
So, far, U.S. campus protests have been much less violent than whatever happened at the Nasser Medical Center. And evidence of genuinely antisemitic protest violence so far appears to be as rare as hostage DNA. In fact, from what I’ve seen, protest organizers — just as we saw with the Occupy movement — have promulgated ethoses (ethosi?) and principles of conduct that I would have scoffed at and condescended to as a young man and find lovely and moving as an old man (I turn 58 this month, job recruiters, so you can ignore me even more in May!)
The bottom line is, whether it’s protesters talking about funding Israel or politicians talking about stopping protesters: We talk about what we think we can change. (Which is why nobody’s talking about Sudan, for instance. (Sorry, Sudan.))
College kids protest things. They’re fucking college kids, for fuck’s sake. They’re the closest thing we’ve got to a national conscience. Their track record is basically one of being right before the rest of us dummies agree with them years later — on civil rights, Vietnam, apartheid, economic disparity, whatever. Remember when campuses exploded with protests to fund animal testing? No? Okay, then.
So, Dr. Newsfucker this morning is gonna prescribe one gigantic fucking chill pill to be taken 17 times daily, with water, by police, college officials, politicians, the media, and even White House transcribers. It’s spring. Protests bloom. That’s what happens in democracies.
Senate Votes on $95 Billion in Humanitarian, Anti-Humanitarian Aid Today
Congress is expected today to approve a massive shopping spree of people-killing products and other weapons. Legislation being voted on by the Senate includes $61 billion for Ukraine to shoot down Russian drones and Russian draftees. It also includes $8 billion for Taiwan, just to make sure we don’t miss a continent. And then there’s this:
$5.2 billion for Israeli missiles and rocket defense systems,
$3.5 billion for advanced Israeli weapons systems and production,
$4.4 billion for other stuff for Israel; and
$9.2 billion to help Gaza deal with what Israel does with all that other shit.
At least one member of Congress, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) said he’s a “no” vote. Jewish guy.
And, yes, this is essentially the same package Congress coulda/woulda approved months ago, only without the additional border spending that Biden and congressional Republicans wanted but D4FRFP1 Donald Trump ordered killed because it might’ve helped Democrats. Nice play, Shakespeare.
A spokesperson for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said the U.S.-funded Israeli armaments will “translate into thousands of Palestinian casualties.” Which is why college kids and other protesters are protesting.
Supreme Court Takes Tent-Living Night Shift
While politicians around the country talked about criminalizing pro-Palestinian tent cities where college students are spending their days protesting, the Supreme Court yesterday considered also criminalizing tent cities where people sleep at night because they have no roof.
The court is considering a challenge to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that banning de facto camping when there’s no public shelters amounts to cruel and unusual punishment. Or at least cruel punishment.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor made the case that sleeping is not a choice, but a thing that bodies do, unless it’s the body of a teenager at night when their friends are online.
“Where do we put them,” Sotomayor said, “if every city, every village, every town lacks compassion and passes a law identical to this? Where are they supposed to sleep? Are they supposed to kill themselves, not sleeping?”
(The option of grinding the homeless into an edible paste is due to be offered in an amicus brief today by SoyGur, LLC, formerly known as the Soylent Green Limited Liability Corporation.)
Even Justice Brett Kavanaugh asked whether fining homeless people does any good if there aren’t enough beds for them. Or beer. What about BEER…?!?
“How about if there are no public bathroom facilities, do people have an Eighth Amendment right to defecate and urinate outdoors?” said Justice Neil Gorsuch, who routinely awards people the right to shit literal poison into our water supply if they’re rich enough to be corporations.
Union Soldiers Win Yet Another Victory in the South
Tennessee Volkswagen workers on Friday overwhelmingly voted to unionize as members of the United Auto Workers (UAW). It was the first union victory at a foreign-owned car company in the South since the Civil War.
A ragtag army of rebel Republican governors had mounted a last-ditch defense, warning workers that joining unions will cost jobs under the state laws that those governors support. But, like many non-union made products, the Republican effort was shittily made and fell apart after just days.
We all know what kind of workers the South’s leaders would like to have. But a whopping 73% of Volkswagen workers voted last week to emancipate themselves from the burdens of not being able to bargain collectively.
UAW President Shawn Fain told his victorious footsoldiers that the campaign is not yet over. The UAW army plans to take Mercedes-Benz next month at two Alabama plant(ation)s. The UAW’s campaign aims to unionize almost 150,000 workers at southern factories owned by BMW, Honda, Hyundai, Mazda, Lucid, Mercedes, Nissan, Rivian, Subaru, Tesla, Toyota, Volkswagen, and Volvo. Presumably retracing Sherman’s March.
Trump Isn’t Properly Immunized Against RFK-24
Because D4FRFP Donald Trump is terrible at thing-doing, the Republican-cheered presidential campaign of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., appears to be taking an ominous turn. For Trump.
For months, polls have suggested that a Kennedy candidacy will draw more votes from Pres. Joe Biden than from Trump. Those months may be at an end.
Two recent polls show Kennedy drawing about equally from both frontrunners. And Republicans are starting to fear Kennedy’s trajectory puts Trump in the crosshairs. “They say he hurts Biden,” Trump said last night, “I’m not sure that that’s true, and I think he probably hurts both.”
And Politico reports that donations so far suggest Kennedy’s potential appeal to Trump supporters is growing. For instance, Kennedy is getting more money from past Trump voters than from past Biden voters. And Kennedy’s campaign team is adding former Trump staffers even faster than it can fire them for saying Trump-esque stupid shit.
Kennedy, of course, is an anti-vaxxer, which Trump hilariously can’t embrace whole-heartedly because he’s justifiably proud of the historic federal effort on his watch to speed the COVID vaccines. Tragicomically, none of Trump’s supporters care about the handful of good things he accomplished, leaving him torn about his own legacy. So now, every time Trump brags about the vaccine, he injects the Kennedy campaign with another anti-vaxx voter.
Crime Watch
TRUMP Yes, his trial is happening. Yes, David Pecker is expected to testify today about the National Enquirer helping the Trump campaign by killing negative stories. Yes, Trump’s also gonna fight the gag order that he’s been violating. No, I won’t be doing minute-by-minute coverage. Yes, it’s because I’m self-righteous and snooty about over-indulging in news-o-tainment.
Campaign Watch
PRESIDENT Pres. Joe Biden is due to deliver a healthy, bouncing abortion speech in Florida today.
This is effectively Biden’s first substantive response to D4FRFP Donald Trump announcing that he has no actual principles and is fine letting states decide whether to murder the precious unborn because what’d they ever do for him?
One week from tomorrow, the six-week abortion ban of Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) is set to kick in, not that you’ll be able to feel that kick at just six weeks old. That means roughly a seven-week gestation period for the horror stories DeSantis is about to sire, giving them a due date just when the nation truly starts paying attention to the campaign.
Florida, of course, imposed the ban simultaneously with scheduling a referendum on abortion rights for the November election. Meaning, pro-choice turnout in Florida will be driven not just by the chance to terminate another Trump presidency before it can leave the womb, but also by the possibly once-in-a-lifetime-that-begins-at-viability chance to overturn DeSantis’s six-week ban and enshrine reproductive rights in Florida law.
TCB
ME ON THE RADIO I was on The Nicole Sandler Show last night talking about my report on Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) meeting with Ukraine’s prayer breakfast leader — who’s been telling evangelicals they can make Ukraine into JesusLand, with “an army of Jesus,” if evangelicals help out — just before Johnson announced he’d help out. You can listen to me and Nicole yapping away at NicoleSandler.com.
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Go get ‘em, kids…!
D4FRFP = Disgraced, quadicted, fraudster, rapist, former President.
Re. Biden and his remarks condemning college protests yesterday the adage “When you’re explaining, you’re losing” comes to mind.
Your coverage of the UAW might have benefited from some context, like maybe suggesting that the reader google "UAW corruption", fire up the coffee pot and settle in for a nice long read. The ideal of unionization in principle and the reality of UAW are divergent to say the least.