As America drifts into a dictatorship, at least we can take comfort in the fact that we are being led by men and women who have replaced their souls with red hats and their hearts with a single bitcoin and brains with vats of beef tallow.

Villains are going to villain. We expect them to be villainous. What pisses me off are all the well-meaning people rushing to help them. Like, I know it seems like the slide into fascism is inevitable, but do you really have to roll out the red carpet? Like, do you have to whip out your coat and put it over the puddle, so JD Vance doesn’t get his shoes wet as he sashays away to get us all fired?

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Dingus Runner-Up: Ezra Klein

This week, no one was working harder to aid and abet the cause of fascism than Ezra Klein, the New York Times columnist and podcaster, who rushed to defend Charlie Kirk’s legacy from Kirk’s own words. Literally no one was asking him to do this, but he was like, “Oh, we need a reasonable centrist to provide a veneer to hate? I VOLUNTEER AS TRIBUTE!”

It’s the stupidest Hunger Games of all time. Tracker Jackers, but it’s just a host of podcast bros who cannot grow facial hair wearing ill-fitting khakis to follow you around demanding you debate your right to not die of sepsis in a parking lot.

Lizard mutts, but it’s just the president’s Cabinet, and you have to pretend like they’re helping the economy while they chew on your lower intestine.

Jabberjays, but it’s just a bunch of blond women with lip filler telling you how much they love being a stay-at-home girlfriend while they rake in thousands from Instagram posts sponsored be DefinitelyWon’tMakeYouCrapYourself cooking oil.

“I’m a wife and a mama!” is the last thing you hear before you bleed out through your ears.

Klein wrote a whole column arguing that Kirk had done “politics right.” Which is completely accurate if you ignore everything Kirk ever said or did or stood for. Like if you completely ignored the virulent racism, the homophobia, and the transphobia, the history of racism in Kirk’s organization, Turning Point USA, and the iffy way it skirted campaign finance laws, then sure. That’s politics done right.

Plastic bags have more structural integrity than Ezra Klein, and a lot more backbone.

Ezra, buddy, did they give you a gold star for being such a good bootlicker? Does it help you to be the dictator’s favorite little boy?

Ezra Klein in 1916: “Grigori Rasputin Was Practicing Politics the Right Way”

I would make Klein the dingus, but Ta-Nehisi Coates already took him to the cleaners, writing of Kirk in Vanity Fair:

What are we to make of a man who called for the execution of the American president, and then was executed himself? What are we to make of an NFL that, on one hand, encourages us to “End Racism,” and, on the other, urges us to commemorate an unreconstructed white supremacist? And what of the writers, the thinkers, and the pundits who cannot separate the great crime of Kirk’s death from the malignancy of his public life? Can they truly be so ignorant to the words of a man they have so rushed to memorialize? I don’t know. But the most telling detail in Klein’s column was that, for all his praise, there was not a single word in the piece from Kirk himself.

This country and our pundit class are so good at ignoring the words of Trump and his supporters. For years now, we have had leaders who will stand up and say things like, “I am going to punch babies in the face.” The headlines then read, “Republicans vow to reach out to American children.” Then, a year later, when a baby gets punched, everyone is shocked, surprised, and upset by the black eye. But inevitably, the pundit class will write effusive columns noting that perhaps fewer babies would get punched if only the liberals weren’t so self-righteous about it.

Centrists lining up to go chide liberals, while Republicans make jokes about the murder of politicians, and cheer on the deportation of lawful permanent residents of the US.

Dingus of the Week: ABC

But this week, the real dingus was ABC, which put Jimmy Kimmel on indefinite leave after the president complained about one of Kimmel’s jokes and FCC chair Brenden Carr threatened to pull ABC’s license.

And you know it’s a bad time in America when a man who used to host a show called “The Man Show,” which featured women with big boobs jumping on trampolines, is considered too liberal.

It’s a bad day in America when the guy who made his career on a show with “Juggy Girls” is now the one holding it down on our rights. Like if I have to go to bat for a problematic white male comedian, at least make him funny, like Dane Cook.

Okay, what happened was that on his ABC show, Kimmel observed, “The MAGA gang (is) desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.”

Kimmel added, “This is not how an adult grieves the murder of someone he calls a friend. This is how a 4-year-old mourns a goldfish.”

In response, Carr went on Benny Johnson’s podcast to threaten to pull the license from ABC and its affiliates for Kimmel’s crime of making fun of the president. You can understand why Carr, a public servant, would talk to Johnson. Johnson is a good, trustworthy, corn-fed Iowa boy who also happens to be accused of being verbally abusive to staff, and has also been accused of a plagiarism or two. You know, a good Midwestern guy (derogatory).

And ABC immediately capitulated, putting Kimmel on indefinite leave.

Carr claims to believe the FCC should champion free speech, but my good man, is free speech in the room with us right now? Did you help all the free speech when you threatened to fire the men for speaking?

We are dying from all this freedom. We are choking on all this free speech. We are literally asphyxiating on the First Amendment.

But it’s ABC that is the real dingus here. Recently, ABC, which is owned by Disney and ergo has so much cash it’s the equivalent of 27 Bezoses, settled a lawsuit with Trump after he sued the network when George Stephanopoulos incorrectly stated that Trump had been found liable for “rape” in the E. Jean Carroll case. Trump was actually found liable for sexual abuse. They could have spent one half of a Bezos and fought this, but no. ABC settling so quickly, without even a fight, did not augur well for this new era of American dingusery. I’ve had farts with more perseverance than ABC.

If only there were some sort of historical precedent that we could look at and learn from? But alas!

What is all the money good for if you can’t use it to fight creeping autocracy? What are you using the money for, ABC? Are you using it to train ants for a live-action A Bug’s Life?

Or did it think it could appease the beast by bending to its every whim? Did it think that if it made one sacrifice, the administration would pat its leaders on the head and let them continue on with business as usual? Did those leaders think that by sacrificing a George to the angry orange god, they could save a James?

Or is this an “every fortnight we sacrifice one man into the volcano to appease the hungry gods of free speech” kind of a situation?

Like when the Republicans said they wanted to make this a Christian nation, I guess I didn’t realize how many people would be hanging off crucifixes.

Me, looking at all the free speech in America.

On a more serious note:

Every week for the past five years, I have written a Dingus of the Week. It began as a way to make myself laugh at a time when I was at my lowest. I, too, had been fired from a media job. Then, my crime was telling my boss not to publish an op-ed that argued unarmed Black people deserved to be shot. For that, I was labeled “insubordinate.” That, coupled with the backlash campaign to my work mounted by local Republicans, meant I was out just a year after I started the job.

After that, I started this newsletter as a way to support myself and my kids, because there were no more media jobs in Iowa. And the Dingus of the Week was part of that endeavor, because I’ve always believed that if you can laugh, you can survive. Maybe a joke can’t change the world, but it can make it better and more inhabitable. If you laugh, you know you are going to be okay. And problems you can laugh at are problems you can beat.

Attacking the laughter, taking away the jokes, is a way of stripping us of our humanity.

So, I will keep making my little jokes here. I will keep saying Jared Kushner looks like a wet paper towel, and I will keep saying Trump’s Cabinet is a collection of expired dairy products, and that RFK Jr. is a worm-addled Habsburgian prince of the collapsing American empire.

And as long as I am independent, let me just take a moment to say: We are living under the most corrupt administration that America has ever seen. It makes Watergate look like a high school prank. And the way Kirk’s death is being manipulated into an excuse for an authoritarian crackdown on teachers, journalists, comedians, and so many more people is both craven, pathetic, and dangerous. And any centrist who plays cuck to this charade should be ashamed.

And I’ll see you all in hell.

Thank you for supporting me.

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And now for something good

Local Johnson County Supervisor Jon Green defied the governor’s orders to fly the flags at half staff in honor of Charlie Kirk. And it’s nice to see someone willing to use the power they have to call bullshit on the absolute nonsense that is happening. You simply do not have to do what you are told. You don’t have to hand it to anyone. You don’t have to capitulate to the violence of an unjust order.

People in power only have that power because we give it to them. So, we can take it away. We can refuse to comply. We can stop trying to keep the peace. There is none.

So thanks, Jon Green, for reminding people, even for a moment, that we have a choice. We can do our best to gum up the works of this fascist project called the Trump presidency.

Every time Rudy Giuliani suffers, an angel gets its wings.

Literally, a whole-ass study proved that unions are good.

Lisa Cook continues her fight against Donald Trump. Good for her.

Fat Bear week is upon us! And this refers to literal bears, not the burly gay men. Although this newsletter vehemently and ardently supports all kinds of bears.

Shut it down.

Something I am enjoying

When my son started preschool, he hated it. He’d so much prefer just staying at home and reading books all day. And when I’d pick him up, I’d ask him how his day was, and he’d say, “terwibble.”

At that time, he also loved it when I sang him “Big Rock Candy Mountain,” which is a folk song about the Great Depression, where the narrator imagines a hobo’s paradise. “Oh, the buzzin' of the bees in the cigarette trees/ The soda water fountain.”

Every night when I sang that song before bed, I changed the lyrics to imagine his paradise. “Where your sister always shares/ And you don’t have to wear your clothes, you can wear your underwear.” Because he thought everything was “terwibble,” I began making him tell me one good thing that I’d try to make up a verse about. Some days it was cookies, soccer, cats, puppies, snuggly blankies, no school, and sisters not being violent. Whatever it was, I’d try to make up a little verse about his paradise in that moment.

He’s 12 now, and we still sing “Big Rock Candy Mountain,” and every night that I get to put him to bed, we imagine new ways the world can be better, new joys to extend, new happinesses we never want to end.

I am sure one day soon he won’t want me to sing it to him. And like with so many moments, I won’t know when my last day will come. So every night I get to put him to bed, I make up little utopias just for us. And I am so happy for every moment I get to do it.