They Can't Stop Us

Those who choose to view abortion as unethical have a right to their own value system. That's the whole point of "Pro-Choice." It's entirely possible to view abortion as unethical while understanding that its a personal choice. A constitutionally granted freedom of choice is exactly what allowed their Christian value system to enrich their lives without any risk of enforcement from the other direction.

It's an attack on human rights masquerading as "enlightened." It's the foremost issue determining whether a politician understands a separation of church and state.

It seems like people generally understand when we say "Abortion is THE issue."

Among dozens of other entirely legitamate implications currently filling our news feeds, abortion rights represent the baseline of modern politics. Its strength or vulnerability can tell us a lot about the present moment.

It represents the will of the people in a way that pro-lifers and red voters and the far right don't want to accept, because it conflicts with their preconceptions about the true majority of US citizens who advocate for progress.

The far right isn't blind. They entirely understand the direction the country is moving in. Labor rights and unions are becoming the norm. Capitalism is under attack. Has there been any other era in history when so many people all at once have shouted and screamed "fuck billionaires?"

Grown increasingly enraged and emboldened, more and more progressives are running for local elections and frequently winning. The people are taking charge, and the far right is scared. So in their heads, combative decision-making on behalf of the far right minority is the best offense. But each time this happens, it only emboldens progressives even further.

This is why the red states need the filibuster. They need the electoral college. They need the ability to redraw maps whenever possible. Because they know that they can't win without cheating.

It won't happen this year, but the end result is a restructuring of our constitutional rights system. By the time this is over, both reproductive rights and same-sex marriage rights will be permanently unbreakable.

Essentially, the far right's long-game is fucked. They're scared. They didn't see any of this coming 6 years ago. They saw a "victory" that actually represented the beginning of their inevitable demise.

We were recently thinking about where we'd be right now if Mitt Romney had won in 2012: We're guessing he would've been a soft republican president. It's very likely that Hilary would have won against him in 2016, extending liberal complacency far enough that a progressive uprising like what we're now experiencing would likely not exist. In reality, Covid and the Summer 2020 protests both occurred under the worst possible circumstances of US leadership; by default, literally anyone else in the entire world would have done a better job. So under this theoretical scenario, Dumbass Hillary would have probably done an ok enough job to secure another term.

I think we've been underrating the effects of progressive emboldenment under President Doctor Professor (2016-2020). The progress we've made in the past 6 years might have taken decades to achieve under liberal leadership.

So the far-right can threaten us with changing the constitution all they want. Progress is going to keep happening with or without their support or leadership. They can't stop us.

But despite our eventual triumph, the loss of this one major battle is a pretty devastating one.

26 states in 2022 will create laws that force people to have children, whether they want to or not. This prospect signifies a new disgusting benchmark for the state of the union. This is the worst it's been in my lifetime, which is really saying something.

"How could this happen with a blue president while dems have a majority in congress?" Because dems don't actually have a majority. A majority entails enough votes to get anything done. With a true majority, this wouldn't be happening.

Fight the real enemy. Centrist liberals allowed this to happen. Fossil fuel companies and weapons manufacturers and the billionaire class ensure that centrists remain just as desperately sneaky and scummy as the far right. There's a very good reason why the DNC stole Bernie's delegate lead and handed it to the guy who got 5th place in the Iowa Caucus and then forced the media to reframe Unky Joe as the guy who was everyone's favorite all along. The whole thing is connected.

So I take back what I said earlier --- There's one other prospective scenario alongside the defeat of capitalists. We're going to win eventually, but only if the opposition doesn't exterminate us out of existence first. They're going to have to kill us to stop us. And they probably will without a violent uprising. It sucks to admit the hard truth, but this won't be won peacefully. And a lot of people aren't going to understand that until it's too late.

January 2021: We Did The Blackpill

Losing my goddamn shit over here.

Wednesdays are officially the new hot weekday for sizzling news items. Let's see, we got the insurrection, the new impeachment, the inauguration party, stonks day, Bezos steps down. All happened on Wednesdays. Who knew hump days were all about the wild child?

Throughout it all, January 2021 was probably our official month of Blackpill Ingestion. In celebration of this momentous occasion, we might as well round up all the garbage.

The three largest puzzle pieces that unlocked our epiphany arrived in the reactions to the Bernard meme, the controlled chaos involving meme stonks, and Promising Young Woman.

Bernard Memed Because He Is Cool
Jan 20: We watched the inauguration and the embarrassing DNC celebration party because we correctly figured it would be fascinating. "Return to Obama-land" means a return to celebrity lawmakers, and so the events' TV production team and organizers consider everyone involved a celebrity, including anyone who primaried. Accordingly, they eventually aired the now world-famous 10-second wide shot of Bernard Sanders unintentionally expressing all of the frustration that his past and present supporters felt in that moment, as we anticipate the certain path of upsetting inevitabilities carved and cleared for a flood of status quo irrigation, not unlike the ongoing flow of the Dakota Access Pipeline.

Despite catty comments from the fashion police and the classist Karens, Bernard looked stunningly fabulous. We don't throw around the word "King" ever. But for what it's worth, "King" was the first word that came to mind. Stans typically overuse "king" and "queen," so this moment helped us realize that we are "Stans of Bernard." With respect to Jon Moxley and Jeff Tweedy, Bernard is our lone stan figure.

And yes, we get it: We understand why some socialists and progressives felt disappointed by Bernard's decision to support Unky Joe, unjustly labelling him a sellout and a traitor. But we will never understand how easily these same people forgot how the DNC blatantly and publicly stole his (our) delegate lead.

And here's where we get to make Hot Take #1: Fuck Pelosi and The DNC for condemning "people who want to take away our democracy" when they're not only guilty of pulling the exact same shit but - quite predictably - they fucking got away with it. Realizing how close we came, the DNC absolutely wants his past supporters to say "I fell for it" and give up hope.

Like it or not, it's Bernard's job to work with these losers everyday, and he would have made an unwise decision spending the road to election day condemning moderates and risking a vote split just to make his whiniest supporters happy. P.S. These delusional people assumed that a hypothetical Bernard presidency would involve some sort of magic wand that instantly converted the entire country to full socialism. They would have been unhappy no matter what he did or said. He's worked in congress for decades and has somehow avoided the pod people. He also understands long game strategy, and perhaps we should have some faith that the country's only trustworthy politician does in fact know what he's doing.

As the Bernard meme grew exhaustingly overused throughout the following weekend, a handful of remarks - mostly from bot accounts - unsuccessfully attempted to shift the dialogue in the direction of white misogynist cancellation. Others wondered why we weren't using this historic inauguration as an opportunity to meme Kamala The Cop. A week or so later, her Karen-in-training clown of a step-niece not only became a meme but signed a modelling contract, so they got their wish.

Aside from anything Bernard-related, it's definitely worth noting the musical-theater-heavy "Kids Bop" sponsored DNC celebration perfectly capturing their immense condescension and contempt for anyone but themselves and the powerfully rich.

Meme Stonks Are Okay
Smooth segue into the stonks thing: The underlying conflict regards The Powerful VS The Voiceless -- consistent with congress' reaction to the insurrection. They could have impeached Dr. Professor for a hundred other offenses, but none of them really mattered until powerful people felt threatened. The powerful also get to strategically choose which voiceless-adjacent people to provide a temporary platform. But only when they have to. (Like the poet at the inauguration. Or Ken Bone. Two great examples.)

Stonk trading is not supposed to be ethical. But despite its blatant inherent evil, Robinhood users who took the app's branding too literally became surprised when the free user-friendly stonk app cracked down on organized targeting. What did they honestly think would happen? Playing with stonks involves an understanding that powerful people will always win.

That's actually all we really have to say about the stonks thing.

Movie Review: Promising Young Woman
We haven't had this much time to catch up on movies in well over a decade, and the hits just keep on comin'. Accordingly, we've grown obsessed with Letterboxd and the good people at Red Letter Media. But we've also been enjoying episodes of our favorite dirtbag podcasts that occasionally focus on movie critique, perhaps partially as a nod to Zizek's film criticism.

Skipping over some explanation here ... something about how we somewhat expected a years-long movie marathon to expand our worldview, but perhaps not to this extent. In every movie we've seen in the past six weeks, we had no trouble finding at least some hinted theme about power struggle or class struggle.

Promising Young Woman is an interesting case -- an exercise in modern capitalist liberal idpol pro-cop propaganda. Earlier today, it was nominated for four Golden Globes. We would recommend it to anyone for the same reason we would recommend occasionally watching 30-60 minutes of cable news 2 or 3 times a month: it's important to know your enemy; it's good to know the extent of the bullshit.

We appreciate it because it's not an echo chamber of our own belief system and its grossly flawed messaging actually helped us gain clarity about a few aspects of liberalism that we most strongly disagree. So it's an important movie, but not at all in the way its filmmaker intended.

As a movie, it's pretty sloppy; its narrative's got some clunks, a few unchecked plotholes, a few too many "how convenient" moments, and virtually no likeable characters. Viewers are expected to root for the main protagonist lady, although she's never really given a moment or two of endearment. Her motivation for revenge only about 50% makes sense. However, the filmmaker (nom'd for Best Screenplay and Best Director) can use the film's messaging as a crutch to fight back against any anticipated critique. Yes it's flawed with many exposed loose ends, but that should only matter if you're part of the problem.

Here's the spoiler paragraph: So it's structured with a standard three act template. The first and third acts could have both been pretty great -- and in the case of the final act, very moving -- if they had been presented as shorts or as episodic segments. Acts one and three actually feel tonally incongruent. These are separated by an objectively bad second act (spoilers) that ends with a badly executed, awkward, corny, uncomfortable "dating" montage that's (probably) intended to trick people into thinking that the movie is wrapping up. But since happy endings don't exist in real life, the movie continues. Also by the middle of the second act (spoilers), we learn that the protagonist's one-dimensional revenge-motive doesn't involve any actions that actually teach the film's would-be-predators any long-lasting lessons, which renders her efforts entirely meaningless. At the end of the movie, the big finale (spoilers) concludes with the cops taking care of literally everything. A great message indeed.

We're almost positive that PYW was one of the 8 or 9 trailers screened prior to Cats, our most recent movie theater experience (one entire year ago this week), which also included a trailer for Trolls World Tour (a $110 million movie) among others. When it eventually hit streaming services, PYW's $19.99 rental price seemed suspiciously large compared to most of the other mid-to-low budget 2020 Sundance premieres. We suspect it had some big investors. And after today's multiple nomination announcement, we can see why.

If you're interested in seeing a film that handles #metoo responsibly and effectively, PYW is not that movie; instead, go see The Assistant, which also premiered at Sundance 2020 and was probably our favorite film of the year.

The Assistant is now streaming on Hulu.

Bernard Suspends Campaign

In January, a former HRC campaign adviser convinced Warren that her poll numbers would benefit from a mid-debate sneak attack against her closest ally. Their combined strength would have easily unified progressives, overtaking the nomination and changing the course of history. Warren was handed an opportunity to maintain her dignity and earn our respect by deflecting CNN's live televised attack against her ally; instead, she deliberately chose to ignore the high road. Whoever advised this correctly guessed that liberal feminists would instantly take the bait, splitting the progressive left and destroying any optimistic prospects of taking this all the way as a team. Something about all of this seems very calculated.

Within the next few weeks, Diamond Joe received a whopping 5th place ribbon in the Iowa caucus. Bernard held a slight lead, but we couldn't help thinking "we'll believe it when we see it." Which foreboding inevitability would push Bernard out of the picture? Would President Mayor Pete drop out and endorse Uncle Joe? Would Barry Oblama-mama publicly endorse Big J the day before Super Tuesday? These seemed like the two most plausible predictions, and we were almost right. Considering Diamond Joe's low voter enthusiasm throughout the first three primaries, it's very bizarre that three of the remaining seven major contenders (Pete Butt, Klobz & Steyer) all suddenly dropped and immediately endorsed Uncle J after he claimed only one medium-sized win in the south, without any genuine indication that voters wanted this.

Historically, the DNC subbornly refuses to learn from past mistakes. They're addicted to losing, and they love nominating weak losers. This was the case with Dukakis, John Kerry, and HRC. We can't call Al Gore a weak candidate because he technically won. Granted, HRC also won popular vote by a lot, but her multitude of glaring liabilities were all easily exploitable by the great Doctor Professor. It seems like the DNC has no general interest in accounting for exploitable liabilities, instead going off a subjective checklist of "electability."

For Bernard, his one true liability (if you can even call it that) was the word "socialist." It was the prospect of Doctor Professor alarming boomers and red state voters by shouting and tweeting the word "socialist" in all caps, out of context, over and over. Socialism, a largely misunderstood concept currently heavily flowing throughout our country, was literally Bernard's one liability, whereas Sleepy Joe's liabilities could (and will) fill an entire book. It won't be long before his weaknesses are exposed by Dr. Professor, one by one, loudly, publicly, and frequently.

Despite gaining only marginal voter momentum virtually equal to Klobz and Mayor Butt, Warren unwisely continued campaigning throughout Super Tuesday and single-handedly destroyed Bernie's lead. Whether Warren made this decision entirely on her own has yet to be determined, but the DNC was clearly overjoyed at this outcome. Afterall, she was the only other candidate attracting progressive voters that day, achieving exactly what the DNC had hoped. Where she earned zero delegates, voter gaps widened, casting extra delegates to Joe; in some states, Bernard's projected lead was outright stolen.

Warren didn't simply receive a few delegates that Bernard was owed -- it was much worse than this. The widened voter gaps showed Warren virtually seizing delegates from Bernard and directly handing them to Joey Joe Joe. And it gets even worse, because this permanently shifted the media narrative, destroying any odds that cable news might portray the race as a close contest, which might have engaged voters to think harder, listen closer, and do their homework before just settling on the frontrunner. Our best guess is that Warren was "advised" to stick around "just in case," but secretly longed to spite her former ally out of jealousy, and publicly cited a gross generalization of Bernard's most obnoxious online supporters -- realistically, a trollish loud few, equal to the percentage of the most problematic supporters of every other candidate.

If Bernard himself did not present inherent liabilities, the media would create them through association and blame Bernard for not diverting away from actual issues and condemning any support from imperfect areas. Realistically, every candidate's supporters had issues. But this was all the liberals had to run with -- a truly pathetic attempt at demonizing someone who was very much in their corner and quite literally the only decent old guy in U.S. politics.

In the event that Bernard still maintained a lead by the close of Super Tuesday, the DNC would have dragged out Barack. And if that didn't work, Bernard might have been assassinated. (Yes, we're serious.)

Blaming Warren seems a bit unfair. She paid and trusted people to advise her campaign who may or may not have been tipped that Joe needed to take the nomination at all costs. As for Big Joe, even Barry warned him, "you know Joe, you really don't need to do this." It's not the fault of Liz or Unky Joe that they're being used.

This was not as simple as "well, that's just the way people voted." The attack against Us was calculated as fuck. Because they hate Us. The DNC hates Us. The media hates Us. Cable news hates Us. They conspired in tandem to ensure no loss of power.

The next four days after Super Tuesday, Bernard addressed the nation four times in a manner tonally and aesthetically unlike anything the country had experienced since as late as January 2017. This is exactly how the president is supposed to react during a moment of crisis. Incredibly and strangely reassuring despite the bleak circumstances, Bernard's March 12th address was the single most presidential moment of the past three-and-a-half years, the very definition of "electable," treating the crisis with utmost responsibility. Had the live stream been picked up by any mainstream media, it's entirely possible that undecided voters would have experienced the same odd sense of distant familiarity. For a few fleeting moments during those four days, it felt like we actually had a leader, a glimpse of the alternate reality where Bernard rightfully won in 2016.

Sadly, Sleepy Joe is a loser, not a leader. We plan to vote Bernard in the primary anyway, and then vote against the Doctor Professor in November. But that doesn't make Sleepy Joe any less sleepy. We wish that were not the case, but he is. And he will lose.

Ready For The Great Rebound