Where We Are This Week
Make America Funny Again
Congratulations are in order to all of you, my beloved friends. We have just about survived yet another election cycle. You know, aside from the two assassination attempts, the Democratic coup, and the two major wars in Gaza and Ukraine, it’s been pretty quiet!
I remember when Joe Biden got elected. It was deep into the Covid-19 pandemic, and it was the fall after the ‘summer of love’ in Seattle and Portland. CHAZ/CHOP was the funniest, most ironic thing in American politics.
My wife and I drove to Colorado with our dog in the middle of the summer only to find campgrounds had been flooded with refuge-seeking campers escaping the draconian lockdowns of whatever city they inhabited. Inflation hit primitive campsites before it throttled everything else — no one talks about that.
I hadn’t started this newsletter. We hadn’t had our daughter. The skatepark in my town hadn’t opened. People were still wearing masks. October 7th hadn’t happened yet. Manchester United were still bad. Joe Biden was still very old. Donald Trump hadn’t been arrested a billion times, and no one was actually taking Kamala Harris very seriously.
Since covid, it’s felt like one long year. Surprises, undulations, left turns — sure. But no new paragraphs, no new beginnings, just ellipsis after ellipsis after…ellipsis.
Maybe what I’m talking about isn’t the age of the pandemic or the new era of an increasingly censorious, authoritarian federal government but the Trumpian epoch of American politics.
I never thought Donald Trump to be a revolutionary figure. He’s no ideologue. He’s certainly not an iconoclast. He’s just a loudmouth billionaire who strung a few sentences together, caught a wave of popularity, and figured out how to ride it all the way to shore. Mark Cuban could have done it. Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson could have, too.
America has no shortage of demagogues-in-waiting. Both of the latter have generated their fair share of clamor and interest when rumors of public office swelled. Oprah is another. We can’t get enough of these rich, entertaining know-it-alls.
The Orange Man™ gives the people what they want. By dumb luck, he struck the rich vein of populism and, for better or worse, has continued to ‘drill baby drill’ ever since.
To the adults in the ‘rational middle,’ the fervor of the irrational detractors and supporters of Donald Trump has made little sense. He’s neither demon nor savior but try convincing three-quarters of America of that fact. In the near future, he will be the most studied figure in American politics by political philosophers and historians — I have no doubts about that.
Nevertheless, here we are, four days away from his second election out of three campaigns or another four years of Obama-family-tree politics and the anticipation of a possible fourth presidential bid.
So, of course, people are going nuts.
Early on in the GOP primary, Vivek Ramaswamy went on Jordan Peterson’s podcast, where they spoke for at least a couple of hours about politics, philosophy, and culture. It was the true beginning of the podcast era in presidential campaigns. I said it then, and I will reiterate it now, any presidential candidate should be capable and willing to hold these types of discussions.
Last Friday, Donald Trump officially ushered in the new medium into the presidential realm when he appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience.
For three hours, they talked about what it was like to be president, what it was like to be shot, policies and rallies, and Trump came the closest I’d ever heard of admitting he was wrong. He came off as normal, sensible, and, dare I say, restrained.
Granted, he wasn’t pressed on almost anything. He wasn’t pressed on whether he felt morally responsible for January 6th, whether or not he regretted exposing the health of Americans to the predations and profits of pharmaceutical companies via Operation Warp Speed, or if he would still date his own daughter if she weren’t happily married. I’m only kidding about the last one — or am I?
Regardless, it humanized him; something that cackling, calculating, reptilian, D.C. creature Kamala Harris could benefit from.
Harris, so far, has pretty much only engaged in pre-scripted, edited, limited conversations with other like-minded individuals. Rogan wasn’t exactly hostile to Donald Trump, but no one would be mistaken in saying he’s not been a vocal supporter of the 45th president.
To be fair, Harris did go on the Call Her Daddy Podcast. You know, the number one podcast listened to by women, the one where the host and guests recount which sexually transmitted disease was their favorite and exchange abortion punch cards.
Call me crazy, but I would venture to say that Joe Rogan’s podcast has a few more undecided voters tuning in than Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy. I’m not sure how many new votes Trump garnered by going on the JRE, but the number Kamala Harris could have secured with a successful JRE performance could have dwarfed the former president’s number.
It’s just a hunch, but Harris had way more to gain by going on an unscripted, conversational podcast than the 44 minutes she did on the one where the host calls her her subscribers ‘daddy gang’ and wears sweatsuits with heels.
Will the Joe Rogan interview with Donald Trump change the outcome of the 2024 election? Certainly not, that’s been pre-determined by Bill Gates and George Soros years ago! I kid, I kid. Really, no, it won’t, but it might change what is seen to be a prerequisite for any presidential hopeful in the future. It might actually make the Presidential Debate Commission give us an actual debate the next go-round.
All of this is an educated guess, but, this, I know for sure: if Donald Trump secures re-election this upcoming Tuesday, calls for censoring or limiting access to the Joe Rogan Podcast (and others like it) will be stronger than ever. Free speech! An American tradition since 1776.
Puerto Ricans are garbage and have no sense of humor. These are the two things we learned after Tony Hinchcliffe gave the opening remarks at Trump’s Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden.
I’m just kidding, of course, they have a sense of humor!
Okay, okay, I relent. They are neither garbage, nor humorless.
Maybe having a roast comedian kickoff your biggest rally only days before the election isn’t the greatest idea in the world. As a comedian, maybe telling roast jokes about minorities at a political rally where the left side of the aisle thinks those that are in attendance are literal Nazis also isn’t the best idea. Best ideas aren’t politicians’ strong suit, however.
But oh my goodness, is it really worth the consternation everyone from Barack Obama to Aubrey Plaza and back to Joe Biden has been displaying over a dumb joke?
The joke isn’t a statement of belief, but those on the Left are jumping at the chance to be indignant and offended by these ‘racist’ and ‘bigoted’ remarks. Turns out those Trump supporters deserved to be called the Third Reich!
That’s the problem with our politics. We can’t turn it off even for a second. No one can take a break from the constant yelling at each other to laugh at the fact that while we’re debating what constitutes a ‘woman’ and what bathrooms a ‘they/them’ should use, Iran has never mistakenly killed a man for not wearing his hijab properly.
Doesn’t the fact that a celebrity gameshow host and an unmitigated failure of a vice president who was appointed as the nominee of her party with *no votes* are our only viable choices for leader of the free world call for at least a chuckle? No?
Jokes aren’t politically useful. Laughter isn’t an effective cudgel with which to beat your opponent into submission.
The best example I have of this is when Medhi Hasan and Ryan Girdusky got into a heated exchange on CNN earlier this week. Hasan called Girdusky and Trump supporters Nazis (how original, am I right?) to which Girdusky pressed Hasan, a notable Qatari stooge, on his pro-terrorist tendencies.
The trading of barbs ended with Girdusky telling Hasan that he hoped his beeper didn’t go off. Pantomimed offense ensued as Hasan claimed he just received a death threat to his face. In his defense, imagine the hurt and pain it would cause to be linked with a death cult that promotes the suffering of its own citizenry for political gain and seeks a genocide of the Jewish people — like the Nazis.
The Overton Window is broad enough to liken half of the entire country to the goose-stepping idiots of 20th Century Berlin yet too narrow to accommodate a snide comment about sympathizing with Hezbollah. Good grief.
Girdusky was promptly removed from the panel and is now banned from appearing on the Network.
Obviously, we take ourselves too seriously. Which isn’t great for the guy writing a newsletter making fun of everything. No one knows which wires you cut to diffuse a bomb, but you can diffuse a tense situation with laughter. When everyone’s too sensitive, overwrought, and self-conscious to take a joke, violence is inevitable. I mean just look at Charlie Hebdo.
So, before Tuesday, laugh a little. Make fun of your party and your parents’ party. Take a risk. Tell a few jokes. Just as long as they’re not about me.
To a better next week,
Cheers,
~FDA