Friends, knowing what’s in store for you in the paragraphs to come….well, I hope you like white grievance, cuz you’re getting a heapin’ helpin’ of it tonight. The lunch lady is dispensing softboi whinging with an industrial-grade scoop this week. Plop. Plop. Plop. I apologize in advance.

The general consensus, amongst the least impressive specimens in circulation anyway, is that Our Culture Is Being Destroyed Because A Successful Black Woman Was Permitted to Touch This Flute Not One of Us Had Ever Heard Of Until Two Minutes Ago. Many a fit was pitched. MANY.

Somehow they’ve convinced themselves that when they melt down publicly over stuff like this, they’re merely blowing the faintest of dog whistles, ever so gently, rather than yelping like a Junior Klansman who got his robes caught in the rusty old lawnmower he was listlessly dry-humping.

Listening to Ben Shapiro whine about Lizzo playing James Madison’s flute is like being locked in a sauna with a fifty gallon drum filled with spoiled vanilla pudding that shrieks somehow. Why does anyone choose to live this way? Isn’t it exhausting? Don’t you just irritate the living shit out of yourself? See, the reason we know your culture sucks is that you’re incapable of emotionally navigating extremely minor, completely inconsequential changes to the world around you.

You don’t need to set your hair on fire every time they change the box butter comes in, y’know. You don’t need to show up armed to drag queen bingo. And if Mr. Potato Head happens to “go woke,” you always have the option of simply shrugging and moving on with your life, which I would argue is the only sensible response to fluctuations in the volatile world of potato toy branding.

It would almost be funny, were the wingnut media bubble not so liberally seasoned with voices like Roger “Let’s Get Right to the Violence” Stone’s. It’s a nifty little assembly line they’ve put together; the Shapiros and Hannitys rile ‘em up, out-and-out maniacs like Mike Flynn give ‘em a radicalizing shove with mad tirades about war-declaring governors, and before you know it, you’ve got Proud Boys and Oath Keepers and various ancillary asshats running about, rioting and firing nail guns.

You see a lotta headlines n’ thinkpieces these days, in our sickly, Cillizzafied, political press, about the profane competition taking place between Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott, as they vie for squeals of glee from the bloodthirsty MAGA mob.

I’m told Kayleigh McEnany has pitched hosting a game show, as a lead-in to Tucker Carlson’s White Power Hour, where Republican governors construct dueling obstacle courses (at taxpayer expense, of course) for asylum seekers to cross, while staffers hurl slurs from the stands. It’ll be like American Ninja Warrior, only a little…y’know…Nazier.

‘Course, the Dotard’s mostly mad because these wannabes keep stealing his best ideas, though in his version, the federal government would deliberately transport “rapists and murderers” to “liberal cities” in order to “destabilize” them, which strikes me as a rather odd thing for a fellow to want to do to a country he’s president of, but I suppose the world looks different through spite-tinted glasses.

Anyway, you can’t get anywhere in Republican politics anymore without performative cruelty to the nonwhite. You can see the panic in Glenn Youngkin’s eyes as he tremblingly protests “Virginia is a border state,” which it absolutely isn’t. If Virginia were a border state, Glenn would have his own migrants to traffic, but he doesn’t, which is why he’s all pouty in the first place.

Now, Doug Mastriano is a fully post-dog whistle Republican candidate, unashamedly embracing professional anti-Semites like Andrew Torba and Jack Posobiec, as well as Christian nationalists like Lance Wallnau, all while daydreaming of prosecuting women for murder over abortions. Pennsylvania voters seem decidedly unenthusiastic about the prospect of being governed by their embarrassing racist uncle who got the whole family banned for life from Chili’s, thank god.

Arizona’s Kari Lake brings a lot more media savvy to many of the same terrifying ideas, so she’s polling better than Doug, which isn’t awesome. Is this an awkward time to mention that she hired an admitted heroin dealer to work on her campaign? And not just any heroin dealer, but one who plotted the assassination of an FBI informant?

But it’s John Fetterman who’s SOFT ON CRIME he’s got SCARY TATTOOS because he’s in a GANG just like THOSE PEOPLE did I mention they let a BLACK LADY play JAMES MADISON’S FLUTE?

Ted Cruz thought he might gin up a little attention for himself by being the lone vote on the Senate Rules Committee against the electoral count reform bill, but as such a well-known asshole, his braying faded into the background, as per usual. Sure is cute watchin’ the lil’ fella try, though!

By now, I’m sure you’re well acquainted with that familiar trope of the omnipresent Turd Reich tell-all genre: the “he was even weirder and dumber and racister than you knew” anecdote, something about Donald Trump trying to stick his finger in the King of Thailand’s ear, or the time he locked himself in a West Wing bathroom and, fearing starvation, devoured eleven rolls of toilet paper before the locksmith arrived, eight minutes later. Anyway, Maggie Haberman’s book was always gonna be the Oops! All Berries version of that.

We got new details this week about that almost incomprehensibly pathetic 2019 incident where the government tried to hide a whole-ass destroyer from President Shithead on an overseas trip, because he was feuding in his mind with the dead guy whose name was on the side of the boat, and I guess if I were in the market for a personality to build a cult around, I would rule out the debilitatingly insecure ones right off the bat.

Juggling both law and order as only a Republican attorney general can, Ken Paxton fled a subpoena server in a truck driven by his state Senator wife, probably straight to Aileen Cannon’s house.

I gotta get me one of them Judge Cannons, by the way. Looks pretty handy, owning your own, personal, private, federal judge…’specially one so willing to accept custom orders on short notice. “The law is whatever your tenth-rate strip mall legal team needs it to be, Mr. Trump, sir!” You could throw quite a party with power like that.

I guess Ginni Thomas professed her sincere, religious belief in the Big Lie to the January 6th commission, which triggers the constitutional right to overthrow the government, as every pigtailed schoolchild knows. Pretty cool this loon was texting Q shit to the President’s Chief of Staff during an attempted autogolpe, huh?

Speaking of SCOTUS, it’s always delightful when Sammy Alito adds his gasbag wail to the cacophony of wingnut grousing, isn’t it? Look, either take the speech rights, too, or learn to deal with criticism of your theocrat tyranny, you preening taintblister.

Sometimes I wonder how we fell so far down this shitty, shitty rabbit hole…then I see something like Chuck Todd “interviewing” Congresswoman Nancy Mace about her party’s intention to impeach President Biden, without it ever once occurring to either one to mention a potential justification for such an extreme measure, and…I get it. I mean, I weep uncontrollably for an hour or two, but I get it.

So, Mike Lee says it’s “overreach” for the FBI to arrest a “Catholic father of seven” accused of twice assaulting a 72-year-old abortion clinic volunteer, because Mike Lee’s political and religious beliefs align more closely with the attacker than the victim in this instance, and golly, what a fun, healthy, not-at-all-semi-fascist standard that is! Apropos of nothing, please enjoy this link to Evan McMullin’s campaign site.

J.R. Majewski, who you’ll remember from last week’s tale of stolen valor, may not be particularly good at lying, but you gotta give him an E for effort. This time next week, he’ll be claiming he led the Bin Laden raid, only the deep state won’t let anybody know. For any Republican strategists out there, this is another really useful cautionary tale about the dangers of selecting candidates based on the game show hosts they paint on their lawn.

Apparently, in the red states, if you’re really good at football, they let you steal millions of dollars from the poor now. Yeah, they just snatch the money away from the neediest and most vulnerable, and deliver it (by horse-drawn carriage no doubt) directly to wealthiest people they can find. Keep electing Republicans, Mississippi, it’s really working out.

Hey, party at my place in seven months when the fashy new government installed in Italy’s low-turnout election this week collapses. Get it out of your system, kids.

The young men of Vlad Putin’s reborn Soviet Empire seem curiously uninterested in their glorious leader’s gracious invitation to get puréed by HIMARS in Ukraine, and are instead fleeing their homeland in droves, fancy that.

For whatever audience remained, Poots went ahead with his sad, petulant, completely illegal annexation ceremony, held at the Moscow branch of Four Seasons Total Landscaping, where he ranted like some incel trying to get Don Jr’s attention on Truth Social. It was all very impressive. Superpower shit. Truly.

(Man, imagine all the weird, weird shit Putin’s saying to Russian Maggie Haberman right now.)

Anyway, in the time it took you to scroll through this silliness, I’ve sold 783 “Ashli Babbitt Died For James Madison’s Flute” bumper stickers to the Don’t Fauci My Florida email list I bought off DeSantis. Rube-bilking is a growth industry, and daddy needs beer money.

I’ll see y’all in a week. You stay safe out there, there’re roving gangs of clowns trying to force-feed “rainbow fentanyl” to your kids, y’know.