Hello, good morning, happy Friday. This week’s newsletter will be kind of short, sorry. Maybe I will do a “late edition” or “weekend edition” or something to make up for lost snark. I have been wanting to write more, lately, anyway. Anything is possible.
In rapid-fire form: The Bachelorette is not as bad as anticipated. Loki is excellent. The warm weather is nice except when I have to commute in it. I finally watched Bo Burnham’s new special, Inside, and it was magnificent and also it broke me; if I had to pick a single piece of media to represent the entire pandemic, that would be it.
The house always wins
If you are not a rich person, you have probably seen it talked about that all the rich people use tax loopholes and whatnot to avoid paying taxes they would otherwise owe, but I think there is a general sense that they still pay a large percentage of their income in taxes, like enough that the complaints from Republicans about the top marginal tax rates would actually have any teeth to them. Anyway, no:
In 2007, Jeff Bezos, then a multibillionaire and now the world’s richest man, did not pay a penny in federal income taxes. He achieved the feat again in 2011. In 2018, Tesla founder Elon Musk, the second-richest person in the world, also paid no federal income taxes.
Michael Bloomberg managed to do the same in recent years. Billionaire investor Carl Icahn did it twice. George Soros paid no federal income tax three years in a row.
It is all bullshit. One does not get to become that rich without making money off of other people, and in fact even now that they are so rich we are continuing to fund their lavish nonsense. So when we say “tax the rich” in many cases that could be satisfied by simply getting them to pay the same effective tax rates as everyone else, much less the highest marginal rates on their income, etc. etc.
Façade
This is yet another story about how right-wing fuckos turned out to be grifters:
Jim Caviezel appeared onscreen in Oklahoma on a Friday night, his digital visage bathed in the hot lights of Rhema Bible College’s amphitheater and the adulation of his audience, and proceeded to make a real mess.
“You can do something now. You can end this,” he told the audience. “If we let our little ones continue to be slaughtered, boy, there’s gonna be a judgment on this world, and especially our country.”
It is a long and wild read, if you are into that sort of thing.
Thugs
When QAnon conspiracy theorists descended on a Dallas event hall in late May for their convention, they were met at the door by members of 1st Amendment Praetorian, a tough-talking new volunteer group devoted to running security at MAGA events, assembling “intelligence” dossiers on perceived Trumpist foes, and foiling threats from “antifa” protesters, real or imagined.
Decked out in black shirts bearing their group’s Roman-helmet logo, the self-proclaimed Praetorian members soon found that Dallas was light on antifa. Instead, they helped to bounce a few reporters, including one from The Daily Beast.
The QAnon conference marked a new high-profile stage for the group. Its co-founder, former Green Beret Robert Patrick Lewis, tweeted a photo of himself unfurling a Pine Tree flag—a Revolutionary War-era emblem appropriated by the far right—with disgraced former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and then-Texas GOP Chairman Allen West.
Crooked ump
We haven’t talked a lot about the Supreme Court in a while, so here is something about how much John Roberts has ruined our democracy:
The last nine months have seen the most terrifying assault on American democracy in 150 years. A quarter of Americans believe Trump’s “Big Lie” that the 2020 election was stolen. On transparently false pretexts, three states, soon to be four, have passed the most extensive restrictions on voting since Jim Crow—not coincidentally targeting the same people, Black voters. And Republican Party leadership has not only refused to investigate the January 6 insurrection, which was based on lies about voter fraud and stolen elections, but has now spun their own Orwellian rewriting of history to deny they had anything to do with it.
There are many people responsible for this lamentable state of affairs: Donald Trump, the demagogues at Fox News, opportunists like Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, plenty of Trump wannabes in Florida and Texas, and the ordinary Americans who watch or vote for them.
But you can draw a straight line from the anti-democratic depredations of 2021—and what has to be done to fix them—to the chambers of Chief Justice John Roberts.
The tyranny of small minds
You might be predisposed to think that people who extoll the values of science and logic would be less likely to be grifters, that they would practice what they preach and that they would keep to the Sagan-esque ideal of building a kinder, gentler world. As it turns out, no, atheists can be grifters, too:
It was inspiring — really inspiring. I remember watching clip after clip of Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens debating Christians, Muslims and "purveyors of woo," exposing the fatuity of their faith-based beliefs in superstitious nonsense unsupported by empirical evidence, often delivered to self-proclaimed prophets by supernatural beings via the epistemically suspicious channel of private revelation. Not that Harris, Dawkins and Hitchens were saying anything particularly novel— the inconsistencies and contradictions of religious dogma are apparent even to small children. Why did God have to sacrifice his son for our sins? Does Satan have free will? And how can the Father, Son and Holy Spirit be completely separate entities but also one and the same?
Good riddance to these dudes. It’s been quite a while since I looked up to them, and I’m glad they’ve (mostly) fallen out of cultural favor.
Silver spoon in hand
Probably most of you have read this story already, given my audience, but in case you haven’t yet you are in for a ride. It is a story about power, prestige, and self-delusion:
It’s supposedly haunted,” Amy Chua says brightly as she ushers me into the cavernous antechamber of the New Haven home she shares with fellow Yale Law School professor Jed Rubenfeld. Chua helped me find the sprawling Tudor-Gothic stone edifice by noting its “weird chimneys and griffins.” This is the house from which Chua and Rubenfeld — Chubenfeld, as they’re semi-derisively known on campus — once held court. Yale Law, the top ranked in the country, is both intellectual hothouse and finishing school for the American elite, and for the past two decades, the couple was “the self-appointed social center of the entire institution,” as one former friend on the faculty puts it. “They had the ability to create spectacle, to make themselves the center of a conversation.” Yale Law is not only the place where Bill and Hillary Clinton met and that has graduated four sitting Supreme Court justices. It promises intimacy, and is half-jokingly referred to as Montessori law school. Only 200 students enroll each year, less than half of Harvard’s 1L class. In turn, these students are set afloat on even smaller boats of 16 to 18 students — the “small group” — captained by a single faculty member who introduces them to the world of the law and of Yale Law School.
You deserve some good animal content
Have a good weekend.
Addendums
Shrinking jobs plan. Slack attack. An oral history of Lettuce Entertain You. Burnout. Undercounting LGBTQ+. Hype house from hell. Shipping crisis. Napoleon Dynamite revelation. More right-wing grifters. Don’t forget our history. Crypto scam vortex.