Dumbest Thing I've Ever Heard: 8/1/2023
Fifth Place: Asa Hutchinson
Despite being the only Republican running for President who I have any respect for, people need to face a rather important fact: Asa Hutchinson is not going to be President. Since the start of the 2024 race, it has been obvious that if Donald Trump entered he was going to be the nomination--and Trump has entered. This was demonstrated perfectly when Hutchinson was on CNN last night and we saw this graphic:
He couldn't even break half of one percent in any of the eight groups listed--seriously think about that.
Fourth Place: Laura Ingraham
Can we just admit that Fox News is a neo-Nazi network at this point? For fuck sake, last night brought us yet another example of a host pushing the horribly racist Great Replacement theory, with Ingraham saying:
Now, this is what Democrats have always wanted though, isn't it? An open border that would help usher in a new America. And this is what we're getting: Millions upon millions of illegals who fanned out across America with their free cell phones and dubious intentions.
I don't even know what to say about this outside of--well, this is the same thing Fox has been doing for years, and it seems like barley anybody, including the people whose job it is to monitor the right for things like this, barley notice it anymore. Media Matters barley took notice and from the looks of it no other media watchdog even mentioned it, it takes something especially offensive--like Greg's recent comments on the Holocaust--to even cause people to notice that Fox is engaging in the same rhetoric that actual fascists do.
MSNBC is easily the best out of the three cable news networks, but even they sometimes fall into the trap of not framing the story correctly. For example, Steve Benen's article on the website ran the headline "Dems slam Justice Alito’s latest claim as ‘stunningly wrong.’" However, this headline should make it a point to note that it's not merely the Democrats "slamming" Alito for saying Congress has no authority to regulate the Supreme Court, but it is them pointing out that what he said was, in fact, incorrect. This would be like claiming a teacher "slammed" a student who incorrectly answered a question on a test--except the student was also one of the nine most powerful people in the country.
Second Place: Michelle Goldberg
Her column "The Radicalization of the Young Right" falls into the typical liberal trap of having nostalgia for the terrible conservatives of the past because maybe they weren't as bad as those on the right today. The article sees her giving the benefit of the doubt to Nate Hochman, the DeSantis campaign staffer who was fired for putting fascist symbols into campaign ads, by writing:
Though the video’s imagery is clearly fascist — the sonnenrad, or sunwheel, is flanked by two rows of marching soldiers — Hochman has said that he didn’t know what the symbol meant. Given that he is Jewish, I’m inclined to believe that rather than being a covert Nazi, Hochman is simply a callow young man immersed in a milieu in which fascist idioms are so commonplace they can be picked up inadvertently.
And honestly, who here hasn't accidentally put a fascist symbol into a video? (Or made their crossword puzzle look like a fascist symbol on the first day of a Jewish holiday?)
As Hochman clearly recognized, these days, young reactionaries find their inspiration not in the adolescent superman fantasies of Ayn Rand but in the nihilistic Joker energy of 4chan.
And how exactly are those two things different? Ayn Rand wrote stories about how everything was bad in mainstream society and those on the sidelines need to take over and get rid of all of those who disagree, and that's the motto of the modern right-wing. Of course, Ayn Rand was never a source of inspiration for reactionaries, who were primarily conservative, because Rand was not one--William Buckley, the person behind the post-World War Two conservative movement, even hated Ayn Rand and pushed her out of his new right.
It's not everyday you see somebody attempt to defend Richard Nixon, but O'Connor did just that in his Townhall column "How Watergate Journalism Sowed the Seeds of Today’s Toxic Division." Even ignoring the silliness of the claim that Bob Woodward, a registered Republican, would do something like take down a sitting Republican President, and that The Washington Post would use Watergate as nothing more than an attempt to take down Nixon but wouldn't release most of the information on it until after the 1972 Presidential Election (George McGovern changing running mates was covered far more than Watergate during 1972) is nonsensical, but O'Connor is here to tell us what really happened:
But what was so patently false about the Washington Post Watergate journalism? From the first days of the burglary arrests of June 17, 1972, the Post knew facts strongly showing that this had not been a White House campaign operation but, rather, was a small part of a widespread, long-lasting CIA program of surveilling prostitutes and their Johns. Inveigling seeming White House approval from lower aides, the CIA hoped to gain a get out-of-jail-free card if later exposed.
And the fact that the organization which did this was called the Committee to Re-Elect the President is--what, a really bad coincidence? For those curious, O'Connor shows no evidence for this claim--instead he just spends the rest of the column insulting Mark Felt and modern journalism.
John O'Connor, you've said the dumbest thing I've ever heard.
