Which is scarier, giant ants or big aunts?

Big Aunt Kathy can be totally awesome with sweet treats, $5 in your birthday card and even the pinching of the cheeks has love attached to it (although you are 62 years old). But then again Big Aunt Marge can be hell and wants to know why you never got married and what’s up with the roommate in a one BR apartment; also why can’t you dress more feminine, you aren’t one of THEM are you?

Giant ants on the other hand demand sweet treats, will try to crush you in their mandibles and emit a terrifying screeching sound. OK so Big Aunt Marge might be tied for the scariest, she is a bit similar.

The giants ants in Them! have gotten so huge because of radiation from the first atomic bomb test at the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range in New Mexico. Sci-fi films of the 1950s were filled with mutated monsters caused by radiation. The nuclear devastation caused by the dropping of atom bombs on Japan created a slew of mega monsters known as Kaiju starting with the king of them all, Godzilla. (Thirty of them free to watch on the Internet Archive here.) Which premiered in 1954 as Gojira, the same year as Them!

The cleverness of Them! is taking a tiny creature that we may crush beneath our feet and making them the ones who do the crushing. I watched this flick with my dad as a kid, he was a huge fan of sci-fi movies. He liked to explain to me some of the deeper meanings attached to these films. A fear of communism informed the themes of much of 1950s sci-fi cinema, like 1956’s Invasion Of The Body Snatchers. (I originally typed “cummunism” and that kind of typo needs to be memorialized.)

Many of these films also leaned into the fear of what kinds of havoc science and exploration could possibly cause, while at the same time presenting the scientists as the ones saving the day. In Them! the scientists saving the day actually include a woman. A pair of myrmecologists (they study ants), a dad and daughter team of doctors, are brought in to help find a way to stop the ants after a person is found with mutilizations in the basement of a destroyed building.

I am thinking that this is a job way past the Orkin Man’s abilities to handle.

But the ants are already spreading and it may be too late to stop the destruction as the military and scientists make a final last stand in Los Angeles.

But a new breed has risen and they scare the establishment the most…

Giant Ant-Tifa!

Them! stars James Arness, James Whitmore, Joan Weldon, Edmund Gwenn, Sandy Descher, Fess Parker, Chris Drake, and Leonard Nimoy. Directed by Gordon Douglas.

Them! is available for free with ads on Plex, free on the Internet Archive and $3.99 in the usual places.

To make requests and see the movie lists and schedules go to WonkMovie.

The animated short is The Grasshopper And The Ants, the classic 1934 Silly Symphony from Disney.

Our next Movie Night selection is MST3K: The Crawling Eye, it is available for free on YouTube.

Buy Wonkette some popcorn?

Last Thursday, before and after we saged our laptop, we told you about how on Monday officials in New Mexico had searched the property formerly known as Epstein’s Zorro ranch, a spooky, blustery parcel on a remote high desert plateau between Santa Fe and Albuquerque, after an anonymous email tip from 2019 claimed that two girls were buried there. But that tip, as with most others, was never investigated, and the ranch was never searched, in spite of multiple reports that children had been raped there.

And shit gets so much weirder, y’all. The man who quietly bought that land in 2023 was former Republican Texas state Senator, Don Blaine Huffines:

… who immediately set to secretly digging the property up with backhoes, no permits requested. Once reporters found out, Huffines said his plan all along had been to make the place a Christian retreat, but the county says he has not requested nor filled out any paperwork for either permits or to operate such a thing, either. And Huffines is not just some rich entitled sack of shit who might be able to pretend that he didn’t know any better; before he was a state Senator he was a career real estate developer. Who is now running to be the Comptroller of Texas! Huffines knows full well how building permits work, and wants to make keeping tabs on Texas’s financial paperwork his entire job. But either he figured he was a special exception to getting his digging shut down, as it now has, and, or, Some People Are Wondering if he thought the risk of immediately digging up the place was worth it because there’s some evidence on that ranch he wants to try and hide for one or more of his GOP pals. Who can say!

It seems unlikely any evidence would be left after so much time, or able to be located in the ranch’s vast 7,600-acre expanse, especially after Epstein’s Belarusian dentist girlfriend had ample time to clean it up before it was seized to pay Epstein’s debts, but who knows.

And Don Huffines’ Trump connection is HMMM. Both he and his twin brother Phillip are OG Tea Partiers cum bigtime Texas MAGA, GOP and Trump donors. Yes, of course Don has a twin brother in this wacked-out hallucinatory Nancy Drew hellscape we’re all now forced to inhabit.

Don Huffines was so MAGA that in the Texas senate, along with the usual MAGA crap, he wrote a bill to end vehicle safety inspections. Naturally, another hobbyhorse of his attacking the Texas Department of Child and Family Services for being too woke, huh! Those MAGA Republicans sure do hate anything that tries to rescue children from abuse with the heat of a thousand suns. And eventually Huffines got too nuts for even Texas, in 2018 voters in his district booted him in favor of a Democratic candidate for the first time in decades.

And not only was Zorro ranch never searched by local authorities regarding the tips about sex abuse or dead bodies, or by federal ones, after then-AG Bill Barr unusually ordered a shut down of all investigations into Epstein’s doings five days after he died, other suspected Epstein crimes were also ignored. Epstein was alleged to have destroyed petroglyphs on the property, and was suspected of harboring other stolen artifacts, including the circa 1760’s “death bell” stolen in the 1930s from the Jose de Gracia Mission Church in Las Trampas. And there were those dinosaur bones he, Ghislaine Maxwell and RFK Jr. allegedly looted together. Literary foreshadowing even the Brady Bunch writer’s room couldn’t come up with!

Another topic and another odd coincidence, on July 2, 2008, two days after Epstein began serving his Florida prison sentence, the Zorro Trust company won the Oklahoma state Powerball lottery for $85 million. Just Jeffrey Epstein picking up a ticket on a whim at the 7-11 with his butterscotches? This blog is sus by stating as a fact that Ghislaine Maxwell stole a baby (which of course might have actually happened, but is only an unsubstantiated diary entry in the files as of now), but the Powerball ticket win did happen against unbelievable odds following technical difficulties, and it’s all an interesting read.

Back to dinosaur bones, Epstein also ingratiated himself with a lot of scientists who happened to be into eugenics also. Or “transhumanism,” which is just eugenics with computers. People like Peter Thiel, or George M. Church, a molecular engineer working on gene editing. And Epstein was obsessed with the subject of breeding a genetically superior race with his über-sperm, he was not shy about it:

Once, at a dinner at Epstein’s mansion on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Lanier said he talked to a scientist who told him that Epstein’s goal was to have 20 women at a time impregnated at his 33,000-square-foot Zorro Ranch in a tiny town outside Santa Fe. Lanier said the scientist identified herself as working at NASA, but he did not remember her name.

Epstein also had his own genome sequenced, and wanted to use CRISPR to edit and improve his genes.

But was Jeffrey Epstein actually doing Dr. Frank N. Furter style medical experiments on his ranch and making and stealing babies? Did he build a secret incinerator? (Seems a bit wild, as there would be no reason not to have an incinerator on a remote ranch with no trash collection, so therefore to hide one, but again, who knows.) And what about how New Mexico state Rep. Andrea Romero claimed “people had been “coming forward saying they were drugged” and had their “sex organs and sperm harvested from their bodies”? Are they credible people, are these reports corroborated in any way? When you cannot trust the FBI or any authorities to do anything but cover up and smear victims, rumors will swirl, and all you can say is again, who fucking knows if any Jurassic-Park type experiments on human slaves actually happened.

More lookie-here: Epstein’s accountant since 2005, Richard Kahn, testified behind closed doors to the House Oversight Committee. Unshockingly he said he didn’t see anything or know anything, even though Epstein had, like, accounts at JP Morgan Chase with six figures of money under girls’ first names with no social security number attached them that Kahn facilitated payments to, and Epstein’s books had enough flapping red flags that he was being investigated by the DEA for suspected drug dealing and money laundering from 2015 until some unknown time. And when the FBI came to raid Epstein’s manse, it was Kahn who had servants pack up two suitcases with the contents of a certain safe and squirrel them away. So safe to say, hyuk, Kahn knows more than he’s saying.

Also the HOC wants to depose Tova Noel, the prison security guard suspected of being paid to cover up Epstein’s murder.

Drip, drip, drip, Clarice.

Ps., Zorro would’ve slashed all their asses.

[Santa Fe New Mexican archive link / NPR / Bloomberg archive link]

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As we mention whenever we get the chance, our home state may not have the size or influence of a Florida or a Texas, but when it comes to pushing far-Right culture war bills, the Idaho Legislature punches above its weight in crazy. Hence our beloved state motto, “Though she be but little, she is batshit.”

(Okay, we’re also a small enough media market that rightwing dark money goes a lot farther than in bigger states, making it easier to elect weirdos and lobby them once they’re elected.)

Here’s the latest horrible idea from the state that was first in the nation to ban trans girls and women from sports: Having already banned gender-affirming medical care in 2023, the Idaho House this week passed HB 822, a bill outlawing what it calls “pediatric secretive transitions.” School staff, health professionals, and childcare providers must inform parents if their kid attempts any kind of “social transition” in their gender identity, because we all know about how schools are trying to forcibly turn kids trans and hide it from their parents.

Like most such legislation, it’s deliberately vague about what exactly must be reported to parents, and it includes a massive penalty that probably violates the state constitution: Not only can aggrieved parents sue for damages, but the state attorney general could seek civil penalties of up to $100,000. The bill also doesn’t include any exceptions, so a school or a counselor in private practice would be required to out trans-maybe kids even if they have reason to believe the parent might abuse or abandon the kid. Because “parental rights.”

The bill passed Wednesday on a nearly party-line vote, 59 to 9, although one Republican, state Rep. Jack Nelsen of Jerome, voted against it. We haven’t checked to see whether his house has been burned to the ground yet.

The bill is the scrawny brainchild of state Rep. Bruce Skaug, who previously led the Lege’s drive to criminalize gender affirming care to minors, and then to prohibit taxpayer funds from covering transgender healthcare through Medicaid, even for adults. That 2024 law pushed a clinic at Idaho State U in Pocatello to stop providing gender-affirming care other than counseling, because the statute also prohibited gender-affirming care on state property.

HB 822 would require “covered entities” — schools, medical providers, and childcare providers — to notify parents within 72 hours if a minor asks them to “participate in or facilitate the social transition of the minor student,” including asking the adult to refer to them by different pronouns, a different name or nickname that isn’t a “derivative” of their given name, asking to use the wrong terlet, locker room, changing room, or litter box, or wanting to play on the wrong sex’s sports team. (Presumably, a good portion of Shakespeare’s plays would be off limits too.)

Weirdly cramming the language of criminal law into a civil law bill, HB 822 states, “A covered entity shall not aid or abet a child's efforts to socially transition without first obtaining written consent from the child's parent.” Helping kids be who they are is “aiding and abetting” now, even when parents support it.

The bill’s definition of “social transition” is dangerously broad, opening the door to all sorts of litigious mischief:

“Social transition” means the process by which an individual goes from identifying with and living as a gender that corresponds to the individual's sex to identifying with and living as a gender different from the individual's sex and may involve social, legal, or physical changes, including adopting a name, pronouns, appearance, or dress that does not correspond to the individual's sex.

Skaug claimed in committee debate that the bill is sufficiently specific that it would never ever be used against teachers who fail to report minor departures from gender stereotypes.

“So that’s not when a girl wants to have a short haircut. That’s not when a girl wants to dress in boy’s clothes or vice versa,” Skaug said. “But if there’s that desire to have social transitioning from one gender to the other, then that needs to be reported to the parents.”

But there’s nothing in the bill to stop parents from suing a teacher or counselor for not reporting a girl who wears her hair short, wears a man’s dungarees, and even operates power tools while cursing. As House Democrats noted in a seven-page Minority Report on the bill, the question of whether a kid has “adopted an appearance or dress” inconsistent with their sex is “entirely in the eye of the beholder,” and in the face of a potential $100,000 shithammer of punishment, the bill would encourage over-reporting.

The Democratic minority report also highlights the lack of any exceptions for the minor’s safety, an omission that’s sure to be the basis of a lawsuit if HB 822 makes it into law. Nope, have to tell the parents if a trans kid confides in a trusted adult, even if the kid fears their parents might react with violence or throw them out of the house. The result, say the Democrats, “is not greater safety — it is more fear, more isolation, and less access to care for Idaho's most vulnerable young people.”

Well OK, but how are the parents supposed to force the kids into “conversion therapy” and make them no longer trans if they aren’t alerted?

As it turns out, Republicans in House leadership took the unusual step of voting to block the minority report from being included in the House Journal, the official record of the body’s activities. The reason they offered was that report was rude to the GOP committee chair because it (accurately) complained that he’d only allowed 14 minutes for public comment, and the comment period was dominated by opponents of the bill, including two witnesses who weren’t from Idaho. Seems like a good opportunity to Streisand Effect the heck out of the minority report.

As we’ve noted, once in a while the Idaho Senate does the state a favor and refuses to consider some of the flaming paper bags of dogshit the House sends it, but it hasn’t shown any willingness to do so with recent anti-trans bills. Gov. Little seems likely to tout the “parental rights” rhetoric and sign the thing, and then we’ll have to see how the lawsuits go.

From here, we suppose the Idaho Lege will move to consolidate rightwing moral panics by forbidding furries from using litter boxes designated for furries of the opposite gender.

We should also note that at least one part of the bill is opposed by the far-Right Idaho Freedom Foundation, the dark-money group which has huge influence in aiding and abetting culture war legislation in this state. The IFF generally supports the law, but complains that the “written consent” requirement is too lax, because “There should be no allowance — even with the written consent of a parent — for a child’s mental health issues to be affirmed in the facilitation of a sex change, even if only socially.”

Freedom is much too dangerous to be left up to families, after all.

[Idaho State Journal / Idaho Capital Sun / Idaho HB 822 / Minority Report on HB 822 / Idaho Statesman (archive link) / ACLU of Idaho / CBS2]

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All Sand And Furry, Signifying Nothing

Secretary of Defense and single biggest regret of every woman he’s ever dated or married Pete Hegseth was unhappy. It was the fall of his first year steering the Pentagon into a steep and unrecoverable dive, and the building’s press corps refused to tickle his balls while whispering compliments on his flying skills into his ear.

So Hegseth demanded all the reporters on the Pentagon beat adhere to some limiting rules that no self-respecting journalist would ever agree to, such as not publishing anything unless he had signed off on it. Those who would not sign this pledge were invited to get the fuck out.

The result was that any respectable journalist at the Pentagon got the fuck out. The new Pentagon press corps was made up of lickspittles from fringe right-wing news sites who would happily polish Pete’s shoes or tell his wife that was their pile of hundreds of PBR cans piled ankle-deep on the floor of his office in exchange for the right to ask him questions like Secretary Hegseth, how badass is America’s military and Secretary Hegseth, how are you so handsome?

That last one would be especially ironic since Hegseth reportedly banned still photographers from his briefings recently after they took pictures of him he deemed unflattering. Man, they’re photographers, not magicians.

LIKE SO!

But it is still a free-ish country where the media is concerned. Which means journalists can still report stuff Hegseth doesn’t like. And boy, does that make him whinier than a dog that can’t get its owner to toss a few scraps of roast beef into its dish.

Hegseth spent the first few minutes of a press conference on Friday bragging about all the badass warmaking and warfighting and warkilling the American military is currently doing in Iran, all the Iranian military capacity it has degraded and all the killing it has done and will do. He promised to give the enemy “no quarter,” which is a war crime in violation of the Geneva Conventions. In America’s new Hegseth-directed age of manliness, only pussies care about such civilizational guideposts.

Then he got to the heart of his complaint, which is that the media — not the awesome patriotic wingnut media, of course, but the mainstream — insists on reporting on stuff that doesn’t give Pete Hegseth a stiffy, such as that people are dying and the Trump administration seems to have done whatever the opposite of planning is for this war that it keeps saying is not a war.

“People look up at the TV and they see banners. They see headlines. I used to be in that business and I know that everything is written intentionally.”

My man, you were not in the news business, you worked for Fox. But yes, people generally intend to write what they write. For example, we assure you when we write that you are a slimy, smarmy, drunken gecko-brained fuckwit who couldn’t out-think the pull cord on a lightbulb, we absolutely intended to say that.

“Or more fake news from CNN reports that the Trump administration underestimated the Iran war’s impact on the Strait of Hormuz. Patently ridiculous, of course. For decades, Iran has threatened shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. This is always what they do. Hold the Strait hostage. CNN doesn’t think we thought of that. It’s a fundamentally unserious report.”

CNN is not the only outlet that has reported that the Trump administration had zero plan for Iran maybe closing the Strait of Hormuz. And the administration’s actions in this regard — demanding sailors show some “guts” and sail through the Strait, scrambling to learn how the shipping insurance market works so it can underwrite policies as an incentive — suggest very strongly that Hegseth is lying here.

Also suggesting he’s lying? He’s Pete Hegseth. That’s another clue.

But it was the next bit that made people sit up.

“The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better.”

Nothing says “free press” like a high-level political apparatchik all but jizzing his shorts at the idea of a wingnut billionaire taking over a major news network and turning it into a mouthpiece for the government. And that’s before you get to the wingnut billionaire already owning another major news network, which his hand-picked idiot is busy turning into Fox News without the charm.

We’re sure antitrust lawyers who may sue to prevent the Warner Discovery-Paramount merger appreciate a government official so publicly putting a finger on the scale, though. Hegseth’s statement could make a nice exhibit in a brief someday.

We have given CNN our share of crap over the years for its reporting and its personnel and its insistence on employing Scott Jennings. But still, it deserves better than to be sneered at and belittled by the likes of Pete Hegseth, an overgrown eight-year-old in a big-boy suit and a mediocrity the likes of which this country usually had the good sense to send to business school instead of occupations of some importance.

After he had finished trashing the media, Hegseth took questions from the real journalists at One America News Network, the Daily Wire, the Epoch Times, Real America’s Voice, and Mike Lindell’s TV channel.

One day someone competent will be back in charge. We just hope there’s anything left to oversee.

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Happy weekend!

Today is Pi Day. Get it? Because of how today is March 14 and the first three digits of pi are 3, 1 and 4? So clever!

Anyway, I can’t make myself care about pi, except to the extent that I find it very annoying when, on television shows, they use “can recite pi up the the 37th digit” or whatever as a tropey shorthand for “is a genius.” Because if that’s a genius, then what is anyone who has ever played Hamlet on stage? Hamlet has 1400 lines! If we are talking about the impressiveness of memorizing something, that seems a lot more impressive to me than just someone reciting numbers. Also, a lot more entertaining.

But hey, at least it’s not “having an eidetic (photographic) memory,” which no adult person has ever been proven to have, a fact that one would think a “genius” would know.

Speaking of geniuses, today is also Albert Einstein’s birthday, as well as the birthday of Billy Crystal, whom we could say is a comedic genius, and of Giovanni Schiaparelli, who was an astronomer genius when it came to Mars and also the uncle of one of my most favorite geniuses, the anti-fascist fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli.

Also speaking of geniuses, your first present today is a 1990s commercial for The Church of the Subgenius, a thing I should probably know way more about than I do. (Rebecca says her brother is a pope.) I definitely did not know that was what the picture of the 1950s guy with the pipe was about!

Apropos of nothing other than it being on the front page of the ObscureMedia subreddit, your next present is this wonderfully batshit motivational record for 1950s shoe salesmen.

I am so glad it exists!

And, apropos of Donald Trump not being able to rule out a draft, I bring you The Smothers Brothers and George Segal performing the Phil Ochs song “Draft Dodger Rag.”

You are welcome!

Have you been struck with a sudden urge to shower us with money and jewels? If so, we are on Substack now so you can just go ahead and click subscribe! Click click click!!

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Talk amongst yourselves!

It was Tabs, there was a kitten playing with water, and it was Good.

Gross incel AI guy puts the Ladies in their liberal-arts-degree-having place.

Ron DeSantis is term-limited, but he’s leaving behind a legacy for future culture-warring governors to keep Florida cities from having nice things.

Yet another rightwing woman finds out that her ideological compatriots hate her for being a woman. This keeps happening somehow! Maybe if she smiled more.

Brent Bozell III got appointed as Trump’s ambassador to South Africa and learned that his racist dog whistles weren’t actually welcomed by the government there.

Oil futures aren’t nearly the hot prospect Donald Trump’s boosters hoped. But the climate will be!

Have a nice civilized drink in preparation for St. Patrick’s Day. Whew.

We’ll see you after the weekend, kids. We love you.

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Biden (grabs mic): LIQUID FNORDS!

Greetings, Wonketeers! I’m Hooper, your bartender. St. Patrick’s Day is, functionally, tomorrow. We’re bracing for an epic bar crawl, with a bevy of Midori-fueled emerald cocktails on the menu. It’s going to be epic. Before the green stuff hits the fan, I thought I’d take a little time off from doomscrolling and sip something comfortable. Let’s crack open some Irish whiskey and stop worrying for a while. This bottle’s a fun little find that illustrates what makes The Water of Life so special. Let’s have a sip and relax.

Uais The Triple Blend Irish Whiskey

Serve neat. Sip Slowly. Relax. Enjoy. Take a few deep breaths. Put down your phone. Watch the fire. Listen to some Gaelic Storm. It’s going to be okay.

I’m going to start off with a bit of heresy from an American bartender: I don’t like bourbon. It’s boring. To qualify as bourbon, a spirit must be at least 51 percent corn, made in America, and aged for at least three years in charred American oak casks. I’ve tasted so many bourbons by now. Some are made with care and craft; some are made by get-rich-quick schemers looking to make a buck. After a while, they all taste the same.

Irish whiskey is a lot looser with its definitions. Irish whiskey must be made with some malted cereals, fermented with yeast, and aged in Ireland in wooden barrels. There’s a ton of wiggle room in that definition, and the variety of Irish whiskeys proves the point. The only consistent factor is the need for malted grain, which is hardly a great sacrifice. (Malted grains are cereals that have been partly germinated, then toasted to stop them from sprouting. I’ve snacked on malted barley at a distiller’s before, and it’s incredibly tasty. Pretzels use malted flour; so does a chocolate malted shake at the ice cream parlor.)

This particular bottle is everything you can do to Irish whiskey, all mixed together in a glorious smorgasbord. Uais whiskey is 25 percent pot still whiskey — mostly barley, some malted, some not. The English, being English, started taxing malted barley in the 1800s. The Irish cut their whiskey with unmalted barley, found the end product tasted better, and kept on making the good stuff. It’s 25 percent single malt whiskey, made with nothing but malted barley. And the rest is “grain whiskey,” made with oats, corn, whatever’s tasty. The end results aged in wood — some charred ex-bourbon casks, some virgin oak. It’s definitely an “everything but the kitchen sink” whiskey, the sort of thing you almost never see in America.

But Lord, is it ever tasty. I get pineapple and honey on the nose of this spirit, plus some of the funkiness I associate with top-notch Jamaican rum. It is so very, very smooth. You don’t need water, or ice, or anything to enjoy this liquid gold. All you need is time, and space to breathe.

Okay. We’ve decompressed from the news a bit. Time for something a bit more … robust to get us up and moving.

Jameson Triple Triple

Put an ice cube in this one, it’s a bit more robust. Savor the nut and apple notes at the front of the whiskey. Grab an Irish ale to wash down the burn. When you’re good and ready, pop some Dropkick Murphys into your headphones. Stand up, stretch, and get ready to fight the next round. We aren’t down for the count yet.

Jameson’s is going to flow like water on St. Paddy’s Day, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t make some good stuff. This whiskey’s been aged in oak, sherry, and chestnut casks. You’ll never find a combination like that in American bourbon. It’s nutty, complex, and sweet, and it’s a bit hot going down, but we deserve this. It’s only a buck or two more than regular Jaymo, and so much nicer. I have determined, after scientific experimentation, that shots of Jameson are smoother on St. Paddy’s Day than on any other day of the year. You owe it to yourself to determine the veracity of that theory. A few beers would help the process. Guinness is cliché. It’s also really good. Drink what you like. I won’t judge.

And then pop in some Dropkick Murphys. This band is so very, very much on our side. If there was ever a Celtic punk band that has our corner, this is the one. Listen here if you don’t believe me. Or here. We aren’t done yet. We got this. Take a deep breath. Stand up. Call out the Black and Tans one more time. We aren’t done fighting yet. If I’ve convinced you to toss a sawbuck down at the liquor store for a bottle of good Irish whiskey, toss one more into the kitty for Wonkette. This is one of the last, lonely fronts in the war for sanity and goodness in America. It’s St. Patrick’s Day. We’re all Fighting Irish now.

Wonkette kitty

My home bar is Hemingway’s Underground, the hottest cocktail bar in pretty little Medina, Ohio. I’m behind the stick Wednesday-Saturday, 4-10. Last call’s at midnight. If you try to get on Saturday during the bar crawl, God help you. Swing on by, and I’ll make a drink for you … or anything else from our little Happy Hour here at Wonkette.

OPEN THREAD!

Remember how a bunch of low-information voters — that inexplicable some 4 to 6-ish percent of people who also voted for Barack Obama and also Joe Biden, or who previously didn’t vote at all — came out for Trump in ‘24 because of The Groceries and The Gas and The Inflation and the Masculine Penis Insecurities or whatever?

Bad news, weirdos! The Gas prices have surged 20 percent over the past two weeks, after the Strait of Hormuz — which connects the Persian Gulf with the Gulf of Oman and through which 30 percent of the world’s boat-shipped oil and 20 percent of its natural gas flows — was deemed by insurance companies to be too dangerous to allow tankers to go through after the US attack on Feb. 28. And so now nearly all tanker traffic there is at an indefinite standstill and there’s a line of about 3,000 boats with some 20,000 crew members stuck. And Iran has been jamming ships’ GPS systems, making it dangerous for them to try to move.

And at least 18 ships have already been hit by Iran, including three more tankers struck by projectiles or burning shrapnel in the Gulf just Wednesday night, and two more Thursday, one of which may have been American-owned. But Pete Hegseth insists the Strait is actually OPEN: “The only thing prohibiting transit in the straits right now is Iran shooting at shipping. It is open for transit should Iran not do that.”

The highway is open for you to go lie down on it! The only thing prohibiting you from doing so are the cars and trucks, and also several hundred murder drones hovering above you. And a land mine or two. Get out there, what are you, some kind of a chicken ladypussy?

Pete’s correct in one way, though, the Strait of Hormuz is open for Iran’s pal China, and tankers bound for there have gone through without a hitch. Not that China even needs it that much, they’ve been reducing their dependence on oil for decades. And Trump just lifted sanctions on Russian oil, too, letting them go about their business. Toot toot, mothercluckers! In their wildest dreams Xi and Putin could not have imagined Trump’s presidency going so well for them. Ukraine and Taiwan are now wide open too, Callooh! Callay!

Meanwhile, Trump’s fracking-fluid-chugging Energy Secretary Chris Wright told CNBC on Thursday that the US Navy is “not ready” to escort oil tankers through the Strait. Guess Pete’s got a lot of chicken ladypussies in his Navy. John Kerry would have done it!

But so to recap, the Dept. of WAR went to WAR without enough drone interceptors to last it a week, much less achieve air superiority, has been planning its bombings using 15-year-old maps, and struck with no plan in place for getting tankers through the Strait. SUPERIOR WARFIGHTING!!

Just tie Pete Hegseth to a prow and send that boat through with his perky little nipples first so he can show all those dress-and-wig-wearing Navy admirals and pronouns-in-bio oil tanker captains how safe it is! Get his figurehead doing something more useful than holding up some hair gel and trying to make an apocalypse!

But until the day anyone starts taking Wonkette’s advice, there is no world peace in sight. Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio dismantled all international diplomacy to build a piss-off-the-whole-world machine. Trump could have done nothing at all and left Obama’s 2018 non-proliferation agreement with Iran in place. He could have let green energy develop so the US doesn’t get 40 percent of its oil from foreign sources. But that’s so him. He also could have done nothing at all when he inherited old Fred’s fortune, lived off of the interest and not bankrupted six companies, including two casinos. It’s never really been about the money, just like rape is never really about sex. And this post is supposed to REALLY be about oil futures, and we digressed!

The Future Is Oil

Oil futures! Their price has been soaring. Not just because of the Strait situation, but also the widespread and growing infrastructure damage across 11 countries so far that could take years to repair. Global oil futures are kind of like a contract you’d sign if you have oil heat in your house. You can choose to pay a monthly rate that may vary, or you can fill the tank at one locked-in price, which is a way of betting that the price will go up instead of down. Energy traders are doing the same thing, betting the price will go up, and that their $100-a-barrel oil will sell for like $500 in the future. However, most of these trades are done on margin, pre-Great-Depression-style: The trader puts up a percentage of that, like 2-12 percent. So, if the price falls before the contract is up, a futures trader (and therefore the market) gets that much that much more exponentially screwed. Like if you bought a $100 tankful, but put $12 down, then owed the rest of the balance a year later, then multiply by billions of tanks that you contracted to all sell for $100 each to your neighbors in a year. And you borrowed the $12, too.

There’s also been rumors that the US has considered getting involved in the oil derivatives market (another term for “oil futures,” as in a market derived from the oil-commodity trade), which could make what analysts call a “Biblical disaster,” if prices went down and the Treasury then got stuck with a massive bill, though Scott Bessent denies they’re considering it. And according to the Financial Times, the government’s boneheaded and discombobulated moves already are affecting the oil trade:

Oil fell sharply on Tuesday after a post on X by energy secretary Chris Wright that surprised traders by saying the US Navy had escorted an oil tanker through the Strait of Hormuz. The message was deleted minutes later, and the White House later denied that the navy had escorted a ship through the waterway.

The 32 member states of the International Energy Agency (IEA) have held an emergency meeting to assess the situation, and dozens of countries agreed to release about 400 million barrels of oil from their strategic reserves, including the US. But that announcement did not make prices go down by much, and it will take about 120 days for a release to happen. In the meantime, expect the price of The Gas and therefore The Groceries and every other commodity that you don’t grow in your own back yard to be going up, up, and up. And the deficit, well, if those DOGE boys were crying about the wastefulness of arts grants going to Jewish writers, they’re going to have absolute strokes now.

Sounds like … Dire Straits.

[Good Authority / WSJ / Sky News / Financial Times archive link]

Wonkette ass, gas and grass fund

Brent Bozell, a racist Furby who looks like Santa Claus after he fell on hard times, spent several years drinking rotgut and sleeping in Union Missions, found Jesus, got sober, and now works as a substance abuse counselor in between church testimonials, needed all of two weeks to start fucking up his new job as America’s ambassador to South Africa.

Two weeks! The only way he could have beaten that record is if he walked into the South African president’s office wearing a Klan hood his first day on the job.

Bozell spoke at a meeting of South African business leaders this past Tuesday. It was his first public speech since he officially became the ambassador on February 23, exactly two weeks prior. And in the spirit of being new to the country and wanting to get off on the right foot with his host government, he kept it simple. He touched on the historic relationship between America and South Africa, and expressed his hope that stronger business ties between the two nations could lead to prosperity for all their citizens.

Ha ha ha, we kid. Bozell actually hit on some of the more sensitive topics in the country: affirmative action laws allegedly hurting white people, and the wingnut conspiracy theory that white farmers are having their land stolen by the Black-majority government. The way he talked, you’d think he was surprised all the businessmen in front of him weren’t wearing loincloths and bones through their noses.

From NBC News:

Bozell said South Africa should change some of its affirmative action laws that were designed to redress the inequalities of South Africa’s decades of racial segregation under apartheid. He compared the laws to race laws that oppressed Black people during apartheid.

America, the world’s largest exporter of both oil and whining about reverse racism. One of those two is an endlessly renewable resource, and it’s not oil.

Bozell also called for changing a land law that allows the South African government to expropriate land without compensation in some circumstances.

Oh Lord, not this codswallop again. It has been an article of faith on the Right that the majority-Black government of South Africa has been chasing white farmers off their land (or murdering them outright) and then seizing it as reparations for apartheid. This belief is so deeply ingrained with the wingnuts that Trump specifically called it out in an Executive Order a year ago that was meant to address the “egregious actions of the Republic of South Africa.”

It is also one of the reasons Trump has cited in bringing a whole bunch of white South Africans to America as “refugees,” even as his administration has closed the refugee admission program to anyone whose skin is a hair darker than Benjamin Moore White Dove.

After Bozell’s comments, the South African government summoned him to explain himself. An ambassador is almost never summoned in this context because the host government wants to award him a medal, unless the medal reads “World’s Biggest Asshole.” If it’s happening, the ambassador or his nation has offended the host country in some galactically stupid way.

In Bozell’s case, South Africa’s foreign minister told reporters that while the nation welcomes “the strengthening of bilateral ties,” they expected Bozell to follow “established diplomatic etiquette and international protocols.” Buddy, did no one tell you the name of the president who appointed Methadone Santa Claus in the first place?

This is why you appoint ambassadors who have experience and training, not racist lunatics whose family’s whole gestalt for 70 years has involved telling white people all the ways the Left, the media, and the Blacks are trying to screw them.

Bozell also got in trouble for condemning the phrase “kill the Boer,” which comes from a 1980s anti-apartheid song and refers to white farmers. Far-left political groups in South Africa will chant it in what sounds to us like the South African Left’s version of American trolling.

South African courts have determined that the phrase does not meet its definition of hate speech. The American government disagrees:

[T]he U.S. had presented five requests to the South African government around a year ago to improve ties: distance itself from Iran, change parts of its affirmative action laws affecting American companies operating in South Africa, outlaw any expropriation of land without compensation, declare rural crime a priority and publicly condemn the “kill the Boer” chant.

Basically, the current US government wants back the South African government it allied with in the 1980s when the rest of the world was sanctioning South Africa over apartheid. And as ever, the Trump administration is damned selective about what it believes to be hate speech. Far-left South Africans chanting “Kill the Boer”? Hate speech. The president accusing Haitian immigrants of stealing and eating people’s pets? Free speech, no matter how racist.

Bozell at least backtracked on his condemnation of “kill the Boer,” saying that the United States “respects the independence and findings” of South African courts. No word on whether the Trump administration will at any point start respecting the independence and findings of American courts, but we can dream.

The irony is that this contretemps comes on the heels of recent news stories about white South Africans who are returning home because they have found that living in the United States is too stressful. Like this guy, who moved to America in 2003 and, like a true American, has grown to wonder what the fuck is going on with this place:

Andrew Veitch left South Africa after being held up at gunpoint in his car. But now he feels there are greater threats in the United States, he said, citing mass shootings in public places as well as violence by U.S. immigration officers.

“People are being shot in broad daylight. American citizens are being shot and killed,” said ‌the 53-year-old, who moved to California in 2003. “I don’t want to live in a place like this.”

Or this other South African, Naomi Saphire, who spent 20 years in North Carolina. She returned to South Africa when she realized her kids would spend more time outside, the schools are better, and healthcare is affordable:

“My heart is just full of gratefulness to be here,” the 46-year-old said from her home in Plettenberg Bay. “The U.S. has been really good to me (but) I just felt like I was depriving my kids of this life.”

Life? You call affordable healthcare and good schools and children touching grass on the regular a positive lifestyle? Whatever, hippie.

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[NBC / Reuters]

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I realized recently that it’s been a while since we’ve seen an incel mass murderer. Because, really, for a time there, it seemed like something of an endless parade of angry young men going on murder sprees over not being able to get laid. It occurred to me the reason for this may be that, while they’re probably still not getting laid, they’re certainly less alone now. “Incel culture” has become mainstream on the Right. They hate women like incels. They talk like incels. Terms like “foid” (short for “femoid” or “female android”), “looksmaxxing,” “______ mogged,” “the wall” have entered their lexicon. Many of them are straight up turning themselves into incels just by hating women and various other groups of people so much that they are repulsive to women.

These days, they don’t have to go to dark corners of the internet in order to share their insane theories about women, to be told by other men that they are inherently superior to women, that women are crazy and evil and that giving them rights has ruined everything. They just have to go over to X The Everything App or to YouTube or, you know, listen to a sizeable majority of the mainstream male Republican pundits.

There are even more than a few women they can listen to. Women who will gladly tweet and stream and podcast all about how they think feminism and the sexual revolution ruined everything for women as well, who will even claim they want to #RepealThe19th because of how stupid and crazy we all are.

But that sort of pretense isn’t easy to maintain, especially once it’s no longer serving you. Thus, we’ve increasingly seen stories about alt-right women defecting from the movement after they have “seen the light” and suddenly come to realize that these men don’t actually like them, either. This week, we’ve got one in New York mag.

They all have pretty much the same story at this point. They fell into all of it because they were mad about “woke scolds” and thought it was cool and rebellious to embrace far-right ideology, because they enjoyed the attention they got for repeating anti-feminist talking points and maybe even believed that they’d rather be stay-at-home moms — literally nothing wrong with that! No one cares! Go and be well! — or that working instead of raising children was making women “crazy.” Then they realized, at some point — whether because they ended up in a pretty bad domestic violence situation like Lauren Southern, or because their baby daddy let his acolytes post AI child sexual abuse images of them on his social media site as happened to Ashley St. Clair, or because they realized that the Right did not actually allow for differing opinions or criticism, or because they realized that the men they were sucking up to hated their guts as much as they hate ours.

“Anna,” a former “celebrated pundit of the New Right,” anonymously told New York her own version of this well-worn origin story. She was liberal when she was younger and living in a conservative town, but then she left and …

[D]uring college in the mid-2010s, she was exposed to the overweening, haughty moralism of Peak Woke.

“I’m somebody, dispositionally, who likes to have a good time,” she tells me. She found the humorlessness of the contemporary left more alienating than the conservatism of her youth.

She wasn’t attracted to the right by the romanticized aesthetic of “traditional America” — big beautiful houses and bread-making and families with half a dozen children. Rather, she says, “I was in love with the frisson of transgression.” The online right had begun to engage more explicitly with forbidden subjects: nativism, race science, and gender essentialism drawn from evolutionary psychology. “There was an element of gnosticism to it,” she says, “the sense that you know secret things that other people don’t know.”

Ah yes, the “frisson of transgression.” “Gnosticism.” What a fabulously intellectual way to say “I got tingly from being a bigot and didn’t actually care about who I harmed as long as I felt special.” Another woman who spoke to New York said about the same thing.

[Alex] Kaschuta [who hosted the alt-right podcast Subversive], like Anna, says she was initially attracted to the New Right out of curiosity, contempt for woke pieties, and a taste for transgression. “I’ve always liked edgy stuff, unfortunately — that’s one of my problems,” she says, laughing.

We’ve seen a lot of this. People attempting to write off racist, misogynistic or otherwise shitty views as some attempt to “freak out the squares” — as though it’s somehow similar to middle schoolers trying to convince their teachers that they are Satanists just to mess with them. The thing is, you don’t do the latter unless you think it’s dumb that people are freaked out by Satanists (which it is), and you don’t do the former unless you think it’s dumb for people to not want to be harmed by bigotry. This kind of thing doesn’t exist in a vacuum.

Anyway, “Anne” seems to have realized the error of her ways when they started to harm her.

“Over time, the language of New Right misogyny got way more tuned in to red-pill-type stuff,” she says. Among young MAGA men, there ceased to be a huge difference between self-understood trads — Christians who tend to (patronizingly) venerate women’s special contributions to family and religious life — and rageful incels, who see women as conspirators in a plot to deprive them of sex and status. Both groups, Anna says, came to see women as “these objects you can use at will. So if you want a marriage, if you want a lifelong ‘bang maid,’ then you can pursue that. And if you want to just have endless hookups, you can pursue that by using these dating tactics within the red-pill sphere.”

While the language has certainly become more coarse over time, while it’s much more “acceptable” on the Right to now say, as Nick Fuentes does, that you’d like to see women put in concentration camps, this really isn’t anything new. In fact, what many of these women imagined themselves “rebelling” against was the silly feminist notion that these men thought these things and behaved this way in the first place. That the “woke scolds” were imagining all of this sexism and racism that didn’t actually exist anymore. Indeed, the swiftness with which they waver between blatant misogyny and racism and claiming that these things are not a problem in today’s society will give you whiplash.

Now, I am always glad for people to defect from any bad way of thinking, whatever it is that wakes them up. The fewer of these fuckers, the better. That being said, I do think this is all bullshit. I do think that the reason they’re leaving is because they’re being pushed out, not because they are suddenly realizing that right-wing ideology is bad.

The Right has fallen in love with the narrative of “the woke scolds were too much and we were all rebels who would never be any good, so we had to become Nazis!” but that is, and always has been, absolute bullshit. If someone’s instinct is to “rebel” or even simply to be contrarian, they’re not going to be out here demanding that everyone go along with them — because once that happens, you’re not a rebel anymore, you’re not “transgressive,” you’re just like everyone else. Their anger wasn’t ever that they couldn’t use slurs. The power to do so was within them all along. What they were mad about was that it wasn’t socially acceptable for them to do so. That other people weren’t doing it.

Similarly, no one (other than companies that don’t want to pay people enough money to subsist on a single income) has done anything to prevent any of these women from becoming housewives or stay-at-home moms. I’ve been a feminist my entire life. I’ve been a feminist in a professional capacity for over a decade at this point. At no point have I ever heard any feminist disparage “stay-at-home moms.” Literally not once. Ever. This is a narrative that lives exclusively in the minds of paranoid conservatives who live in terror of someone policing their life choices the way they police the life choices of others.

But you know what? Even if they did! Even if absolute legions of feminist writers devoted themselves fully to proclaiming that stay-at-home moms should not exist … other people’s opinions are not the law.

The fact is, both the men and the women who participate in this bullshit are looking for the same thing — validation and self-esteem. They want to be told “you’re better than other people just by being you.” For all the talk of “merit” on the Right, this is what they’re most thirsty for. The men want to be told they’re inherently superior to women — as well as people of color, Jewish people, LGBTQ+ people, etc. depending on their personal identity — and the women wanted to be told they’re “not like the other girls!” or “so based!”

I suppose it is entirely possible that these women spent years in the dark and are just now realizing that the men in their movement really do hate women and really do want to deprive them of rights and that this would be unpleasant for them were it to actually occur — this seems to be what “Anna” feels happened to her.

“You almost don’t realize what’s happening until five years later,” Anna says, “when you look back and you’re like, Oh gosh, I was being used.” She also blames herself: “I was too frivolous with ideas.”

But I don’t think these defections are happening by coincidence at a time when shitty men now feel so “empowered” that they no longer require the permission of pick-me girls willing to say “I agree! Women are terrible and crazy and too emotional and shouldn’t have rights!”

Arguably, these women are no longer necessary to their movement and are being cast aside as such. Conservative men no longer feel like they need to be able to point to a woman and say “Look! She’s okay with it!” because they have gotten to the point where they do not care about that anymore.

This, indeed, is more or less what Kaschuta’s former compatriots had to say about her.

Many attacked her looks (Kaschuta is blond and conventionally attractive) and then attributed her defection to those same insults. Charles Cornish-Dale, a New Right figurehead who goes by the name Raw Egg Nationalist and appeared several times on Subversive, posted on X, “The truth about the whole saga … is that people (i.e., men) started calling Alex fat and telling her they didn’t want to be browbeaten and tone-policed by a woman.” This, he said, was the real reason she had turned against the right, “not principles or ideas.”

At this point in their evolution, they now feel free to denigrate those women just as furiously as they denigrate feminists, if not moreso.

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They now take pledges to, as the article notes, “rape, kill and die” for Nick Fuentes (frequently abbreviated “RKD4NJF”). As “Anna” put it, they are “insisting that women subject themselves entirely to male authority, while advertising that male authority will be cruel and vicious and fickle.” They no longer feel the need to pretend that this is meant to be a good time for women as well. They’re just viscerally furious at women for existing and “ruining” everything for them by insisting upon being treated like human beings. They want to see us all punished for this and they no longer want to have to pretend to not hate a few women here and there.

In return, they are gaining power in the Republican Party. A follower of Fuentes’s was just elected as president of the College Republicans of America.

Granted, these defections and even these men outright saying that they want a world in which they get to be horrible to women will probably not deter other women from attempting to join in on all the #RepealThe19th good times. Because sure, they’ll still get a few “so based” and “If only all women were like you!” comments here and there and that will make it all worth it for them — for a while, at least, until they, too, experience the spontaneous revelation that they will have to also accept a much larger dose of disrespect in exchange.

PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!

In its perpetual battle to out-crazy Texas (and Idaho, which often punches above its weight in rightwing crazy), the Florida Legislature on Tuesday passed a bill aimed at banning local governments from doing diversity, equity, and inclusion, including (and especially) a prohibition on anything “promoting” or “adopting” activities that recognize the existence of LGBTQ+ people. Assuming DeSantis signs it — I mean, come on — the law would go into effect January 1, 2027, and would immediately eliminate any local laws, ordinances, programs, policies, or refrigerator magnets related to “DEI,” including those related to LGBTQ+ people.

The bill includes a provision allowing residents to sue local governments, too, which could result in cities having to defend themselves at great cost from some prick who has a tizzy over seeing a Pride flag or anything with a rainbow on it. For all we know, it might lead to lawsuits seeking damage payments from women employed by municipal governments if they’re spotted driving a Subaru Forester or playing softball.

The Lege even included an extra bit of power we’re sure DeSantis would love to have, but which he can’t exercise because term limits make this his last year in office, barring a coup. But his successor as governor will be able to remove from office any elected official they deem to be in violation of the new anti-DEI law, just by signing an executive order to suspend them, no court or other hearing necessary. A suspended local official could appeal to the Florida Senate, but good luck, since it has a GOP supermajority.

As Erin Reed explains, the bill, Florida SB 1134, is a nasty dog’s breakfast of a thing, deliberately vague so it can be waved threateningly at local leaders who might defy the whims of a Republican governor (don’t be silly, Democrats won’t be allowed to win that office ever again).

It states that any city or county office or official acting in their official capacity cannot “promote or adopt training, programming, or activities designed or implemented with reference to race, color, sex, ethnicity, gender identity, or sexual orientation.” It also mandates that local governments not use funds for “contractors, employees, vendors, volunteers, or agents” who will “ascribe to, study, or be instructed” using materials with reference to the same identity categories, which could impact community health centers, hospitals, and nonprofit services in cities across the state.

The bill grudgingly allows for recognition of federal holidays, so until the Lege comes up with something creative, municipal events for Martin Luther King Day and Juneteenth will be tolerated. Maybe the authors expect Donald Trump to eliminate those at the federal level.

SB 1134 doesn’t specifically ban Pride events, but its broad prohibition on use of public funds for anything construed to “promote” LGBTQ+ anything is sweeping enough that it could “prohibit cities from displaying Pride flags on government property, sending official city delegations to march in parades, posting Pride events on city websites or social media, issuing proclamations recognizing Pride Month, or providing city resources like water trucks and staff time to support festivals.”

Equality Florida issued a statement condemning the bill as “dangerous, vague by design, and part of a broader political agenda of censorship and government overreach” that was “intended to bully local governments and ​have a chilling effect on how they celebrate and support the diverse communities they serve.”

The statement noted that as the bill moved through the Lege, opponents were at least able to win concessions that should “protect and preserve the Pulse Memorial in Orlando,” as well as an amendment that allows local governments to at least issue permits for Pride festivals, though the bill imposes restrictions on supporting or promoting them.

The law could potentially play hell with St. Pete Pride, the state’s biggest Pride festival and a magnet for tourism from all over the southeast US.

According to St. Pete Pride President Dr. Byron Green-Calisch, roughly $300,000 of the festival’s approximately $1 million budget comes from the City of St. Petersburg.

If the bill becomes law, cities could lose the ability to provide that funding.

“Unfortunately, I am disappointed, but not surprised,” Green-Calisch said.

Green-Calisch said St. Pete Pride will survive, as long as supporters know how to love, but that it might end up looking and feeling different if the city government is barred from providing support. Get ready for lawsuits, damn it.

The Florida Lege is really feeling its oats this week; in addition to SB 1134, the Lege also passed a bill Wednesday that will prohibit local governments, public school districts, and state universities from adopting net-zero policies aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. It would even prohibit local governments from purchasing vehicles or equipment “based solely on the types or sources of fuel used by, or used in the production of, such goods,” so no electric cars, buses, or even leaf blowers, you monstrous liberal do-gooders. You will burn fossil fuels and you will LOVE IT.

The bill’s sponsors claim it will still allow municipalities and schools to pursue clean energy for the purpose of saving money, as long as they don’t mention the heresy of climate change, which despite being true is anathema in Florida law. But fear of violating the law could very well prevent cities and schools from installing solar panels or other clean energy tech, just to avoid punishment.

The law’s passage has already led one sustainability and engineering firm to rethink its plans to expand its presence in Florida, so that alone is probably cause for celebration. We’re not sure what DeSantis has planned for the signing ceremony. Maybe a parade of diesel pickups with their exhausts modified to “roll coal”?

[Erin in the Morning / WTSP / Tampa Bay Times (archive link)]

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It's A Gas, Gas, Gaslighting

Alex Karp, the CEO of Palantir who is so off-putting he makes founder Peter Thiel seem like a regular guy you’d have a beer with, said a thing yesterday in a CNBC interview that’s going viral for how weird and gross and revelatory it is of the mindset that drives these socially inept techbro creepers who happen to have a lot of money they didn’t really earn.

Apparently these dicks think their AI is going to somehow be the thing that shows all those educated Democratic-voting women who refuse to fuck them who’s really boss. That’s right, you guessed it, the boss is the stupid, unaccomplished men they don’t want to fuck.

Palantir CEO Alex Karp thinks his AI technology will lessen the power of “highly educated, often female voters, who vote mostly Democrat” while increasing the power of working-class men.

“This technology disrupts humanities-trained — largely Democratic — voters, and makes their economic power less. And increases the economic power of vocationally trained, working-class, often male, working-class voters,” Karp said in a CNBC interview Thursday. “And so these disruptions are gonna disrupt every aspect of our society. And to make this work, we have to come to an agreement of what it is we’re going to do with the technology; how are we gonna explain to people who are likely gonna have less good, and less interesting jobs.”

So AI is like affirmative action and DEI for gross (white conservative) guys?

‘Kay.

How is AI going to do that? Karp is not clear, but it sounds like he means those educated bitches with their opinions and their brains are going to be cut down to size. We guess somebody is just going to have to just explain to those women that they’re not going to have their good and interesting jobs, because of how anything ladies with critical thinking skills can do, AI can do better.

Or maybe AI will help dumb (white conservative) men convince those women they’re on an equal playing field intellectually.

Or something.

We guess, in the phraseology of looksmaxxing incels — and why wouldn’t we put it in those terms? The types of guys Alex Karp thinks the AI revolution will benefit sure are! — the AI is going to allow uninteresting (white conservative) guys to skillsmaxx themselves and economicpowermaxx themselves so they don’t keep getting successmogged by “humanities-trained” woke bitches, who will once again need men to survive and will respect them as the true Gigachads they’ve always been and give them blowjobs all day long!

If those last few sentences sounded like we were having a stroke, you can either remain in blissful ignorance — really — or you can hit the link above for a glossary. Also we are not even sure we used those words correctly, because we are not a loser. No goddamned idea.

Honestly, we have no goddamned idea about any of it, except that we’re sure that these techbro Palantir types are, above pretty much all else, highly misogynistic fucksticks, and you can draw a direct line from their misogyny to regular old MAGA misogyny, which travels right through JD Vance (AKA Peter Thiel’s personal AI robot) and into the wider world of those MAGA incels and Christian extremists.

They all share a common enemy, and if you are a woman or an LGBTQ+ person or a person of integrity or decency or class or compassion or intelligence that can’t be programmed, well you’re it, baby.

Also, too, though, when you hear Karp making this overt appeal to bitter white conservative men who think “humanities-trained” bitches have stolen things from them, do you actually think the tech billionaires are going to let the largesse of their AI windfalls trickle down to those guys, orrrrrrrrrrrrr is this just the same Cletus Safari resentment politics Donald Trump and MAGA have been playing for over a decade now?

And how is he so certain that the people truly about to be hit the hardest by AI are those educated Democratic women and not, say, all the divorced dads who learned to code and still think Elon Musk is cool?

So many questions, but at least these fucking losers are just saying all the quiet parts loud now!

Here is some more batshit from Karp from the same CNBC interview, about how the thing that really makes America special is our ability to kill.

So much for We The People, shining city on the hill, give us your tired, your poor and all that other “humanities-trained” girly shit.

Pete Hegseth’s Christian extremist masculine insecurity freakout over Anthropic refusing to let him use their AI robots as assassin drones makes a lot more sense now.

Hey, was Palantir software involved in the Trump/Hegseth mass murder attack on that Iranian girls’ school? Not sure why that came to mind just now but:

On the U.S. side, targets for Operation Epic Fury were identified by Palantir’s Maven Smart System — a sophisticated military planning tool that takes in data from surveillance, logistics, sensors and intelligence, and can create a dashboard for commanders to inform their decisions.

And here is Karp bragging about how he’s “heard” that Palantir’s Maven is the “backbone” of Operation Hegesth’s Balls Just Dropped:

Weird how he says he’s against “regime change,” but supports this war, where we just assassinated Iran’s leader. Oh well, we didn’t accuse him of being smart. (That’s why he needs so much artificial intelligence! It’s like Viagra, for Alex Karp types!)

These people are absolute degenerates. Dumbass deplorable degenerates.

[New Republic / Washington Post]

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Good morning good morning, here have some news!

This one time, we did a war game, and the retired brigadier general playing “Iraq and Iran basically,” with no navy and no … other important military stuff … kicked the US’s ass like on the very first day. So they redid the game and said he wasn’t allowed to win. Anyway, now we have Trump and Real Iran and uhhhhhh. (This story is much better written than that and also is not dumb and stupid.) (N+1 mag)

Pete Hegseth’s holy night was the night Donald Trump pardoned some war criminals for shooting children. Everything about him is poison (Gift link New York Times)

What in the sweet baby jesus is this story, “Follow the Zorro Ranch Money,” about Jeffrey Epstein winning $85 million in the Oklahoma lottery? And when is the next installment coming out??? (Elisa Valdes-Rodriguez)

Ed Martin should get disbarred for this too. What a poisonous toad! (2025 Pro Publica)

Oh lord, my beloved old people, pick up your tennis-ball-footed walkers and RUN. The DOGE boys from Marcie’s post the other day are “buying businesses in senior care.” (404 Media)

This other DOGE bro is pretty sure he’ll get a presidential pardon if he goes to prison for stealing the entire nation’s Social Security data. No one’s ever been more right. (Gift link Washington Post / Wired)

Tiedrich found a hero reporter. Her name is Liz Landers, and you should try to ignore the terrible mechanical whine and enjoy!

You guys aren’t going to believe this, but the Senate passed a bipartisan housing bill by Tim Scott and Professor Senator Edubs Warren. Trump says he won’t sign it because he hasn’t gotten his SAVE America From Married Women Voting And Also Something About The Trans. (Gift link NYT)

You guys are going to believe this, and Washington state just passed a millionaire’s tax, heart eyes emoji! (My Northwest)

You guys are going to believe this too: government protections for domestic workers in Washington state! (Washington State Standard)

Man, the Florida Lege is really feeling its oats. Its crazy crazy crazy oats. First they said Gov. Ron DeSantis can fire local elected officials for the sin of PRIDE (Erin in the Morning), and now they’re making it illegal for local governments to do anything climate-related, like buy hybrids or electric cars. (Tampa Bay Times)

Late update, I forgot to give you this week’s Saturday Night Movie Night! Join ZiggyWiggy at 9 p.m. eastern to watch Them! available for free on the Internet Archive. $3.99 in the usual places.

Yes I’m going to be shilling this fundraiser all month. Support the girls’ Detroit public elementary school and buy some pizza (pizza). Little Caesar’s will ship the incredibly convenient pizza kits right to your home! Swear to god it is worth having these in your freezer, I was sad when we finally ate all ours last year. (Pizza Pizza)

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Somehow, SOMEHOW, we are still at war strategic incursion?

Goddamn, Evan wrote another perfect post.

I just read some even crazier shit about this, don’t worry, it will be in tomorrow’s tabs.

Why won’t the lamestream media report on things Trump didn’t do just because he didn’t do them?

You know what could help a situation like this?

That’s right:

Nelson Muntz voice: HAHA.

See you bright and early for tabs, which will also have that video because I love it very much.

Meet the newest candidates for the Rudy Giuliani Award For Excellence In Getting Disbarred For Committing Crimes And/Or Violating The Constitution For Donald Trump!

Who will be the first lawyer in Trump Regime 2.0 to fully throw away their ability to practice in their chosen career for the sake of that liquid-shitting orange fistula in the White House? Who will be the next Trump idiot to one day hear Satan utter the words “You’re not licensed to practice law in hell either!” just like Trump’s original mentor/ethically bankrupt lawyer Roy Cohn did, on the day he went through freshman orientation in hell?

We don’t know, but it could be the former US Attorney from Baywatch Lindsey Halligan, because she’s under bar investigation in Florida. Or it could be needy tryhard and breathtaking dumbass Ed Martin, who has failed out of so many Trump regime positions we can’t even keep up anymore. He’s in big trouble with the DC bar.

Let’s start with the dingus Lindsey Halligan, since her latest news of shame happened first. Has it been almost two whole months since Lindsey Halligan stormed out of the Eastern District of Virginia shouting “YOU CAN’T FIRE ME TWO MONTHS AGO, IIIIIIIIIII QUIT”?

Well here is the latest good news for her mom and dad to put in their family “what happened this year” letter they send to relatives at Christmas.

Halligan is under investigation by the Florida Bar, because remember, she wasn’t some kind of important DC lawyer or any kind of important lawyer before all this. She was a Florida insurance lawyer. The nonprofit Campaign for Accountability filed complaints against her in Florida and Virginia, and Florida’s response back was basically oh, we know.

This of course stems from all Halligan’s bumblefucking clownshittery at EDVA, making up imaginary cases against James Comey and Letitia James to serve her master Donald Trump; telling the grand jury God knows what to trick them into delivering indictments (“fundamental misstatements of the law that could compromise the integrity of the grand jury process,” said magistrate judge William E. Fitzpatrick); and then that small matter of how she kept signing her name “Lindsey Halligan, Superlawyer Esquire US Attorney For A Real District In America!” even after she had been gently but firmly gavel-splained that her appointment was unlawful and she wasn’t any such goddamned thing.

Now, this isn’t like she’s going to get disbarred next week or anything. This is a very early step. But, as the New York Times notes delicately, “the prospect of Ms. Halligan losing her license could serve as a check on administration lawyers who have been accused by judges of pushing the boundaries of the law or intentionally misleading the courts, which has happened frequently in recent months.” It also could make it more difficult for them to get new hires at DOJ, which is, uh, not going well already.

“Working at DOJ used to be prestigious! Now it’s for total dipshits, and you might get disbarred or go to prison for crimes one day, and also government salaries are shit. INQUIRE WITHIN!”

So that’s Halligan.

Then there is Ed Martin, pictured here with George Santos’s camel toe and oh my god are those Donald Trump’s favorite cheap-ass Florsheim dress shoes he is wearing?

Shoe identification inconclusive.

But the DC Bar is in the process of sanctioning Ed Martin!

What’s he in big trouble for this time? Ohhhhhh, he is so stupid.

They have filed disciplinary charges against him because last February 17, year of our Lord 2025, when he was acting US attorney in DC, he sent a letter to Georgetown Law (a better school than he went to), accusing them of doing aggravated DEIs, without even trying to define “DEI” or explaining how they had done this. A whistleblower had told him so!

And in that same letter — he was always a fan of writing these bitchy letters that were supposed to be threatening, also of going on Russian state TV 150 times — he told Georgetown that he was going to go ahead and sanction them, and that “no applicant for our prestigious fellows program, our summer internship, or employment in our office who is a student or affiliated with Georgetown law school will be considered until this is resolved.”

To which Georgetown Law Dean William M. Treanor replied that ACTUALLY, bitch (he did not say bitch), the First Amendment says you can’t tell Georgetown what to teach AND MOREOVER BITCH (he did not say moreover bitch), refusing to even consider applications from Georgetown students was a violation of their constitutional rights.

And Ed Martin, Stupid Man, just kept doubling down. (Remember those heady early days of the Trump administration when universities were still taking these buffoons seriously? Oh wait some of them still are? Jesus Christ, dude.)

The DC Bar explains that Martin violated the First and Fifth Amendments of the Constitution, and that he “knew or should have known that.” Which is a funny way of implying/saying explicitly that he’s stupid.

Oh yes, then he tried to obstruct the investigation into this, the complaint says.

And yes, he could be disbarred for this if it doesn’t go his way.

Ed Martin, you’ll remember, was originally supposed to be where US Attorney Jeanine “Boxwine” Pirro is sitting and hilariously fucking everything up. Her most recent fuckup, you might remember — or the last one we wrote about, God knows what she’s done in the last six days — was quietly having to declare victory and stop trying to indict Joe Biden and/or his associates for “autopen,” since “autopen” is not actually a crime. And who started that Mr. Wizard Inspector Gadget investigation into “autopen”? Who was that stupid? Ed Martin, obviously, when he was the acting US attorney for DC, before the Republican-controlled Senate couldn’t keep a straight face long enough to confirm him.

In other words, same timeframe when he was sending these dumbfuck letters to Georgetown.

Then they shoved Martin over to Pam Bondi’s DOJ to lead the “Weaponization Working Group,” which Bondi named after a full day of reading 1984 on the toilet, allegedly. Investigate the investigators that “weaponized” DOJ against Trump, just by investigating his billions of crimes!

It wasn’t a real job, he’s too stupid for real jobs, even in this administration. (Of course, at least he was still in the DOJ building, wait just kidding before that was over they moved him to an office in a whole different neighborhood, far away from whatever passes as real professionals at Trump’s DOJ.)

Martin did that for a whole year and came up with nothing. So DOJ Number Two Idiot Todd Blanche quit-fired Martin from being the boss of the Weaponization Working Group, but let him still be the “pardon attorney.”

Can a special new busywork job laundering Kristi Noem’s fuckblanket at her new job at new fake agency “Shield Of The Americas” be far behind for blessed Edward?

Martin is of course all over Twitter screaming WITCH HUNT! and WEAPONIZATION! and what-have-you. What else is he going to scream? “I’m only employed because I never stop looking Donald Trump in the eyes while I’m giving him rimjobs”? Doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, and neither does Donald Trump’s butthole, does it, Ed?

He is also trying to pretend they’re only going after him because they fear him, something something, he’s got ‘em right where he wants ‘em!

Every one of these loser is so irredeemably thirsty.

Todd Blanche, who is, let’s be honest, also a fairly yappy and stupid lawyer, is also chiming in on Twitter, accusing the DC Bar of being a “blatantly Democrat-run political organization,” and adding, “Thank God I’m not a member, and trust me, I never will be.” Which is kind of like bragging that you refuse to join the “I’ve Had Sex Before” club.

Todd Blanche, it should be noted, thinks that every bar association that doesn’t want to join him and Ed Martin with their tongues up Donald Trump’s fascist hole is an activist woke liberal bar. Which is pretty much of all of them.

The New York Times notes that the DOJ is currently trying to threaten/bully state bar associations out of investigating its lawyers, a demand these numbnuts lacks the standing to even utter with their stupid mouthholes, but that tells you how desperate they are, and how scared of these state bar associations.

One might even say these bar associations are right over the target.

OPEN THREAD.

[New York Times / Politico]

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Donald Trump keeps finding new ways to subvert everything that’s supposed to be normal about politics, and right now he’s even disproving the old truism that US presidents don’t have much control over the price of gasoline at the pump. That now needs to be amended to add “… unless they start a completely pointless war in the Middle East, cutting off much of its oil trade.”

Iran has retaliated by attacking other countries’ oil infrastructure, and by blocking shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, though which some 20 percent of the world’s oil supply normally travels. The blockade is also affecting shipments of liquified natural gas (LNG) to Asia, which gets about a fifth of its fossil gas from the Middle East.

On Monday, Trump, that strategic genius who knows more than any general, told Fox & Friends host Brian Kilmeade that there was an easy way to end the blockade: “These ships should go through the Strait of Hormuz, and show some guts. There’s nothing to be afraid of. They have no navy. We sunk all their ships.” Iran attacked three cargo ships near the Strait Wednesday, although we’re fairly certain the captains weren’t taking advice from Trump in any case.

Then on Tuesday, US Energy Secretary Chris Wright added to the confusion by lying in a tweet, claiming that the US Navy had actually escorted an oil tanker through the Strait of Hormuz. The tweet was deleted after about 10 minutes, but the false hope did cause a brief drop in oil prices on the international market, so we’re sure that more attempts to drive prices down by lying will be on the way.

In an attempt by adults in the real world to offset some of the disruption to world oil supplies, the International Energy Agency announced Wednesday that it would release 400 million barrels of oil from its 32 member countries’ reserves, about a third of the total emergency reserves. Fatih Birol, the IEA’s executive director, said that the move was necessary to address supply disruptions that were “unprecedented in scale.”

Oil prices went right on rising anyway, with the global standard “Brent crude” price per barrel going up about 15 percent in trading, reaching over $100 a barrel Thursday, an increase of over 35 percent from before the shiny new war.

Oil analysts explained that the planned release of oil reserves isn’t likely to calm the fears of continued supply shortfalls, because it takes time for the member countries to actually draw down and ship their releases, and the shortfall since the start of the war is already about 200 million barrels, already half of what the IEA countries will release.

Gregor Semieniuk, a public policy and economics wonk at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, told Al Jazeera that traders have already “priced in” the release, but that “if market expectations are that the reserve release cannot make up all the shortfall, it will do little to check prices beyond what it has already done.”

The US will release its share of oil reserves starting next week, a total of 172 million barrels, the Energy Department said Wednesday, although we’d suggest reporters check back to make sure it actually happens. And maybe this time around, when or if oil prices begin easing after Trump’s war ends (if it does), Trump will actually convince Republicans in Congress to replace the reserves. (The Big Blowjobs for Billionaires bill was supposed to provide $20 billion for that purpose, but the GOP was more interested in tax cuts and deporting abuelas.)

The blockade isn’t simply stopping shipments of oil, of course; with no way to export the oil they pump out of the ground, several countries are also running out of storage space for their oil, as the Washington Post reports (gift link).

They are being forced to ramp down operations and may have to shut some facilities altogether until shipping routes reopen. That has a domino effect, as the operations cannot be quickly resumed. Ramping them back up takes weeks, potentially adding to the chaos in oil markets.

And that’s without taking into account the costs of rebuilding oil infrastructure that Iran continues to attack.

It’s not just oil being affected, of course, because when oil prices increase, you get higher costs for everything that requires shipping, from food to air freight. If the blockade lasts long enough, the world could even experience a food crisis, because uh-oh, fertilizer is another chief product of Persian Gulf nations, which ship fertilizer and component chemicals all over the world, including to the USA.

As we keep pointing out, if the US and the rest of the world had actually taken the threat of climate change seriously for the past three decades and sharply ramped up clean energy production, we’d all be less subject to sudden interruptions of oil supplies by now. That’s one reason — along with China dumping its excess production of solar panels into the world market, making them incredibly cheap — that so many developing nations without oil reserves are going for solar backed by battery storage instead of paying through the nose to import more oil.

Trump’s “little excursion” into Iran is also likely to spur more countries to ramp up their own renewable energy supplies, as Europe did following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In the short term following the cutoff of Russian fossil gas, some European countries mined and burned more coal, but after the first year of the war, gas and coal use actually declined as solar and wind became a larger portion of the European energy mix. (The fossil fools at PragerU nonetheless made a propaganda video for kids suggesting that climate change was just a scheme to bully kids into shunning beautiful filthy coal.)

Now we have another oil shock, and as Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin reports, renewables are looking awfully good, because what if the world’s economy weren’t so subject to a sudden cutoff of oil through one waterway in the Middle East?

“It just shows once again the risk of being dependent on imported fossil fuels, whether it’s oil, gas, LNG, or coal. It’s an incredibly fragile system that most of the world depends on,” Nick Hedley, an energy transition research analyst at Zero Carbon Analytics, told me. “Most people are at risk from these shocks.”

As with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the immediate fallback is likely to be a rise in burning coal, particularly in Asian countries dependent on LNG shipments from Qatar. That could reverse, temporarily at least, 2025’s promising declines in coal use by India and China, which have lagged behind the rest of the world in turning away from coal.

The potentially good news, both for climate and for the world economy, is that unlike in previous worldwide oil crises, clean energy — especially solar backed with battery storage — is a price-competitive option, particularly for countries faced with replacing imported gas with imported coal. May as well go with energy sources that can be controlled locally. Again, here’s Zeitlin:

“Countries which are heavily dependent on fossil fuel imports are once more feeling very nervous,” Kingsmill Bond, an energy strategist at the clean energy think tank Ember, told me. “The interesting thing is we have two answers: renewables and electrification. If you want quick results, you put solar panels up quickly.”

None of this is easy or instantaneous, which is why we all should have been doing more for decades before now. As we’ve said before, one of these days when the US decarbonizes its grid and we’re all driving electric nerd cars, gas prices simply won’t matter in elections, but we’re a good 20 to 30 years away from that at a minimum, depending on how thoroughly Trump manages to hold back the energy transition.

Then again, maybe we’re letting our enthusiasm for clean energy blind us to easier, faster solutions to the crisis Trump has plunged us into, like these great proposals from Twitter (link to Bluesky copies) from guys who are apparently 12 years old.

Expect Trump to endorse both ideas over the weekend.

[WaPo (gift link) / Al Jazeera / Politico/ Heatmap News / Grist]

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Thanks A Lot, Trump!

If there is one thing we know for sure the Trumpers are mad about, it is the “mainstream media,” which they believe is unfair to them and to Trump, largely because they have spent decades at this point believing that Fox News is the platonic ideal of “Fair and Balanced (TM).” Mark Meckler, a right-wing commentator and self-described “radical, right-wing, Tea Party, Bible-thumping, gun-toting conservative,” is no exception.

Meckler, Right Wing Watch reports, is the co-founder of the Convention of States Foundation, a far-right group that describes itself as “a national movement to call a convention under Article V of the United States Constitution, restricted to proposing amendments that will impose fiscal restraints on the federal government, limit its power and jurisdiction, and impose term limits on its officials and members of Congress.”

Conservative groups have been trying to get this going since the Tea Party era, back when their big thing was not only getting the government out of their Medicare, but out of people’s lives in general — you know, outside of forcing them to have babies against their will, telling them who they can marry, telling them what gender they are, requiring store clerks to wish them a Merry Christmas, requiring public schools to promote their religious beliefs, and making it more difficult for them to divorce their spouses.

Naturally, Meckler sees no contradiction between this desire and his support for an autocratic president who actively dislikes any restraints on his power and has stated his desire to run for an extremely illegal third term.

In a recent episode of COS At Home, the monthly show produced by his organization, Meckler complained about how the mainstream media didn’t report that Trump sent a medical ship to Greenland, because of how the healthcare there is so terrible.

Via Right Wing Watch:

“There was a really interesting thing that happened recently [that] most people didn’t pay attention to in the news,” Meckler said. “He sent a mercy ship, a surgical ship to Greenland to provide medical care for Greenlanders, because apparently the medical system there is a disaster and they are not provided that kind of support from Europe. So I think now what he’s going to do is use the candy part of the [negotiation]—like we can help you out, we’re going to make you guys wealthier, we’re going to make you healthier—and ultimately, I think that means he gets to whatever agreement he wants on Greenland.

“Amazing how the mainstream media doesn’t cover that type of story,” Viaud replied contemptuously. “It’s unbelievable.”

So unbelievable. Though, to be fair, it wasn’t just the mainstream media that did not report on this beautiful act of international goodwill. It was all of the media. Indeed, no media that we know of reported that Donald Trump sent a mercy ship to Greenland. Why? Is it because they were all asleep when it happened? Is it because they hate Donald Trump and don’t want to admit he did anything so beautiful and selfless? Even the 80 million media outlets now owned and operated by his supporters?

Or could it be … because this didn’t happen?

It’s true. This never happened outside of the imagination of Mark Meckler.

Now, back in February, Trump did post the following on Truth Social, the social network that he owns:

“Working with the fantastic Governor of Louisiana, Jeff Landry, we are going to send a great hospital boat to Greenland to take care of the many people who are sick, and not being taken care of there. It’s on the way!”

Greenland, however, was not too interested in his offer.

Greenland's Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen responded on Facebook that “It’s going to be a no thank you from here. President Trump’s idea to send an American hospital ship here to Greenland is noted. But we have a public health system where treatment is free for citizens. It’s a deliberate choice. And a basic part of our society. It’s not like that in the United States, where it costs money to go to the doctor.”

He also suggested that Trump talk to Greenland directly instead of “just coming up with more or less random outbursts on social media.”

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But couldn’t they just pretend it happened? Can’t they just pretend that Greenland doesn’t have free healthcare? Maybe make a little AI video of the boat arriving and all the Greenlanders cheering for the opportunity to experience the fine healthcare that has made Louisiana the least healthy state in the entire United States, according to America’s Health Rankings?

I mean, Trump already helped them out a little with this lovely little AI-generated image of the ship on its way.

How are people supposed to trust the media if we never report on any of the wonderful but entirely fictional things that Trump does? If reporting on the things he actually does and says makes him look bad, then the only way to correct that bias is by congratulating him on winning both the Nobel Peace Prize and the Grammy for Best Pop Vocal Album. It’s just common sense.

If the mainstream media wants to win back the trust of the American people, they’re going to have to do exactly what Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is doing with the Department of Health and Human Services to win back people’s trust of that institution — promote things that are explicitly untrue and also pretend that bad things are actually good things. That is what the people want. They want measles and they want to see medical ships making pretend voyages to Greenland. Is that really so much to ask?

PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!

Gott im Himmel, Jeffrey Epstein’s New Mexican Child Rape Ranch!

It’s a lot, so let us purify the air with a spritz of Byredo Desert Dawn perfume then one of De Los Santos, pour a cup of bush tea from our Pueblo tea set, and begin around the present.

Short version, fucking creepy shit from multiple reports, man, where to even begin! We gotta don a muumuu and light up a cigarette Joan Didion-style too for this jackrabbit hole. What first, the alleged buried bodies of girls strangled to death during rough sex, the “people coming forward saying they were drugged, had sex organs and sperm harvested from their bodies, and woke up around medical equipment not knowing where they were or what happened to them,” or the coverup that went and still goes all the way to the top, and the New Mexico Legislature and State’s Attorney’s quest to uncover the truth!

Monday, at the direction of New Mexico state Attorney General Raúl Torrez, New Mexican authorities searched the property formerly known as Jeffrey Epstein’s Zorro ranch in Santa Fe County.

The impetus was an anonymous November 2019 email, included in the recent Epstein Files fatberg, which had been sent to a local radio host named Eddy Aragon, claiming that “somewhere in the hills outside the Zorro, two foreign girls were buried on orders of Jeffrey and Madam G. Both died by strangulation during rough, fetish sex.”

The writer claimed to have video footage of Epstein and also late banking heir Matthew Mellon having sex with minors, and a “Girl from Bay Area suicide attempt confession to Madam G (audio)” and said they’d turn the files over in exchange for one Bitcoin, which at the time was only worth about $4,000.

But the FBI was unable and/or unwilling to follow up or corroborate the tip.

And holy incriminating, this New York Times report on Kash Patel’s FBI’s shambolic attempts at coverup!

In late July, F.B.I. agents exchanged a flurry of early-morning emails about a sensitive task relating to the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

An agent listed the names of 14 prominent men, with President Trump at the top, and gave direct instructions: “Take these names and build out new spreadsheet w all the derog on them,” referring to derogatory information found in the Epstein files.

That morning [the same day Todd Blanche flew to Florida to interview Ghislaine Maxwell, BTW], agents prepared summaries of the “salacious statements” that tipsters and other interviewees had made against Mr. Trump and others. Their rundown on the president consisted of two bullet points. One was an allegation from a woman who said that he sexually assaulted her when she was a teenager. The other was a claim that Mr. Epstein once introduced a woman to Mr. Trump, saying, “This is a good one, huh?” with Mr. Trump replying, “Yes.”

PREVIOUSLY!

Then derp,

In the days that followed, the F.B.I. converted the summaries on the prominent men into a slide that was part of a 21-page internal presentation on the Epstein case.

And later in August an unclassified version of the table with more detail was circulated, which also revealed that the FBI had done background checks on the tipsters for any of their criminal histories. For the “derog.” (!)

You don’t make a PowerPoint slideshow about a criminal fucking conspiracy!

What’s more, five days after Epstein’s death, according to no one less prominent and Trump-humping than House Oversight Committee Chair and jowly chucklefuck James Comer, Bill Barr’s FBI issued an order to states and the US Virgin Islands to stand down on any ongoing investigations of their own.

Now New Mexico state investigators have opened up their own inquiry, and three weeks ago established a Truth Commission of four members to investigate. Just like in Rwanda.

New Mexico! It is not only the land of Georgia O’Keefe’s dry and labial hills, it has a dirty side too, Breaking Bad-inspiring, a place Cormac McCarthy ran off to go get lost with his underage muse. It also has more than 7,000 abandoned mines, and areas that are still remote, including that Zorro ranch property, which sprawls over nearly 12 square miles in Santa Fe County, that Epstein bought in the early 1990s, making him the state’s largest landowner at the time. Then he erected a massive complex that included a 28,636 square feet main house, which was the largest private residence in the state too, and later added a private airstrip, a helicopter pad, a firehouse with engines and an airplane hangar for a jet. The property is so private it has its own half-mile private road, and is surrounded by land owned by the family of the former New Mexico governor Bruce King and the government of New Mexico, who Epstein bought the parcel from.

Epstein had willed Zorro ranch to his final girlfriend, Belarusian dentist Karyna Shuliak, but it instead went into a trust to settle victims’ lawsuits, and in 2023 the property was bought by a real estate magnate from Dallas named Don Huffines, who just very last week happened to have won the Republican primary for Texas comptroller. Why was a person who wants to be comptroller of Texas buying property out of state, and that property in particular? (And surely a Belarusian dentist would know how to dispose of identifying features of remains?)

And though it is called a “ranch,” it’s in a high, cold desert, not suitable for farming much of anything. Except, you know, humans. And souls.

NYT: “Since purchasing the property, Mr. Huffines has rechristened it San Rafael Ranch, after the patron saint of healing, and said he would transform it into a Christian retreat.”

What kind of Christian, and what kind of healing, gee!

But back in Epstein’s heyday, the ranch entertained a lot of visitors.

Maria Farmer and her little sister Annie claim to have been abused there; Maria went to the FBI back in 1996, six administrations ago, to say that Epstein and Maxwell had lured her and her underage sister to the ranch and sexually assaulted both of them, and also that Donald Trump had chillingly sized her up with Epstein like a piece of meat. She even called them again a decade later. Two tips that the FBI proceeded to ignore! Poor Virginia Giuffre reported that she was raped at the ranch also.

Another frequent guest was JPMorgan Chase banker Jes Staley, who appears in the files nearly 8,000 times, gushing to Epstein in more than a thousand messages about visiting him, including a request to “say hi to Snow White” at the ranch, and requesting to play “Beauty and the Beast” the next time. Finance guys, they have a reputation as dark-triad debauchers for a reason. The high-finance system doesn’t merely turn a blind eye to sins, it richly rewards bankers that bring in clients’ bucks by any means necessary. It makes sin reinforcing, creates a sin race for who can be the most sinful! Epstein flaunting a jailbait entourage, gatekeeping who could invest with him, Tarzan-vining his connections … that wasn’t just about wanting little-girl massages, though he did. It was also key to his forbiddenest-fruit mystique, and the whole package made him and his banker friends a money-hoovering machine.

PREVIOUSLY!

Staley later became chief executive of Barclays until 2023, when his embarrassing ties became known. JPMorgan Chase paid a $290 million settlement and Staley was shitcanned and banned from bank-management roles in London. And, but, yet, still, it does not seem like the FBI ever opened any kind of criminal investigation, and he’s never been charged with a crime.

Another visitor, the Democratic New Mexico governor from 2003 to 2011 Bill Richardson. Before he died in 2023, he was also a congressman, US Ambassador to the UN, and then Secretary of Energy under Bill Clinton. And somewhere in there he also found time to meet with Epstein at least nine times, including at the ranch and on Lolita Island, flew on his plane and helicopter, and Epstein contributed at least $50,000 to his campaign.

Other guests to the ranch: Robert Redford, Woody Allen, Reid Hoffman, Joi Ito, and Peter Thiel.

And New Mexico state Rep. Andrea Romero told the Daily Mail, “We have people coming forward saying they were drugged, had sex organs and sperm harvested from their bodies, and woke up around medical equipment not knowing where they were or what happened to them. [...] It’s so dark and perplexing, and I know that if you mention this to someone, it sounds very conspiratorial … But we need to get down to the truth of what really happened here in our own backyard.” One should say so.

For better or worse, that is all the details we have to go on. But considering Epstein was fantasizing about a breeding ranch for his superior sperm, and Virginia Giuffre said he and Maxwell had been hitting her up for her womb, and Epstein somehow was able to ship in countless of Russian, Western European, and Eastern European girls between borders with little to no trace, and with a manse and spread big enough for a dozen Dr. Frank N. Furter laboratories, who fucking even knows any more.

Well, perhaps somebody. Concluded the NYT:

One F.B.I. document said that shortly after news reports said Mr. Epstein was under investigation by the local police for abusing girls, the police chief in Palm Beach, Fla., Michael Reiter, received a call from Mr. Trump. Years later, the police chief told the F.B.I. what he remembered of the conversation.

“Thank goodness you’re stopping him, everyone has known he’s been doing this,” Mr. Trump said, according to the document recounting their conversation.

Everyone! Is Putin everyone?

Drip, drip, barf!

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New most embarrassing thing about Pete Hegseth just dropped, you ready?

It is in the Prissy Pete category, like his special makeup studio where he goes to apply just the exact right amount of whatever to make himself look like a MANLY Prissy Pete.

This is better than that, though.

Remember how a few months back, Pete queened out and kicked out all the real journalists in the Pentagon and replaced them with ball-licking sycophants? Well, some photographers insufficiently committed to Hegseth’s delicate sensibilities and image-conscious insecurities got back in for the first Iran briefing, and they took pictures that made Manly Prissy looked not his manly prissy best!

Now, those photographers who took the “unflattering” pictures have been banned, and off with their heads! What is wrong with these peasants, did they not get the memo about which cheek the Diva Of Defense considers his good side?

The Washington Post still has some journalism happening in the building:

The Defense Department has barred press photographers from briefings on the ongoing U.S.-Israeli military conflict with Iran after they published photos of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that his staff deemed “unflattering,” according to two people familiar with the decision who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation.

On the condition of anonymity, so that the public may know about The Princess And The Pete’s latest temper tantrum.

Amazing.

It’s all about the March 2 briefing. (That would be two days after the February 28 US strike on the Iranian girls’ school, where Hegseth and Donald Trump killed a bunch of little girls because, turns out, they were targeting based on 10-year-old data. That’s according to the military’s own investigation.)

The picture in question: above, taken by the AP’s Mark Schiefelbein. (The Post notes that it’s actually not entirely clear whether it was just that one pic, or all the pics from that day, which upset Drunky Smurf so much.)

Pete Hegseth? Looks like Pete Hegseth. He’s not a particularly good-looking man. It’s no worse than any other time old Secretary Shitfaced graces a camera with his presence. In fact, it’s considerably better than any of the screenshots Wonkette has ever published of him.

For context’s sake, here is Wonkette’s chosen screengrab of Hegseth from the same briefing:

Hahahahahahahahahahahaha, Wonkette is a quality website.

Of course, in the Post story there is a blah blah statement from a Pentagon spox not exactly denying the reporting, but trying to huff and puff in another direction, pretending it’s about space in the Pentagon briefing room. Bullshit.

As if anybody cannot see what happened here.

Little Lord Hegseth, the softest WAR SECRETARY OF WARFIGHTERS in the whole entire history of WAR SECRETARIES OF WARFIGHTERS, saw his picture in the newspaper and it sent him into one of his spells.

UUUUUUGHHHH! Can they PUH-LEEZE ask him before posting pictures on Instagram or like at least do a filter or something? God!

Now where’s that makeup boy? Daddy Warfighter needs a touchup. Makeup boy! OH, MAKEUP BOY!

Or something like that.

As the Post notes, after Donald Trump started bombing Iran for no discernible reason, an agreement was made to let some of the (real) journalists they banned a few months ago back in, after the Pentagon asked for a camera from the major (real) networks during these briefings. But that lasted one whole day, apparently. For subsequent Iran briefings, they have only let in DoD photographers.

We guess they’re the only ones who do it like Pete likes it.

Which, serious talk? Is some fascist bullshit.

Remember all the drama over those pictures of the entire Trump Cabinet from that Vanity Fair profile of Susie Wiles, how they all looked super ugly because the photographer Christopher Anderson captured the evil in their souls and the rotting decomposition of their bodies, and because photojournalists have an ethical responsibility not to touch things up to make things more flattering for their subjects, because fuck you is why? (Read Anderson’s interview about the photo shoot if you haven’t.)

This is what these sons of bitches are concerned about.

You’d think they might be more concerned about the fact that we have a stupid Defense secretary who’s so low-ranking, inexperienced and mentally deranged that he really apparently had no idea how violently Iran might respond to being attacked. That his stupid fucking boss and the regime’s stupid fucking advisers, and a stupid fucking Energy secretary named Christopher Wright, were totally blindsided by Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz. (Anybody with the most basic knowledge of that part of the world could have told you that one!)

You’d think they might be concerned that Trump is out there babbling that in Iran, “they have a new leader every three weeks, every three days.” Huh? He’s so incoherent he doesn’t even know what he’s lying about from sentence to sentence.

You’d think they might be worried that all of Trump’s and Pete Hegseth’s little-girl-killing and all their tough guy bullshit has led to a situation where Trump’s own intel services have assessed that the Iranian regime is nowhere close to collapsing. That they literally had no understanding of what the Iranian regime even is.

You’d think they might be concerned that President Dementia Trash is calling this war of choice a “little excursion,” as if “little excursions” murder seven of our troops (that we know of, so far) and injure and mangle many more.

You’d think they might be desperate to figure out who to fire, who to hold responsible for the fact that they killed all those little girls based on outdated 10-year-old information.

Instead we have headlines like these (ProPublica and MS NOW, respectively):

The U.S. Built a Blueprint to Avoid Civilian War Casualties. Trump Officials Scrapped It.

Kash Patel’s latest firings ousted agents with expertise in Iran

Instead, what are the secretary of Defense and the dick-fluffers around him worried about?

They’re worried Americans and the world might find out that the most vain, prissy, high-maintenance Defense secretary in the history of this or any other country, the most unqualified, the one with the deepest and most pathetic masculine insecurities, is not actually very pretty.

Uh well spoiler, guys: Everybody knows.

Everybody can see that he cakes his makeup on like he’s rolling into Fox & Friends Weekend still drunk from the club, the way he reportedly used to do.

Everybody can see that no matter how much makeup he puts on, he’s got ugly unsightly bumps on his face that suggest that he had bad skin even before booze took its toll.

Everybody can see how low-class he looks wearing his big boy dress shirts and dress pants with the sleeves rolled up, with his white supremacist tattoos hanging out, revealing the truth that clothes very much do not make the man.

Everybody can see his gross chosen hairstyle that makes him look like the aftermath of an oil spill, the kind that leaves baby seabirds paralyzed on the beach. How he looks like an unbathed slob. How he looks like he smells like stale cigar smoke and the whiskey of a month full of weekends. We’re talking about a man who used to brag about how he didn’t wash his hands.

Everybody can see how rapidly he’s aging, as from some angles he’s starting to look more and more like the latest septuagenarian Southern Baptist minister to be caught in a kid-touching scandal.

Everybody can see in his angry sneers and scowls how he simultaneously looks like the cycle of abuse, stranger danger, and the reason for women to cover their drinks and use the buddy system when they’re walking at night, all wrapped up in one human form.

Those angry sneers and scowls, boy howdy. They show the camera the blackness of his soul, how there’s no good on the outside or the inside.

Look at him:

It’s comically easy to get a screengrab of Pete Hegseth looking like microwaved shit, because that’s what he is.

Here’s the thing, though: Everything that makes Hegseth so butt-ugly is of his own making, a result of his own poor choices and failings as a man.

Because the other thing that everybody can see is that Hegseth looks like the shadow of a man who used to be handsome, perhaps. That maybe if he had spent his years smiling more, those years might have been kinder to him, that his soul might not have been sucked out by the same demon that’s been visiting Stephen Miller each night since he was a teenager.

But he didn’t, and they weren’t, and that demon’s got his hands full with the Trump administration.

And that’s what any real photojournalist’s camera is going to see, as well as any person watching a video of Hegseth and hitting pause every three seconds to see which angry, scowly face or melodramatic, prissy face is the funniest.

Again, sorry not sorry.

[Washington Post]

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When the American military bombed an Iranian girls’ school and killed almost 200 girls, it was the American military that did that? Oh, no shit? BRB blood pressure venting upward in a reverse trepan through my actual skull:

“In my opinion, based on what I’ve seen, that was done by Iran,” Mr. Trump told reporters on Air Force One on Saturday, as Mr. Hegseth stood beside him, adding: “They’re very inaccurate, as you know, with their munitions. They have no accuracy whatsoever. It was done by Iran.”

(Gift link New York Times)

DC’s Catholic cardinal has eyeballs in his head, says Trump’s Iran war of choice doesn’t pass any kind of test of morality. (The Guardian)

Are we trying to get terror-attacked? Honest question. (Timothy Snyder)

You know how we always blame US presidents for gas prices and they don’t actually have much to do with them? Well, SMALL EXCEPTION for this dude, Wharton’s Greatest Alum. (The American Prospect) Everybody releasing their petroleum reserves, as nations did yestertoday, could buy The Economy 45 to 50 days. Let’s see if Trump manages to get out of Iran before end of April! (NOTUS)

Seems like it was just yesterday (’s yesterday) that Trump and some Fox News douche were telling oil tankers to stop being pussies, go through the Strait, and be legends. So what if it’s too dangerous for the US Navy?

Ballot seizure practice runs, this time in Maricopa County, AZ. And the dude there was just delighted to comply! (Status Kuo)

Pretty moldy video by now, but everybody should watch and bookmark it anyway. Here’s Senator Sheldon Whitehouse a week ago detailing Trump’s Russia-Epstein ties.

I don’t know how Brandon Brown’s farm plan stacks up with whatever Wonkpal Dr. Sarah Taber would advise us to do, but I enjoy this fellow’s campaign blogs. You could sign up for them too! (Brown for SC)

Reading the New York Times’s latest snippy little entry in its eternal anti-Zohran Mamdani crusade. (Elias Isquith)

Elon Musk wants to launch one MILLION satellites into our night sky. How about fucking no? (Scientific American)

Evan’s FLORSHEIMS from the other day gets better. We present the classic fairy tale: The Black Shoes, in which they dance themselves to death or get real bad heel blister chafing in their dumb ugly clownshoes that don’t fit.

Everything’s terrible but at least Marco Rubio’s shoes don’t fit. Link fixed. (Tiedrich)

Charlotte Clymer is delighted by Bobby Pulido in Texas’s CD-15! (Charlotte’s Web Thoughts)

Here is a sports thing that is fucking stupid. (The Athletic)

NOT AN AD! We just love our friends Penzeys, and they love us! It’s their annual BOYCOTT BUSTER for CAPTAIN BOYCOTT, because of how shitty rightwingers keep boycotting them for being TOO AWESOME, and you can get 25 percent off vanilla (code BAKE at checkout) and $40 gift cards for $27.95 (limit 10). Valid THROUGH TODAY ONLY!

Yes I’m going to be shilling this fundraiser all month. Support the girls’ Detroit public elementary school and buy some pizza (pizza). Little Caesar’s will ship the incredibly convenient pizza kits right to your home! Swear to god it is worth having these in your freezer, I was sad when we finally ate all ours last year. (Pizza Pizza)

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