Welcome back to my column, the only true source of news. And Teen Vogue too, until this week. Rest in power to the only publication that you might buy for your daughter, thinking she’d use it to learn how to do her hair, but instead she finds instructions on how to make a Molotov cocktail. And welcome to Sascha Seinfeld, who is helping out with TG. Any bad jokes, factual errors, and libels are hers.
→ Okay, now I’m anti-shutdown: The FAA is cutting flights by 10 percent at 40 major airports, citing shutdown economics. Cancel culture strikes again! Air traffic controllers have been missing paychecks, and the FAA says they can’t promise our safety in the sky anymore: “We are seeing pressures build in a way that we don’t feel, if we allow it to go unchecked, will allow us to continue to tell the public that we operate the safest airline system in the world,” said FAA administrator Bryan Bedford. This seems like a highly wordsmithed way of saying: You are not safe in the air.
I want the most dangerous thing that happens in the air to be a flight attendant encountering a man unwilling to stow his large electronics. I consider it an emergency when Delta runs out of Cheez-Its. And now you’re telling me there’s a nonzero chance I could have a layover in the Atlantic?
We are officially in the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, and largely, somehow, we’ve been able to skate through it. But now it matters. Now it hits home. Now that holiday flights could be impacted, you have my full attention. President Donald Trump claims the shutdown helped explain the drubbing Republicans took in various elections this past Tuesday—you can watch this CBS Mornings segment for more. (Every time I say CBS, I’m given a jelly bean. CBS. Yum, root beer–flavored!)
→ The long, strange road of Kevin Roberts: This is a hot topic, so let’s stick to the facts. First, Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, put out a full-throated, on-camera defense of Tucker Carlson for hosting Nick Fuentes, an antisemitic little goblin with peach fuzz and a perpetual, thin-lipped smile, as if blood libel were Christmas cheer. No one asked Kevin to get involved; no one needed Kevin in this situation; Kevin just decided to film that since he was feeling a little left out and needed to make his bizarre opinions known. In the video, he blamed a “venomous coalition” of “globalists” for “sowing division” on the right over Fuentes and called all criticism an “attempt to cancel” Carlson. Well, people got really mad about this. I’m sure the donors who pay him a million bucks a year weren’t thrilled that he decided to formally throw the Heritage Foundation into team Rage Against the Jews.
Then began Kevin’s apologies. First, Kevin tried to throw a staffer under the bus for reposting messages in defense of the statement, making a big show of demoting his chief of staff, who later resigned since maybe that would help make all this go away? Kevin also released a written clarification about his feelings toward Fuentes: “Allow me to elaborate.” He tried to do that on Dana Loesch’s show, but she, unfortunately for Kevin, is very smart and it didn’t go well for him. Then, this week he offered a more formal on-camera apology to the staff, saying he “made a mistake.” Then he did another on-camera apology (number three? Four?): “Leadership requires owning the moments where we fall short.” Poor Kevin. He thought it was Nazi o’clock and didn’t realize he could’ve just waited a few more weeks. We’re getting there, Kev! Keep your powder dry, brother! Hard to blame him for being early: Kevin’s looking to the new generation of conservative activists, many of whom love Fuentes (according to Rod Dreher, who knows such things). But Heritage is still funded and guided by Boomers, and Boomers don’t want that race war. Boomers aren’t ready for the Jewish purge. They’re cranky and don’t want to deal with logistics. Some of those Boomers, like Chris DeMuth and Stephen Moore, quietly resigned this week. Complaints about Kevin as a leader are leaking, while Kevin’s allies are making lists of Heritage dissidents for later use. And it brings me back to a previous big Kevin controversy, in which he allegedly killed his neighbor’s pit bull with a shovel. Say what? Yes. Apparently, he brags about this at dinner. I gotta say, I’m pretty scared of pit bulls myself, so I think we need Kevin’s side of the story before we draw conclusions.
The New York Times, by the way, gave Fuentes a gorgeous photo, where he looks hot and cool and sorta misunderstood. And here’s how the piece describes him: “Plenty of conservatives, especially Jewish ones, abhor Fuentes’s growing clout. But by cheering on Donald Trump as he promoted conspiracy theories and systematically destroyed bulwarks against nativism and bigotry in the Republican Party, they helped make Fuentes’s rise possible.” So, in summary, we must conclude the Jews are to blame for Nick Fuentes’s rise, and if it happens, also his fall. Which is so funny because that’s also what Nick Fuentes concludes!
