I Pronounce the New Yorker Dead

I swear that I planned to stop flooding your inbox for a few days, but the New Yorker has just published an emotionally incontinent toddler essay that manages to be completely wrong on every single crushingly obvious point of fact. It’s a miraculous piece of writing.

Premise: Harris got support from women who reasonably fear being turned into handmaids by mean snarling right-wing Cletus with his guns and his pick-up truck, and Trump got a lot of unhinged support among weak men, because men hate women and are scared of them, and so we’re striking back against the mean girlbosses who terrify us. The comedy starts with the very first sentence: “The big two genders are said to be at war.” But just the first two — the other 9,439 are staying off the battlefield for now.

Scared-Cletus Trumpers, the story reports in the second paragraph, are turned on by the fact that Melania Trump is “hot, silent, and seemingly miserable.” We like when our womenfolk suffer, because we’re scared and dumb and mean. The evidence for Melania Trump being “seemingly miserable” is that they said so. Here she is at the Al Smith dinner, just a few weeks ago:

How does she endure this kind of suffering?

The strawmen pour out like — I don’t know, can you spray strawmen through a firehose? We should test that as a physics problem, to be ready for the coming months. Let’s offer up a screenshot, and see how much absolutely shameless ignorant bullshit can be packed into a single paragraph:

So the woman-hating Trumpists who want weak women who don’t scare them are embodied by JD Vance, who’s married to a fellow Yale Law grad who’s been working as a trial lawyer at a major corporate law firm, and Tucker Carlson, a 55 year-old man who’s been married to the same woman for 33 years.

SUCH TYPICAL RAGE-CHOKED WOMAN-HATING INCELS, something something. Does anyone at the New Yorker kind of skim this dimwitted shit a little before they publish it?

All of it screams bad faith, every word. Near the end, here’s the working-up-to-the-stakes foundation for the Big Finish:

Trump’s return to power—his imminent control over the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary, the coming dissolution of the very idea of the government providing any sort of guardrail against corporate power, carceral violence, and environmental destruction—is the beginning of a political era that will likely last decades.

The president who signed the First Step Act — who quite literally and very loudly foregrounded the reduction of mass incarceration as a major part of his first term — is somehow planning a reign of “carceral violence,” while inviting the lifelong anti-corporate environmental activist and Big Pharma-skeptical crusader Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to join his administration so he can “dissolve the very idea of the government providing any sort of guardrail against corporate power.” You fucking idiot. This is what a race to the bottom looks like.

The fool who wrote this pathetic garbage, Jia Tolentino, has an MFA in fiction, and is a former deputy editor of Jezebel, a feminist website that was shut down because it was so relentlessly stupid and eyeball-repellent.

Here’s how the New Yorker promoted this story on social media on Nov. 9:

See, far-right Trumpists believe that women should be removed from the public sphere altogether. That’s what the election was about, and men who support Trump want women silenced and hidden. They’re like the American Taliban.

On November 7 — two days earlier — Trump announced that Susie Wiles will serve as his White House Chief of Staff. She’ll be the first woman in American history to serve in that exceptionally powerful role.