It Sticks to Your Boots

slogging through the culture

I have a bunch of things I’ve been meaning to write about, but I haven’t been in the state of mind to address them. A bunch of my post-procrastination output will show up in the coming week as I force myself to get to it. But the Washington Post just helped me understand the reason why I haven’t been in the necessary state of mind to talk about the condition of the world, and have instead been wandering around the house in a dirty old bathrobe, muttering to myself:

To everyone who’s been wondering if journalists can be replaced by AI chatbots, here’s the start of the answer: Timothy Bella certainly can. (As a personal aside to the copy editors at the Washington Post, let me just point out that this headline, as written, says that conservatives killed a man on a subway.)

You’ll be shocked to hear that this one’s a seizing on piece: “The political right has seized on police statements that Neely had 44 previous arrests for offenses such as assault, disorderly conduct and fare evasion.” Not to mention the attempted kidnapping of a seven year-old, but let’s not be right-wing about this. Let’s not POUNCE on the mere act of kidnapping of a child, Nazis!

Anyway, the premise of the story is that the political right is cynically using the controversy to “score points,” and yes, the story actually uses scoring points: “The financial support Penny’s legal team has received is due, in part, to the coverage of right-leaning media outlets and Republican politicians using his case to score points on the latest front of the culture war, experts say.”

Here are two back-to-back paragraphs from deep in the story, and remember this framing:

Marshall, the Northwestern professor, noted that Penny’s case pointed to a history in which U.S. politicians have used crime and fear of crime to their own advantage, capitalizing on moments of division to strike a chord with their bases. Experts cited Trump as a recent example. They also emphasized how DeSantis, who is expected to seek the 2024 Republican nomination for president, exemplified this practice when he tweeted his support of Penny, saying the country must “take back the streets for law-abiding citizens.”

“Politicians speak about them and promote them long before the cases go to trial,” Marshall said. “In a prior generation, it would have taken weeks to build up to this point. Now, it can build up to this point in a matter of minutes, and people can jump to conclusions quickly and can make assumptions before the facts are known.”

So: Right-wing politicians are speaking about these cases and promoting these stories before trial, jumping to conclusions quickly and using crime narratives “to their own advantage,” which is very evil and right-wing of them.

Okay, now here’s the first paragraph of the same story:

In the nearly two weeks since Daniel Penny was recorded killing Jordan Neely on a New York City subway with a minutes-long chokehold, the 24-year-old Marine Corps veteran has faced calls to be arrested, been denounced as a vigilante by activists and been labeled a “murderer” by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.)

1. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez immediately said that Daniel Penny is a murderer.

2. Also, Ron DeSantis immediately said that Daniel Penny is not a murderer.

3. This proves that Ron DeSantis is seizing on the moment, jumping to premature conclusions and using the case to gin up a cynical talking point for political advantage.

The left speaks; the right pounces and seizes on and scores points.

Read the whole story if you must — here’s a version that isn’t paywalled — but have Naloxone on hand for when it dulls your brain to the danger point and you start blacking out. There’s more tendentious bullshit in there, if anyone feels like parsing it, but feelings of mercy force me to stop for now. The infinite tediousness of this lazy, empty, completely predictable “the political right is seizing on” story — Major Cities Destroyed in Nuclear Attack, Republicans Pounce — is just the latest piece of evidence to support my growing conviction that 99% of mainstream discourse resides on a continuum somewhere between “empty calories” and “deadly poison.” Which means, of course, that I am seizing on how bad this story is. To score points in the culture war!