The GOP Is In Its Shooting Dogs Era
Old Yeller 2024 Edition.
By sheer volume and velocity of the news, you have probably forgotten about the man who formerly worked at NPR and got so upset about how woke it was that he wrote a furious post about it in Bari Weiss’s newsletter. I believe it was titled: “Wow! You Won’t Hear THIS from the Mainstream Media.” The industrial process through which the grim grousings of mediocre pundits are laundered into dispatches from the bloody front of the culture war depends on various defective human instincts, a high baseline level of politicized bad faith, and unreflective people most susceptible to all this riffraff. Ultimately, this kind of story is running on autopilot even if it continues to reverberate. This stodgy senior editor did the typical post-2015 grift of posturing himself as someone who voted against Trump twice but is uncomfortable with how too many people at NPR have progressive politics, and says there are too many issues that it feels like you can’t debate or even discuss so he went on various conservative media platforms to have these discussions. The right-wing fever swamps created a controversy out of this and it rose to the likes of the New York Times because a bunch of scab-picking weirdos threw a temper tantrum hoping it would force the president of NPR to resign in disgrace. Ultimately, nothing happened.
In the prissy, seething monoculture of perpetually scandalized and increasingly deranged reactionaries, a manifestly unserious story like this will always exist in some mutation, even if it is just another fragrant input shoved into a greasy pipeline. They are replacement-level manufactroversies, and will always be secondary to the ever-escalating spate of complaints and unhinged behavior that has come to be the default tone of MAGA politics. Right-wing media and politicians will pivot and pander and giddily give themselves over to the incoherent and spiraling panic surrounding MAGA Twitter and 4chan. Something as dull and abstract as a weenie complaining about NPR feeds directly to the ravening lunatics frothing at the opportunity to “go 1776” on opponents who have succumbed to the woke mind virus. It’s all a sales funnel where the end goal is blind loyalty to a depraved political party that may erode American democracy and inspire race warriors to shoot up grocery stores, but it’s all in the greater service of banning gender-neutral bathrooms or whatever. Most of it is a hijink to con people into unwittingly donating to Trump’s legal defense fund.
What began as relatively benign, if not banal, lib-triggering contrarianism has morphed into a steadfast and hair-trigger opposition to basic decency. This feeds into a political culture that is not only cynical and lazy and cruel, but also paradoxically insecure and perpetually terrified at the prospect of any erosion of their authority on American culture. This aggrieved and heedless panic is the very essence of this boomlet of histrionic opportunism and the wellspring of MAGA’s every lurid excess. The only logical throughline throughout all of this is reflective anti-liberal spite, and abject cruelty is their substitute for engagement or debate.
In retrospect, given this context, we should’ve assumed the next grand appeal to Republican voters would be “I shot a dog for no good reason.” It’s unclear what kind of American, or how many of them, would fall under the Blasting dogs with a shotgun is good, actually coalition. But clearly, the cruelty is pervasive enough within the Republican base to incentivize South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem to reveal in her forthcoming memoir that she murdered her 14-month-old wirehaired pointer named “Cricket” by leading her pet to a gravel pit where she shot it to death.
This carefully crafted piece of voter-focused sociopathy was Noem’s angle at being selected as Trump’s running mate, as she included bizarre anecdotes like “people are looking for leaders who are authentic, willing to learn from the past, and don’t shy away from tough challenges” and this only proves how “politically incorrect” she is. Again, tough challenges and politically incorrect are her pick me, campaign trail euphemisms for killing her dog, whom she “hated” and described in her book as “untrainable,” “dangerous to anyone she came in contact with,” and “less than worthless … as a hunting dog.” She voluntarily disclosed that she also killed her goat. As she was subsequently dubbed “evil,” “trash,” and “Jeffrey Dahmer with veneers,” among other pithy pejoratives, she has since double-downed to the backlash by admitting to putting down three of her horses.
There is very little room for complexity or ambiguity in many areas of American political discourse, and even less room for compromise and unity, but thankfully, American society isn’t so broken that the topic of murdering dogs is sucked into the mind-numbing amorality of naked partisanship. The main right-wing cope in response to this is, “Democrats care about dead dogs but not dead babies,” which is pretty desperate. I remember when Mitt Romney admitted he strapped his family dog to the roof of his car during a vacation Clark Griswold-style, and it sprayed fear-induced diarrhea all over the roof—and now he is portrayed as Washington’s most reasonable man.
Whether Noem’s story is true or exaggerated or completely fabricated is somewhat beside the point. It says a great deal about where Republicans are as a party that bragging about killing a dog in cold blood entered the political calculations of someone with veep aspirations. It is axiomatic that these people have no shame and no conscience and do not care about the well-being of a swelling tranche of Americans; after all, Senator Ted Cruz is leading the charge to undermine the Biden Administration’s rule that requires airlines to issue refunds to passengers whose flights are delayed or canceled. The Republican Party is full of craven and mendacious opportunists who are always trying to see what they can get away with—how little effort might be enough in some cases, and how much overage is justifiable in others. They all clearly believe they have that permission. It’s a matter of when their voters will grant them that permission and for what ends.
“manufactroversies” — well played.
One of my wife's friends texted her that NPR piece, then my wife texted it to me, then I looked at the URL, then I told her it was published on Bari Weiss' blog, then my wife "emphasized" my response in iMessage, then she told her friend it was biased horseshit published on Bari Weiss' blog, then her friend -- a staunch progressive -- was triggered.
Nothing was solved.