F**king Mondays: Fox News's Solar Migrants, This Is Not Liberalism, And Trump Screws Up Abortion Statement
Happy Monday!
NOTE: This was published several hours ago, but due to a glitch at Substack it was never sent out via email. You might receive another version of this article tomorrow so please accept our apologies in advance! - Ben
Welcome to another edition of “F**king Mondays!” In the roundup today:
Fox News covers the eclipse. Sort of…
Fox News presenters have apparently been given the memo to insert the southern border migrant crisis into every story they cover. This makes sense given they are spending millions of dollars on 24/7 coverage of the issue.
In truly impressive feat of storytelling, the Fox team even managed to weave the southern border story into today’s total solar eclipse, tying President Biden’s alleged “failure on the ground,” with a phenomenon so rare we won’t see another one for 40 years:
In other news, information about the appearance of two cicada broods this summer broke just as Trump announced his thoughts on a national abortion ban!
One wonders why Fox News viewers don’t question the fact that the border crisis just happens to coincide with the US presidential election every four years. But then a large number of them seem to believe “the Biden administration is using it [the solar eclipse] as an opportunity to shut down cellphone service or bring in the National Guard in an effort to make beautiful blond children who play sports transgender.” So probably not that surprising.
This is not liberalism
It is becoming increasingly difficult to have a rational debate about the Israel/Gaza conflict, mostly due to the radical fringes dominating the conversation. Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah has provided perhaps the best example of how identity politics extremists distort reality with deeply manipulative, racially charged language.
There are a number of dangerously stupid falsehoods Attiah is peddling in her tweets above. The first is that President Biden is an “ethno-supremacist.” Attiah appears to believe that Biden’s support of Israel makes him a white supremacist, no doubt because Jews are white and the Palestinians they are oppressing are brown. This is not only false, but deeply racist towards Jews in Israel, most of whom are darker skinned than Palestinians.
Even if Attiah was talking about the minority Ashkenazi population, she would do well to read some history books, specifically German history around World War II. The classification of Ashkenazi Jews as “white” it should be noted, is a fairly recent phenomenon popularized by American identity politics adherents. Along with it came the erasure of Jewish history and the transformation of the Israel/Palestine conflict into another woke battle against “white supremacy.”
Attiah also seems to believe that there are white and non-white versions of liberal democracy (and that Biden represents the former). It is hard to decipher what she means by this, but the claim is self evidently ludicrous.
Attiah uses Twitter to deliver high handed, occasionally threatening sermons on the politics of oppression, but the Israel/Gaza war represents an escalation of her manipulative rhetoric.
It is fine to criticize Biden’s approach to this horrifying conflict. It is not fine to call him a white supremacist or infer that Israeli Jews are engaged in a racially motivated genocide — because neither claim is true. Attiah likely knows this, but as a high priestess of radical identity politics, she knows that repeating it often enough will make it so. This is not liberalism by any definition of the word, and the sooner the left disowns this nonsense, the better.
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Trump backtracks on abortion in the worst way possible
With more layers of orange paint on his face than usual, Trump released a statement today on his position on abortion. It was a bizarre message from the former president who tried to dress up his refusal to back a national abortion ban with a deranged claims about Democrats wanting to execute newborn babies (yes, really). Trump also praised himself for his role in ending Roe vs Wade (one of the most unpopular legal decision in US history), voiced support for IVF, and argued states should determine rules on abortion term limits, not the federal government.
Trump’s more “moderate” position is no doubt an attempt to stop his polling numbers with women cratering to the point of no return. Biden’s numbers with women recently increased by 5 points according to a Quinnipiac poll, suggesting the President could do even better with women than he did in 2020 when he won 55% of the women vote.
Whether the GOP likes it or not, women have not forgotten the Supreme Court’s decision to gut Roe vs Wade in 2022 and have been punishing them at the ballot ever since. As Jennifer Rubin notes:
The impact of abortion criminalization has been profound. The percentage of Americans who say abortion should always be legal rose from 27 percent in April 2022 to 35 percent. Moreover, a record number now consider this an important issue (41 percent) while voters believe President Biden (53 percent) would do a better job on abortion issues than his almost certain 2024 rival, Donald Trump (41 percent).
Democratic strategists are well aware of this extraordinary backlash and will work furiously to make this a centerpiece of Biden’s re-election campaign. Trump knows this and is desperately trying to limit the damage. With efforts like this however, he might as well be donating to his opponent
See you next week!
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I can accept criticism of how Biden is handling the Israel/Gaza situation, but I have no patience and do not accept these arguments from some of the far left that Biden is just as anti-Muslim as Trump. I find them as offensive as those who want to eliminate every Palestinian.
Excellent! Especially regarding the "white/non white" people of Israel...yes, most of whom are darker than the Palestinians; as you stated. thanks you