AUGUST 2020 IGNOMINIOUS ABSURDITY OF THE MONTH: THE IGGY

1. Fox News’ Laura Ingraham “Expert” Guest Rebecca Friedrich. Fox News’ push right now is to have schools reopen, children go to school, teachers return to classrooms, and the world to pretend that the COVID-19 pandemic is just a bad case of the flu. That’s the angle being taken (and proven wrong time and again over the past few months), but the propaganda wing of the Republican Party has its marching orders and those orders are to drive their viewers off a cliff.

Right-wing wraith Laura Ingraham used the first part of her show to attack “the media” for questioning the safety of the country’s top officials’ push to reopen schools. Ingraham, relying on her audience’s inability to connect basic math and logic together, pointed out that 166 children reportedly died in 2019-2020 due to the flu, but only 30 children have died so far from COVID-19. She forgot to mention that schools began closing across the country in March and if they had not, and had children not been by and large quarantined along with their families, maybe that number doesn’t match up—and maybe it’s only July.

From there Ingraham, in her “The War Against Kids” segment, explained that “leftist teachers unions” were punishing children in service of some commie political agenda. Ingraham connected the dots to Black Lives Matter, defunding the police, Medicare for All, stimulus checks for undocumented immigrants, a tax on the rich, and a ban on charter schools. But there was more to come as Ingraham had an expert who could dig even deeper to far more nefarious conspiracies.

Wearing a gold cross around her neck, Ingraham, probably imagining she is fighting off the never-ending stream of vampires she brings onto her show masquerading as “experts,” had former Los Angeles Unified school teacher Rebecca Friedrichs on. If Friedrichs’ name sounds familiar, it might be for her participation in a union-busting case that was brought to the Supreme Court in 2015. The case ended up in a split decision affirming the lower court after Judge Anton Scalia died and the Republican Party refused to consider President Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland. This is the expert Ingraham brought on to explain why our children needed to go back to school amidst a pandemic.

After saying how warmed she was by Ingraham’s support of her anti-union verve, Friedrichs explained that the pushback by unions over reopening classrooms is a “smokescreen” for a far more wicked agenda: The unions, and specifically teachers’ unions, “are actually using our schools to sexualize our children and to train them in anti-American ideology.”

Did you read that right? Yes, you did. But how powerful are teachers’ unions? Super-duper powerful, it turns out. According to Friedrichs, this massive indoctrination plan is coordinated with “over 180 organizations” including “the CDC, Planned Parenthood, and Black Lives Matter incorporated.”

Yes. You heard that right. (As an aside, Friedrichs explained that she has been “shouting about this for decades.”) I’m excited to hear about how powerful the teachers’ unions are and hope that this will mean that starting salaries for schoolteachers will soon be six-figure affairs! Unfortunately, these teachers’ unions are less interested in lining their pockets like the Trump administration and more interested in sex! Sexy sexy sexy sex! Let’s not get so hot and bothered that we cannot hear how this conspiracy is connected to not reopening schools.

It turns out, the conspiracy is to force children to only learn online. Because learning online is how they do the sexualization-of-our-children thing.

REBECCA FRIEDRICHS: It is shocking what they're teaching our children online through virtual learning. They are teaching our children to sext, to view pornography. They are hooking them up with online sex experts. So, what they are doing is grooming our children for sexual predators to use them. This is child abuse.

Friedrichs explains that many of these teachers don’t even realize that this is what the unions are doing. Not sure how that works, but there you have it.

2. Fox News’ Tucker Carlson. Fox News will no doubt eventually be forced to boot Tucker Carlson off their airwaves, likely for the same reason they were forced to part with Glenn Beck: At some point the host's increasingly rabid proclamations and incitements will create more legal liability to the company than the dwindling advertising revenues can make up for. Until that moment, however, Tucker and his band of ragingly racist writers will continue to produce the Tucker Carlson White Nationalism Funtime Show, sponsored by That Pillow Guy.

Tucker's latest claim, before the selection of Kamala Harris as his runningmate: Three Black women on Joe Biden's shortlist of potential vice presidents is "probably illegal." Yeah, he said that. It's Tucker. This is his nightly song-and-dance. It's what the pillow guy pays for, and why he's Trump's new best friend, and how Fox News mainstreams racist bullshit into things that the rest of the network's hosts can then coincidentally wedge into their own discussions.

As transcribed by The Daily Beast: “For what could very well be the most important job on Earth, Biden has decided to hire exclusively on the basis of qualities that are both immutable and completely irrelevant—race and gender. And that’s it. But wait a second, you ask, isn’t that insulting? Isn’t it wrong? Isn’t it probably illegal? Yes, it is all three of those things.”

Tucker had personal insults for each of the four Black women he was singling out, of course. Rep. Karen Bass is a "lunatic," Stacey Abrams is allegedly "delusional," former National Security Adviser Susan Rice was something-something-Benghazi, and as for Sen. Kamala Harris: "Pretty much no one who knows Kamala Harris likes her." (If this sounds almost exactly like the same insults Donald Trump himself hurls, it is no coincidence. It is well known that Tucker and Trump share a single brain, which they pass back and forth in a lunchbox. When Trump has one of his sleepier, medicated-seeming performances, it is because Tucker was late returning the lunchbox brain.)

So sure, Biden being uncomfortable choosing yet another white man in this particular moment is "probably illegal," Tucker says in his nightly attempt to rile his racist audience, "but no one's pushing back against it." It is nonsense meant to make his racist audience angry, in a campaign to make them angry every night, without fail, relentlessly, forever. What happens after that is of no concern to Tucker; at least for now, That Pillow Guy is paying his bills.

3. Ohio State Senator Stephen Huffman. Huffman, who is also a doctor, suggested that Black Americans might be prone to COVID-19 because they don’t wash their hands enough, a remark for which he later apologized. Aren’t you sick and tired of Americans, most often Republicans, who tend to misrepresent historical inequities as personal failures?

Black Americans have died from COVID-19 at a rate of more than twice of white Americans. This figure is not because of the idiotic notion that a behavioral trait makes them more susceptible; rather, it’s a product of the mountain of medical disadvantages Black people face. Compared with white people, they die three years younger. They have higher rates of chronic illnesses. When they go to hospitals, they’re less likely to be treated. The care they receive tends to be poorer. Knowing these biases, they are hesitant, to seek aid for COVID-19 until their symptoms are severe—that is if they even have health insurance coverage.

The dismantling of America’s social safety net, which Republicans have been pushing for years, has left Black people with less income and higher unemployment. They make up a disproportionate share of low-paid “essential workers” who are expected to staff grocery stores and warehouses, clean buildings, and deliver mail while the pandemic rages around them. Earning hourly wages without sick leave, they couldn’t afford to miss shifts even when symptomatic. They face risky commutes on crowded public transportation while more privileged people teleworked from the safety of isolation.

There’s nothing about Blackness that makes you more prone to COVID. As with so many other things in America, existing inequities and prejudices stack their odds in favor of the virus, just like with other maladies, like poverty, hunger, unemployment, police violence, and the harmful effects of extreme weather and environmental pollution.

The tendency of white Americans to attribute the failure of Black people to achieve or be treated equally to poor choices or some inherent predisposition is racist to the core.  It is reinforced these days by a powerful mythology of racial progress.  It follows from a false belief that Blacks have become more equal in America.  This provides a reason to blame the victim.  If Whites and Blacks are converging on equality, those left behind must not be trying, and it diffuses moral responsibility for actively and significantly reforming the American system.  Huffman is certainly not alone in his prejudice.

4. President Donald Trump. Sometimes I can’t just resist. Arguably the worst combination in a human personality is outright evilness and stupidity. Donald Trump possesses both in abundance. As to the stupidity, how can you better explain his propensity to mispronounce names?

This month he referred to Yosemite as Yo-Semite. Was this ignorance or was he referring to a Jewish person? His latest salvo was referring to the country of Thailand as Thigh-land. As he put it:

“… shifting production to Thigh-land and to Vietnam, Thailand and Vietnam, two places that I like their leaders very much, they’re very nice to us. Do they take advantage of the United States.”

Given the pride Trump takes in grabbing pussy, paying prostitutes, and womanizing, his fixation with Thigh-Land  could conceivably be a Freudian slip rather than sheer stupidity. So the question is: Does Trump have childish nicknames for every country (remember when he referred to Nepal and Bhutan as “Nipple” and “Button”?), or is this just his usual garden-variety stupidity? It’s surely the later. Case closed.
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And the winner is . . .

I can’t give the August award to Tucker Carlson because his absurd comment is par for the Carlson course, and he’s won in the past, President Trump because he is already certified as a unredeemable ignominious person, or Stephen Huffman because he at least apologized, so the August IGGY award goes by default to the “moronic education “expert,” Rebecca Friedrich.


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