SEPTEMBER 2020 IGNOMINIOUS ABSURDITY OF THE MONTH: THE IGGY

With revelations about his disregarding the seriousness of the COVID-19 virus, pressuring the CDC to release updates that fit his administration’s “all-is-well” virus narrative, heavy indebtedness and failure to pay taxes, and his horrific behavior at the first presidential debate, among other things, the September news cycle was, not surprisingly, dominated by President Trump. This forces me to include some Trump selections among the September IGGY nominations.

1. Michael Caputo, Assistant Secretary of Public Affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services. Since he was installed at the 80,000-employee department last April by the White House, Mr. Caputo, a media-savvy former Trump campaign aide, has worked aggressively to control the media strategy on pandemic issues. But over the weekend, he was engulfed in two major controversies of his own making.

First Politico, then The New York Times and other media outlets, published accounts of how Mr. Caputo and a top aide, Paul Alexander, had routinely worked to revise, delay or even scuttle the core health bulletins of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in an effort to paint the administration’s pandemic response in a more positive light. The C.D.C.’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports had previously been so thoroughly shielded from political interference that political appointees only saw them just before they were published.

Then on Monday, The Times reported that a Facebook presentation by Mr. Caputo the previous night was filled with bizarre and incendiary comments. He had attacked C.D.C. scientists as anti-Trumpers who had formed a “resistance unit,” engaged in “rotten science” and “haven’t gotten out of their sweatpants” except for coffee shop meetings to plot “how they’re going to attack Donald Trump next.” Mr. Caputo said. “There are scientists who work for this government who do not want America to get well, not until after Joe Biden is president.” He urged his gun-owning followers to buy ammunition because “it’s going to be hard to get” and warned that left-wing hit squads across the nation were training for violent attacks. He also referred to physical health concerns and said his mental health “had definitely failed.”

To a certain extent, Mr. Caputo’s comments were simply an amplified version of remarks that the president himself has made. Both men have singled out government scientists and health officials as disloyal, suggested that the election will not be fairly decided, and insinuated that left-wing groups are secretly plotting to incite violence across the United States. But Mr. Caputo’s attacks were more direct, and they came from one of the officials most responsible for shaping communications around the coronavirus.

Caputo’s 26-minute broadside on Facebook against scientists, the news media and Democrats was also another example of a senior administration official stoking public anxiety about the election and conspiracy theories about the “deep state” — the label Mr. Trump often attaches to the federal Civil Service bureaucracy.

Caputo predicted that the president would win re-election in November, but that his Democratic opponent, Joseph R. Biden Jr., would refuse to concede, leading to violence. “And when Donald Trump refuses to stand down at the inauguration, the shooting will begin,” he said. “The drills that you’ve seen are nothing.”

Why would Caputo make such outrageous claims? Not because he is a health expert, heaven forbid (he has no background in health care), or an astute visionary. No, it’s because he’d Trump’s kind of guy: a diehard loyalist equipped with a deep antipathy and suspicion of scientific expertise who knows how to toe a political line favorable to the Trumpster.

Will these inflammatory words get Caputo fired? Of course not; he’s a Trump man. Why would the president, who on his visit to the fire-ravaged West challenged the established science of climate change, declaring “It will start getting cooler…. Just watch. I don’t think science knows, actually,” fire a chip off his ol’ bloc?

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.