Greetings and welcome to this 59th edition of the Carnival of Fools. It’s going to be a strange performance this week, like one of those Grateful Dead shows where the band drank from the wrong watercooler before starting off with the first set. So first we’ll play the hits that you want to hear, then I’m going to play one for myself.
The ‘No Kings’ Rally Stirs the Mush
This weekend, on a cold autumn Saturday, my city returned once again to its protest roots, as throngs of suburbanites and team-sport fanatics flocked like lemmings to Chicago’s Grant Park. No, it wasn’t 1968 all over again (and the Cubs got bounced from the playoffs a while ago). It was for a nationwide “No Kings” rally, an official bleat of displeasure — brought to you by the Democratic Party™ — against the course of the second Trump administration.
Readers, let me assure you that absolutely nothing of importance whatsoever happened on this day. While turnout was fairly respectable, it was by no means overwhelming. The biggest whiteout Chicago has seen in the 21st century remains either the Polar Vortex of 2014 or the World Series victory celebration in November 2016 — and I really must emphasize the mayonnaise-like nature of it all, because that was my overwhelming demographic impression of “No Kings”: the same mix of earnest youths, activists, and gray-haired suburbanites as my local farmers’ market, only on a larger scale.
Unlike the last time a major protest stumbled into my toddlin’ town, I chose not to head down to the demonstration to get my fair share of abuse. I used the weather as an excuse this time — it was miserable on Saturday morning in Chicago, and even more miserable that night, but serendipitously cleared up for the midday span of time the rally was held — but in truth I just couldn’t see the purpose of it; it felt like trying to hype yourself to attend a WNBA game.
My instinct was proven right when I met the rally-goers later that afternoon and learned everything I needed to know about them. How? Because vast, clotting flocks of them poured like teeming hordes of vermin into the West Loop (my adjacent Chicago neighborhood) and devoured our food infrastructure. Legally and politely, that is. And while wearing some of the most embarrassing Boomer mom T-shirts I have seen since the “pink pussyhats” brigade of the 2017 Women’s March.
And that’s what, by all accounts, “No Kings” day was across America: for locals, an inconvenient surge of upscale suburban tourists stealing our carryout slots on Uber Eats. Aside from that, it was a minor traffic hazard. It beats rioting, and that is worth noting. It was also impossible not to note — and I went back to confirm this by checking drone footage and photos of the Grant Park rally — how mightily white this rally was, in a city that is only 36 percent white itself.
What does that tell me, in a city where turnout for the mayoral election that sent Brandon Johnson to enduring infamy was under 35 percent? It tells me only that the engaged are as engaged as they ever were, but there has been no real breakthrough yet. Working men are not in the streets, to use the common turn of the phrase; this is the activist and leisure class, in highest dudgeon, declaring their discontent and then decamping to Randolph Street to enjoy the newest taquería.
I don’t discount the energy of those who turned out to rally: Opposition to Trump is real, and it is laser-focused among the educated class, specifically among women. It would be foolhardy to mock or laugh at the reality of these people’s discontent, even if you disagree with the underlying reasons for it (and I do not in all circumstances). At the end of the day, these are the people who are going to vote in the midterms. Will Trump’s more casual supporters? 2018 certainly told us one tale. We shall see about 2026.
CBS News Reports: No Problems Here!
As you have no doubt already heard, big changes are afoot at CBS, which has recently been purchased in a merger with anonymous tech conglomerate Skydance by Silicon Valley nepo-baby David Ellison, son of Oracle founder (and Trump ally) Larry Ellison. With Ellison comes the imperative for a change of direction at CBS News — and as part of the turnover, he has acquired Bari Weiss’s Free Press outlet along with the talents of Weiss herself.
It’s quite the journey for Weiss, a woman whose initial fame derived from being hounded out of the New York Times for insufficient wokeness. The downstream result of that was the Free Press, a Substack blog that quickly mushroomed into its own dissident-left traffic phenomenon during the Biden era. Now, perhaps inevitably in an age of media decay and tumult, it has been resorbed into the mainstream media, this time on more advantageous terms.
Good luck, Bari! The strange thing about Weiss, as any conservative or Republican will tell you, is that she is not one of us. I don’t know Weiss myself — our paths have never crossed in person or online — but I can tell you that I’ve read and seen enough of her work to know exactly who she reminds me of: my normie liberal friends from back in the ’90s and ’00s, whom I got along with just fine. Contrast that with the mainstream media — as best embodied by the New York Times, the voice of Establishment Journalism — which is now breathlessly reporting on her each and every move as if she is Attila the Hun parked on the outskirts of Rome, pondering whether to take the city or turn back. (“Lo! A holy embassy from 60 Minutes requests an audience for pleading!”)
Meanwhile, all of us on the actual right are sitting here with mild bemusement, suppressing chuckles as CBS News internally seeks to eject Weiss like a committed alcoholic’s poisoned antibodies might heroically rally to reject a healthy liver transplant. (“We had to kill the patient in order to save him.”) Forgive me that analogy, but it is grotesquely apt — for you see, CBS News evidently doesn’t have a bias problem, it can quit anytime it wants:
Bari Weiss, the new editor in chief of CBS News, surprised senior staff at the venerable news program “60 Minutes” during a meeting on Tuesday when she asked a provocative question:
Why does the country think you’re biased?
The inquiry was met with stunned awkwardness, according to three people who recounted details from the private session in Midtown Manhattan. The staff of “60 Minutes,” the nation’s most-watched news program, view their coverage as firmly nonpartisan and reject criticism from President Trump and his allies who argue that it has a liberal slant.
I’m thrilled to find that 60 Minutes’ staff views itself as “firmly nonpartisan,” because it brings back memories of how a college friend of mine once claimed he was “firmly heterosexual” back when he was recommending Lords of Acid to me in 1999. What can I say? Entire industries are now apparently in denial about their true nature these days, and this includes CBS News — an organization I would describe as “besieged” were not almost all the sabotage coming from inside the building.
What do you remember about CBS News in recent years? You might mention Kamala Harris’s bumbling interview during the 2024 campaign season, but here’s the thing about that: It revealed organizational bias — of course CBS would never have aired the unedited interview — but it could not successfully conceal Kamala Harris’s incompetence. You can’t edit around that.
Meanwhile, I remember Dan Rather. I remember the forged documents Rather ran on 60 Minutes about George W. Bush’s service in the Texas Air National Guard in the run-up to the 2004 election, with — as he has confessed stupidly and often since — the explicit motive of swaying its outcome. Others can name their CBS News disgrace of choice, but I — young enough to be properly cynical, yet old enough to retain hold of the Ancient Lore — know that CBS News broke trust with the mainstream of America decades ago, and never even bothered to repair the breach. They simply moved on, hoping viewers would forget. They did not, and they themselves have moved on.
Godspeed, Bari. You have your work cut out for you.
Why Not to Leave the GOP
A brief notice about people who got into this game for the wrong reasons. Yesterday, The Bulwark published a piece from a former Republican flack with a predictably readership-pleasing headline: “My Last Day as an Accomplice of the Republican Party.” (It was a typical theme for The Bulwark, whose audience and political aim I will not pretend to understand or respect.)
And you know what? I wouldn’t necessarily be unsympathetic to a piece pitched from this angle, were it directed properly. Nobody will ever mistake me for a party-line partisan — my sole bigotry is in favor of conservative principle — and as someone who has passed up three straight chances to cast a presidential ballot for Donald Trump, I’ve developed my rhetorical posture into titanium-flexible ironic detachment simply because in 2025 one bends unless one intends to break. In other words, I am presumably the target audience for such a piece.
Except I’m not. This piece isn’t written by or for disaffected conservatives, it’s written for . . . well, the sorts of people who keep The Bulwark in business:
WHAT FINALLY BROKE ME out of my comfortable cocoon had nothing to do with Trump or his grip on the Republican party. Rather, it was the rightward lurch of the Supreme Court and the lengths to which the right was willing to go to undermine established legal precedents and access to reproductive rights.
When I was younger, I was staunchly pro-life. But as I got older, I grew to realize this wasn’t the black-and-white issue I had previously believed it was. While I slowly became pro-choice, I still didn’t consider it a personal priority when I voted. In fact, I failed to fully process the ramifications of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.
I’m sorry, but for all the reasons to abandon the GOP — boy, could I rattle off a few! — the least principled one of all is to claim the Supreme Court, and abortion politics, as your breaking point. To say so merely means that you presumed to work professionally to elect Republican politicians while rejecting conservative values, as well as the party’s official platform, for half a century. Congratulations on your confession of naked careerism.
Now is not the time to explain how much the issue of life means to many of us conservatives. If you think you can persuade the sorts of activists who drove the GOP to victory — in the judiciary as much as anywhere else — that their lifelong cause was somehow errantly conceived, then good luck to you; you will have better luck convincing your grandmother to stop attending Sunday Mass. But one way or another, the overturning of Roe v. Wade has been a conservative goal for decades. Life has not suddenly become cheaper over the past eight years. Did the author’s convictions?
What this tells me is that there exists an entire class of people, now frozen out of the modern Republican Party power structure, who have nothing left for themselves but to lament their former status — because all they ever really believed in was their status, and the rest was mere fashionable affect. It is incredibly easy to level just criticism against Donald Trump and his putrefying effect on our political culture without forfeiting the reasons one was conservative to begin with. But some people feel differently.
Whatever the horrible results of the Trumpist purge of the professional GOP — of the decent, of the honest and true — it has at least revealed the difference between Republicans who criticize Trump because they are conservatives and those who criticize Trump because they would now not get paid for their work otherwise. Some people really do conceive of their professional political lives in terms of wanting a nice job as the comfortably decent, losing opposition.
People like this are the reason people like me are now suffering through people like Trump. I blame them nearly as much as MAGA’s myrmidons and consider them two sides of an equally useless coin.
Until next week.