A few hundred progressive activists gathered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, this past weekend for the 19th annual Netroots Nation political conference. For three days, progressive politicos, activists, lawyers, journalists and the terminally online workshopped strategies for winning this November and beyond.

Some attendees took a moment to assist hotel workers threatening to strike during the FIFA World Cup later this month. A few even managed to slip out and join Philadelphia’s annual Dyke March in front of City Hall on Saturday.

If you’re not familiar with Netroots Nation, 20 years ago, it was the Democratic alternative to political conferences like CPAC. It was tech-centric, merging the internet’s budding social media landscapes with policymakers and the people who had their boots on the ground throughout the United States.

Netroots was born out of The Daily Kos, the proto-lefty blogging space that rose to prominence during the George W. Bush administration and its Middle East misadventures. In the late 2000s, Netroots was where Democratic and progressive politicos could gather and discuss strategies and give speeches (which were carried on C-SPAN) on a national stage. It was a required stop for rising stars and prominent people in the Democratic Party.

Prefer a non-Substack subscription? The button below will take any amount of your choosing at Paypal — let me know if you want the newsletter subscription too! they’re separate! — or we have a Patreon too.

Wonkette $ machine!

In 2008, then-Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton gave the keynote address during the Democratic presidential primary. As president, Barack Obama gave a taped address in 2010. Then-Vice President Joe Biden delivered the keynote in 2014. In 2015, Senator Bernie Sanders got one of his first major appearances on the national stage (and former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, after being interrupted by activists, nuked his 2016 presidential campaign and political career).

Twenty years later, it’s different.

The hard truth is that nobody really covers Netroots anymore. The New York Times, the AP and other major news services don’t even bother sending a human pencil to scribble the Five Ws and a few quotes. Struggling and/or lesser known progressive outlets might send someone, if they can afford the expense. In the past, Dave Weigel would show up for a day out of fairness and admitted nostalgia. But I didn’t see any major news outlets or names this year. They didn’t bother to show up in New Orleans last year either.

Political organizing and activism are very different from how they were 20 years ago. The internet has connected people in ways nobody could have imagined, for better and for worse. It’s allowed for the complex networks usually formed on the ground to flourish online, but it seems to also have led to a more disinterested media.

Further, Netroots is not a place for splashy shows and pompous theatrics, like a Turning Point USA concert. It’s mostly workshops and trainings with very specific focuses: discouraging codeswitching; achieving slavery reparations; the ethical usage of AI; how to run for political office and run a campaign through open-source social media platforms; voter registration and GOTV strategies in cities and rural areas; organizing nonviolent resistance to protect communities from ICE agents; combating the resurgence of eugenics-based assumptions about disabled people. There are documentary screenings, and lectures led by journalists and authors.

It’s nerdy. Very, very nerdy.

The general mood this year might be described as “fed up.” People were fed up with Trumpland’s unholy alliance linking theocratic cranks, fascists, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, genocidal lunatics and the secret police trampling on civil rights. They were fed up with shameless corporate greed, the concentration of wealth and big tech cramming AI down their throats.

During a panel on combating corporate greed, representatives Becca Balint and Maxwell Frost pushed for journalists and voters to challenge candidates and elected officials on economic policies. Frost commented that progressive policies get a lot of flak about cost, but when paired with a tax on the extremely wealthy, those criticisms evaporate. Balint noted that Trump’s signature legislative achievement, the atrociously named One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBA), has become so unpopular that Trump is demanding the bill be rebranded as the ”Working Families Tax Cut Bill” or “Working Families Tax Plan” — a wholesale ripoff of popular progressive phrases and slogans.

At a panel on defeating the far-right seizure of the Supreme Court, panelists noted that the civil rights-era SCOTUS was almost an anomaly when compared with the US’s 250-year history of disenfranchising its minority populations.

The Nation columnist Elie Mystal criticized the administration of former President Joe Biden for not using the military to provide abortion access on US bases following Texas’s abortion ban. The crowd cheered and applauded.

While Netroots has always been linked with tech — which serves as the backbone for fundraising and GOTV operations — this year there was a palpable backlash against tech and AI. I heard it from a number of people.

“AI has ruined the soundbite,” commented Erika Gulija, senior vice president of New Heights Communications, near the end of her panel on reframing activist jargon. “What AI can never replicate is the human experience.”

In an arts and crafts breakout room, people made buttons, clay sculptures and bracelets. One person had laid out beads with the letters, “F, U, C, K” followed by, “I, C, E.”

Rachel Tait with Project 26, a Pennsylvania-based advocacy group focused on student GOTV and leadership, said she felt the arts and crafts room was important for people who wanted to just get away from all the “stuff” in the Exhibitors Hall, where all the tech companies were set up. She raised her hands and shrugged her shoulders, a gesture that can only be described as “ick.”

There’s an argument that outfits like Turning Point are overtaking over the traditional wonky political convention. They don’t hold three-day policy discussions with statistics geeks, policy wonks, and the terminally online agoraphobes who make up today’s ADHD scrollitariate. They’re putting on the Ice Capades.

Turning Point foots the bill to get a lot of kids with braces in seats. They’re paying to bus in youth to sit front row at a Trump show. Kids at Turning Point rallies have explicitly told me as much. They got free tickets from their local chapters, and a chartered bus ride.

The vendors in those exhibit halls are hawking Trump-themed swag, like bootleg MAGA hats, shirts, wigs and bobbleheads. People are selling tchotchkes, wood carvings, cigars, rhinestone jackets, and whatever Mike Lindell is grifting. It’s a bit different from newsletter, marketing and donation platforms.

Old-school political conferences aren’t cheap. They’re expensive for the hosts, the sponsors, the attendees and the journalists covering them. Most people have to pay their own way in the hope of pitching a new idea, building up their network or covering activity at the ground level. It’s a chance for the rank and file to create a face-to-face dialogue with other humans. And, unlike Turning Point, nobody has to check with the fire marshal before setting off sketchy pyrotechnics.

The closest thing to that kind of fire at Netroots came from the barnburner speech by Frederick D. Haynes III, a pastor running for Congress in Texas’s 30th District, currently the seat of departing Rep. Jasmine Crockett. Haynes said, “We’re in a nightmare where we have a cult leader in the White House who is running roughshod over democracy. It is a nightmare where workers are under attack. It is a nightmare where the greedy are exploiting the needy … [but] it’s still our dream to create economic justice. It is still our dream to make America a beloved country for all, and not an empire that exploits. It is still our dream to create a class of a nation that, in a real sense, understands the real strength of a nation is not its military bases around the world, but instead bases of love and compassion and concern for all. That is our dream.”

As you may have heard, Donald Trump went on Meet The Press this weekend. Donald Trump’s face was red and he was covered in wetness and he got very upset on Meet The Press this weekend. Donald Trump stormed out of Meet The Press this weekend, because host Kristen Welker was unfair to him, by asking him to back up his lies with evidence.

Let’s have a look!

After the show’s intro and some clips of the interview ahead, Welker explained the setting of the previously recorded interview and how nature itself played a role in it.

WELKER: At the invitation of the White House, we joined him at Custer Farms and had a wide-ranging interview that was unfortunately interrupted multiple times by the stormy weather overhead.

The coincidence of this farm sharing its name with an infamous general whose hubris and stupidity led to his downfall at the Little Bighorn River in the Montana Territory was not lost on us.

Welker began the interview proper by asking Trump what should have been a simple question:

WELKER: Is the United States at war with Iran?

Trump rambled, as he always does, about Iran being “largely decapitated” while forgetting not to use the “w”-word:

TRUMP: I call it a military exercise because people would rather have it called that. It’s not a big war for us.

Prefer a non-Substack subscription? The button below will take any amount of your choosing at Paypal — let me know if you want the newsletter subscription too! they’re separate! — or we have a Patreon too.

Wonkette $ machine!

While Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth play games about whether we are/aren’t at war, and as they change the names of military operations thinking that will reset the clock, Welker noted that Trump’s own need to brag on social media undermines those attempts:

WELKER: You did post on social media just this week, “My final negotiations to end the war with the Islamic Republic of Iran.” There is a naval blockade in place –[…] which technically is an act of war under international law. So is this a war as long as there’s a naval blockade in place?

Trump babbled about how it’s not a war because it’s not as long as Iraq or Vietnam:

TRUMP: We’ve lost 13 people here and that’s a lot. […] But, if you look at Vietnam, where hundreds of thousands of people were killed, if you look at any one of the last seven or eight wars where many, many people were killed, we lost 13. […] I’m moving very fast. I’m into three months. You know, Vietnam lasted 19 years. […] again, you were in Vietnam for 19 years. You were in Iraq for many years. You were in Korea for many, many years. You were in all – I won’t even talk about World War II, because that was the big one. […] Kristen, you were in Vietnam for 19 years […] Now I’m going to finish it. But remember, you were in Vietnam 19 years because of stupid people.

Please keep comparing your stupid quagmire to Vietnam. Would hate it if they were inextricably linked in people’s minds. Of course, the Trump administration loves to claim Iran has been attacking us for 47 years, which must mean it’s our longest war ever. That’s just how math works.

Next question:

WELKER: Who is leading Iran?

TRUMP: I don't want to go into names. They're leaders. They're respected by the people that have to respect them.

Translation: He has zero fucking clue.

Welker then pushed Trump on this whole conflict being a huge broken campaign promise.

WELKER: One of your consistent campaign promises was no new wars, going all the way back to 2015. Did you break that promise to the American –

TRUMP: No. […]

WELKER: So you’re saying you didn’t break your promise. And yet, Mr. President, in your first term, you held to that promise […] What changed, because you insisted “no new wars”?

TRUMP: Well, well. First of all, I didn’t guarantee no war.

Surprise, he lied! Who could have seen this coming?

As Welker had prefaced, the storm weather kept interrupting the interview. Trump at first tried to roll with it and “power through.” But as it persisted and Welker kept committing acts of journalism and standing her ground, Trump became more and more irritated.

This led to Trump having a meltdown when Welker pushed him about the J6 insurrectionist-bribing slush fund, which is allegedly not supposed to be a thing anymore.

He lashed out a whole bunch of times, including the one you may have seen on the internet, where he shouted old-man-yelling-at-clouds conspiracy theories at Welker about rigged elections, and she kept asking for pedestrian things like “evidence.” He insisted to Welker that she “listen to me!” while continuing to spew his lies and sundowning conspiracies. But what proof did he have?

TRUMP: It’s — all I have to do is look. All I have to do is look!

WELKER: But that’s not evidence.

Trump stormed out after insulting Welker personally and ranting about how unfair the media is to him:

TRUMP: You’re either crooked or you’re stupid! […] I won an election in a landslide and I got 94 percent bad press! […] Your elections are crooked and you’re crooked, and Meet the Press is crooked! […] And so is ABC and CBS and CNN! […] You’re a one-sided crooked networ! Sorry. Let’s call it quits because I’ve had enough. Thank you, darling. Have a good time.

Thank you, Kristen Welker, for challenging him, and thank you, Mother Nature, for getting his hair wet. (Though we would always note that it’s permissible to use the words “lie” and “liar.” Really! Try it!)

Have a week.

Share

Follow Michael Mora on Threads, occasionally on Bluesky (and if you are still on Twitter, I’m also HERE).

You can subscribe to Michael Mora’s Substack, The Diasporican Writer, for additional thoughts and topics!

Hola, how is it hanging, everyone! Time for tabs!

Surely we will be saying more about this today, but wow, did you see Donald Trump looking all red and wet and close to death absolutely screaming at Kristen Welker on Meet The Press because she kept asking for one scintilla of evidence that the 2020 election had been stolen, or that California is being rigged right now? Oh man, that two-bit dictator loser LOST IT. Credit to Welker for keeping going, though as always we note that it is permissible to use the words “lie” and “liar.” Anyway, he stormed off, big tantrum, too emotional to be king.

Biggest little bitch in the whole wide world.

Haha, Trump’s loser bouncy house wrestling birthday might get struck by lightning. [Bloody Elbow]

Can you imagine the audacity of that ugly-skinned pig Pete Hegseth setting foot in Europe, surrounded by a continent full of his superiors, and criticizing them for how they handle their business? On D-Day? That little boy was lied to, clearly, about how he is a special child of God, fearfully and wonderfully made, etc. [Guardian / France 24]

While all the Albanian citizens loudly scream that they don’t want those dead-eyed trash holes Jared and Ivanka building their shit resort on an Albanian island, the European Union is also warning Albania that Jared and Ivanka’s little project might hurt their chances to get into the EU. Oops. [Politico Europe]

Related, Donald Trump now would like to buy some islands in the Indian Ocean, to punish the UK for refusing to let him use the Diego Garcia military base as a staging ground to lose his stupid Iran war on the first day. [Reuters]

Prefer a non-Substack subscription? The button below will take any amount of your choosing at Paypal — let me know if you want the newsletter subscription too! they’re separate! — or we have a Patreon too.

Wonkette $ machine!

That whole screwworm thing in Texas? The windsock Ag secretary Brooke Rollins says that’s Joe Biden’s fault. [Brooke Rollins on Twitter]

Uh oh, looks like Spencer Pratt will not be making the LA mayoral runoff. RIGGED!

How much is Donald Trump ruining the NBA Finals for New York and for everyone else too, just by attending? So, so much. He ruins everything his fucking breath touches. [AM New York / Yahoo Sports]

The pope went to Madrid to see Bad Bunny this weekend, or something. [Washington Post]

And more about the pope’s historic trip to Spain:

Finally, here is the setlist for The Cure’s show at Primavera Sound in Barcelona this weekend. Seems like it was kind of cool.

Jesus.

OK, enough stories, you get no more stories! Want more stories? No!

Glad we had this discussion.

Want to read more Evan than just what’s at Wonkette? Visit The Moral High Ground and subscribe to it!

Follow me on Instagram!

And on BlueSky!

And on Facebook!

Here, a LinkTree!

Share

Want to donate just once?

It’s good to be back on my feet again following my fall down the stairs and the resulting injury to my ankle. I’m not yet fully recovered, I still need to wear a support boot for another four weeks and I’m awaiting my first physiotherapy appointment. In the meantime, I’m able to spend a limited amount of time standing in the kitchen, which allows for a partial return to baking. The limits to my ability to stand for prolonged periods have presented the perfect opportunity to provide you all with a couple of simple, speedy recipes which are great for enjoying during the hot months of summer. Think strawberries and cream, with the sweet crunch of meringue, or as the filling for cones of flaky puff pastry. These recipes make extensive use of shortcuts to reduce the effort required on your part, but the results are guaranteed to impress anyone you serve them to. Read on for recipes for Cream Horns and a very British dessert, Eton Mess. These are both classic summer treats over here in the UK, and I hope you will love them as much as I do.

A Little Slice Of History

The origin of Eaton Mess is a tangled web of myth and fact, but what is known for certain is that it is a fairly new creation, first appearing in the 1930s. Eton Mess was first created at Eton College, the prestigious private school which boasts such illustrious former students as most of the male members of the British Royal Family, George Orwell, Hugh Laurie, Tom Hiddleston, Ian Fleming, and former Prime Ministers Boris Johnson and David Cameron. I can almost forgive them for the latter two of these alumni in light of how much joy Eton Mess brings me.

My favourite story concerning the origin of Eton Mess is that it was created by accident as a result of the antics of a labrador retriever who sat on a picnic basket containing a raspberry pavlova at a school cricket match. Legend tells us that after the cricket match had ended and the crushed dessert was discovered, the hungry boys decided that they didn’t care that the dog had ruined dessert and ate it anyway. After which they declared that they preferred the crushed and mangled version over the original pavlova and requested it be added to the school’s regular menu.

Sadly, the picnic story is a complete fabrication and Eton Mess was first created in the kitchens of Eton College by one of the cooks, although another legend tells that this was a result of said cook dropping a raspberry pavlova and deciding they couldn’t be bothered to make a new one and would just serve what remained of the one they dropped. This story cannot be confirmed either, however what is certain is that Eton Mess has been a fixture of the summer menu at the prestigious school ever since its creation.

These days, strawberries tend to be the favoured fruit for inclusion in an Eaton Mess, but any summer berry is acceptable. Regardless of the fruit used, an Eton Mess must always contain whipped cream, and broken pieces of meringue. It is a favourite method for using up leftover meringue (store bought or homemade is fine) and berries in kitchens all over the UK. If you plan to make your own meringue, you’ll have to start early, as it will require at least 3 hours to bake and then needs to cool completely before serving. You may be better making the meringue the day before you intend to serve it.

Recipe 1: Eton Mess

For those of us who are pancreatically challenged, the carbohydrate count for this recipe will vary depending on the fruit used. For the meringue, the carbohydrates are 200g for the entire meringue, or 25g per portion when serving 8 people. A serving of whipped cream and 3 strawberries will add around 3g of carbohydrates to this total.

Your Equipment

Stand mixer with whisk attachment, or an electric hand whisk and mixing bowl

Deep sided baking tray

Baking parchment

Your Ingredients

4 egg whites

200 g sugar (superfine / caster sugar is best, but regular sugar will work)

Approximately 24 strawberries, or 3 per person (or summer berries of your choice)

300 ml heavy cream

The Important Bit

The first thing to do is make your meringue. Ideally, this should be done the day before you intend to serve your Eton Mess, as it requires a long baking time.

Start by preheating your oven to 210 F / 100C.

Using your stand mixer, whip the egg whites until they form stiff peaks. They are done when you can hold the bowl upside down over your spouse, friend or child’s head and they do not have to go and wash their hair.

Take the sugar and add it to the egg whites 1 spoonful at a time, whilst whisking continuously. The resulting mixture should be thick and glossy. If you wish to be a little bit more creative, you could add a little food colouring gel to your meringues at this stage – just whisk a little bit into the meringue mixture.

Line your deep sided baking tray with baking parchment and spread your meringue across the baking parchment in a layer that is around 0.5 inches thick.

Place the meringue into the oven and leave to bake for 3.5 hours.

Remove the meringue from the oven and allow to cool completely before breaking it into pieces and storing in an airtight container until it is needed.

When you are ready to serve your Eton Mess, whip the heavy cream until it forms stiff peaks, then slice your strawberries.

Place the meringue and strawberries into serving bowls, add the whipped cream, and give it a gentle mix to combine the different elements.

Enjoy.

Recipe 2: Cream Horns

A delicious, summertime treat made with puff pastry, strawberry jam (not the smooth kind) and whipped cream. If you’re feeling fancy, consider topping it with a chocolate dipped strawberry. You can buy the puff pastry from the grocery store, I won’t tell a soul. You could even use store bought jam if you don’t want to try making your own.

For my fellow members of the Dead Pancreas Society, this recipe makes 10 Cream Horns with a total of 33g of carbohydrates per portion.

Your Equipment

Stand Mixer with whisk attachment, or electric hand whisk and mixing bowl

Sharp knife

Baking tray

Baking parchment

Pastry brush

Aluminum foil / Tin foil

Bain Marie (or a heat proof bowl, wire rack and a pan of simmering water) / Microwave and microwave safe bowl

Piping bag and piping nozzle (star shaped is perfect)

Your Ingredients

A little cooking oil or spray oil

300g ready rolled puff pastry

1 egg, beaten

3 tbsp brown sugar

300 ml heavy whipping cream

300g strawberry jam

10 strawberries

50g dark chocolate

The Important Bit

Preheat your oven to 420F / 200C. Line your baking tray with baking parchment.

Use your aluminum foil / tin foil to make 10 cones, each roughly 4 inches (10cm) tall. The easiest way to do this is by crumpling up the foil and fashioning a cone shape out of it. Then coat this foil cone with another piece of aluminum foil so that it has a smooth surface. Lightly coat the cones with oil and set aside while you prepare your pastry.

Cut your pastry into 10 equally sized ribbons along the longest side, each ribbon should be a little under an inch wide. Wrap each ribbon of pastry around one of your foil cones , starting from the thick end of the cone and working your way towards the tip. The pastry should just overlap itself as you wrap it around the cone.

Place the wrapped cone on its side on the baking tray. Repeat until you have used all of your pastry ribbons.

Brush each pastry cone with a little of the beaten egg and sprinkle lightly with the brown sugar.

Bake the pastry cones in the oven for 12 -15 minutes, or until the pastry cones are golden brown. You may need to bake the cones in 2 batches, depending on the size of your baking tray.

Remove the cones from the oven and allow to cool completely before gently removing the foil cone from inside the pastry cone, it should slide off fairly easily when gently wiggled.

Melt your dark chocolate in a bain marie, or by microwaving on medium-low in 30 second bursts, stirring after each burst, until the chocolate is fully melted. Dip each strawberry in the chocolate and shake off the excess chocolate. Put aside to allow the chocolate to set.

Using the stand mixer, whip the cream until it forms stiff peaks. You could add a little confectioner’s sugar and vanilla essence to the cream to make Chantilly cream if you wish. Fill a piping bag with the whipped cream.

Place a generous tbsp (30g) of strawberry jam inside each pastry cone, then pipe in the cream.

Top each Cream Horn with a chocolate dipped strawberry. Serve to anyone you wish to impress.

Join me next month for a trip back in time as I bake a truly Royal dessert — the Queen of Puddings.

Until then ...

Share joy, share love, share cake!

Please help Wonkette keep providing you with all the news, dick jokes and cakes you could ever desire.

Donate button!

In 1977 I was 14 and hating myself for thinking that I liked girls more than boys; meanwhile Harvey Milk was being elected as California’s first public office holder to be openly gay. It was really not that long ago that the queer community lived under constant threat, when being gay was illegal, when young people saw no future in being themselves. Everything old is new again. Is it nuclear family or strong families month? Because Gay Pride includes both of those. I like Esquire’s take: States Have Replaced Pride Month with an Insanely Weird Conservative Holiday.

ziggy's stack

After the Hate, Replies to My Note 'Today I was called a faggot.'

I wrote this Note on March 28th after a traumatizing experience while on a NYC MTA bus. It generated nearly 400 replies that were emotional and at times surprising from Substack readers. I was overwhelmed by the support of strangers and friends from all types of backgrounds. There was a small amount of ugliness, even here on Substack bigots still spew their hate…

Read more

2 years ago · 175 likes · 64 comments · ziggywiggy

And this is where I broke down in tears while writing.

I am a 63-year-old non-binary lesbian. I have witnessed significant change happen in the lives of gay people since I first accepted that I was gay at the age of 18 in Indiana. I lived through the oppression and hate, to the shift of acceptance and love, then back again to hate. It went from slashed car tires and beer cans tossed at my head in the ‘80s and ‘90s to high fives in the street when gay marriage was legalized during the Obama years to clenched fists and threats of violence during the Trump reign. I hoped for an easier life for the young queers that followed after me. Old dykes can be relied upon for that kind of thing. It is something that Harvey would have understood.

This Gay Pride month feels incredibly important right now. We have come so far yet many of us olds have seen the pattern repeat. This community has always been an easy target when Republicans have wanted to prove how much they believe in family and the Bible. But it is also a chance for us to remember those who put their lives on the line to say,

Milk is the story of a complicated and imperfect man who did much to inspire the LGBTQ+ community and worked to change the laws that treated us as second class citizens. Harvey Milk showed tremendous courage in stepping up, when death threats might have stopped others.

Harvey moved us forward yet here we are in 2026 fighting to keep what Harvey fought for. We will not let his courage be for naught. He believed fighting for the gay community also meant fighting for all marginalized communities.

It meant offering hope.

On November 27, 1978, Dianne Feinstein, made this announcement to the press:

That is how Harvey Milk’s life ended at the age of 48. But I prefer to celebrate his courage.

Now some say that Harvey was not murdered because he was gay, it was politics!

Really? Mayor Moscone was murdered for political reasons. Harvey was too, but we know what Harvey’s politics were. It is of course not so simple, if Harvey were not fighting for the right to just exist, it could have been “just politics.”

He also spoke about a simple thing, hope.

This movie is a celebration of his life and his courage in fighting for the gay community. That is how we should remember him and honor his work.

I always fight for hope, I can see no other way to win in this battle that we all know we are in, fighting for more than LGBTQ+’s right to exist, more than all the things that are not straight, white, Christian and male. We are fighting for all of us.

From the “Hope” speech that sticks with me as I was a young gay person in Fountaintown, Indiana :

The trial of Dan White also gave us what was known as the Twinkie Defense.

On June 26, 2025, the USNS Harvey Milk was renamed the USNS Oscar V. Peterson by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.

Milk stars Sean Penn, James Franco, Josh Brolin, Emile Hirsch, Diego Luna, Alison Pill, Victor Garber, and Cleve Jones. Directed by Gus Van Sant.

Milk is available with subscription on Prime; free with ads on Dailymotion; $3.99 in the usual places.

To make requests and see the movie lists and schedules go to WonkMovie.

The animated short is Cariño by Carlos Taborda, Roshel Amuruz, and Ashley Williams.

Next week’s Movie Night selection is Bound, available for free with ads on Pluto TV. $3.99 in the usual places.

Subscribe now

Prefer a non-Substack subscription? The button below will take any amount of your choosing at PayPal — let me know if you want the newsletter subscription too! PayPal won’t automatically sign you up for the newsletter! — or we have a Patreon too.

Give via PayPal

We’ll give some credit to this Washingtonian magazine profile of David Brooks and his plans for life after ending his New York Times column back in January. Author Drew Lindsay acknowledges at the outset that many, many readers just plain find Brooks exasperating, irritating, and “ideologically squishy.” It’s one thing to say that the person you’re writing about is controversial or even widely disliked. But it’s even rarer to concede that the subject of your profile is widely considered an insufferable weenie.

In fact, we were actually a little surprised to see the Bluesky post promoting the profile, because we hadn’t even noticed when Brooks stopped writing his columns and got hired on by the Atlantic. That, or we did hear it, but it was of such little consequence that we’d forgotten. If David Brooks stops telling the world to reorganize itself to suit David Brooks, would it make a sound?

Best take on this post so far comes from Wonkette founder Ana Marie Cox, who quote-posted it with the comment, “The only thing David Brooks has ever grinded on is his intern.”

Prefer a non-Substack subscription? The button below will take any amount of your choosing at Paypal — let us know if you want the newsletter subscription too! they’re separate! — or we have a Patreon too.

Feed The Kitty

The profile certainly acknowledges that many people find Brooks almost endlessly annoying — with choice quotes from critics, too. Chicago Times book reviewer John Warner observed, shortly after Brooks’s final column, “I am in my 22nd year of publicly pronouncing that David Brooks sucks.” That’s from a fun piece in which Warner shared a couple of his own favorite headlines from stories mocking Brooks, like “Trying to Figure Out David Brooks’ Deal” (2023) and “David Brooks Also Eats Cereal.”

Warner also added a key point that helped me understand my own reactions to David Brooks sucking, which is qualitatively different from how I feel about the suckiness of, say, George Will or Bari Weiss: “I do not think I hate author and New York Times columnist David Brooks, and yet, there is no writer or public figure towards whom I have been so critical for so long.”

Yeah, it’s not hate; it’s just deep, abiding irritation.

In any case, Brooks is moving on from his twice-weekly columns to writing bothsides crap for the Atlantic, for which he’ll also be doing a weekly video podcast co-produced by Yale, where Brooks also landed a five-year fellowship. He will use his new sinecures to yell at educated cultural elites for dividing America, which will be very different from his political columnist days in that he won’t necessarily be tying those mushy jeremiads to the news of the day.

His new mission, Brooks says, is to move beyond politics and to work on bigger-picture stuff: “What the novelist deals with, what a historian deals with, what a moral philosopher deals with—that just strikes me as more important.”

As Lindsay describes it, Brooks hopes to move America to rebuild a “shared moral order” that he thinks we once had, by restoring “kindness, humility, and generosity, virtues he believes lie buried under 60 years of moral relativism.”

“What the hell happened to us?” he asked on a recent Times podcast. “Why did 77 million people last election take a look at Donald Trump and didn’t see anything morally disqualifying? I do not think that would’ve happened in America 50 years ago. I think there was a moral ruination, a loss of moral knowledge that preceded Donald Trump’s arrival on the scene.”

It’s always the moral relativism with this guy, the endless struggle to recapture the common decency Americans used to have in some imagined past. Was it back when we still had lynchings, perhaps? Or merely redlining, proxy wars, and Watergates?

David Brooks calling for a return from moral collapse feels like another invitation to remember how in 2013 he left his wife Sarah after 27 years because he fell in love with his much-younger research assistant, Anne Snyder. That was while she helped him with his 2015 book The Road to Character. Really.

But please, Lindsay notes, Brooks says his relationship with Snyder

remained purely professional during the period when he was still married. When he later made his feelings clear, Snyder rebuffed him, left DC, and cut off communication.

Still, Brooks pursued her, planting messages for her in his Times columns. Eventually, his efforts paid off. They married in 2017.

How romantic! He embedded little coded love notes in his columns, which he wrote with his penis! And now he’s still so much in love! Hosting a recent dinner party, Brooks asked everyone in the room to “Describe 30 seconds of your life when you were deliriously happy,” which is a darn good conversation starter, like something from my favorite NPR podcast, Wild Card. He initially joked that for him, it was the Mets winning the World Series in 1986, but then he recounted how he fell in love with Snyder. Awww. Ewww.

Lindsay notes, a bit squeamishly, that the “unconventional details of Brooks’s personal life have served as fodder for his critics anytime he has addressed questions of morality.” After offering a few examples of such criticism from folks who find Brooks especially smarmy and hypocritical for some reason, Lindsay concedes again that “Brooks has always inspired such animus. The man can get under the skin.”

But I think he overstates things a bit in saying that critics don’t merely disagree with Brooks, but instead are “outraged.” As I said above, my own reaction isn’t hate, outrage, or even disgust. It’s related, but more a kind of aggravated exasperation, a sense that David Brooks will always be so invariably clueless that if he were your passenger on a road trip, you might need to hit the brakes really hard just to make him shut the hell up.

We’ll close with one more smile and nod to Lindsay for describing Brooks as “cartoonishly out to lunch” after mentioning the notoriously goofy 2017 column in which Brooks suggested that cultural elitism was to blame for excessively complex Italian sandwich meats that alienate the working class and polarize the nation. Nice touch, although we could also mention Brooks’s more recent sputtering over the insanely high price of a meal at Newark Airport — but neglecting to mention that a good chunk of the cost came from his bar tab.

It really does little good to be annoyed at David Brooks, though. He seems incapable of understanding why people find him so grating. Besides, I got one good thing out of this profile. I think I might try that “30 seconds of delirious happiness” conversation starter with the woman I just started seeing! Hi, M!

[Washingtonian / The Biblioracle Recommends]

Yr Wonkette is funded entirely by reader donations. If you can, please become a paid subscriber, or if you’d like to make a one-time (or recurring) donation, you can click this here button. You can click it from the left or from the right, in fact.

Money Us.

Sometimes in life we just really want things to be true. Like, I realize that Henry I probably did not actually die from a surfeit of lampreys, but I want it to be true because, come on! “Surfeit of lampreys”? That’s incredible. Also, incredibly, not the name of any band I can find anywhere. (I call dibs.)

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has things that he would like to be true as well — one thing in particular, and I bet you can guess what it is! He desperately wants it to be true that vaccines cause autism, which I’m pretty sure is even less likely than the surfeit of lampreys thing. It’s hard to blame him, when you think about it. He’s invested. There’s a world where he never started on this shit to begin with and is considered a relatively well-respected environmental lawyer married to the lady from Curb, and no one knows a thing about his terrible semen poetry, his brainworm, his tendency to work out in jeans, or his roadkill jones. But he did start on this shit and therefore is stuck having to continually search for proof that he is right, regardless of how many times he is proven wrong.

And, as such, he would like to look at your personal, private, medical records, please!

Yes. KFF Health News reports that he is specifically requesting “data from little-known state systems that allow hospitals and clinics to exchange detailed, identifiable patient information” for the purpose of finding a link between autism and vaccines. These systems, known as health information exchanges, make it so that if you go see another doctor, that doctor can get access to your prescriptions, allergies, lab results, etc. in order to avoid prescribing you something that might harm you or requiring you to get labs when you’ve already gotten them recently.

Via KFF Health News:

“We need a good health record system, and one of the things that really surprised me most when I came into office is that there is — that the systems are broken,” Kennedy said in a May interview. “We’ve had to go to the states and, luckily, we’ve got a lot of cooperation from the states, but we now have databases together that we can actually do the studies on. Those studies are in motion.”

Really? He was surprised by the fact that he didn’t have access to the private medical information of US citizens? Really?

HHS officials have reportedly met with the people who run these information exchanges for various states, explaining to them that they need this access, though they could not tell them how, exactly, they wanted to use it to “prove” that vaccines cause autism. Since most people have been vaccinated, it would not be unusual for most people with autism to also have been vaccinated. Though, curiously, one study determined that children with autism are actually less likely (84 percent) to have gotten their MMR vaccine than those without (96 percent).

The information he’s seeking would not only provide the HHS with information related to autism and vaccines, but to prescriptions they’ve taken, other things they’ve been diagnosed with, etc. etc. They could know whether or not you’ve taken birth control, psychological medications, or whether or not you have a drug problem or a chronic illness.

Last June, Behm and leaders of other state exchanges met with Kennedy’s top advisers to discuss sharing more medical data with federal agencies. The state organizations followed up with a pitch in October for a new surveillance system that would give the federal health department “real-time, 24-hour data feeds on opioid and chronic disease trends” within a year, according to a presentation reviewed by KFF Health News. Under the proposal, HHS would get data from 90% of the population’s medical records by 2028.

This sure seems like the kind of thing that paranoid right-wing conspiracy theorists would really be up in arms about. Or at least the “libertarians.” Surely, if it were a Democratic administration asking for this kind of access to people’s medical records, they’d be worried they’d use it to track anti-vaxxers in some capacity, or to do some kind of mind control/Manchurian Candidate thing, since they’re always on about that shit. But I guess since it’s the Trump administration, everything is cool.

So far, the only state that we know for a fact is going along with the request is Nebraska. After agreeing to share their residents’ personal medical information with Kennedy, the state then got the largest federal grant to their health department right afterwards — $18 million, almost twice what California and Texas received. CyncHealth, the agency that runs the state’s health information exchange, also got millions of dollars.

One former CDC official told KFF Health that, yes, this money was given to Cynchealth for agreeing to participate in Kennedy’s scheme.

Another former CDC official said that he told Kennedy there was a way to get access to the kind of information he wanted but with patients’ records de-identified — but Kennedy was not interested.

Want to donate to us but not to Substack? Click here or join our Patreon!

Non-Substack donations!

There is a lot of bad that could come from this. Nationalizing this kind of data could feasibly lead to prosecutions of those who have been prescribed abortion medication in other states. If it’s done in “real time,” as they are hoping, women could be stopped and arrested on their way home from their appointments and prevented from taking the pills. They could even just know who has had an abortion, they could know who is on birth control and all kinds of other data on our reproductive health. Not to mention, Republicans have also recently decided that SSRIs and other psych meds are bad; there’s no telling how they might use that kind of information should they have access to it.

It is also, may I just say, motherfucking absurd to spend actual millions of dollars on something that is never, never, never going to “prove” that vaccines cause autism. That this is any kind of priority at all, given how many studies have already proven that they do not and how extremely flawed the studies that said they do were, is actually sick. Take that money and spend it on helping families with autistic children, spend it on kids who are sick, or hungry, or unhoused, spend it on anything other than fighting Don Quixote’s windmill.

I will tell you though — if I thought that there were any study on earth that could convince Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that vaccines do not cause autism, I’d be all for it (provided it didn’t violate anyone’s civil liberties). But there is no such study. There can never be any such study. There have already been over 1200 global studies, meta-analyses, etc. on the subject and they have all come to the conclusion that there is no link, but he will not believe them until they give him the results he wants. And he’s willing to violate our privacy and spend millions of our tax dollars in order to get them.

PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!

It’s been quite a week for firings! CBS News fired Scott Pelley for not quietly standing by as Bari Weiss wrecked 60 Minutes, and now the Archbishop of Washington DC has relieved an exorcist of his duties just because of a little heresy about UFOs and demons. Dangerous days to speak up for what you believe in, be it journalistic integrity or demons from Hell masquerading as flying saucers!

As the Washington Post reports (gift link), Monsignor Stephen Rossetti is a longtime “priest and psychologist who has held prominent positions in the Archdiocese of Washington for decades. From 1993 to 2009, he treated clergy with mental health issues — including priests accused of sexually abusing adults and children — as head of the St. Luke Institute in Silver Spring, Maryland.”

More recently, Rossetti has headed the St. Michael Center for Spiritual Renewal, an outfit aimed at feeding the Catholic-flavored adherents of the “charismatic” movement, which is all hopped up on the Holy Spirit and the idea that humans are helping out on God’s side in a spiritual war between good and evil. That’s also very popular with Protestants, with the whole “prayer warrior” thing in which prayers are useful in stopping actual demonic attacks.

Rossetti’s most recent advice on battling demons got him in hot holy water, and that’s why he had to turn in his exorcist badge and exorcism gun Wednesday. In a May 29 video posted to his Facebook page, Rosetti shared his professional opinion as an exorcist and expert on demonic doings, and opined that UFO sightings are actually people seeing demons crossing into our realm, to do evil stuff! Those tricksy demons, he said, are posing as space aliens to mess with us.

Rosetti later removed the Facebook video, but it has been preserved and appended as an introduction to this oddball YouTube video from something calling itself the “Faith, Hope and Love Ministry.” Enjoy, if that’s the word; Rossetti’s 6-minute vid begins at the 2:55 mark. The hour or so that follows appears to be wholly unrelated, and we have no idea whether Rossetti agreed to his video being reposted here. (The WaPo story inaccurately suggests he appeared as a guest on the show, but nah, the video producers clearly just plucked it off Facebook and added it in; Rossetti doesn’t interact with the video’s host. Sloppy reporting, WaPo!)

There’s no need to watch the full 90-minute video (or even the Rosetti bit, since we summarize the good parts below), but we’ll note that the host says it includes a prayer that’s certain to release a thousand souls from Purgatory each time someone recites it, so those souls can “go up to heaven and join the Holy Army to fight Satan.”

So after you die without a final absolution, you spend eons in Purgatory being cleansed of your earthly sins, and you think once you’re released, you’ll be rewarded with an eternity in Paradise. But the moment you get there, you’re drafted as a grunt into God’s Army, handed a flaming sword, and sent off to fight Satan instead? Talk about a bait and switch!

At least in John Scalzi’s science fiction classic Old Man’s War (Wonkette-gets-a-cut link) you got a choice, and a new young body and some orgies first.

Prefer a non-Substack subscription? The button below will take any amount of your choosing at Paypal — let us know if you want the newsletter subscription too! they’re separate! — or we have a Patreon too.

Feed The Kitty

Rossetti started out on firm enough ground, noting that Catholic doctrine doesn’t preclude the idea that there’s life on other planets, although he personally doesn’t think there is. Then he gets into the demony stuff:

There’s a danger here, and I want to raise that, as an exorcist I wanted to raise that danger. And that is that demons like to hide. They don’t want us to know they’re around, they don’t want us to know what they’re doing because they’re more effective when we don’t realize it. And they can kind of get into your head, you know, and manipulate things in the world, and influence us to do evil.

Demons are everywhere, and we’re at spiritual battle with the Evil One, Rossetti explained, citing Scripture. “Demons indeed can break into the physical world at times, and they can be seen. We actually have some photos of such things,” he explained, saying that there’s documentation of people seeing “shadow men,” and cases of people possessed by demons seeing “dark shadows, possessed houses, globes of light, all sorts of things — and more direct manifestations of evil hands, we’ve seen that — and actually images of beastlike creatures.”

Well of course there are pictures and eyewitness hallucinations testimonies to prove all that. Rossetti also offered an example of a woman who had “a particular gift” (which was “documented” somehow), who was shown a picture of a “UFO,” and said “It’s a demon.” We can only wonder what she’d have said about photos of punk rock bands, undersea creatures, or My Little Pony collectibles.

Anyway, Rossetti concluded, carefully noting that it was only his best logical conclusion, not Church doctrine, “There’s no question in my mind personally […] it’s my personal belief that probably many, if not most of these ‘UFO’ sightings are in fact demons.” He noted that a demonic origin would explain how “UFOs” can do all sorts of things that are beyond human technology, like sudden acceleration to incredible speeds and instant changes in direction. All of it is in the service of deceiving humans into sinning and evildoing.

Rossetti then rambled off into discussing other demonic deceptions, like how mediums and “automatic writing” allow demons to warp our minds, and how if you see a “friendly ghost” in your house you should instead pray for that soul, not accept it as a benevolent visitor from beyond.

In a statement, the Archbishop of Washington Cardinal Robert McElroy said Wednesday that Rosetti was no longer an exorcist, and that the archdiocese had cut its ties with his St. Michael Center. McElroy said that Rossetti’s remarks “linking UFOs to demonic presence and the Center’s recent use of social media gravely undermine the Church’s very precise teaching on the devil, demons and exorcism.”

This makes a ton of sense to us. It’s obvious that the Devil is real (his picture is even on canned meat products), and that demons are all over the place, even in some of our favorite anime series. It therefore is perfectly logical that demons must from time to time be expelled from people, usually by a young priest and an older priest working together while dodging bucketloads of pea soup. But come on, that stuff about UFOs is pretty far out, man.

It’s not clear whether Rossetti’s removal as an exorcist will do anything at all to tamp down the popularity of the Demon-UFO hypothesis as a fringe obsession among some members of the Excitable Christian Right. They see demons under every bed and in nearly everything on TV, after all, and even great thinkers like JD Vance — in case you’ve forgotten, he’s a heartbeat away from the presidency — have opined that whatever those blobs on radar screens may be, they aren’t from other planets, but from Hell, as Vance explained on conspiracy nut Benny Johnson’s podcast back in March:

“I don’t think they’re aliens, I think they’re demons anyway, but that’s a longer discussion,” he said. […]

“Well, look, I think that celestial beings who fly around, who do weird things to people. I think that the desire to describe everything celestial, everything is otherworldly, to describe it as aliens,” Vance said.

It’s just more natural to Vance that it’s Satan, because as a Christian, he knows that anything weird is evil, and “one of the devil’s great tricks is to convince people he never existed.”

As of blogtime, there’s been no word yet on whether Monsignor Rossetti will be appointed to a position in the Trump administration, possibly in the Defense Department’s Spiritual Warfare Division.

[WaPo (gift link) / Syracuse Online / Guardian / NYT / Sign of the Cross Media / Guardian]

Yr Wonkette is funded entirely by reader donations. If you can, please become a paid subscriber, or if you’d like to make a one-time (or recurring) donation, you can click this here button.

Keep Watching The Skies!

Happy Weekend!

Today is National Yo-Yo Day! Isn’t that exciting? About as exciting as someone making you watch their yo-yo tricks?

Well, almost.

It is also the day after my birthday and thus also the day after the anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s death. And it was the actual birthday of VC Andrews, author of the very normal children’s novel, Flowers in the Attic, along with a bunch of other books, both by her and written in her name.

As such, I bring you the 1987 movie version of Flowers in the Attic, starring Kristy Swanson, who I am sure you are aware is the worst now.

Swanson played the original Buffy (in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie), which reminds me that it was revealed yesterday that Anthony Stewart Head, who played Rupert Giles in the series, had passed on June 1.

As such, your next present is a video compilation of these very truly batshit Maxwell House Gold Blend instant coffee commercials he was in.

Is it the accent or was he just absurdly charming? Probably a little bit of both. He was also very good at singing!

We all know that Joss Whedon is trash, but I refuse to let him take Buffy from me. Your mileage may vary! So if you don’t want to watch those clips, allow me to bring you, instead, this yo-yo commercial featuring THE COOLEST GUY IN THE WORLD

Yo yo!

You are welcome!

Have you been struck with a sudden urge to shower us with money and jewels? If so, we are on Substack now so you can just go ahead and click subscribe! Click click click!!

Subscribe now

 Or if you’d just like to donate just once …

Donate Once!

You can also join our Patreon, or buy our merch.

You can even send us paper checks to:

Wonkette
PO Box 38273
Detroit MI 48238

Talk amongst yourselves!

Prefer a non-Substack subscription? The button below will take any amount of your choosing at Paypal — let us know if you want the newsletter subscription too! they’re separate! — or we have a Patreon too.

Feed The Kitty

The day started out, as must needs be, with Tabs, and a .gif of a cute octopus.

Donald Trump’s on-camera naps keep getting longer and more obvious, but everyone around him insists he’s just glancing down or resting his eyes a moment. Remember, Joe Biden was the sleepy one.

Jared and Ivanka bought an island off Albania, and they’re going to develop a luxury resort there, which is somehow a spiritual experience too. No, we don’t understand it, either.

In yet another completely predictable public health crisis in a modern nation whose elected leaders stopped believing in science, raw milk has made a whole bunch of people sick in Idaho. It’s probably Joe Biden’s fault!

Remember the olden times when a respectable Republican candidate would go to great lengths to distance him/herself from a raving white supremacist fantasizing about killing homeless people? Yeah, neither do we, really.

Speaking of raving Nazis, former head Border Patrol goon Greg Bovino is preparing to run for president in 2028, and he might only be like the third worst person considering a bid for the GOP nomination.

We ended our Friday with a cocktail, and not a moment too soon!

What a crazy week! (We may as well add that to our post template for every Friday one-a-day.) Hope you get a nice chance to recharge your batteries this weekend! We’ll be here all weekend for news, and your Wonkette One-A-Day will be back Monday, too!

Greetings, Wonketeers! I’m Hooper, your bartender. A few weeks ago, I had a somewhat confused customer ask for reassurance about her drink. She wanted to make sure there was no cucumber in her pina colada. Rest assured, we do not put any cucumber in our pina coladas. There is no cucumber in our espresso martinis, either. And I will jump out of a window before I put cucumber in eggnog. However, we do put cucumber in a very nice gimlet, and this is the perfect weather for a cooling, refreshing drink. Let’s make a Cucumber Gimlet. Here’s the recipe:

Cucumber Gimlet

2 oz Hendrick’s Gin

1 oz St-Germain Liqueur

1 oz lime juice

Sprinkle of sea salt

2 slices English cucumber

Add all ingredients to a cocktail shaker. Gently muddle the cucumber slices. Shake and double-strain into a Nick and Nora glass. Garnish with a cucumber slice.

“Smell is important to me because it transports me back to a certain place or time. When I smell lavender, I always think of my nana. Smell triggers all sorts of memories and ideas.”

— Lesley Gracie

I have mentioned her in passing before, but I want to take a moment to genuflect at the feet of Ms. Lesley Gracie, the master distiller and driving force behind Hendrick’s Gin. A Yorkshire scientist who was tasked in the 1990s with creating a new gin for the distillery, Ms. Gracie reshaped gin as a category with Hendrick’s. She proved, definitively, that gin did not need to taste like floor cleaner. A whisper of juniper was all that was needed to provide a bright, clean palette for a masterpiece of flavor. The industry hasn’t looked back since.

Ms. Gracie hasn’t looked back either. Her Orbium gin, influenced by the herbal profile of absinthe, was another stunning entry into the gin category. Her Midsummer Solstice gin was created specifically for the brand ambassador’s wedding; she incorporated his fiancée’s favorite flowers into the recipe. While staying with a native tribe in Venezuela to learn about local botanicals, she set up a still to capture the taste of scorpion-tail plants. She continues to toil away at her greenhouses in a remote corner of Scotland, producing magical liquors like Another Hendrick’s, an astonishing orange blossom and cocoa nib creation. The people she works with are convinced she is a witch. They are correct. This woman’s alchemy is utter magic.

There is a special version of Hendrick’s, Sunspell, that is only available at duty-free stores. Ms. Gracie, much like Anthony Bourdain, believes that travel is necessary for becoming a well-rounded person. While I agree in principle, international travel and a life measured in tipped hourly wages don’t mix. If any of you discover this bottle, please contact me. I’d do a great deal to acquire a taste.

To summarize: Ms. Lesley Gracie — I’m a fan.

Adding cucumber to Hendrick’s is a complete no-brainer; reinforcing Ms. Gracie’s work makes sense. St-Germain’s pedigree is significantly less inspiring than Hendrick’s, but the “bartender’s ketchup” fits into this flavor profile beautifully. Cucumber, rose, and elderflower … it sounds like a poem. The lime juice provides the acid needed to balance the cocktail. This is, fundamentally, a daiquiri — one of the core recipes and an absolutely fundamental cocktail worth mastering. There’s no room to hide with a simple drink like this. Ms. Gracie’s masterpiece has all the room it needs to shine. Enjoy it.

Let’s talk ingredients:

Hendrick’s Gin: No, you may not use vodka here. I don’t care if gin made you sick in high school. If I haven’t managed to convince you that Hendrick’s is something special by now, skip this recipe and go get a White Claw.

St-Germain Liqueur: I don’t actually love this spirit, but it does pair up with Hendrick’s extremely well. I might be tempted to try using honey syrup (50/50 honey and water, heated until dissolved) as an alternative. Note that St-Germain and honey syrup are sweet, but less sweet than simple syrup. You’ll want to use more sugar and less acid than your ideal daiquiri.

Lime juice: If you dare use bottled juice in a cocktail this delicate, we will have words.

Cucumber: Use an English cucumber for this drink. Salad cucumbers have too many seeds, and their pulpy core makes for a lousy garnish. Use a light hand when muddling the cocktail. You aren’t making pulp. You only need to break up the slices a little.

Sea Salt: A little salinity to make the sweet less of a shout and more like a conversation in the glass.

My home bar is Hemingway’s Underground, the hottest cocktail bar in pretty little Medina, Ohio. I’m behind the stick Wednesday-Saturday, 4-10. Last call’s at midnight. Swing on by, and I’ll make a drink for you… or anything else from our little Happy Hour here at Wonkette. We’ll make it through this together.

OPEN THREAD!

Tips for Wonkette!

Pint-sized douche canoe Greg Bovino had a busy week. He spent last weekend hanging out with actual neo-Nazis and white supremacists at an anti-immigration conference in Portugal, where he rubbed elbows with luminaries of the world’s most racist movements. Then he told the Daily Beast he is “gearing up” to run for president in two years, presumably on the bet that the Republican Party will be so far gone by then that JD Vance and Marco Rubio will be seen by primary voters as unacceptable leftist squishes.

Relatedly, we are coming up on the anniversary of Donald Trump’s ride down the golden escalator. Eleven years later, we’re looking at a 2028 GOP primary that will make 2016 look like an episode of Schoolhouse Rock!

Bovino’s hints at a 2028 run for president motivated some of his far-right fans to build a “Bovino for 2028” website to kickstart Pipsqueak Himmler’s campaign. Here is a pop quiz for all of you: Which of the following galaxy-brain statements from the website’s section titled “Why We Need a Bovino Presidency” did we make up? (All punctuation errors theirs):

1. Immediate formation of the department of youth masculinity in order to save the young men of America from the impotent spell of a purely digital, basement based existence & into warriors the warriors for freedom & protectors of national sovereignty our nation cries out for.

2. The creation of a non-governmental, citizen led and funded, society for american intellectualism and cultural expansion, promoting free access to online and in-person socratic discussions, debate competitions, open debate on the vast and wide ranging negative physical, spiritual, an and emotional impacts of ai and digital existence, ted-x style symposiums promoting american, western, and Western aligned ideals.

3. Nationwide Educational Campaign via curated influencers aimed at restoring the fervent defense of the sanctity of life and gender identity, rooted in a true scientific basis to compete with the institutionalized progressive attacks on pregnant women and the young people of america under attacking by gender bending vultures on all ends.

Surprise! The correct answer is “None of them, Katie!” All these bullet points can be found verbatim on Bovino2028.com, along with all sorts of other weird-ass shit. There is a call to create a “Department of Families & Holistic Living,” and a section that we puzzled over in the chat cave before deciding it threatens anyone eligible to vote who chooses not to with either paying a fine or working it off at “a fixed rate of human capital that contributes to the betterment of american [sic] society.”

We already have millions of people who work for the betterment of American society. Sometimes they are public service employees at AmeriCorps or Teach for America, or any number of such government programs and NGOs dedicated to helping others. But they were mostly founded by liberals, so they probably turn you gay.

Basically, Bovino’s early 2028 platform is a grab bag of culture war stuff even further out there than the current administration, combined with vaguely Nazish imagery involving Bovino wearing his greatcoat from the Hugo Boss “Für den Ruhm des Führers” Collection:

Finally, a candidate who will fight for America’s most put-upon minority: Men.

The website is the brainchild of a couple of wingnut operatives with, let’s say, colorful resumes. One, George Riley, was somehow the executive director of the Florida Republican Party from 2016 to 2019. He was reappointed to the job in March of 2024. A month later, his family in Tampa reported him missing. The cops found him at the B Resort and Spa three days later, in good health. Also, drunk.

And that was his second hotel stay of the week:

Earlier in the week, Riley had been evicted from the Kissimmee Hampton Inn after a four-day stay for “excessive drinking” and damage to the room. Riley didn’t object when told he would be charged extra because the room needed a deep cleaning.

The room needed the deep cleaning because he had reportedly pissed and puked all over it. Just the sort of fan you want promoting your campaign for president! Assuming that’s president of Sigma Chi, we mean.

His partner in this endeavor is one Jacob Engels. And wouldn’t you know it, when we put his name into the Wonkette Wayback Machine, we found we had written about him before, in 2019, when he was — drumroll, please — a member of the Proud Boys who was helping to run Roger Stone’s social media accounts. Apparently either Engels or one of Stone’s other flunkies had posted an image to their master’s Instagram account showing Judge Amy Berman Jackson with a rifle crosshair on her face.

That was bad enough. What was worse was that Jackson was the presiding judge in Stone’s ongoing trial for obstruction of justice in the Russia investigation and related charges. Stone then had to spend an entire hearing apologizing to Jackson while arguing the symbol was a “Celtic cross.” The subtext here was: No harm, no foul, pull that stick out of your ass, Your Honor.

Stone was found guilty and subsequently pardoned by Donald Trump, of course.

Here is how Our Liz described Engels then:

The Daily Beast did a profile of Jacob Engels earlier this month, describing the 27-year-old as “Roger Stone’s Mini-Me.” (No word on whether he’s also a swinger who posts personal ads describing his wife’s genitalia to prospective partners.) He did, however, have lots to say about the Florida ballot recount. Flanked by Tyler White, founder of the Florida Proud Boys, Engels led protests outside the Broward County elections office during the 2018 vote tabulation, shouting for former elections supervisor Brenda Snipes to, “Come out, you old hag.” He seems nice.

Oh, and Engels was just arrested in Wisconsin two weeks ago for meth possession. We fully expect Bovino to name him as his campaign manager.

The third partner here is a woman named Yovana Alvarez, a Mexican immigrant who calls herself the Bovino Queen. She said of Bovino that “his level of ethics is unique, something I have never seen before.” As the Daily Beast points out, she said this about a guy who had to confess to lying to a judge after he and DHS couldn’t prove his allegation that a protester in Minneapolis hit him in the head with a rock before he threw a tear gas canister into a crowd in retaliation.

Perhaps she thinks ethics is a synonym for evil or brain damage or haircut that makes him look like a lesbian softball coach. Hard to say.

Good luck, America. As the Bovino for 2028 website tells us, only one candidate has the “metal and character” to rise to the challenge of deporting the 100 million Americans who, in Bovino’s wretched mind, are here illegally. On that, we probably agree with his supporters.

Share

[Daily Beast / Bovino for President]

Like a freaky billionaire techbro, Wonkette also would like to live forever! Help us do that here, or on our Patreon.

Care to donate?

Spencer Pratt, the former Hills villain who is running for mayor of Los Angeles and may or may not be (Nithya Raman is gaining on him! Fingers crossed! Votes are still being counted!) facing Mayor Karen Bass in the November election, has been attracting both surprising and entirely unsurprising endorsements from celebs across the C-Z list spectrum.

Like how just the other day, Bill Maher was absolutely swooning over him, and that, I have to say, truly feels like the correct trajectory for Bill Maher. It feels appropriate to me that where he would ultimately land is telling the reality star formerly known as Fleshbeard “You’re a guy who knows his priorities, you know, in a general sense. I don’t think you’re wrong.”

It also feels appropriate that Pratt has won the shriveled, rotting heart of Gen Z white nationalist Nick Fuentes, who is looking forward to what he believes will be Pratt’s fascist reign over the City of Angels.

“There’s the Spencer Pratt election in Los Angeles, very exciting,” he said on a recent broadcast. “I really hope that Spencer Pratt makes the runoff and then becomes the mayor of LA. I love Los Angeles. See, this is the problem. I love these cities. I love LA. I love New York. I love Chicago. But what we really need is a fascist dictator to take over every one of these cities and murder all the criminals.”

You know, as gross as I find Spencer Pratt, I just don’t see him getting it together to be a fascist dictator. He has had, as far as I know, two jobs total: reality star and crystal salesman, and I would have to imagine that being a fascist dictator would require at least some degree of competency.

Also no! No one who is not an actual psychopath thinks that that is what “we” really need.

“Because these are the greatest cities in the world. They’re so rich, they have the best food, the best amenities, beautiful waterfront,” he said. “Think about how nice it could be. The problem is all these cities stink like weed and there’s too many homeless people and there’s too much graffiti and too much crime.”

Well, anything we can do to keep Nick Fuentes out of our cities. Especially since he has expressed a desire to use human beings for fuel.

“So we got to fix it up,” he said. “We got to make it better, you guys. Miami, New York, Chicago, LA, it can be so good, but we just need to put a lot of Black people in prison forever. We just have to find a final solution to the homeless problem. I don’t know, you know, we need to, we need more fuel, like that’s an idea.”

A final solution. I’m trying to find words, I’m really trying to find words on account of how having words is pretty much my whole job, but there are no words. Especially since he thinks he’s being cute.

“I don’t care who does it, Democrat, Republican, please just kill these people, please,” he whined. “Can you just please kill these people, like seriously? Because you go to Los Angeles and unless you’re in the West Side of the city, it’s just total anarchy. You go to downtown, you go to the Garment District and it’s like Zombieland. Please just kill these people, please.”

Yeah, I’m pretty certain that Fuentes himself is a whole lot more of a danger to society than any unhoused people he would be inconvenienced by seeing were he to set foot inside a city. After all, they are significantly more likely to be the victims of crimes than they are to perpetrate them, and he’s the one who’s out here calling for actual murder.

Bold thing for someone who has already inspired several mass murderers to do.

So, just to be clear: Nick Fuentes, a rabid white supremacist who really wants to see people get murdered, looks at Spencer Pratt and thinks “Yep! That’s the guy for me! That’s the guy who is going to give me the fascist dictatorship and mass murder of my dreams.”

What an endorsement!

Want to donate to us but not to Substack? Click here or join our Patreon!

Non-Substack donations!

But here’s the thing. Some might say “Oh gee, it’s unfair to hold all of that against Spencer Pratt! It’s not like he knows the guy!” but there’s a reason why someone with such an abjectly cruel position on unhoused people (and everything else) would find him appealing. After all, Pratt spends a lot of time specifically dehumanizing unhoused people because he wants people to stop having empathy for them and instead see them as scary, dangerous criminals who are out to get them — the kind of rhetoric that ultimately inures people to rhetoric like Fuentes’s. Pratt has repeatedly claimed that they are all on “super meth,” which is not even a real thing. He claims that most of these people actually have homes but choose to live on the street, for funsies. You know, the usual things people who don’t want to have to feel bad for unhoused people say. I’m sure he’s got a great story about a time when he bought an unhoused person a sandwich and they totally rejected it, because they really just wanted money for their super meth (not because, you know, taking food from strangers is perhaps not a safe thing to do).

In a recent interview, he also accused them of just wanting to abuse animals:

“Well, they're not homeless. They're drug addicts. Most of these people are addicted to fentanyl and meth. This isn't Spencer making that up. There is places for all of these people to sleep in LA. No matter what anybody tells you, we have housing and shelter for everyone that's living on the street. They are choosing to be on the streets because they want to do drugs. They don't want rules. They don't want to listen. They want to have animals to abuse.”

They absolutely do not. Indeed, one reason why some may choose not to go to shelters is because they don’t want to abandon their pets.

Also, that is, in fact, “Spencer making that up” — only about 37 percent regularly use illicit drugs and alcohol, 50 percent haven’t used any illicit substances in at least six months, and 25 percent have never used at all, so his meth is not mething and his math is not mathing. That is not most, that is not even half. And it’s worth noting that a whole lot of these people are self-medicating because they have untreated mental illnesses or PTSD.

There are at least 46,000 unhoused people in LA and 16,000 beds available, so I think his math might be a little off here. There are often a lot of empty beds, but that actually has more to do with issues in the system the city has for keeping track of them — which sometimes lists beds that are empty as full or vice versa.

There are also entirely valid reasons people may choose not to go to the shelters — they fear their property is going to get stolen (which happens, a lot), there is a risk of physical violence, and a lot of these people have had really bad times in the shelters, unfortunately. There is also the fact that most shelters are not, in fact, usually equipped to care for drug addicts or those with severe mental health issues and we need more that are. Personally, I do not blame unhoused people for doing drugs or drinking when I’m not totally sure that I could do that sober. One study found that, rather than becoming houseless because they were already drug addicts, a quarter of unhoused people with drug or alcohol problems did not even have those problems before losing their houses.

These are the things people need to hear about the unhoused population, not Spencer Pratt’s bullshit, and certainly not Nick Fuentes’s.

PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!

About 60 people in Idaho have become sick after drinking raw milk in the last two weeks, which is the sort of thing we should get used to now that the American Right has decided that science and medicine are nothing but conspiracy theories. Yes, this is a whole ‘nother story about cows from the one about the flesh-eating screwworm outbreak in Texas. Just one more data point in the bounty of frightening public health news in the Age of MAHA.

Idaho’s Department of Health and Welfare (DHW) announced Wednesday that the outbreaks started on May 19, and had been traced to two different “milking operations,” one in the northern part of the state and the other in southern Idaho. We might call a milking operation a “dairy farm,” but considering the woo-woo hype and antigovernment fervor with which Trumpers have embraced raw milk, it’s pretty clear the sellers are milking the consumers, too.

About 45 of the people who fell ill tested positive for the bacterial infection campylobacteriosis; not everyone who got sick was tested, and health officials warn that more cases may be identified as the investigation continues.

While DHW didn’t publicly identify the sources of the infected milk, the agency said the dairies are cooperating with state and local public health agencies to “identify and fix any potential sources of contamination.” Good as far as it goes, but that doesn’t address the basic reality that the source in general would be cows, which live in barns and poop, and the best fix for potential bacterial contamination of milk is to pasteurize it. Jesus, we’ve only known about that since the late 19th century.

Prefer a non-Substack subscription? The button below will take any amount of your choosing at Paypal — let us know if you want the newsletter subscription too! they’re separate! — or we have a Patreon too.

Feed The Kitty

In a statement, Idaho DHW spokesperson AJ McWhorter explained that really, there was no need to name the milking operations tied to the illness outbreak “because this is a potential risk for any raw milk producer.” Did McWhorter go on to add that raw milk from other producers is also likely to make you sick, because of the whole “no such thing as safe raw milk” thing? Not so much. Instead, McWhorter reassured the public that the milking operations “are working with public health officials to figure out which patches of milk might be affected and to take steps to remedy the situation,” although getting out of the business of selling raw milk doesn’t appear to be one of those steps.

This is at least Idaho’s second cluster of infections related to raw milk this year; in February, nine residents of Ada County, in the Boise area, became seriously ill after drinking raw milk. Two children were among those who got sick. In that outbreak, lab tests confirmed the illnesses were related to infection with E. coli bacteria, according to Central District Health, the local multi-county public health agency.

CDH reported that the children were hospitalized for “hemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS), a rare but serious complication of E. coli infection that can lead to kidney failure and long-term health problems.”

In the current outbreak, the state health agency hasn’t provided any breakdown of the patients’ ages, and didn’t say whether anyone had been hospitalized.

Remember, kids, raw milk has no nutrition benefits over pasteurized milk, no matter what loopy raw milk advocates may claim. It’s just more likely to make you sick. In addition to campylobacter bacteria, raw milk can transmit “Listeria, E. coli, Salmonella and Mycobacterium bovis, which can cause tuberculosis in humans.” It’s especially dangerous for children, the elderly, pregnant people, and folks who are immunocompromised. Bizarrely, raw milk enthusiasts pretend they’re “protecting” children from the big scary corporate dairies that use pasteurization, even though pasteurized milk is far safer for kids.

Campylobacteriosis is an especially nasty infection that can cause serious illness and complications including Guillain-Barré Syndrome. Symptoms usually start two to five days after exposure, and last about a week; the symptoms include “diarrhea (sometimes bloody), fever, stomach cramps, nausea and/or vomiting.”

On the other hand, you really piss off the liberals who want to crush freedom through over-regulating what we eat and drink, so it’s probably worth weighing whether you’re willing to risk socialism just for the sake of keeping your precious children from having bloody diarrhea or maybe dying.

[Idaho Capital Sun / Idaho Dept. of Health and Welfare / Food Poisoning Bulletin / KTVB (February) / Politico / University of Arizona]

Yr Wonkette is funded entirely by reader donations. If you can, please become a paid subscriber, or if you’d like to make a one-time (or recurring) donation, you can click this here button. But for Crom’s sake wash your hands first.

Got Raw Milk? What Are You Thinking?

Is there a more vapid human being alive than Ivanka Trump? And we say this knowing full well that she’s married to a man so vapid that you can practically see cirrus clouds drifting out of his ears. We say this knowing she comes from a family of such mental lightweights that they need to be staked to the ground so that they don’t float off into the upper atmosphere like the old man in Up.

And yet, we sat through the first seven minutes of an interview she gave in which she discussed her project with hubby Jared Kushner to build a luxury resort on an island off the coast of Albania while only thinking three times about throwing our laptop out the window. It’s called personal growth, google it.

The island, Sazan, is a 2.2-square-mile outcropping in the Mediterranean. It’s a mostly untouched wilderness, covered by flora and fauna and military bunkers and landmines left over from when it was a Cold War outpost where Albanian soldiers watched out for the invading capitalist armies of NATO. Now that Albania is all free and whatnot, its leaders are trying to boost its tourism industry. And what better way to do that than buy the island for a reported $1.6 billion and build an ultra-luxury resort for rich people?

Two years ago, the Kushners announced a deal with the Albanian government to develop a 10,000-room resort on Sazan. Now, most of us might look at this project and think of rapacious capitalism swallowing up yet another pristine wilderness in a world that has already swallowed up enough of those.

For Ivanka, though, it is some sort of lifestyle choice that she spews in terms that would sound familiar to every goddamn Instagram influencer who has built a following by switching their kids to an all-meat diet or becoming a tradwife:

“It feels more like ... the culmination of all of my experience in real estate, all of my travel, a lot of reflection on how I want to live, how I think people increasingly are wanting to live and trying to really build something that’s a tangible manifestation of that.”

Oh Lord, spare us. People increasingly want to live in an ultra-luxurious Trump-branded resort decorated in enough gold leaf to fill 10,000 tacky Russian restaurants? When Ivanka Trump looks at how “people” want to live, she means the world’s most egregiously wealthy people. The kind who have staffs to run their lives for them. What she’s building is yet one more resort where these people can lounge by the pool or take snorkeling lessons.

We have been to a couple of semi-luxury resorts. They can make for fun vacations! But Ivanka thinks she’s spending a couple of billion dollars to reinvent the wheel and fill that aching spiritual void in her chest. You’re a Trump, good luck with that.

She also told the podcast host she had just returned from “walking the land, really just trying to sort of be with it and experience it.” Who is she, David Carradine in Kung Fu?

Even the way this project came about is so, so fucking annoying:

“We were on a friend’s boat and we stopped for a swim. Effectively, that’s how we found it. We swam to the island, we went on a hike, barefoot all the way up to the top, and we were just captivated, and it stayed with us ever since.”

Translation: we were on someone’s luxury yacht — possibly one belonging to Rupert Murdoch for those whose brains are unfortunately cursed with Ivanka and Jared’s origin story — cruising around the Mediterranean like a common Clarence and Ginni Thomas, and we just dropped anchor and swam up to another nation’s sovereign territory where luckily its military no longer hangs out. There we looked around and thought, What a wonderful, isolated paradise! How can we spoil it?

It pains us to say this, but Glenn Greenwald really pulled off the old “worst person you know makes great point” meme with this one. We will now hurl ourselves into the sun:

The Kushners are not the only ones wondering how they can spoil the island. Plenty of Albanians are wondering that as well and have been out in the streets this week protesting the deal. It seems that there has been almost no consultation with the public about the fact that the project is being built inside a nature preserve along what one source called “one of Albania’s most valuable diversity areas.” It’s a stopover for birds, including some endangered species, migrating along the Adriatic coast. Nearby areas are among the few remaining refuges for the Mediterranean monk seal, which environmentalists have been trying to save from extinction for a couple of decades.

Ivanka and Jared are just going to plow over all of this for their own aggrandizement, or because Ivanka wants people to think she hit her mid-forties and started wondering, Okay, but what have I really DONE with my life like she’s a bored Real America suburbanite approaching a midlife crisis.

Also, see if this sounds familiar:

Alarm ... had spiraled into public outrage when workmen began erecting a concrete-based, barbed wire-topped fence around the site near Zvërnec, installed a private security firm to protect it and heavy machinery started decimating ancient dunes and Mediterranean pine forests to clear the way for access roads.

A Trump project that the locals do not like nonetheless plowing ahead without possibly securing all clearances, destroying willy-nilly irreplaceable natural wonders and blocking people who yesterday had access to the land from it? It’s every Trump project ever! It’s the border wall destroying animal habitats, it’s the East Wing getting torn down with no warning to the public, it’s Donald destroying the famous Art Deco panels on the Bonwit Teller building instead of preserving them as he had promised to do when he built Trump Tower.

Also, the protests in Albania got rowdy enough for police to start using water cannons and teargas on the protesters. It sounds like something Trump-linked, all right.

So add Albanians to the list of people who are sick of the Trumps’ shit. It’s long been an absurdly long list.

Share

[YouTube / The Guardian]

Thank you for your generous donations that help us bring bitter, bitter laughter into your lives. We also have a Patreon.

Care to donate?

Just a day or so after Secretary of State/National Security Advisor/White House dog walker/Florsheim model Marco Rubio yappily and angrily protested to Congress, with the energy of a common Don Jr. if you know what we mean and we think you do, that Donald Trump had NEVER! NO NEVER! fallen asleep in his presence, Trump had a nap for the ages during a televised Oval Office meeting yesterday. There was no question about this one, he was just snoozin’. If this nap was one of Trump’s anal polyps, it would be extended. (Allegedly!)

Take a nap with the president, all the kids (in the Epstein files) are doing it. (Allegedly!)

Prefer a non-Substack subscription? The button below will take any amount of your choosing at Paypal — let me know if you want the newsletter subscription too! they’re separate! — or we have a Patreon too.

Wonkette $ machine!

The rest of the appearance was just as snoozy and dementia as we have come to expect from the president who is so excited about the UFC bouncy house they’re building him on the White House lawn for his 80th birthday, he thinks he might just leave it up forever.

Listen to him slur his speech, he sounds like he’s completely about to bottom out, repeating his delusional lie that he has ended eight wars, maybe nine, maybe 10. No White House journalist has the courage to ask him to list these wars. (He has ended zero wars.)

Here is Trump admitting that he only selected the square-headed man-pig Bill Pulte to be (acting) director of national intelligence because he is clinging to hallucinatory beliefs that Pulte can find THE TRUTH about the RIGGED ELECTIONS. Trump must have been too busy snoozing to notice what an incompetent fuckshow Pulte has been when it comes to going after Trump’s enemies.

Boy, this is sad.

Listen to Trump babble and stumble around as he explains how well he’s done with “The Black Jobs.”

Listen as Trump explains that after he’s done winning the war he started with Iran, which he and Pete Hegseth lost on the first weekend, that he’s going to “make a brief stopover” to start (and immediately lose) a war with Cuba.

Oh boy, he was playing the greatest hits, though. Look, Democrats! Another clip of Trump angrily explaining to the American people that “affordability” is a “con job”!

Ah yes, and on top of the Epstein Memorial Ballroom and the bunker baby bunker for big stupid baby presidents, and on top of the reflecting pool (taller than skyscraper if you stand it up!), and on top of his Hitler arch, and on top of the Kennedy Center, NO WAIT SCRATCH THE KENNEDY CENTER, Trump is very excited to build a Trump promenade leading up to the Lincoln Memorial!

Uh oh, was it sleepy time again? Or did sleepy time never end? Look, Sleepy Joe Biden! You got a buddy!

Please stop exercising your freedom of speech, the dictator is SWEEPING RIGHT NOW.

Shhhhhhhhh.

Want to read more Evan than just what’s at Wonkette? Visit The Moral High Ground and subscribe to it!

Follow me on Instagram!

And on BlueSky!

And on Facebook!

Here, a LinkTree!

Share

Want to donate just once?

BON JOUR! Montreal, don’t forget we’re coming at you in just a weekish! Kiss us on our faces Sunday, June 14, 3-5 p.m., for French Canadian counterprogramming to Donald Trump’s gross birthday party! We shall dine and drink at Stella Pizzeria, 1327 Laurier Ave E, Montreal, QC H2J 3R3. Join us for YAY!

Now can we interest you in some freshly foraged tabs?

The House says no to Trump’s stupid war. Yes, that the House. (The Fucking News)

The crime droog slushfund isn’t dead, because true love can never die. (Our Liz at Public Notice)

Hey maybe it’s time to meet Andrea LaFlamme! (Andrea for Maine) This story about men defending Graham Platner misogynistly came out about six hours too soon. (Liberal Currents) Because this is a very bad story about Graham Platner :/ (Gift link New York Times)

Let’s change the channel to James Talarico.

Keep Wonkette alive FOREVER!

Subscribe now

Prefer a non-Substack subscription? The button below will take any amount of your choosing at Paypal — let me know if you want the newsletter subscription too! Paypal won’t automatically sign you up for the newsletter! — or we have a Patreon too.

Wonkette $ machine!

Oh good lord. Trump’s new pick for director of national intelligence Bill Pulte was a memestock clown who grifted off conspiracy theories about a secret plan to save Bed Bath and Beyond. And that description is fairly sanewashed compared to the whole actual story. (The Bulwark)

Corporate donors to his ugly ballroom bunker have raked in more than $50 billion in new or increased government contracts in just the past six months, and/or had federal “enforcement actions” against them suspended. What good friends! (Public Citizen report Ballroom Billions)

The National Parks chief told these protesters their signs about “Trump Raped Little Girls” had been evaluated under all appropriate standards and found to be “obscene.” Then he sent the Secret Service to arrest them for “death threat.” (Our Liz at Law and Chaos)

Andrew Boutros, the US Attorney in Chicago in charge of the clusterfuck “Broadview Six” indictments, seems to think the main issue was that a grand jury transcript said “AUSA (inaudible)” instead of the AUSA’s name. I don’t think that was the main issue! (US Attorney’s Office) The AP ignored that stupid part and just went with “this whole thing was pretty bad yo.” (Paraphrase.) (AP)

Who cut the DOGE whistleblower’s brakes? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (Wired)

Trump is using the Defense Production Act to spend $700 million on coal, for “national security.” Probably mandate that all fighter jets have to run on them too, why not. (Reuters)

Trump slept through his own announcement.

Everybody hates data centers now. That was really really fast! (Heatwave)

This is a very good bill by Sen. Ruben Gallego to start taxing rich shitheads as soon as they borrow against their assets :) (Gallego)

And they’re taking his name back off the Kennedy Center, bet he arrests the lawyer who told staff they have to :) (CNN)

One Dirty Martini Pasta please! (Better Homes and Gardens)

Join your friend ZiggyWiggy Saturday at 9 p.m. Eastern for Wonkette movie night! This week you’ll be watching Milk, available with subscription on Prime; free with ads on Dailymotion; $3.99 in the usual places.

Parties upcoming! MONTREAL (June 14), JUST ADDED DETROIT (June 27), MISSOULA (July 25), ATLANTA (but we won’t be there, because “see Missoula,” July 25), CLEVELAND (Aug. 8) AND PITTSBURGH (Aug. 9), and SONOMA/SF (Nov. 30)! TIME TO PARTY!

Have you sent Wonkette to a friend today?

Share

Bookshop.org is the anti-Amazon, a certified B-corp partnering with local bookstores. Here’s our Bookshop affiliate link, when you buy books, Wonkette gets 10 percent. Hey, Wonkpal Denny Carter has a new book there, I’m gonna buy that!

This is the button for giving us all your extra money (ONLY IF IT IS EXTRA) but with Venmo.

Venmo Wonkette all the $$$!

Andy Ogles, he is this Tennessee Republican congressman who is dumb as a bag of hammers, and also just a complete sack of shit. (Yes, he’s the one who raised $23,000 to build a burial garden for stillborn infants, which was subsequently never built.)

Ogles thought he had a good tweet to commemorate Nuclear Family Month, the thing conservative Christian white nationalists and kid-touchers are doing as counterprogramming to Pride Month this June. Sarah Huckabee Sanders is calling it “Fidelity Month.” Kay Ivey in Alabama is calling it “Strong Families Month.” And in Ogles’s Tennessee it’s Nuclear Family Month.

It’s all euphemisms, what they mean is that God hates fags. They’re vile, irredeemable, bigoted human execrement, and that’s what they’re doing to oppose Pride month.

But Republicans didn’t like Ogles’s tweet, we guess because it was a little bit too honest about their intentions:

Hasn’t Ogles heard? We’re only saying “nuclear family month.” We’re not saying the first part about God hating fags right now. That completely defeats the purpose of creating a euphemism like “nuclear family month”!

Dumbass!

Prefer a non-Substack subscription? The button below will take any amount of your choosing at Paypal — let me know if you want the newsletter subscription too! they’re separate! — or we have a Patreon too.

Wonkette $ machine!

Immediately came the condemnations, rushing down like waters, from Democrats of course (like Katherine Clark above), but also from Republicans who were appalled, appalled at this bald-faced show of bigotry by one of their own. A Republican acting like an anti-gay lunatic bigot? No they never!

There was New York Rep. Mike Lawler (R-swing district), who came out, well, swinging:

After Ogles deleted the tweet, Lawler added to CNN:

“I’m not going to dispute his statement, but the fact is that tweet was offensive. I know it was offensive to many colleagues and staff members here, and you know it was pretty clear that it was f**ing stupid so,” Lawler said.

Lawler continued “everybody has family members, friends, neighbors, colleagues, staff that are in fact homosexual, and to somehow insinuate that they are less than or not Americans, or should not be Americans, is idiotic and offensive. And I was clear about that yesterday. I’m glad he deleted the post, but do better.”

“Do better,” said the white Republican. LOL.

Rep. Nick Lalota, also a Republican from a swing district, told CNN, “Gross, disgusting tweet, inappropriate. All Americans, regardless of their sexual orientation, should enjoy the protections of America, our Constitution, and all of our blessings.”

But it wasn’t just Republicans from swing districts who are already worried they’re going to lose big in November.

Ted Cruz got in on the woke “let’s not kill gays” bandwagon:

Asked by TMZ whether he agreed with the post, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said, “For all of recorded history, homosexuals have been part of humanity.”

“I’m quite libertarian by nature,” he continued. “I think the behavior of consenting adults is their business.”

Thanks, Ted.

Even Tennessee bonkers yokel Rep. Tim Burchett said, “I thought it was wrong. You know what people do in their own dadgum bedrooms, is their business.” And House Speaker Mike Johnson, a bigot’s bigot, one of the most disturbed Christian nationalists in the whole country, started talking about what the Bible is unequivocal about:

“The Bible is unequivocal, We’re supposed to love our neighbor as ourselves. Everybody is supposed to treat every single person with dignity and respect whether we agree with them or not. That’s a Christian virtue, that’s a biblical virtue, it’s an American virtue. It’s part of we are,” Johnson said. “Andy took it down and did it publicly. He should have done that. It was the right response.”

Hahahaha, fuck off.

All of these people are cross-burning trash, albeit perhaps on different levels. Pardon us, though, if we’re not real concerned with differentiating who votes for the Nazis because Hitler makes the trains run on time vs. the ones who are truly in it for the Jew hate. They’re all voting for, and representing, the Nazis.

This is, of course, Andy Ogles’s brand, the thing he does, in the absence of an ability to add anything of value to anyone’s life. He tweeted in March about Muslims:

He also demanded an investigation into the NFL and NBC for airing the Bad Bunny halftime show, due to all the perverted and untranslatable Spanish-ness that happened there. He’s just a subhuman pig, that’s all.

Ogles, as we said, deleted the tweet, blamed it on a staffer and apologized:

Ooh, they got reprimanded! What a naughty, naughty employee! (If we even believe Ogles didn’t tweet it personally, and we do not.)

In response, he got replies from bluechecked Republicans that said things like “You were looking good but you crossed the LGBTQ mafia and folded like a lawn chair. Deeply disappointing. These people will hate you anyway but you apologized and blame your staff to lick the boot.” Another: “You really bent the knee to the left and are apologizing for this? THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT WE WANT YOU TO BE SAYING. You are a weak pathetic disgrace for a man, you stand for absolutely nothing."

And how about:

Because this is who these people really are.

Lots of people are pointing out that there truly is a very gay side of the DC MAGA coalition, lots of self-loathing white Republicans like those we discussed in this article at our side gig The Moral High Ground. But those token Marys are fuckin’ stupid if they think they’re the ones in the coalition who are going to win out, that white supremacist Christian nationalists will settle for anything other than one day sending them to the gulag along with all the other wokes.

The Moral High Ground

New York Times Idiot Thinks These Trump Losers Are The 'A-Gays'

Hello, Moral High Grounders! If you love this newsletter, if you care about independent media, and you like sticking it to loser MAGA motherfuckers, PLEASE upgrade your subscription to PAYING and/or founding subscriber!Buy me one coffee a month! Or just become a paying subscriber and I’ll buy it myself…

Read more

9 months ago · 266 likes · 26 comments

This is who they are.

Homocon Dave Rubin found this out — yet still won’t admit it — when he and his husband announced they were going to be dads, and in response garden-variety Republicans on Twitter showered them with virulently homophobic hate and condemnation, and suggestions that their children should be taken away. Men like Rubin have so little self-esteem, value themselves so little that they’re willing to “agree to disagree” about their very lives and dignity. (Which is how Rubin is able to justify his friendship with the Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles, a man who fundamentally believes exactly the same things Andy Ogles tweeted.)

It’s worth noting that this is happening against the backdrop of a year, administration, and era where American society is actively moving backward on equal rights for all people, obviously egged on by the fact that Republicans are letting their Nazi flags fly proudly these days. Support for marriage equality is actually slipping in the United States, and the movement is among Republicans. NBC News cites Gallup, which found in 2021 that 55 percent of Republicans supported marriage equality, but now it’s only 37.

You one of those ignoramuses who thinks Obergefell is settled law, that this illegitimate partisan hack Supreme Court won’t start abusing gay people the second it feels like it has the right case?

Andy Ogles had to take that tweet down because he said the quiet part loud, no more, no less. And yet all those governors’ “Nuclear Family Month” declarations remain.

They mean the same thing, dumbasses.

OPEN THREAD.

[CNN / NBC News]

Want to read more Evan than just what’s at Wonkette? Visit The Moral High Ground and subscribe to it!

Follow me on Instagram!

And on BlueSky!

And on Facebook!

Here, a LinkTree!

Share

Want to donate just once?

Disclaimer: This post will not feature any pictures of screwworms, because of how they are extremely gross and I don’t want to look at them. Feel free to Google image search them yourself, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.

On Tuesday, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins very confidently stated that the rumors of an impending invasion of flesh-eating New World Screwworms were absolutely false, assuring Republican Texas state Rep. Don McLaughlin that the closest of the cow-killing flies (because they’re actually flies, not worms) were at least 25 miles from the border.

McLaughlin, you see, had put out a statement the day before saying that they were only a mile away, asking for some protection for Texas farmers.

“For more than a year, I have joined Texas ranchers in sounding the alarm while federal regulators have moved at a snail’s pace,” said McLaughlin. “Today, the threat is no longer hundreds of miles away. It is at our doorstep. Texas cannot afford to wait until the New World Screwworm crosses the border and begins devastating our livestock and wildlife.”

In response, Rollins patronizingly referred to McLaughlin as a “well-intentioned state legislator” whilst also reprimanding him for having spread such dangerous misinformation.

“When that false information gets out, it causes significant panic,” Rollins said. “And rightly so, especially if it’s coming from elected officials and the media.”

She doubled down on social media, writing, “We’re keeping the public updated in real time, shutting down rumors, and laying down the facts on exactly what we and our state partners are doing to protect American agriculture, livestock, and wildlife.”

Well! Either McLaughlin was actually correct or we are dealing with some real super flies (apologies to Curtis Mayfield), because those motherfuckers ended up in Texas the very next day. More specifically, they ended up in a three-month-old calf — the first such case since the flies were eradicated from the US in the 1960s. Although last year there was a screwworm found in a woman who had traveled from El Salvador (she survived).

The calf has since been quarantined and they’re hoping that the case will be a one-off, but that seems somewhat unlikely.

This is a very, very big deal for Texas farmers and pet-owners and for the meat-eating, dairy milk-drinking public. Also people who, while aware that such circumstances are rare, are going to spend a lot of time in the coming days freaking out about being eaten alive from the inside out by fly larvae. An outbreak could wind up costing the nation up to $10.6 billion.

Prior to the 1960s, screwworms cost the agricultural industry millions of dollars a year. Starting in the 1950s, the country invested billions into a plan to mass breed screwworms in factories, radiate them so they became sterile, and then send them out to mate with other screwworms in the wild — unions that would produce no offspring. Because the factory-made screwworms outnumbered the wild screwworms 10-1, this eventually led to the end of the species in the United States. Ta da!

Now, you may be thinking “Is this the Trump administration’s fault, though? How can they be responsible for that?”

In so many ways! Remember DOGE? Well, DOGE cut about 15 percent of the USDA’s workforce. They also slashed USAID to bits, killing funding for over 5,300 programs around the world. This included programs dedicated to monitoring and containing screwworm populations. Also avian flu, swine flu and — wait for iiiiiiiit! — ebola! Which, you may have noticed, is also a pretty serious problem right now.

Want to donate to us but not to Substack? Click here or join our Patreon!

Non-Substack donations!

In fact, they specifically cut $250 million from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s Global Health Security Program, which ran many of these monitoring programs.

Why did they do that? Because they thought USAID was woke. Because, instead of looking into what it actually did, why it funded the programs it funded, and how those programs also benefited US citizens, Elon Musk and Donald Trump and others saw tweets like Karoline Leavitt’s about how USAID programs were spending “$1.5 million to advance DEI in Serbia’s workplaces, $70,000 for production of a DEI musical in Ireland, $47,000 for a transgender opera in Colombia, $32,000 for a transgender comic book in Peru” and decided to kill it. Sure, the descriptions of these programs are inaccurate and the only one actually funded by USAID is the first (the rest were funded by the State Department), but why look into it further?

“USAID is a criminal organization,” Musk tweeted back in February of 2025, “Time for it to die.”

Well, now USAID isn’t the only thing dying.

PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!

Six states held primary elections Tuesday, and the big shocker was that for the first time this primary season, a Trump-endorsed contender lost, HOW SAD FOR HIM (and America). In Iowa, Trump’s choice to succeed Kim Reynolds as governor, Randy Feenstra, lost narrowly to Zach Lahn, a righty activist who’ll probably be just as terrible as anyone Trump supports. Trump only thought to make an endorsement in the race last Friday, leaving Feenstra without any time to try to get advertising up touting the endorsement. More important for Great Leader, Trump will no doubt insist Feenstra’s loss doesn’t count against his perfect endorsement record, because Feenstra let him down. Besides, Lahn ran on the slogan “Iowa First,” so Trump may just decide he’d supported Lahn from the start, and anyone who says otherwise is a liar.

Lahn also had the support of creepy racist and former congressman Steve King, who still freaking hates Feenstra for having turfed King out of his congressional seat in 2020, the last time we recall Republicans actually rejecting an incumbent for being an open, raving racist.

Back in 2017, when King insisted “we can't restore civilization with somebody else's babies,” the remark only won praise from David Duke, although it’s now indistinguishable from mainstream messaging from the Trump administration. So we guess it’s time for the New York Times or the new-look 60 Minutes to do a feature on King’s “vindication.”

Lahn will run against Democratic nominee Rob Sand, Iowa’s state auditor, who is not repellent and has a well-funded war chest that could make him one of the few Democrats this year with a solid chance of becoming governor in an otherwise red state. It’s been a couple decades since a Democrat has been elected governor in Iowa.

Prefer a non-Substack subscription? The button below will take any amount of your choosing at Paypal — let us know if you want the newsletter subscription too! they’re separate! — or we have a Patreon too.

Feed The Kitty

Iowa Senate Primary

Also in Iowa, Chuck Schumer beat Donald Trump because Trump’s guy lost the primary for governor and Schumer’s guy, Paralympics gold medalist and state Rep. Josh Turek, won the Democratic nomination for the US Senate seat currently held by Joni Ernst, who will go castrate pigs in the private sector. Turek thumped the other top Democratic contender, state Sen. Zach Wahls, by 25 percentage points and change, running on his story of personal achievement as a professional wheelchair basketball player, his success winning a state House seat in a district that voted heavily for Trump, and a $10 million ad buy by the Democratic-friendly group Vote Vets. The group said it got involved in the race because Turek was born with spina bifida following his father’s exposure to Agent Orange during the Vietnam War.

Wahls has his own compelling backstory; in 2011, when he was a 19-year-old Eagle Scout, he gained national attention when he gave a speech defending his two moms before the Iowa Lege, urging legislators not to ban gay marriage. He won election to the Iowa Senate in 2018, when he was just 27, and likely has a long political career ahead of him despite his primary loss. While Millennial Democrats in some states have had success running against the establishment, Wahls’s promise to oppose another Senate Democratic leadership term for Schumer didn’t play so well with Iowa voters, so it goes.

Turek will face GOP Rep. Ashley Hinson in the fall, and Democrats hope he’ll have an edge if enough rural voters are sick of being screwed over by Trump’s tariffs and by high fuel and fertilizer costs directly resulting from Trump’s stupid war on Iran.

California: It’s (Maybe!) Xavier Becerra And Steve Hilton In Governor’s Race, Karen Bass and ??? For LA Mayor

The big result in California is that, as usual, it’s going to take a few days or weeks to count all the ballots, because it’s a big damn state and because California accepts ballots that were postmarked by Election Day, as long as they’re received by June 9. And of course California does those weird open primaries where the top two vote-getters, regardless of party, go on to the general election.

Governor: As of Wednesday evening, the governor’s race is still too close to call. A lot can still change depending on late-arriving mailed ballots, since it looks like a lot of Democratic voters waited to mail their ballots until Election Day.

After former Rep. Eric Swalwell self-immolated in a fireball of sexual harassment, there was no obvious Democratic front-runner, which led to some worries that Republicans, with fewer choices, would somehow grab the top two spots, but nah, not happening.

With about 56 percent of votes counted so far in the governor’s race, Republican pundit Steve Hilton is narrowly ahead with 28 percent, and Democrat Xavier Becerra, the former HHS secretary, very close behind with 26 percent. Democratic billionaire Tom Steyer is behind both, with 20 percent, and there are a bunch of other candidates as well. Former Rep. Katie Porter, the only major female candidate from either party, conceded on Wednesday afternoon.

Because Donald Trump is an idiot who thinks that only the votes counted in the first few hours are real, he has already congratulated Hilton for winning the primary, and of course accused the state of cheating before the results are all in. If the vote count shifts and Steyer edges ahead of Hilton, expect Trump to order California be nuked.

Los Angeles Mayor: Incumbent Mayor Karen Bass will definitely be on the ballot in November, with 35 percent of votes tallied, but results for the second slot in the general election are still not decided. The count in Los Angeles is further along, with 62 percent of ballots counted by Wednesday evening. So far, weird rightwinger Spencer Pratt is in second place (29.9 percent), and LA City Council member Nithya Raman, who’s challenging Bass from the left, is in third (22.8 percent). Again, the late vote count could change considerably, and Donald Trump will freak out if it does.

Montana Senate Race: This Could Get Interesting

In Montana’s race to replace Sen. Steve Daines, who dropped out on the day of the filing deadline to ratfuck the Democratic slate, Air Force veteran Alani Bankhead won the Democratic primary for Senate, and Kurt Alme won the GOP primary.

Since Daines’s last-minute withdrawal from the race was seen as an attempt to preempt well-known Dems from running, there’s now a lot of speculation that Bankhead may strategically drop her own campaign to give a boost to former University of Montana President Seth Bodnar, who’s running an independent campaign. Bodnar has raised more than $2 million for his campaign, far more than Bankhead.

For her part, Bankhead has repeatedly denied that she plans to drop out of the race, but then until Daines coordinated his little scheme with Alme, he said he was definitely seeking reelection, so we hereby give Bankhead permission to fight the ratfucking with a bit of a fib.

And The Rest / The Professor And Mary Ann

New Jersey weirdness: Democrat Rebecca Bennett won the primary to face incumbent Rep. Tom Kean Jr. in District 7. But “facing” Kean may not be the right term, since he’s been absent from Congress since early March, having missed more than 100 votes. Trump repeated his endorsement of Kean Monday, and a statement from Kean’s office says he’s “focused on my recovery” and planning to return to work “in a matter of weeks.” Maybe he’ll bring Trump’s healthcare plan with him when he comes back.

New Mexico Nice Time: Former Interior Secretary Deb Haaland easily won the Democratic primary for governor, making it likely that very blue New Mexico will choose her to become the nation’s first Native American woman elected to serve as any state’s governor. She’ll be running against Republican Greggory Hull, who should be disqualified for having too many gs in his name.

South Dakota Had An Election Too: The Lower Dakota had a four-candidate Republican primary to replace former Gov. Kristi Noem, who now holds the vitally important job of whatever Trump shunted her into after shitcanning her. As a result, neither incumbent Gov. Larry Rhoden nor challenger Toby Doeden got more than 35 percent of the vote in the primary, which was the cutoff for outright winning the nomination. They’ll go to a runoff on July 28. Doeden received 31 percent of the vote, and Rhoden got 25 percent.

First-time candidate Doeden is a car dealer who insists he’s a “total political outsider who’s tired of the government’s failure to deliver on its promises” but also says he’s one of Donald Trump’s “fiercest supporters,” because it’s not like Trump has any influence in the government or anything. Trump didn’t endorse anyone in the race, but he has to be proud of Doeden’s anti-government bid to embed himself in government.

No Democrat has been elected governor of South Dakota since the 1970s.

[AP / NYT / NPR / CalMatters / WaPo (gift link) / Guardian / NBC News]

Yr Wonkette is funded entirely by reader donations. If you can, please become a paid subscriber, or if you’d like to make a one-time (or recurring) donation, you can click this here button.

Money Us Please And Thank You