Excellent Links

Saturday Morning Open Thread: The Season’s Upon Us

by Anne Laurie| December 13, 20257:14 am| 73 Comments

This post is in: Excellent Links, Open Threads

Like so many people here, my Christmas tree is a celebration of my love for my Christian faith, which is why it's festooned with Superman, Batman, and Apollo's hand holding the Enterprise in space

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— Tom Nichols (@radiofreetom.bsky.social) December 6, 2025 at 11:43 AM

Reminds me of this

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— 07kc07.bsky.social (@07kc07.bsky.social) December 6, 2025 at 11:48 AM

David Gauvey Herbert does some great shoe leather reporting to track down a series of men who played Santa Claus at Macy's famous Santaland in New York. Their stories are even more amazing than you could imagine. @jacobfeldman.bsky.social's top pick www.esquire.com/lifestyle/a6…

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— The Sunday Long Read (@thesundaylongread.bsky.social) December 7, 2025 at 9:27 AM

David Herbert, for Esquire — “Playing Santa Does Strange Things to a Man. What It Did to Bob Rutan Was Even Stranger”:

… The 1947 film Miracle on 34th Street established that the one true Santa Claus operates out of the store’s flagship Herald Square location. After a parade float delivers him to Macy’s on Thanksgiving morning, you can find him there on the eighth floor, wedged between an in-store cooking school and a clothing department, deep in a labyrinth of Christmas kitsch called Santaland.

Macy’s has safeguarded this mystique for eighty years. When journalists ask the company who plays Santa, a spokeswoman insists again and again, like a stubborn witness giving a deposition: “Santa is Santa.” The several hundred men who have worn the red suit at Santaland likewise observe an omertà. “We have a vow of secrecy about not talking about Macy’s operations,” says Brian DePetris, who worked as Santa for twenty-one years. “When you break that, it’s like you’re betraying the brotherhood.”

After their shifts, they walk out the front door of Macy’s, a bit of red around their jaws where they’ve rubbed acetone to take off the beard glue, and then dissolve into the masses of Christmas shoppers. Santa sees you when you’re sleeping, but he also sees you on the sidewalk, on the F train, and in line at the grocery store. He remembers your visit but says nothing.

In the mid-2000s, the company pulled back the curtain for a cheesy reality show you can now find only on YouTube called Unwrapping Macy’s. The cable program followed a tall, handsome executive named Bob Rutan as he helped manage the store’s many events: inflating balloons before the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, rearranging orchids at the annual Macy’s Flower Show, and training elves for Macy’s Santaland.

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Bob agreed to meet me for lunch on a hot August afternoon. Now in his mid-sixties, he was almost unrecognizable from his reality-show days. Long hair fell to his shoulders, framing a wearied, still-handsome face. In the two decades since the show aired, a hundred thousand American Spirits had yellowed Bob’s fingers and turned his voice to gravel. Instead of the Hugo Boss suit and French cuffs he wore at Macy’s, he had on a Stetson and black boots, but the result was less cowboy than derelict. The look had some upside: He occasionally found poorly paid work as a background actor, playing a homeless person.

Bob scanned the menu with interest and ordered with confidence, and for a moment I saw the man who once regularly dined in nice joints like this one, on an expense account, or with credit cards he struggled to pay off, or perhaps as a gift from a vendor, the kind that helped get him fired from Macy’s. As Bob grazed for French fries that had fallen off his plate, he revealed that he’d been a Macy’s Santa himself before his ill-fated corporate run. I was meeting a lot of middle-aged men who felt their lives had been saved by the red suit. But Bob’s life had gone in reverse. After his Santa work came career implosion, tax liens, and family heartache.

And yet his singular trajectory at Macy’s—from a Santa Claus to the executive in charge of the Santa Clauses—makes Bob a sort of skeleton key to Santaland. For years, journalists have asked Macy’s Santas to reveal the secrets of the red-suit fraternity. Most refused. But when I text a man named Tarantino Smith, I tell him Bob Rutan sent me.

“Yes,” he writes back. “I’m available next week.”

Paul Kochman, who spent one December in the red suit and six more as a special Santaland manager dubbed a straw boss, invites me to McCarthy’s Pub on West Forty-sixth Street, a glass of clear liquor in his hand, and then spirits me to a private spot upstairs. “It’ll probably be a bit of teeny-weeny secret spilling,” he says.

Frank Pascuzzi, who worked at Macy’s for five years and legally changed his name to Santa Claus in 2012, drives me to a red-sauce joint on Long Island where the Bolognese is so thick with sugar that his glucose monitor beeps. “Bob fed into the magic,” he says. But Macy’s isn’t a magic show. It’s a $5 billion corporation. “I guess corporate won.”

Each of these men was working a gig, channeling a myth for twenty dollars an hour. And yet every man I spoke with told me that he knows—doesn’t think, knows—that in at least one sit, with at least one kid, he really was Santa Claus. Not that he’d fooled the child. Not that his Method acting had convinced even himself.

No, he knows as sure as Catholics know a round wafer becomes the body of Christ that he really was inhabited by Santa himself.

I heard about these moments again and again. But I never heard a story of transubstantiation like the one Bob told me hunched over his steak frites. For a few minutes, half a lifetime ago, Bob was Santa Claus…

Saturday Morning Open Thread: The Season’s Upon UsPost + Comments (73)

Late Night Open Thread: Make the Bastid Deny It

by Anne Laurie| December 12, 20251:22 am| 67 Comments

This post is in: Excellent Links, Open Threads, Republican Venality, Trumpery

Of course, normal handshakes don't involve the back of your hand in any way, shape, or form, so this is an obvious lie even by Trumpian standards.
What health issue does Trump have that the White House is so desperate to cover up?

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) December 11, 2025 at 2:12 PM

“Karoline, I’ve shaken lot of hands in my lifetime. I’m sure you have too. And I can’t figure out how shaking hands can bruise the back of one’s hand. Can you demonstrate how that would happen?”
“Does it happen because he’s frail or because he doesn’t know how to shake hands?”
“How many per day?”

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— Dana Houle (@danahoule.bsky.social) December 11, 2025 at 4:31 PM

“What explains this dramatic increase in how many hands he shakes?”
“Did President Biden get bruises on the back of his hands?”
“Why hasn’t he considered taking a break from shaking hands so that he can let his body heal?”

— Dana Houle (@danahoule.bsky.social) December 11, 2025 at 4:35 PM

"Unsurprisingly, the White House is trying to lie its way through it. The only explanation offered so far for Trump's mangled hand is a laughable one about 'frequent handshaking.' And president now says it's 'treasonous' to report on his health."

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) December 11, 2025 at 12:17 PM

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Per Public Notice, “A band-aid on a festering hand wound”:

Something’s up with Trump’s health and we should really find out what it is.

… Trump, of course, has political reasons for threatening reporters who might investigate his health. The reality of his decline undercuts his cult of personality, which still maintains he’s a tireless worker who never sleeps and would be damn near immortal if he just cut out the cheeseburgers.
This is about more than just politics though. The country was lucky to survive Trump’s first term even when he was relatively spry, and there are indications his health issues might be playing a role in his increasingly erratic and dangerous behavior.

This is about more than just politics though. The country was lucky to survive Trump’s first term even when he was relatively spry, and there are indications his health issues might be playing a role in his increasingly erratic and dangerous behavior…

It’s reasonable to wonder whether Trump’s ailing health is factor in why he’s unable to explain why he’s pardoning convicted drug traffickers while he blows up suspected drug boats, or going on nonsensical rants about make-believe things like “tariff shelves” and 25 percent economic growth. He’s admonishing Americans to get used to having fewer toys for their kids while he’s simultaneously coating the part of the White House he hasn’t destroyed for a ballroom with tacky and garish gold.

It’s odd behavior by any remotely normal standard, but perhaps more explicable if he’s experiencing cognitive issues that require regular testing — and it’s worth noting that Trump’s aforementioned Tuesday night Truth Social screed mentions he’s undergone three separate “Cognitive Examinations,” including one recently “in front of large numbers of doctors and experts, most of whom I do not know.”

As is always the case with Trump — who at 78 was the oldest president ever inaugurated earlier this year — it’s dangerous to attribute to other factors what can simply be ascribed to malevolence. He’s gone to desperate lengths to conceal his health records for a decade now, and he has a history of making bad and bizarre decisions stretching back to well before he ran for office. His persistently discolored and bandaged hand is not necessarily evidence that he has a grave health condition.

Still, at a time when Trump is pushing the country toward criminal wars of aggression and global pariah status abroad while simultaneously immiserating Americans at home with senseless and self-destructive economic policies, it’s fair to wonder whether he’s of sound mind and body. There’s undeniable evidence that something is wrong. And if it wasn’t a big deal, you’d think the White House would come forward with an explanation more plausible than what they’ve offered so far.

Getty photogs are on the case, but they can only do so much. It would be nice if reporters who have regular opportunities to ask Leavitt and Trump questions developed the type of dogged curiosity about Trump’s health that they had when Biden was in office. And if the response they get is that Trump is still battered and bruised from too much handshaking, then it’s time to call BS and start digging, because there’s a big story here that’s being covered up — in this case literally.

If you’re on social media, remember: Sharing is caring!

Late Night Open Thread: Make the Bastid *Deny* ItPost + Comments (67)

Late Night Open Thread: Throwing Punches on the Titanic

by Anne Laurie| December 5, 20253:17 am| 48 Comments

This post is in: Excellent Links, Open Threads, Republicans in Disarray!

There's an air over the House Republican caucus that is both petty and baroque, some amalgam of late Soviet nomenklatura and Real Housewives franchise, @joshtpm.bsky.social writes.
talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/reali…

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— TPM (@talkingpointsmemo.com) December 4, 2025 at 4:46 PM

We love this for them! Josh Marshall, at TPM:

… When a group is in danger it pulls together. But at a certain point the Titanic isn’t “in danger”; it’s sinking. And at that moment of crystallization one person looks at another and says, ‘I never liked you, motherfucker!’ and throws a punch. What else is there to do? You look at the person next to you and you either kiss them full on the mouth or punch them in the face. There’s no future and no consequences and no reason not to let it all hang out, get every suppressed urge out there. That is what is happening right now in the House GOP conference, though admittedly with more of the latter than the former — at least as far as we know.

This is the fallout of the November election and Tuesday’s special election in Tennessee, where the Democrat overperformed despite losing to her Republican opponent. GOP lawmakers seem to have accepted that their House majority is gone. So every restraint has disappeared, not against Donald Trump but against each other in the House.

‘Politico chief’ Jonathan Martin smells blood in the water, but he seems to think the members are still terrified of Mango Mussolini. Per the Daily Beast — “Republican Insider Reveals Exact Moment Trump’s Party Will Abandon Him”:

… Politico’s politics bureau chief Jonathan Martin told MSNBC’s Morning Joe when he expected lawmakers to break ranks with Trump.

“Quite frankly, I talked to a former GOP senator,” Martin said. “[They] said two words to me: filing deadlines.”

He added, “Why do filing deadlines matter? Because what the senator was talking about was the filing deadlines for primaries next year. Which is to say, when that clears, when that passes, when these lawmakers know who is or is not running against them in primaries next year, then you’ll see even more freedom, even more independence.”

Martin’s comments on the show came amid a discussion about Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s alleged commission of war crimes and Trump’s pardon of a former Honduran president convicted of narco-trafficking.

These represent only two instalments in a firestorm of controversies that has burned almost nonstop since the MAGA leader assumed office for the second time in January.

That storm has, in turn, torched Trump’s approval ratings down to a miserly 38 percent, and left an increasing number of GOP officials wondering how they went from a resounding presidential victory last year to staring down the barrel of a potential electoral bloodbath in next year’s midterms.

“I think it’s one more rock on the back of the members of Congress that they’re carrying up the hill,” Martin said of forthcoming congressional hearings into whether Hegseth may have committed crimes against humanity under international law.

“The hill is Mount Trump,” he went on. “And the hill is having to burden this daily humiliation.”…

“These guys care about their seats and about their reelections,” Martin said. “If they see that they don’t have a primary challenger by a date certain next year, 2026, they can start saying what they actually think about what [right-wing pundit] George Will calls the ‘moral slum’ of this administration.”…

We’re still the good guys, really! It’s just that we’re all terrified of this monster who *somehow* gained control of our party, no one knows how…

Late Night Open Thread: <em>Throwing Punches on the Titanic </em>Post + Comments (48)

Longer Healthcare / Plague Reads: A More Dangerous World

by Anne Laurie| December 3, 20255:36 pm| 81 Comments

This post is in: Excellent Links, Healthcare, World's Best Healthcare (If You Can Afford It)

The power trip
Doughnuts and Bullets. The agony and absurdity of working for RFK Jr. #RFKjr
nymag.com/intelligence…
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— 𝗽𝗵𝗼𝘁𝗼𝗳𝗿𝗮𝗺𝗱 (@photoframd.bsky.social) December 2, 2025 at 11:03 AM

Kerry Howley, at NYMag, on “The agony and absurdity of working for RFK Jr.” This deserves to be read in full, but here’s the closing paragraphs:

… When the Epidemiologist went to work in September, she walked by windows covered in brown paper to mask bullet holes. To use the bathroom she walked by an X scrawled in red marker on the white wall; that was how the cops had let one another know they’d cleared the room. The Epidemiologist had meetings on her calendar that wouldn’t happen because the people they were with had been fired, but she could not remove the meetings from the calendar because the person who had put them there was no longer employed. She was volunteering at a dog shelter to deal with anxiety from the shooting.

In September, there were reports of C. auris in Kansas, but the Agency’s contract with the C. auris expert had expired. There was an outbreak of botulism in infant formula, and in another era the Agency’s scientists would have been on television issuing warnings, but they were not allowed to interact directly with the media. There was an HIV outbreak in Maine, and the state asked for a team, but no team was sent. Staff were ordered to change all references of mpox to monkeypox, and no one could come up with any real justification for this beyond forcing them to do something they considered racist.

“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” a top administration official said in a speech a few years ago. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.”

In October, some 1,300 more people were terminated, but then around 700 were told their termination had been a coding error and invited back to work. It’s like being in an emotionally abusive relationship, the Spreadsheet Queen told her friends. First they tell you you’re worthless. And then they start harassing you about little things, like with the five bullet points. And now you can’t communicate out. And you can’t work. And then you’re shot at, which seems like the height of it, but it’s not. And then he breaks up with you but realizes actually he wants you back.

Measles flourished in Utah and New Mexico, and scientists continued to gain new knowledge about a disease with us since at least the 12th century. Among the most recent discoveries is this: The measles virus, alone among known pathogens, results in “immunologic amnesia,” wiping away as with a memory the host’s hard-won ability to fight other diseases — flu, COVID, strep, anything. Measles dismantles in a few weeks what has been built over a lifetime of vaccination and exposure. What has been learned in the past will not carry forward into the future. When the old threats reassert themselves, the ailing body will have to start from scratch.

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RFK Jr. wants to delay the hepatitis B vaccine. Here’s what parents need to know.
Working out of a tribal-owned hospital in Anchorage, Alaska, liver specialist Brian McMahon has spent decades treating the long shadow of hepatitis B. Before a vaccine became available in the 1980s, he saw the virus…
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— articleweblog.bsky.social (@articleweblog.bsky.social) December 2, 2025 at 12:54 PM

KFF Health News:

Working out of a tribal-owned hospital in Anchorage, Alaska, liver specialist Brian McMahon has spent decades treating the long shadow of hepatitis B. Before a vaccine became available in the 1980s, he saw the virus claim young lives in western Alaskan communities with stunning speed.

One of his patients was 17 years old when he first examined her for stomach pain. McMahon discovered she had developed liver cancer caused by hepatitis B, just weeks before she was set to graduate from high school as valedictorian. She died before the ceremony…

The hepatitis B virus is transmitted through blood and bodily fluids, even in microscopic amounts, and the virus can survive on surfaces for a week. Like many of his patients, McMahon said, both children contracted hepatitis B at birth or in early childhood.

That outcome is now preventable. A birth dose of the vaccine, recommended for newborns since 1991, is up to 90% effective in preventing infection from the mother if given in the first 24 hours of life. If babies receive all three doses, 98% of them have immunity from the incurable virus, with the protection lasting at least 30 years…

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A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention vaccine advisory panel appointed by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is scheduled to discuss and vote on the hepatitis B birth dose recommendation during its two-day meeting starting Dec. 4, potentially limiting children’s access.

On Tucker Carlson’s podcast in June, Kennedy falsely claimed that the hepatitis B birth dose is a “likely culprit” of autism.

He also said the hepatitis B virus is not “casually contagious.” But decades of research shows the virus can be transmitted through indirect contact, when traces of infected fluids like blood enter the body when people share personal items like razors or toothbrushes…

President Donald Trump, Kennedy, and some newly appointed ACIP members have mischaracterized how the liver disease spreads, ignoring or downplaying the risk of transmission through indirect contact. The hepatitis B virus is far more infectious than HIV. Unvaccinated people, including children, can get infected from microscopic amounts of blood on a tabletop or toy, even when the infected person is asymptomatic…

Written by a physician. Friday will be the vote.
The Virus That Took My Father Could Become a Greater Threat www.nytimes.com/2025/12/01/o…
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— Pier Georg Elser Marton (@pierelsermarton.bsky.social) December 1, 2025 at 2:56 PM

[Gift link]:

… My father was a chronic carrier, which as many as 2.4 million Americans are. Eventually up to 40 percent will develop liver complications. Hepatitis B disproportionately affects Asian Americans, accounting for more than half of all chronic cases, even though we make up just 7 percent of the U.S. population. My father was not an IV drug user, nor did he visit sex workers, despite the assumptions that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his allies have made about who gets hepatitis B.

He could’ve gotten the virus when he was born. Or maybe from his brother, or his caregivers, or his friends. Nobody knows. That’s why vaccinating everyone is so important, regardless of people’s perceived risks.

The hepatitis B vaccine — and the current recommendation to give it at birth — is likely why years later, as a doctor, I cannot recall caring for a patient with liver cancer caused by this virus. It was the world’s first anticancer vaccine. To think that members of my father’s generation may be the last to die from this devastating infection is to grasp how truly remarkable medical progress is.

Yet the Trump administration is set to make this extraordinary scientific achievement unavailable for the youngest, most vulnerable group of Americans. If the C.D.C. advisory committee votes to change the guidelines, even if parents request the shot, health insurance may not be required to pay for it. (Perhaps some insurers will cover it, recognizing that a central tenet of medicine is prevention.)…

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We Can’t Diet and Exercise Our Way Out of the Next Pandemic www.nytimes.com/2025/11/26/o…
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— Joe Trippi (@joetrippi.bsky.social) November 28, 2025 at 7:07 AM

“The Real Meaning of MAHA Is You’re On Your Own” [gift link]:

In the event of a sudden pandemic, what should we do? This month, Jay Bhattacharya, the director of the National Institutes of Health, offered a remarkably blunt answer: nothing.

It’s been nearly six years now since the United States’ first reported cases of Covid-19, and the country is in a merciful lull when it comes to pandemic recriminations, as Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s ongoing war on vaccine confidence now dominates the public health culture wars. But Bhattacharya, writing with his deputy Matthew Memoli in City Journal, returns with a bill of Covid complaints, arguing that to prepare for a future infectious disease threat, the country should toss out the longstanding “pandemic playbook” and focus instead on making the population “metabolically healthy” — what you might think of as being fit.

Forget social distancing, in other words; forget masks and forget even a next-generation equivalent of Operation Warp Speed to deliver a next-generation equivalent of miraculous Covid vaccines, which saved millions of American lives and tens of millions of lives abroad. The best way to fight off a novel infectious disease, Bhattacharya and Memoli write, is to get the country into better physical shape before the emergency arrives and bet that our fitter bodies will be capable of simply fending it off, whatever the pathogen, however quickly it might spread and however deadly it might be…

We clean people will live. If you weaker vessels must die, what is that to us?…

Change in Headline
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— Editing the Blue-Gray Lady (@nytdiff.bsky.social) November 27, 2025 at 12:10 AM

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The Undermining of the C.D.C. www.newyorker.com/magazine/202…
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— Ellen Greaves (@ecgreaves.bsky.social) November 30, 2025 at 12:46 PM

From the New Yorker, “The Undermining of the C.D.C.”:

Two weeks ago, by inserting what must be the most notorious asterisk in modern public health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention caveated its long-standing position that vaccines do not cause autism. Under the direction of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services, a C.D.C. web page now contends that this is “not an evidence-based claim” and that research linking vaccines to autism has been “ignored by health authorities.” The fact that the original statement remains at all is due to an agreement with Senator Bill Cassidy, a physician and the chair of the Senate health committee, who disregarded decades of Kennedy’s vaccine skepticism to advance his confirmation after extracting a set of flimsy commitments that Kennedy is now betraying. The Autism Science Foundation said that it is “appalled” by the C.D.C.’s new stance; the American Medical Association warned of “dangerous consequences.”

The Department of Health and Human Services maintains that it is hewing to “gold standard, evidence-based science”—a piece of doublespeak so thick that it might unsettle Orwell. Discounting dozens of rigorous studies that have analyzed millions of patients and failed to connect vaccines to autism, the C.D.C. website claims that about half of parents of children with autism believe vaccines contributed to that autism. It cited a decades-old paper that surveyed a few dozen parents who strongly embraced alternative medicine, at two private practices in the Northeast. The web page points out that autism rates have risen in recent decades and so has the number of infant vaccinations—an observation that might also be made about prestige TV shows and pumpkin-spice lattes. The H.H.S. will now provide “appropriate funding” for studies on vaccines and autism, and last week it appointed a physician with a history of vaccine skepticism as the second-in-command at the C.D.C. The episode puts to rest any doubts about whether Americans can still trust information from the nation’s top health agency.

At stake is a question of the quality of information that should be taken seriously in public discourse and how that information should be communicated. Science may be the most powerful engine for grasping reality, but it suffers a rhetorical disadvantage. In science, the burden of proof falls on the one aiming to overturn the “null hypothesis”—the default position that one thing doesn’t cause another. But conspiratorial thinking is fuelled by the inverse: self-assured conjecture that demands a level of refutation no amount of evidence can offer. Proving the absence of a connection will always be harder than speculating about its existence. The language of science is measured and provisional; the language of politics is declarative and bombastic. In September, President Donald Trump told pregnant women to “fight like hell” not to take Tylenol, because of a potentially increased risk of autism in children; his Food and Drug Administration clarified that “a causal relationship has not been established and there are contrary studies in the scientific literature.” Tylenol, the agency wrote, remains “the safest over-the-counter” option for treating fever or pain.

The privilege that American scientists have taken for granted—one that is now being trampled—is the ability to go about their work free of political interference…

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Do Unvaccinated Kids Make You Horny? • Don’t settle for being the scourge of CBER and the COVID ward at the children’s hospital when you can also be the scourge of Hinge
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— Rasmussen Retorts (@rasmussenretorts.skystack.xyz) November 30, 2025 at 6:30 AM

(Crass, but true — and hilarious.)

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Scientists: don’t feed the doubt machine
From climate to COVID, naivety about how science is hijacked promotes more of the same.
Required re-reading from @drtomori.bsky.social
www.nature.com/articles/d41…
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— Anne Sosin (@annesosin.bsky.social) November 16, 2024 at 9:36 AM

Longer Healthcare / Plague Reads: A More Dangerous WorldPost + Comments (81)

Late Night Open Thread: ‘Merica, Heck Yeah!!!

by Anne Laurie| November 30, 202512:44 am| 44 Comments

This post is in: Excellent Links, Popular Culture

Column: Better than almost anything I’ve seen, “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives” illustrates the strange political and cultural era that our country has found itself in.
The soapy reality show is a perfect mirror of America’s strange cultural moment.

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— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost.com) November 15, 2025 at 4:30 PM

Because sometimes America is not only weirder than we imagine, but weirder than we can imagine… Monica Hesse, for the Washington Post: [gift link]

In 1827, a farm boy from rural New York named Joseph Smith claimed to have dug up some golden plates inscribed with an ancient text, which he then translated into English, which he then published as a tome called the Book of Mormon, which then became a religion, and two centuries passed, and because of all this we may now listen to a group of beachy-waved ding-dongs on television explain that their faith prohibits them from drinking alcohol, which is why they instead do ketamine.

It’s time to talk about the third season of “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives,” which is to say, let’s chat about America…

Who is MomTok? They are Mormon TikTok stars, and that is apparently all I can say because one of the official documents I signed stipulated that I could not reveal “who is back in MomTok and the new leader.” Luckily I cannot keep most of them straight anyway, but their names are all something like Bonnet, McKenzla, Christmas and Breeee. (If I accidentally revealed one correctly and turn up dead, Hulu’s parent company is in Burbank; send the police there first).

In this season, Bonnet, Chastely, Moronika, and Breeeee all contemplate the statuses of their marriages to the men of, yes, DadTok. They all talk about how family is the most important thing while appearing to spend most of their time trying to get away from their families via an endless treadmill of girls’ retreats. You have never seen so much organza worn by women over legal voting age. You have never experienced so many incidents of adults needing to “clear up the drama.” Bonnet, Organza, Citronella and Breeeeee are always needing to clear up the drama, and then plan more parties so that more drama can blork itself onto the screen.

“The vibe is slutty,” Bonnet explains to a fellow MomTok on the occasion of one such party.

“But not when you’re pregnant,” Gangreen protests.

“You can be slutty and pregnant!” Bonnet assures her with confidence…

I asked to write about “Mormon Wives,” because this is a show where it is not only possible but practically mandatory to be both slutty and pregnant. Where taking the Lord’s name in vain is seen as problematic, but slander, lying and underhandedness are not. Where the stars say things like “All my prayers have been answered, and the church is true,” but they are usually praying for fame and money rather than, say, Gaza.

Better than almost anything I’ve seen, this show illustrates the strange political and cultural era that our country has found itself in. “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives” is the perfect prosperity-gospel, purity-culture, Project 2025 distillation of femininity in the current bull market era of evangelical America…

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To understand what we’re talking about, we first need to place “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives” in its proper place in the reality television universe. On one end of the spectrum, you have the “Real Housewives” franchise, in which rich women delight in spending audaciously, dressing skimpily and behaving badly. At the other end of spectrum you have “Welcome to Plathville” or “Sister Wives,” in which modest women share how their faith encourages them to cover their shoulders, submit to traditional gender roles and birth families the size of platoons.

“The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives” takes the spectrum, bends it and hog-ties it into a bow. These are modest women who behave badly and dress skimpily but also submit to traditional gender roles and repeatedly announce their devotion to their faith…

The perception of purity is paramount, but the most telling scenes in the series are the ones where Bonnet, K8lin, Papaya and Breeeeeee discuss their sex lives. Many of them have experience with godly men who want to marry virgins but who then try their best to deflower their girlfriends. “Has anyone tried [a sex act I am not sure I am allowed to print in a family newspaper]?” Chablenzie asks the group in one episode, and the silence is its own answer. We are dealing with a crew who was taught that as long as there is no P-in-V intercourse, everything else still counts as chastity.

The women of MomTok have learned that paying lip service to female independence is the right branding and business move — snort ketamine every time someone claims to be “empowered” — while meanwhile planting themselves firmly under the male gaze. You’ll notice that empowerment, in this world, always looks like wearing sexy clothes and keeping their bodies toned and tanned for their husbands or prospective suitors. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that, of course, but it’s noteworthy that, in this show, nobody is finding empowerment via taking an accounting course or reading “The Feminine Mystique.”…

… The ethos of “Mormon Wives” will remind you of the ethos of Fox News anchors, or the White House press office, or a whole manner of female icons beloved by conservatives (Brett Cooper, Alex Clark), many of whom have built careers around looking spectacular while extolling traditional values and defending lawmakers whose behaviors are anything but traditional.

“The pageant world rules for success are similar to the Trumpworld rules of success,” Kimberly Hamlin, a professor of women’s history at Miami University of Ohio, told the Wall Street Journal in an article about the pageant-to-podium pipeline prevalent in the Trump administration. “Always look your best, always be ready for the bikini contest. Be charming. And always do what the boss wants.”…

Y’all can’t import this culture from somewhere else. We grew it right here…

Late Night Open Thread: <em> ‘Merica, Heck Yeah!!!</em>Post + Comments (44)

Open Thread: The Foreigners Are Laughing At Us, Again…

by Anne Laurie| November 29, 20253:29 pm| 83 Comments

This post is in: Excellent Links, Foreign Affairs, Trumpery

Gillian Tett: Trump went to war with Brazil's Lula, and in the end, Lula got everything he wanted, while Trump gained nothing whatsoever. This is not a unique case. Trump's trade wars are going spectacularly badly for the United States.

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— Scott Horton (@robertscotthorton.bsky.social) November 28, 2025 at 7:00 AM

Not that you can blame them. Gillian Tett, at the Financial Times. (The part I’m *not* quoting here is actually quite percipient):

How do you say “Taco” — as in “Trump Always Chickens Out” — in Portuguese? It is a question some Brazilians might ask now, with a smile.

Four months ago, US President Donald Trump announced 40 per cent additional tariffs on Brazilian imports (creating 50 per cent total levies), because he was furious about the country’s legal investigation into Jair Bolsonaro, its former president, and its clampdown on US Big Tech.

But President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva defiantly hit back at the bullying — boosting his domestic popularity — and defended the courts. A Brazilian judge has now sent Bolsonaro to jail.

There are at least three lessons here. The first is that the White House seems to be becoming more nervous about cost-of-living pressures. No wonder: recent surveys show that consumer sentiment is slumping in tandem with Trump’s approval rating. His team is scrambling to find ways to reduce grocery prices — and cutting agricultural tariffs is an obvious move.

The second lesson is that bullies often respond to strength. Yes, craven flattery can sometimes work, too; Switzerland reduced its own tariffs by sending gift-laden, grovelling executives to meet Trump. But China has pursued a path of belligerence with notable results. And Brazil’s defiance suggests that others are learning from Beijing. If nothing else, this suggests that anyone dealing with Trump should start by assessing how to exploit his weak spots.

Third: it pays to distinguish between tactics and goals when looking at the White House. That might not sound obvious, given Trump often seems to be woefully short of clear strategy. Indeed, his stance on Brazil, Ukraine and the Jeffrey Epstein case — to name but a few issues — has been so capricious that unpredictability is arguably the only predictable trait.

And — unsurprisingly — many critics interpret this policy capriciousness as either a sign of gross incompetence or personality disorders, or both; like a Tudor king, Trump’s narcissistic whims appear to drive his “court”.

But I think a more helpful frame is to borrow advice given to new recruits at some US investment banks, namely to try to identify in any action a hierarchy of “goals”, “strategies” and “tactics”…

Open Thread: The Foreigners Are Laughing At Us, Again…Post + Comments (83)

Open Thread: Philip Bump Is Now At MS-Now

by Anne Laurie| November 28, 202511:12 pm| 32 Comments

This post is in: Excellent Links, Republican Politics

What Marjorie Taylor Greene’s resignation says about the post-Trump GOP
When Trump finally leaves the stage, six different MAGA coalitions will vie for influence in the Republican Party.

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— Jon Cooper (@joncooper-us.bsky.social) November 25, 2025 at 8:49 AM

It’s the Washington Post‘s loss. “What Marjorie Taylor Greene’s resignation says about the post-Trump GOP“:

… Greene’s resignation announcement spurred a flurry of agreement from other Capitol Hill Republicans. Speaking anonymously — a very important caveat — they told reporters from Punchbowl News that Greene’s depiction of a neutered legislature was accurate and as frustrating as she suggested…

… I’d say there are now six post-Trump coalitions to consider.

The Never-again Trumpers. This evolution of the Never Trumpers is perhaps the most obvious group, the central carryover from Fabrizio Lee’s 2021 delineation. These aren’t entirely Mitt-Romney or George W. Bush-style Republicans, but the group includes many who would fit that description, people who sided with the establishment against the Tea Party or who objected fervently to Trump’s rejection of agreed-upon (if imperfectly manifested) conservative and American values.

It’s important to note that this group will almost certainly be larger in future years than it was in 2021. There will be more space for people in the waning days of Trump’s presidency (and after) who reject Trumpism on the grounds of his break with party tradition than there are now. Just as twice as many people said they were at Woodstock as actually were, there will likely be plenty of people who claimed to be Never Trump but were actually Very Much Trump.

The anti-establishmentarians. One segment of the right embraced Trump because he rejected the sort of establishment Bush and Romney embodied. Despite being a billionaire crony of America’s wealthy and powerful, Trump managed to tap into this sentiment by relentlessly casting institutions and the establishment as dangerous in aggressive terms.

To some extent, he believes it; to some extent he understands that eroding trust in everyone else also lowers the bar for how much trust he needs to have instilled in himself. As a political tactic, though, it worked, convincing millions of people to come out and vote for him who might otherwise have stayed home out of the belief that voting didn’t matter. We’ve already seen that this bloc invests its energy and power in Trump almost exclusively, with Republican candidates stumbling in years when Trump wasn’t on the ballot. It’s likely that, in a post-Trump world, most of these voters will dissipate back into indifference rather than coalesce around someone else. What it depends on, really, is that someone.

There’s an important subset of this group: the conspiracy theorists. They are inherently anti-establishment, since conspiracy theories necessarily depend on a rejection of fact and authority. But, thanks to Trump’s self-serving embrace of conspiracy theories as a means to accumulate power, those conspiracy theorists are also heavily loyal to Trump (as Fabrizio Lee found in 2021)…

The Trump loyalists. Just as Trump retained significant support in March 2021, he will also retain support in 2028 and beyond. It’s just a question of how much — and who is the elected standard-bearer for the idea.

Oddly, this may be the weakest of the six competitors for the right’s power. A lot of Republicans will position themselves as the inheritor of Trumpism, but since Trumpism is so dependent on Trump, those inheritors will never be able to actually keep the loyalists satisfied.

Perhaps the most potent non-Trump faction on the right at the moment is the America Firsters. Greene used the term repeatedly in her resignation statement, referencing the idea that MAGA hasn’t gone far enough in protecting the U.S. and its citizens.

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The emergence of America First as an alternative to MAGA is heavily a function of a tactical error Trump made. Trump has, to a significant extent, neglected his base, choosing to focus much of his attention during his second term on increasing the power of corporations and other wealthy Americans. (When, for example, is the last time he held a rally for his supporters?) A focus on boosting foreign partners, tariff carve-outs for allied businesses and Trump’s embrace of visas for skilled immigrants — not to mention his suggestion that America lacks similarly skilled workers! — have prompted allies (including Greene) to suggest that he’s taken his eye off the ball…

The extremist fringe. It used to be that white nationalism, antisemitism and Christian nationalism existed on the fringes of political argument, and nowhere near political power. But that’s changed, in part because political power on the right is so heavily dependent on attention as currency. In a social media, ask-your-own-questions world, policing the frontiers of the fringe and keeping it out of mainstream discourse becomes difficult, if not self-defeating: Why are you trying to keep me from learning about this? What are you afraid of?

Carlson’s recent interview with antisemite Nick Fuentes forced an uncomfortable conversation on the right about the extent to which antisemitism and, more narrowly, hostility to Israel would be welcomed in the right’s coalition. That there was a debate at all, though, shows how far from the fringe these ideas have progressed.

Christian nationalism, meanwhile, barely elicits any consternation at all. There’s a correlation between Trumpism and Christian nationalism; Trump’s second term has seen a focus on integrating Christianity into the federal government that’s been without equal in recent memory. At the same time, it has eliminated recognition of America’s ethnic and racial diversity, through the guise of combatting “DEI.” These ideas are already empowered and will be defended.

What isn’t clear is how much of the American right fits into this segment. By its nature, it’s tricky to measure, given the unwillingness of most people to admit these sorts of views (or even to recognize them within themselves). It’s similarly hard to measure the size of the other groups, given how nebulous the boundaries between them often are.

It is nonetheless safe to say that this is a broadly fair presentation of the battlefield as it stands. It will evolve further, partly in response to how and if Trump attempts to reconsolidate his base. It is inevitably the case, though, that Trump’s power will eventually fracture and be reassigned to candidates and voters who align at best imperfectly with his politics. Where that power will be centered is anyone’s guess.

Open Thread: Philip Bump Is Now At MS-NowPost + Comments (32)

Tide comes in. Tide goes out. You can’t explain that.

“When somebody takes the time to draw up a playbook, they’re gonna use it.”

There are consequences to being an arrogant, sullen prick.

When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.

The republican speaker is a slippery little devil.

The fundamental promise of conservatism all over the world is a return to an idealized past that never existed.

Not loving this new fraud based economy.

Speaking of republicans, is there a way for a political party to declare intellectual bankruptcy?

When you’re in more danger from the IDF than from Russian shelling, that’s really bad.

The National Guard is not Batman.

You know it’s bad when the Project 2025 people have to create training videos on “How To Be Normal”.

Republicans do not pay their debts.

Be a wild strawberry.

That’s my take and I am available for criticism at this time.

New McCarthy, same old McCarthyism.

Well, whatever it is, it’s better than being a Republican.

If you voted for Trump, you don’t get to speak about ethics, morals, or rule of law.

This chaos was totally avoidable.

Their shamelessness is their super power.

This really is a full service blog.

Optimism opens the door to great things.

Dear elected officials: Trump is temporary, dishonor is forever.

The current Supreme Court is a dangerous, rogue court.

Dumb motherfuckers cannot understand a consequence that most 4 year olds have fully sorted out.

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Open Thread: The Foreigners Are Laughing At Us, Again…

Open Thread: Philip Bump Is Now At MS-Now