Robert P. George’s Dec. 7 op-ed, “There are valid debates among conservatives. This isn’t one.,” argued that conservatives should stop promoting “white supremacy, antisemitism, eugenics, the subjugation of women, and other forms of ideological extremism and bigotry.”

You know what this means. It means it’s too late. Telling conservatives to stop being bigots is admitting they’re bigots. And I’m pretty sure a professor of jurisprudence telling them to cut it out isn’t going to work. Hey, you guys — stop being bigots! Oh, okay.

I served in the Reagan and George W. Bush administrations and would like to believe conservatism wasn’t always thus, but I’m beginning to wonder. Was the virus from which today’s bigotry sprang lying dormant in us back then, like chickenpox leading to shingles? The moral herpes virus? Was it like a recessive gene long buried in our ancestral DNA that suddenly got switched on and has become dominant?

Are these new conservatives in fact our descendants? Were we always secretly like this but were pretending we weren’t? I’m hoping these new conservatives are mutants, but I’m not so sure about that anymore.

Speaking of network takeovers, this analysis from Mediaite about the attempt to take over CNN is worth reading.

Imagine if Hunter Biden were helping assemble billions in Saudi and Qatari financing so a progressive media owner could take over Fox News while quietly assuring the White House that he planned to replace hosts and reshape the network’s direction. The national reaction would be immediate. Congressional hearings, emergency ethics panels, a weeklong media frenzy.

Now consider what is actually happening. The developing Paramount–Skydance effort to acquire Warner Bros Discovery involves outreach to sovereign wealth funds in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE. Reuters reported that Jared Kushner helped connect David Ellison’s team with those funds as they explored financing options for a potential hostile bid. These investments are not confirmed or finalized, and Axios has reported that the foreign investors “have agreed to forgo any governance rights – including board representation – associated with their non-voting equity investments.”

. . .

This is not a narrow corruption story. It is much worse — evidence of a structural weakness in the American democratic system that has only recently been exposed, and shockingly ignored. The United States has few meaningful guardrails preventing political families, foreign sovereign wealth, and corporate acquirers from converging inside a transaction that reshapes national news. That is media capture in the modern sense. It rarely looks like censorship. It looks like a phone call before a regulatory decision. A meeting that never happens because someone signals it shouldn’t. A tonal shift in coverage that feels organic but reflects the results of pressure nobody documented and nobody needed to. Influence that is subtle, diffuse, and consequential.

. . .

This is emerging as one of the central problems we face with this newly empowered authoritarian oligarchy. I am not sure what anyone can do about it. I would guess there are lots of ideas circulating and I’ll try to keep up with it as well as I can. But this is bad, very bad.

And it’s not like social media is going to come to our rescue. Facebook, X and tik tok are now in right wing hands and I’m not at all confident that the Google platforms aren’t going to fully join that crowd.

. . .

The other night I heard “Carol of the Bells” echoing from the gallery of a cathedral, and this most beautiful of our Christmas songs made me a little sad.

Long before I knew what the song was called, or anything about it, I thrilled to “Carol of the Bells.” It came to me in my little American capitalist childhood as the background for a television advertisement for André champagne. Even as a very young child, I could tell that there was something strikingly different about the enchanting melody, as though it came from another world. And so it does.

Most of the songs one hears around the holidays, at least in North America, are either arrangements of traditional songs from France, England, Germany, or Austria, or twentieth-century compositions. They have a wonderful variety of messages and meanings. But none of them has anything like the driving ostinato four-note melodic pattern of “Carol of the Bells,” nor its bold polyphony when sung.

“Carol of the Bells” stands out because it arises from a different tradition: that of Ukrainian folk songs, and in particular ancient Ukrainian folk songs welcoming the new year, summoning the forces of nature to meet human labor and bring prosperity. These are called shchedrivky, “carols of cheer” or, a bit more literally, songs to the generous one. The word “magic” is used a good deal around Christmas; this song has its origins in rituals that were indeed magical. And perhaps this is exactly why it reaches us.

. . .

Perhaps this is unrealistic, but I wish that the Ukrainian origins of the song would always be recognized. Ukrainian culture is very significant in our world, but our awareness of it is minimal: the assassination of Leontovych and the transformation of Shchedryk is just one minor example of this colonial history, one that is continued during Russia’s present invasion of Ukraine. In December 2022, ten months into the present invasion, Shchedryk/Carol of the Bells made a beautiful (and bilingual) return to Carnegie Hall, which helped a little.

(Video and lyrics are embedded in article. It is a beautiful rendition.)

. . .

Yes, it’s that special season…for those obligatory “top 10” lists. Keep in mind, I can’t see ’em all; these picks are culled from the first-run features that I reviewed this year.

. . .

Holy Krampus…have I really been writing reviews here for 19 years?! I was but a child of 50 when I began in November of 2006 (I was much older then, but I’m younger than that now). Here are my “top 10” picks for each year since I began writing for Hullabaloo.

(You may want to bookmark this post as a handy reference for movie night).

. . .

The 25th anniversary of Bush v Gore was yesterday. The modern vote suppression movement (as opposed to the earlier vote suppression of Jim Crow) got its mojo from that Supreme Court decision, learning for the first time that the partisan Supreme Court would have their backs. Virtually everything bad that has happened in this country over the past quarter century can be traced to that moment.

Dave Roberts of Volts, (who I’ve been following on social media for 20 years and who is one of the most insightful curmudgeons on BlueSky — a man after my own heart 😉 wrote this about that momen]:

In terms of US politics, Bush v. Gore is the defining event of the century. It set the template: a ruthless right that instinctively seeks power & doesn’t give a shit about rule of law…and a bunch of hapless, feckless octogenarian Dems worried about the good opinion of centrist opinion columnists.

It was like waving a giant white flag and announcing, “the people on the side of rule of law, democracy, and decency WILL NOT FIGHT AS HARD AS THEIR OPPONENTS. They don’t have the grit or guts for it. Act accordingly.” And readers … they have acted accordingly.

Back in 2001, the right-wing takeover of US media was still a ways off. “Right-wing media” was still a distinct, separate thing. Nonetheless, the conservative browbeating of “MSM” voices had been loud enough, long enough, to suppress the natural civic horror at GOP cheating in the election.

This, more than anything, is what the right realized in the wake of the 2000 election: in a moment of chaos or crisis, they can do anything — *anything*, no matter how overtly criminal or gross — & just smooth it over later with “both sides” pablum. “Let’s not fight, let’s look forward,” etc.

They applied that lesson again & again in subsequent years. Bush II was basically a criminal administration, even aside from its world-historical blunders — allowing 9/11, f’ing up Afghanistan, f’ing up Iraq, f’ing up Katrina, f’ing up the economy — but after it was over it took a matter of *months* before the media had collectively smudged & smeared the whole thing, “ah, there were many fights, who can say, let us come together & look forward rather than backward,” etc. Crime –> no consequences. Greater crime –> still no consequences. And so on, still today.

I was still in the throes of anger about the Clinton impeachment in which the media had sided with the Republicans and then this happened. (Remember Sally Quinn and “the village”?) I will never get over being told to “get over it” by Wolf Blitzer on CNN in the days after the decision. I screamed at the TV, “who do you think you are????” It radicalized me.

. . .

. . .

And let’s be clear: it doesn’t work when you’re three. It doesn’t work in kindergarten. That shit doesn’t fly when you’re a teenager either. Try telling a teacher, a cop, or your parents “I don’t know” while standing next to the front porch you drove your car into and insisting it came out of nowhere, and see how that goes.

But somehow, if you’re a seventy-nine-year-old man who brags about having aced multiple dementia screenings like they’re Mensa admissions, it becomes sacred. Untouchable. A full conversational dead end. The room closes around it like wet cement, setting hard before anyone thinks to pull their foot out.

. . .

Gang leader Gregory Bovino, the “Commander Op At Large CA” above, who is going to every city Trump has specifically targeted to cos-play some kind of robo-cop fantasy, says everyone, including citizens, must carry immigration documents. What?

Do you have any immigration documents? I don’t. Apparently, a Real ID doesn’t suffice. Do we all have to carry passports? Does it even matter since they are refusing to even look at them until they can get you into their special, federal, bio-data collection system?

This all stems from Kavanaugh’s ridiculous opinion that stopping people based on their looks constitutes probable cause because it’s no big deal to be brutalized, detained and terrorized if you are a U.S. citizen. Get used to it.

The Supreme Court apparently got their fee fees all hurt because they’re taking criticism from lower courts and the public for their enabling of Trump’s disgusting dragnet. So, as right wingers all do when they get criticized, they’re lashing out like 12 year olds and staging a temper tantrum. (Who could have seen that coming from Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings?) Some of their wives also give the game away.

I fully expect that this authoritarian crackdown will be upheld because of this embarrassing dynamic. The Supreme Court majority has no more seriousness, integrity or dignity than the lowliest podcaster, influencer, or Fox News propagandist. Where they once proved themselves to be partisans they are now no better than shit posters on Twitter.

I mean, the whole history of banking is: "Bankers think of a way to do reckless things that are wildly profitable (in the short term) and catastrophic (in the long term). They offer bribes and other corrupt incentives to their watchdogs to let them violate the rules, which leads to utter disaster." From the 19th century "panics" to the crash of '29 to the S&L collapse to the 2008 Great Financial Crisis and beyond, this just keeps happening.

. . .

The alternative is that these regulators are so bafflingly stupid that they can't be trusted to dress themselves. "My stablecoin is a fit financial instrument to integrate into the financial system" is as credible a wheeze as some crypto bro walking up to Cory Booker, flashing a homemade badge, and snapping out, "Federal Wallet Inspector, hand it over."

I mean, at that point, I kind of hope they're corrupt, because the alternative is that they are basically a brainstem and a couple of eyestalks in a suit.

What I'm saying is, "We just can't figure out if crypto is violating finance laws" is a statement that can only be attributed to someone very stupid, or in on the game.

. . .

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil — It's an extraordinary achievement to win the Nobel Peace Prize. But for this year's laureate, even getting to the ceremony was a feat of its own.

María Corina Machado spent more than a year in hiding after her opposition movement defeated Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in last year's election by a wide margin, according to voting records validated by international observers. Maduro refused to leave office and ordered a massive crackdown on the opposition.

Getting Machado out of Venezuela and safely to Oslo required an operation worthy of a thriller. At the center of that mission was U.S. Special Forces Veteran Bryan Stern, the bearded, broad-shouldered founder of Grey Bull Rescue Foundation. Stern and his team of U.S. military veterans have pulled off hundreds of extractions around the world. But this one, he says, was different.

"She's the second most popular person in the Western Hemisphere after Maduro," he said." Because of that signature, that's what made this operation very hard."

. . .

Stern admits he was a bit star struck by Machado. He'd followed her fight for democratic change for years. He'd always assumed Venezuela's "Iron Lady" got her nickname from her political steeliness. But after that night, he says it's something more.

"She's gnarly," he said, laughing. "Pretty awesome."

Every few months, my mother, a 57-year-old kidney transplant patient who lives in a small city in eastern China, embarks on a two-day journey to see her doctor. She fills her backpack with a change of clothes, a stack of medical reports and a few boiled eggs to snack on. Then, she takes a 90-minute ride on a high-speed train and checks into a hotel in the eastern metropolis of Hangzhou.

At 7am the next day, she lines up with hundreds of others to get her blood taken in a long hospital hall that buzzes like a crowded marketplace. In the afternoon, when the lab results arrive, she makes her way to a specialist’s clinic. She gets about three minutes with the doctor. Maybe five, if she’s lucky. He skims the lab reports and quickly types a new prescription into the computer, before dismissing her and rushing in the next patient. Then, my mother packs up and starts the long commute home.

DeepSeek treated her differently.

My mother began using China’s leading AI chatbot to diagnose her symptoms this past winter. She would lie down on her couch and open the app on her iPhone.

“Hi,” she said in her first message to the chatbot, on 2 February.

“Hello! How can I assist you today?” the system responded instantly, adding a smiley emoji.

. . .