Cruella: The Movie, The Treatment

Cruella, or how the villain of 101 Dalmations came to be the bitch who wanted to skin dogs to make a coat. Let’s workshop this, fellas. We’ve got to sell a shitload of movie tickets. Or at-home rentals or however they buy movies in this fucked-up era. We’ll tell this story from the villain’s perspective. Like Joker for broads. Or Wicked for broads.

We open at a dogfight in a warehouse. Obviously, we’re gonna need a lot of pitbulls. The more beaten up and worn down the dogs are, the better. In walks Emma Stone as Cruella de Ville, covered in dog blood. Freeze frame, record scratch. Emma Stone says in a voiceover, “That’s me. You’re probably wondering how I got in this situation.”

Emma Stone keeps talking. “All I ever wanted was be a gangster, a princess or the editor of Vogue Magazine.” Wait, we can’t actually use Vogue magazine in the movie. Let’s make up a stand-in for Vogue. Something like. . . uh. . . Runway! Yeah, that’s good enough. Anyway, Cruella she’s an upstart with a journalism degree and a boyfriend who’s a chef so he’s a pussy. Anyway she gets a job working at this fashion magazine Runway working for a real high-powered bitch and she can’t fit in at all but through hard work and pretending to be a fashion victim she gets promoted to executive assistant.

The editor (let’s pencil in Meryl Streep for this) takes Cruella to an exclusive fashion show in Paris, France but her boyfriend’s like “wah-wah you’ve changed” but she’s like “don’t be hatin'” and that’s going in the trailer “don’t be hatin'”. Anyway, they go to France and there’s a montage and that Christina Aguilera song plays and there’s a fashion show and they meet the designer (who’s a real fanook) and they ask him what’s his secret and he admits the clothes were made from dog hair.

A bunch of stuff happens in acts two and three and somehow she ends up at a dogfight covered in a blood. Hire a scriptwriter to figure it all out. I just produce these movies.

I haven’t figured out exactly what happens at the warehouse except one of the black guys looks at Emma Stone as Cruella covered in dog blood and says “Daaaaamn!” Michael Vick passed on the project because he “wants to put that part of his life behind me”.

Swiftquest 2021: RIP Swiftquest aka I am A Worse Person For Listening To Taylor Swift

This was supposed to be a year-long bit. It lasted five weeks.

I am a worse person for introducing Taylor Swift into my life. Her music, her persona, her fame, what it says about us as a society and my reaction to it.

I am more depressed. I am more bitter. I have more trouble sleeping and my stomach hurts. I have been taking more antacids and painkillers. It only takes five days to develop an opiate addiction, so I better stop before I become a full-blown junkie. I have new cavities in my mouth and my hair is falling out in clumps. If I’m not careful, I may resort to having my teeth pulled or break my fingers in order to get a pain script. I have sharted several times; in bed, in the car and while talking on the phone or watching TV. I am grinding my teeth a lot more. I’ve been watching The Masked Singer and not hating it. What am I not doing is remembering the so-called catchy songs that Taylor Swift writes and sings.

I’m only partially kidding in that last paragraph.

I was going to listen to all nine TS albums over the course of 2021 and I got as far as 1989, evermore and part of Red. Steely Dan fans should really take a listen to TS if they’re so damned impressed with production quality. It’s extraordinarily well-produced and well-performed pop music. It’s just. . . so goddamn boring and shallow. There’s good modern pop music out there but I’ll be damned if Taylor Swift is making it.

I’ve been looking at a parking lot rain puddle like it was a well. How can I possibly get mad at the shallowness of it all? I’ve been a fool for expecting more. To hell with me for wanting more. The Swifties would tell me to go to Hell, and they may be right. “Go listen to some more progressive rock, old man. This isn’t for you. Go listen to early Genesis or Zappa or Magma or any of that other old guy rock music that turns your crank while us Swifties make alternate fan art album covers for Reputation because the original is just too busy.”

What keeps me from being an total fuddy-duddy is recognizing that there is good modern pop music out there. Lorde’s Pure Heroine smokes the shit out of 1989, as does Kylie Minogue’s Aphrodite. And Lana Del Rey’s Born To Die is uneven but the best stuff on that is better than the best TS stuff. And I know I didn’t mention anything released in the last eight years. I know. That’s on me. I’ve got a lot of catching up to do, I admit.

Do you see what’s happening here? I am reduced to defending Lana Del Rey. What has happened to me? If I did a deep dive on LDR instead of Swift, I’d have a Xanax addiction by March.

WOULD IT KILL ALL OF YOU TO FIND SOMEBODY ELSE TO WORK WITH BESIDES JACK ANTONOFF? SERIOUSLY!

What’s really terrifying to me is that Taylor Swift is actually doing her best to be open and vulnerable but she’s so shallow and empty it looks like she isn’t. What does that say about her and her audience? Is she to girls what John Mayer is to guys? I swear to God you will never convince me to listen to John Mayer! Oh the songs those two wrote about each other. Vinegar reduces to its’ own essence.

What would happen if a Swiftie tried to listen to The Mothers of Invention for five weeks? I defy them to try because I fucking well tried to listen to their favorite artist and I am so goddamn miserable now. For all I know, they’d probably develop IBS and a jenkem addiction. I’d hate for Swifties to die in car crashes because of a loss of depth perception from repeated listens to Weasels Ripped My Flesh and Uncle Meat.

In conclusion, Taylor Swift if you ever read this (which I doubt but you seem like the type to have a Google alert set up for yourself), I don’t hate you but I fucking hate you so much. Look what you made me do. Look what you made me. Look what you fucking made me do. Look what you made me do. You destroyer of souls.

Swiftquest 2021: Prelude

Before I get started I should probably say a few words about what happened in Washington on the 6th. It seems a lot of people are of the mindset “don’t laugh because it’s over, cry because it happened” and I understand that. I think this makes the case for DC statehood because the best they can do at that moment is a few dozen Capitol police when thousands of idiots swarm in. That could happen at any time before or in the future and it’s only the whims of the mob that prevent it from happening. A DC Governor can marshal forces to protect the Capitol beyond the outmanned and outgunned security force. I can’t believe I’m agreeing with Glenn Greenwald when he says that there are billions spent on national security and we can’t protect our nation’s capital from a bunch of idiots with guns just walking in. We are in a lot of trouble. And a lot of leftists are jealous about the treatment these alt-right morons received vs. the treatment they would have received. I don’t blame them, but for god’s sake strap yourself up if you want respect from the cops. Or fear, which is the same thing.

Now let’s get to the reason for the season. I’m embarking on a mental journey in 2021. I’m the kind of guy who might go to China to teach children English if he had initiative and knew any Chinese. But even if I wanted to, we’re currently in a pandemic which restricts travel. So I’m going to listen to Taylor Swift for a year and document my findings. Maybe I’ll learn something about her, about myself, about entertainment, fandom, and this crazy world we live in.

I’m going on a Swiftquest.

This wouldn’t be hard for a lot of people. Many people love Taylor Swift. Millions, in fact. I do not consider myself one of those people.

Here is a list of my favorite bands/artists: Frank Zappa, Queen, Sparks, Frank Zappa, The Tubes, The Sensational Alex Harvey Band, Zappa, The Mothers Of Invention, Todd Rundgren, Zappa, Captain Beefheart, Fleetwood Mac, The Residents, Zappa, FZ, and also Zappa. You know those Spotify Wrapped things they put out every year? Zappa is my #1 artist five years running. My favorite Zappa album is Weasels Ripped My Flesh.

I can’t think of two different artists but I can say that about Frank Zappa and most pop stars. And listening to nine Taylor Swift albums will not be anywhere as difficult listening to the first nine Frank Zappa/Mothers of Invention albums. It would be easy to listen one time and shake it off, shake it off but that’s not what I want do. I want to live in these albums for a while. I want to get to know them. Maybe even wear their skin like a dress.

I’m going to start with 1989 because I was led to believe it was the best one. I’ve listened to it four times. So far I appreciate it as a pop album. I will listen to it more. This journey will not be in chronological order, obviously.

My prep work for this venture has consisted of watching the Reputation World Tour special on Netflix along with the Miss Americana documentary. I will probably discuss these at length in future posts. I will even watch the documentary again just because I think it reveals things about her that she doesn’t expect it to, at least from an outsider’s perspective. A younger me would not be able to do this. A younger me would just trash this music and be done with it. But there has to be something there. Right? Can both these things sit on my shoulders? This is more than entertainment, at least for some people.

In conclusion, I’m glad we have the Internet in it’s current form because there’s no way I would beg, borrow, buy or steal a Taylor Swift album for any reason, let alone to review/discuss it. This was inconceivable twenty years ago, which is the one way the world is better. I’m going to listen to it on my free Spotify account, because I don’t care how money Taylor Swift makes from streaming.

I hope I make it through this journey alive. Coming soon: 1989.

“Some people think that if they go too far/they’ll never get back to where the rest of them are…”

Let’s Kill Twitter

Happy New Year 2021. Best of luck in the new year. We have a lot on our plates. Getting some stimulus checks, yeah? Paying our rent and keeping our apartments, right? How about a little thing called NOT GETTING COVID AND STAYING ALIVE! Amirite, gang?

One thing that keeps coming up as the Trump administration flames out is the potential repeal of Section 230. Passed in 1996 and described as one of the “most important speech-enhancing statues” ever passed by Congress, the Communications Decency Act (CDA) categorically shields Internet services from liability for publishing third-party content.

The immediate of Section 230 is uncertain. Trump wants to revoke it completely and incoming President Biden wants to change it as well in order to protect children from disturbing material… like a drawing of Lindsey Graham being sodomized by a feral cat, for example.

My argument is any time you do something for the children, you end up hurting everyone else. If you want to protect the children, just get rid of Twitter altogether.

Think about it. Their brains won’t be poisoned by the toxic stupidity. They won’t get in trouble when they’re older because they said a racial slur at age fifteen. And most of them have moved on to cooler apps anyway.

Mostly I want to see Twitter die because I can’t tell someone to STFU without getting a 12-hour timeout. I don’t threaten to harm people or post furry porn. I call out fucking morons and get suspended. The terms of service took the place of the First Amendment.

One of the two things is going to happen. Trump gets his way and Section 230 gets repealed and Twitter and Facebook (and WordPress, for that matter) get sued out of existence. I’ll be okay with that even that means the Internet I have always known dies. It was a better world before social media. We’ll just need to start again.

The other things that happens is Biden gets his way and changes Section 230. Then all the websites pull a Tumblr and shove off all the adult content. A nice Internet for the nice people.

Fuck that. I’d rather blow it up. But I’d like most of all to kill Twitter to save Section 230. It would be the most noble thing Twitter ever did.

The Best Albums Of An Entirely Made Up 2020

What a year, huh? I mean, so much to talk about! And what a year in MUSIC! So much to celebrate! This is the time of year when you see these end-of-year best-of lists for albums, and inevitably you’ve never heard of most of these things. In fact, you probably only heard one new song. . . “WAP” by Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion. And the only album you heard was Fetch The Bolt Cutters by Fiona Apple. Neither of those things are on this list this year but these entirely made up entries are and rest assured they have no basis in reality whatsoever.

Cim Jarrey, Cim Jarrey I

The post-prog rock of the controversial Phoenix, Arizona’s Cim Jarrey flowers all over their debut album, the first in what is purported to be a multi-part sci-fi epic about the last white man on a post-apocalyptic desiccated Earth. Some people think “Moisture” is a blatant Residents ripoff. Other people think the album’s subject matter is panders to the alt-right. Quite a few people hate the band name. 

Sonic Youth, Dryer

That band you pretended to enjoy in the ’80s and ’90s has been rebooted to be to pretended to be enjoyed by your children now. Much like Ghostbusters, Sonic Youth is now all women. Dryer is a sequel to 1995’s Washing Machine, regarded by all as the best SY album. Everyone in the band is named Khloe. Best track: “Klimb That Mountain”.

IAMAKAT, onlyfans (12″ single)

They didn’t release an album but the debut single by Brooklyn experimental dance music duo IAMAKAT is an indication of where the genre is headed. The daughter of a New York Times Magazine writer and her DJ boyfriend, their first and so far only song is empowering with its’ refrain of “SEX! WORK! IS! REAL! WORK!” over sputtering slippery beats. It is unlikely they will ever record together again.

Black Twitter Wikipedia Page

The most relevant cultural force in America is social media and the most thriving part of social media is Black Twitter. If you tap into the angular strains of Black Twitter, you will be “sipping the tea” and going “Yassss Queen” in no time. But if you’re a confused, agitated Caucasian, where to start? Why not check out the non-musical Wikipedia page about Black Twitter? At least it’s not Scottish Twitter. 

Approaching, Untitled 

Perhaps the best shoegaze-funk band to come out of. . . England, probably since. . . I dunno. . . that other band you probably heard of.  Were they a funk band though? I mean. . . they played a something kind of funk music but they were a rock band. I dunno. All I know is that shoegaze is automatically cool and especially if it comes from England and funk is always great unless Jamiroquai plays it. So there. Listen to Approaching. 

2020 Honorable Mention List

Chunk Harrington & Boot Hooper – The Cattlemen, Vol. 1

Chase The Other Rapper – I Was Going To Send You A Link To My Favorite Pornhub Video But Then My Mom Got A Job

Obligatory LGBTQIA Placeholder Album Goes Here – lorem ipso facto “uplifting”

Bleedy – Demos for Avril Lavigne 

Army Of Fists – Meat Justice

Scott Bakula – Back To Bakula

Smokey & Marmalade – Live via Zoom Call

Baaaaayyyyybaaaayyyyyy – Toxic Masculity, The Mixtape

FEMINISM – Nice Tits

Burning Lava Corporation – An Orgy During A Funeral Where Everyone’s Wearing Blackface

Viper – I wasnt trying but you listened to it anyway

It Really Is A Miracle That I Have Lived This Long

When I was a little boy, probably around five years old, I went to the dentist. They put me under anesthesia for some type of procedure that I have forgotten. I woke up with a headache, sobbing and inconsolable. The dentist offered me one of those shitty suckers but I didn’t care. I was a mess.

As a result I have avoided anesthesia for all dental procedures since. It was that traumatic to me as a child. I’ve always gone for the local anesthesia instead, figuring I can tough out whatever they’re going to do to me. And until last week, that seemed like the case.

I’ve been needing to have a gum graft for some time now. What happens is they take some synthetic tissue (or from a cadaver) and grafting it onto the gums of a healthy patient. This is something I should have taken the anesthesia for.

For one thing, you have to keep your mouth open for a very long time while the dentist makes incisions, implants the new tissue and puts in the sutures. It’s a lengthy process. Eventually, you will get a headache from keeping your mouth open so long and from staring up into the lights the whole time. They beam that bright light into your mouth, you know? It’s exhausting.

I severely underestimated the amount of sutures it would take to close up everything. In September, I accidentally cut my left elbow and needed five stitches to sew it back up. Now there’s a bit of scar left but it’s patched up reasonably well. I figured there’s four teeth that need to be patched up, I’ll only need a few stitches.

WRONG! The dentist pulled out a suture over a foot long and began sewing in and out of my mouth. Then he got another. Then he got some smaller ones. It was exhausting. I left that place a broken man.

These sutures will remain in my mouth for eight weeks. I can’t eat solid food for a week and I’m supposed to talk as little as possible. Do you know how difficult that is for me? Shut up and enjoy your applesauce, KP.

I have some tips for you if you go to the dentist and need to have something as intense as a gum graft done. First, DO get anesthesia. Second, try to drink water before you go in so you won’t get dehydrated. Third, if you choose to not get anesthesia (because you don’t have the insurance for it or whatever), don’t just stare into the lights the entire time like an idiot. Feel free to close your eyes or put on some sunglasses. Four, if you choose anesthesia and wake up with a headache, it’s probably because you had to keep your mouth open wide for a really long time. And then you’ll realize why you cried when you were five years old after waking up from anesthesia at the dentist. It will all make sense to you eventually.

The way I walk through life, it really is a miracle that I have lived this long.

Review: “Zappa” by Alex Winter

November 1, 2020 – 9:36 p.m.

Nothing is normal anymore. N.I.N.A. Election day is Tuesday. People are acting as if this is the last normal weekend before all hell breaks loose. They forgot the last few years. Keep your eye on the ball. N.I.N.A. If everything were normal, we wouldn’t be where we are now.

Everybody goes about their daily business, as do I. This weekend I took in a film called Zappa (Magnolia Pictures), a documentary directed by Alex Winter (the guy from the Bill & Ted movies) about the musician/composer Frank Zappa. It’s due for release later this month but I watched it as part of a virtual screening through IFF Boston.

I’ve been a fan of Zappa’s for more than half my life but I didn’t know what to expect. I sort of expected a straight-up music documentary. What the movie focused on was the man in the context of the time he came up in and what he tried to accomplish during a turbulent time in American history.

If you’re a fan, this movie covers a lot of the bases that need to be covered in Zappa’s life. Broad strokes are painted about the major events in his career and life (for example: his experimental performances in NYC in the ’60s, his participation in the Congressional “Porn Rock” hearings in the mid-80s, and his dealings with Czech President Václav Havel in the ’90s).

I forgot that he hosted SNL in the ’70s. That would definitely not happen now. I’ve never seen the SNL that he hosted but apparently it sucked. So we can go ahead and pop that illusion that the Aykroyd/Belushi years were glory days compared to now.

This is a movie about the how the man responded to the age he lived in. Think about the times we live in right now. Fascism is here in our country. It is firmly entrenched and rooted in our society and our government. How are we supposed to fight that? We’re told to vote, vote, vote and vote some more. Doesn’t feel very assuring, does it?

In comes this guy Frank Zappa with his band the Mothers of Invention, who sang in 1967, “Take a day and walk around, watch the Nazis run your town, then go home and check yourself, you think we’re singing ’bout someone else, but you’re plastic people!” Zappa always knew fascism was around the corner and it had to be dealt with. Freedom was/is a thing worth defending and that battle didn’t end in revolutionary times.

Frank Zappa made this country a little more interesting while he was around, by doing his part to counter the corporate cake-and-circus state of entertainment and thinking. His absence since passing in 1993 is sorely missed, not just in the greater cultural landscape, but more acutely in the lives of the people interviewed who worked with him in his many different versions of the Mothers and subsequent lineups (percussionist Ruth Underwood is a touching example of this).

And this movie will assure you that there is no calm before the storm, merely cause to the current effect we endure.

Zappa is 127 minutes long and is directed by Alex Winter. It is set for official release Thanksgiving week. It is available through Magnolia Pictures in North America.

Democracy: Our National Nightmare

American democracy! Yeah! Sick of it! Who’s with me? Amirite? Gimme a hell yeah!

Seriously? Aren’t you tired of it yet? I sure am! It’s got to be over soon, right? Honestly, we’re just pretending at this point.

And while we’re at it, let’s get rid of American Exceptionalism! Right? Who’s with me? Let’s stop pretending We’re Number One? We suck. I drive past too many hastily hand-painted signs that look like something out a third world county. 

For years, this family down the road from me used to sell pumpkins every Halloween season, they put up a hastily spray-painted sign on plywood by the side of the road every year that read in big block letters “PUNKIN”. 

Now this could just be anecdotal evidence, and it could just be me making fun of a family who let their child make a sign. But you have to understand that one man’s vote doesn’t automatically equal another man’s vote, and another man’s education needs to equal another man’s education and that won’t happen unless we are all dumber. When you hear that Kentucky is forty-sixth in education in the country, you start to think. . . you won’t be happy until every state is tied for LAST and we are all equally as dumb as Mississippi.

But back to my point, I just want to be left alone with my guns and my uterus and I can’t do that because I have to watch the fat cats in Washington like a hawk. It’s exhausting after a while, to the point of demoralizing. Election cycles are especially exhausting because you just want them to be done with. They beat you over the head with ads in case you’re the .01 of undecided voters. Who are these undecided voters? What world do they live in? What is their day like? What is their favorite sexual position? 

By the time an election is over, especially a Presidential election, you don’t care anymore. You’re tired of government. You want to be left alone. You don’t want to know about it anymore. You don’t want to be “woke”. You want to go to bed and stay there, for years if necessary. And that’s when they put the screws to you. When you’re not watching.

Of course, they’ll be happy to screw you while you watch. We should really tear this country apart but instead we let other people do it for us. 

American democracy is a shitty illusion. It’s like a magician who has the bird in his jacket cuff where you can obviously see the bird before he pulls it out. Just pull a ’70s John Cale and decapitate the fucking bird already.

Everything Is Worse Now… Or Is It?

There’s a few more hours left in September 11, 2020 as I write this. It’s the nineteenth anniversary of the attack on our country by terrorists.

Sometimes I see people who are younger than nineteen and I wonder what their lives must be like. I am forty-two, and I’m a fat guy who’s hairline is starting to recede. I don’t ask where the good times gone because I know the good times weren’t all that great. But they seem so much worse now. I ask myself: are they worse now or is it just me thinking that?

It would be easy to point at right now. We’re in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, one that our country is struggling with and that many of our citizens refuse to believe is even a real problem. We have to wear masks in public and socially distance and yet a lot of people refuse to do so, believing it impinges on their personal freedoms. Meanwhile, they don’t even know what real freedom is.

We’ve given our information away to social media. We’re more miserable than ever because of these tools that were ostensibly created to unite us and give us a common ground. We’re deeply ignorant of what’s going on around us, what’s going on in other countries, our own history. We’re basically focused on our individual attempts to scrape out an existence, and it inhibits our ability to see the bigger picture.

I want to say that a lot of things changed since September 11, 2001 and they did in the bigger picture. Maybe that was the beginning of the end of the United States as a major superpower as we tried to fight an unwinnable fight against a concept (terrorism) instead of an knowable enemy with concrete borders, throwing good resources after bad, costing many lives in the process. And maybe I’m wrong because the United States has always struggled to live up to this ideal we held it up to be. . . this bastion of freedom, peace and integrity.

And how does any of that affect the average person who’s just trying to survive in an increasingly difficult world? Did you ever think that the worst people in the world would rip off this world for scrap metal and leave you with the rest? Why would they do something so callous? They have to live here too, don’t they?

This is only heartbreaking if you think life can be so much better. If you think it can only get worse and it will, none of this affects you much. If you don’t resist the torture and submit to it, you grow numb to the pain. But some of us can’t help ourselves. We keep saying how wrong it is, and pointing out how not only is the emperor naked but dangerous and cruel. And it never gets easier. The older you get, the more it hurts. The more you know, the tougher it gets.

And even that’s not enough because you keep searching for an answer to the question “Now what?”

But ask that nineteen-year-old how life is and see what their response. Are they filled with life? Are they ready to take on their world? Are they young and arrogant and knowing everything? Do they know how arrogant they are yet? I envy that energy and I’d love to have it one more time. Some men my age divorce their wives and buy Camaros in order to fake it. I’d settle for a push towards real change in this country.

That’s me, being unreasonable again.

I Can’t Believe I Have To Think About This Kid Again

Nick Sandmann is working for Mitch McConnell’s re-election campaign.

You’ll remember him from this.

Recently he spoke at the Republican National Convention.

I actually want to feel sorry for him but he won’t let me.

Think about it. You’re a high school boy. You haven’t begun the aging process. You pretty much think you’re the shit. You’re on a field trip. Forget about the fact that you’re going to an anti-abortion rally, because what seventeen-year-old boy really cares about abortion unless he’s had his parents pay for one. Forget about all that indoctrination you’ve received from your parents, your church, your Catholic school upbringing. You’re going to a big city where a lot happens. You’ve never seen anything like this before, and by that I mean black people.

You’ve been left unsupervised in the big city after the big rally with all your classmates when suddenly you find yourself being yelled and cursed at by some actual honest-to-God black people. You’ve seen black people (not up close) but not like these black people. You will be told later that these are Black Israelites. What are they doing here? This was the day for your rally. Who do they think they are? They’re calling you a honky and a cracker and worse words than that. No adults there to tell you to ignore them. What do you do? You do a giant New Zealand haka dance because you’re an idiot and you don’t know any better and you move in closer to them because you don’t know anything about boundaries.

Out of nowhere, here comes this old Indian guy beating a drum and chanting. You are completely gobsmacked and you can’t help but laugh at the strangeness of the situation. You know he’s harmless so you smile. And FLASH, you are preserved for an eternity. The stuck-up Kentucky private school kid sneering at an elderly Native American.

You can call that a media narrative but that’s also exactly what happened.

Ideally, Nick, you’d just go away and whatever happened happened. Whatever political ideology you ended up with (probably conservative), hopefully one day you’d eventually come to the conclusion that you were just some immature kid reacting to a messed up situation. There were no adults in that room, certainly none that you respected because your chaperones were off somewhere doing God knows what. Perhaps they had been there, there would have been a different outcome. Instead, you end up being the poster child for white privilege.

It’s not really your fault. You were just a kid caught up in a dumb situation. You may complain about being cancelled by the left, but you’ll find it’s equally if not more frustrating to be used by the right which is the path you’re heading down.

You’ll spend the rest of your life as a useful. . . I won’t say idiot, but being told you were right when you weren’t right and you’ll never actually get to become your own person. You’ll only be someone else’s idea of who you ought to be. Your parents’ idea, your church’s idea, Mitch McConnell’s vision of you. What a terrifying reality it would be to be used to by a political machine.

I said I wanted to feel sorry for Nick Sandmann a little bit but I don’t. This guy will probably never feel a dark night of the soul ever in his life. Also he lives more comfortably than you and I ever will. I hope his conscience troubles him. I hope the voices in his head grow louder as he grows older. I hope by the time he’s a grandfather, they roar as loud as a thousand klaxons.

And I hope Amy McGrath wins in November.