We Hunted The Mammoth
The two most influential newspapers in the US put out a set of dueling vaccine op-eds today, with the Washington Post’s Aaron Blake delivering up evidence of what his article’s headline called the “slow and steady decline of the vaccine skeptics.” Over in the New York Times, meanwhile, science writer Tara Haelle argued that “[t]he Anti-Vaccine Movement Is Getting Stronger.”
You don’t need a PhD in Critical Race Theory to notice that a lot of the knuckleheads talking shit about Simone Biles for dropping out of the Olympics are white dudes who couldn’t do a single cartwheel to save their lives. Piers Morgan. Charlie Kirk. Ben Shapiro.
Oh, and this dude, Doug Gottlieb of Fox Sports, who seems mad that Biles’ mental health isn’t bad enough to keep her from sports altogether.
On Tuesday, record-shattering gymnast Simone Biles, evidently rattled by an unexpectedly poor performance on the vault, decided to withdraw herself from the team event for the sake of her own mental health — and the performance of her team, which she was afraid of dragging down due to a less-than-100% focus on her performance.
And let’s not kid ourselves: she was also protecting her ow physical health. She could easily have injured herself, even broken her neck, if she hadn’t been able to keep her mind in the game.
Biles, so good at what she does that she’s single-handedly redefining what gymnastics even is, won praise from empathetic observers for taking care of herself when she most needed to.
On the non-empathetic right, not so much.
Just a couple of days ago right-wingers were literally rooting against too “woke” American athletes in the Olympics. Now somehow the righties have collectively regained their sense of patriotism — because it gives them the perfect opportunity to drag Biles for her alleged selfishness in dropping out of one event.
“There’s No ‘I’ In Team, But There Is In Simone Biles,” sniffed Kylee Zempel in the Federalist. “Sorry, Simone Biles, The Olympics Isn’t About You, It’s About America,” added Federalist editor John Daniel Davidson in a second hectoring post.
On Twitter, the abrasive, much-hated Piers Morgan launched into Biles with a couple of snooty Tweets.
Professional reactionary ideologue Charles Kirk of Turning :Point USA denounced Biles as a “shame to this country.”
“You’re representing your nation, you selfish sociopath,” he snorted. “You know who has the gold medal? Russia! … I’m not okay with that!”
Kirk also suggested that “we are raising a generation of weak people like Simone Biles,” as if anything about Biles could be considered “weak.”
Meanwhile the Daily Wire’s wrong-opinion-haver Matt Walsh attacked those who showed sympathy towards Biles.
From the way that Olympic gymnast Simone Biles is being praised this week, you might think that the decorated superstar put on a heroic display during the team competition in Tokyo and led her squad to a gold medal. …
It was all perhaps the most effusive praise that has ever been heaped on a quitter.
That is what Simone Biles did to earn this exuberant applause. She gave up.
Just a few days ago, you may recall, Walsh was happily rooting against the US:
The US Women’s soccer team went on to win their next game and tie a third; they’re going to the quarterfinals.
It seems to me that maybe they’re not the embarassment here, any more than Biles is. Walsh, meanwhile, humiliates himself virtually every time he opens his mouth.
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This week, it’s the Olympics that have the right-wingers in a tizzy, upset by small examples of alleged “wokeness” from athletes to the Olympic organizers. Indeed, more than a few right-wingers are so offended that they’re actually cheering American losses in the games. What patriots they are!
It’s time again for The Week in Woke, my attempt to track the silliest things that right-wingers have declared “woke” on a weekly basis. Today we’ve got a pregnant man, some Major League sports, and a renegade … Fox News?
“Drag Queen Story Hour,” DQSH for short, is pretty much what it says it is: A drag queen goes to a library and spends an hour reading stories to children. The idea originated with queer writer and activist Michelle Tea in 2015, and right-wingers have been having fits about it ever since, seeing it as a vile propaganda tool that’s “normalizing degeneracy” and luring children into the LGBTQ lifestyle. One right-wing Christian activist likened the events to “mental rape.”
Welcome back to the Week in Woke, where we take a look at some of the (often quite unlikely) things that right-wingers are calling “woke.” This week, a you’ll notice, there’s a little bit of a military theme. Because what could be more woke than the military-industrial complex?
Conservatives have been complaining for a while about one of the most pressing civil rights crises of our time: the fact that no one wants to bone them.
Carrie Gress is a Fellow who doesn’t want to live like a man. Gress, a five-time mother and a fellow at a think tank called, rather generically, the Ethics and Public Policy Center, has just published a piece in The Federalist celebrating what she calls the “flyover women” — the salt-of-the-earth, sometimes not-so-glamorous mothers who stand up against Cultural Marxism and “radical feminism” and jobs, if possible.
