What I've Been Reading This Week!
(plus: news about our election pizza party!?)
We’re in the home stretch now, folks.
By the time you read this, it’ll be Thursday morning on October 24, 2024. Only twelve more days until the single most important day of the year: the 69-year anniversary of that time Doc Brown hit his head and invented time travel.
Although Doc Brown inventing time travel is objectively a HUGE deal, we’re focused on that day for one debatably more important reason: the 60th presidential election ever in the United States, a race between Kamala Harris and the faux fry cook in chief Donald Trump.
As a general reminder, early voting IS open in most states, and by the time this article goes live, it will be available to varying degrees in even more states and territories. This helpful map from CNN that you can click on here is actually a wonderful resource for you to know if early voting is available for you!
In case you didn’t know, Election Night is going to be both a hoot AND a holler. But it’s likely to be a source of massive anxiety for a great many of you as well. So, I’m here to help make the night even more hooty and hollery to ease some of that anxiety: we’re throwing an Election Night Pizza Party!
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
At 6:00 PM EST, you can join me on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, AND right here on Substack for one of the most ambitious events Under the Desk News has ever whipped up, where we cover the election results live as they trickle in, all while providing on-the-spot analysis for each result. If somebody wins Florida by a massive margin, you better believe I’ll work myself in knots getting you an explanation why.
If Harris or Trump wins a state in an upset that they were not projected to win, we’ll walk through the precedent of times that polling failed to capture the national vibe. And if the popular votes combined don’t make a perfect 100%, well, we’ll just blame Jill Stein. It’s always Jill Stein’s fault.
Aside from election shenanigans, there’s also gonna be MUSIC.
There’s also gonna be COMEDIANS.
There’s also gonna be an election for you to decide which of my dogs should be president.
But most importantly - there will be pizza.
We’ll be going all night, folks, from 6:00 PM EST to 1:00 AM EST the following day. This will be a celebration of democracy, dogs, and Doc Brown - my three favorite D’s, all in one stream.
-
But until then, how are you doing? What are you reading?
It might seem like I’m thirty places at once every day now, but the truth is, I need to kick back and unwind every once in awhile. Kick off my shoes. Get out from under the desk and onto a bed. Pull up my laptop and decompress a little by READING.
I mean, that’s the idea at least. From my experience, reading leads to learning. Learning leads to excitement. Excitement leads to me sharing my passion with y’all, which in a way is… also work. C’est la vie!
But it’s work I enjoy nonetheless, so I thought I’d start sharing all the cool things I found throughout the week here - both as a way to promote some of my favorite writers and articles, and also open up a conversation about topics I may or may not have covered on my TikTok.
Right now, I’m in the process of reading War by esteemed journalist Bob Woodward, who you may know as one half of the duo who cracked the Watergate story that led to the resignation of Richard Nixon.
War is the kind of book that really outlines how important a fair and free press is in America, providing a balanced look at both the Trump and Biden administrations from the past decade. You may have already heard the big bombshell that Donald Trump, in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, sent COVID treatment materials, including ventilators, to Vladimir Putin and Russia at a time when Americans were struggling to get their hands on such devices.
What you might not know is that according to Bob Woodward, there was as high as a 50 percent chance that Russia was going to use nuclear weapons during its invasion of Ukraine - and Woodward’s book outlines the United States’ part in preventing that potentially catastrophic moment from happening.
I’m still reading it, so I may share my thoughts in a future post or video, but in the meantime, I ALSO have an episode of the American Fever Dream podcast that is out NEXT THURSDAY, where we sit down with Bob Woodward! I’m beyond humbled, and incredibly excited, that Bob will be taking the time to sit down for a chat with us, so stay tuned for that!
You can buy War anywhere you buy books, though you can also order directly from the publisher here!
-
On October 22, The Atlantic published a piece by Jeffrey Goldberg with the provocative title, “Trump: ‘I Need the Kind of Generals That Hitler Had.”
When I first saw this headline, I don’t want to say I was surprised by this statement. This is, after all, a man who swayed for 35 minutes to music instead of answering questions at a rally… abandoned his most fervent supporters in a dark desert with no transportation back to their cars… faked a photo op where he cosplayed as a fry cook at McDonald’s and evaded questions about raising the minimum wage because he saw a “process that is beautiful…” and lied about FEMA depleting disaster relief funds to shelter immigrants.
And that’s all just from the last few weeks!
But, against my better judgment, I wanted to give Trump the benefit of the doubt. I KNOW. But I racked my brain over and over, trying to answer the question: “is there a rational reason somebody might say they want Hitler’s generals? Was Trump taken out of context?” So I read the article.
And folks, the context here makes it all so. much. worse.
Goldberg begins by recounting the tragic story of 20-year-old Vanessa Guillén, an Army private, being murdered by another soldier. At the time of Vanessa’s remains being found two months later, Trump was receiving some of the best press of his presidency due to his (seemingly) empathetic response to the murder: he invited the Guillén family to the White House. He consoled Vanessa’s mother. And he offered to pay for her funeral.
On paper, this seemed to be one of the most unspoken, truly selfless acts of the Trump presidency. And I say that without a drip of irony.
Yet as Goldberg reports for The Atlantic, when Trump was informed that the funeral cost $60,000, it’s said that he responded, “It doesn’t cost 60,000 bucks to bury a fucking Mexican!...Don’t pay it!...Can you believe it? Fucking people, trying to rip me off.”
So much for empathy, Donald. Fun fact: it’s a very public funeral you offered to pay for, not a gold-plated golf club.
Donald Trump has been called a lot of things in his life: cheap. Prickly. A rapist. Racist. Sexist. Gaudy. Awful.
But what Goldberg outlines in his mammoth exposé, which cites numerous anonymous sources from within the former Trump White House, is a portrait of a uniquely broken and evil man. The focus of this article lies primarily in Trump’s relationship with the military, and the rhetoric he uses to discuss them.
At one point, Goldberg brings up a book titled The Divider: Trump in the White House by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser, who initially broke the story that Trump once asked his former chief of staff John Kelly, “Why can’t you be like the German generals?” According to Baker and Glasser, Kelly calmly explained to Trump that German generals, “tried to kill Hitler three times and almost pulled it off.” Trump merely responded: “No, no, no, they were totally loyal to him.”
It’s quite telling that Trump, according to Goldberg, sees the world strictly through his own childish idea of fascism. He has a razor thin grasp on what power truly means, and why powerful monsters throughout history retained that power. Ironically, by wishing for “generals like Hitler’s,” what Trump is wishing for is his own destruction. And come November 5, he may get a first class ticket to that event.
-
Breaking the habit of tying anything and everything back to the election for just a moment, I also wanted to share some thoughts I had reading Alex Cranz’ wonderfully evocative piece for The Verge, “The Character Assassination of Janet Jackson by the Coward Justin Timberlake,” a work that asks its audience to reconsider Janet Jackson’s performance at the Super Bowl back in 2004.
Despite the provocative title, Timberlake is a background character in the piece, only mentioned when providing context to the event most commonly known as “Nipplegate,” where a wardrobe malfunction exposed Janet Jackson’s breast to the entire world.
“It’s just a nipple,” Cranz writes, pointing out the lunacy of a moral outrage rooted in White America having to stare at a woman of color’s bare breast due to Justin Timberlake yanking her clothing down… and then being mad at HER.
An unfortunately common story for women in America to be blamed for the actions of men, even if (and maybe especially if) the actions caused them actionable harm.
Cranz highlights the contrast between actions taken against Jackson (CBS banned Jackson’s music and booted her from the Grammy performance later that year) and the utter lack of accountability Timberlake took or was even TOLD to take; he even performed at those very same Grammys!
For better or worse, Nipplegate was a massive moment in history with a litany of Butterfly Effect ripples that changed history. Famously, a PayPal employee named Jawed Karim missed the halftime show, so he came up with a startup idea alongside friends Steve Chen and Chad Hurley to create a website where moments like Nipplegate could be found forever online.
That startup was YouTube.
Cranz makes the case that because of Nipplegate, the very nature of my least favorite d-word, discourse, changed forever online. It became more immediate, via places like Threads, TikTok, and The Artist Formerly Known as Twitter, and much more passionate, too,
For anybody who’s been following the reevaluation of Justin Timberlake’s legacy, who knows the answer to how “this is gonna affect the tour,” most of what Cranz is writing here isn’t going to feel revolutionary. The Timberlake backlash has been so thorough that it now has its OWN backlash, to which I will now be contributing my OWN backlash to the backlash to the backlash: reevaluating the actions of Justin Timberlake, in 2004 or otherwise, is important to evolving the conversations surrounding why women often face the brunt of fierce backlash for situations beyond their control. It’s Good, Actually™️, to remind ourselves of these double standards that are often stoked by the gasoline of mainstream media and the tabloid press onto the very open flames of the public at large.
In-roads have been made, but we can see traces of Nipplegate in everything from the Blake Lively discourse following the rollout for It Ends With Us, to the constant criticism (some very valid, some not so much) levied against artists like Lizzo, to even the ways people continue to be very weird about virtually every celebrity divorce trial.
Plus, on top of being a very neat article, it’s formatted like an article published in 2004. I never thought I’d see nostalgia for Geocities in my lifetime, but here we are, folks.
-
And in honor of this being Good News Only Thursday, I thought I’d share another article as a treat for us all to go off into the great beyond together with the incredible title of:
“Insane Clown Posse Endorse Kamala Harris.”
That’s right: the Faygo-loving, Detroit-repping rap duo Insane Clown Posse have once again put themselves on the right side of history. I’m sure many of you are scratching your heads right now, wondering what I mean by that, especially considering that for the first few decades of their career, they were, to put it gently… not exactly on the right side of ANYTHING.
These ARE the fellows who once asked “fucking magnets - how do they work?” in a song about miracles. Their logo is a crude little man holding a hatchet? Their fans, lovingly called Juggalos and Juggalettes, hoot and holler and yell “WOOP WOOP” everywhere they go? THESE guys are on the right side of history, V?
As a bit of context before we get into the article, Juggalos are probably one of the most misunderstood fandoms in music history by a wide margin. As Jaime Lees once wrote in an article titled “Insane Clown Posse Made Me A Better Person,”
“Juggalo culture is famous for being unfailingly, entirely inclusive. Society’s arbitrary rules about what is “good” don’t apply here. It doesn’t matter what fringe lifestyle you embody, juggalo culture will welcome you as family. And when they say “family” they mean really family. They’ll embrace you and love you and fight for you as if you are a blood relative. Anyone who wishes to be included is ushered into the herd without question.”
This was further confirmed by that time Insane Clown Posse marched on Washington to fight the FBI about Juggalos being classified as a gang - a classification ICP has claimed cost many of its fans their jobs, relationships, or even custody of their children. 1,500 Juggalos marched on Washington that day in a show of democracy that allegedly drew more attendees than a Trump rally that same day, and resulted in the FBI removing Juggalos from its gang classifications.
Which leads us to Jo Vito’s article for Consequence of Sound, itself a recap of an interview Troy Iwata conducted with Violent J of Insane Clown Posse at their music festival, the Gathering of the Juggalos, for The Daily Show.
Over the course of this interview, Violent J drops bombshell after bombshell. He wants Kamala Harris to win, “because she’s a Democrat, and I love my mom.” I don’t know what that means, but hell yeah, Violent J.
He’s against mass deportation, to which he says “fuck no…now I remember why I hated Trump, that wall shit.” Okay, okay, that’s true, I hate “that wall shit” too, my guy.
He’s for women’s rights, saying “They have the right to BE THE FUCKING SHIT!” You’re goddamn right, Violent J!
He’s pro-taxing the rich, stating he prefers voting for Democrats because, “My mom said the Democrats are saying less taxes on the poor, more taxes on the rich.” This is followed up by Iwata asking J if he pays taxes, and he enthusiastically says he pays taxes “up the fucking anus” and gladly pays DOUBLE what he should. Wait, what? Gonna need a fact check on that one, Mr. J.
But those are just the highlights from Violent J’s part of the segment. Elsewhere in the video, Iwata polls individual Juggalos on their politics, with many highlighting that they care for things like the legalization of drugs, trans rights, and the access to reproductive healthcare.
“Our ethos is based upon whatever you wanna be, you should be accepted,” one fan says. “If you wanna be a trans killer clown, please do.”
Even though many of the Juggalos admit they’ll be sitting the election out due to feeling disenfranchised as working class Americans, many of them admit freely they value Violent J’s insight - to the point that they call him their ideal candidate for the presidency, something J denies any interest in since it would require him to wake up early every day - maybe the single most relatable thing Violent J said in this entire interview.
But jokes aside, someone with Violent J’s platform openly endorsing Kamala Harris is a HUGE deal. I’m cheating by including this video on a list of what I’m reading, but I think it’s important to remember that voting blocs and demographics exist EVERYWHERE, and outreach in ALL communities is important. Many of the Juggalos Iwata interviewed said they weren’t planning on voting, but could that change due to J’s endorsement?
Will the Violent J endorsement move the needle on a potential President Harris at all?
Only time will tell. WOOP WOOP!