"Weird."

Gov. Walz and the MAGA Freakshow

Today, in honor of Vice President Harris’s absolutely brilliant choice of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz for veep, I am re-publishing the inaugural issue of American Freakshow. I started this newsletter more than a year ago in response to pictures of the Hitler memorabilia collected by Texas real estate magnate Harlan Crow, who also happens to be Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ megadonor and free private jet provider.

These people are freaks, I thought, and MAGA is a Freakshow.

It took this stout white guy from Minnesota to finally name what we have all been watching for eight years. Yes it’s fascism, corruption, autocracy, kleptocracy, misogyny and hate … but its essence is just “weird.”

Walz said the “weird” that went around the world, the way the little kid in The Emperor’s New Clothes points out the truth about the leader’s nakedness: “I think this is going back to the bread-and-butter: getting away from this division,” he said when The Morning Joes asked what Democrats can do to make political inroads in deep-red rural areas. “We do not like what has happened, when you can’t even go to Thanksgiving dinner with your uncle because you end up in some weird fight that is unnecessary … It’s true: These guys are just weird.”

“Listen to the guy,” Walz said a few days later at CNN. “He’s talking about Hannibal Lecter and shocking sharks and whatever crazy thing pops into his mind, and we just give him way too much credit. When you ratchet down some of the scariness and just name it what it is … I gotta tell ya, my observation on this is: have you ever seen the guy laugh? It seems very weird to me that an adult can go through six-and-a-half years of being in the public eye, [and] if he has laughed, it’s at someone, not with someone. That is weird behavior. I don’t think you call it anything else.”

With Kamala Harris’s laugh and Tim Walz’s plain talk, maybe we can realistically hope the MAGA Freakshow tent folds after November 5.

Read Freakshow’s first issue from April 2023 below:

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The Nazi table linens.

Inspiration strikes at odd times. The muse taps while I’m walking the dog, riding the subway, taking a nap. I try to keep pen and notebook at hand.

It took the Nazi table linens, part of Harlan Crow’s collection of Hitler memorabilia, to inspire me to start this substack about the freaks that have flourished in American politics in escalating numbers and grotesquery last seven years.

Harlan Crow is the Texas real estate magnate (the Crows are “the Trumps of Texas”) and one of the timeshare owners of the current U.S. Supreme Court. He looks like just another well-fed golfer and Mar a Lago guest who happens to have, umm, special interests. White, entitled, septuagenarian and pudgy like Patriots owner and charges-dropped strip mall rub-and-tug client Robert Kraft. Seemingly normal. Thanks to a sharp-eyed writer for the Washingtonian, and a visit to his Dallas palace, and its garden of dictators, we know he is not. (Linens photo above, credit Washingtonian Magazine.)

Ever since the summer of 2016, Americans have been wandering through an increasingly crowded carnival of political actors with spectacular deformities.

It started at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, a garish, hallucinatory spectacle. Battalions of cops from all over the country had mustered in bulletproof SWAT clothes and in formation, called in for expected violence which fortunately didn’t pan out. Of course all the violence was psychological. Posters and t-shirts of Hillary, her face splattered with cum riding a broom like a witch, were on sale. There was Roger Stone,a dandy seersucker suit cloaking his giant Nixon back tat, promising to destroy the Clintons with salacious surprises. Peter Thiel, fresh off financing juvenile blood age-defying experiments, announcing to a stadium of conservatives who already believed Democrats were baby-blood-sucking pedophiles that he was gay. General Michael Flynn howling “Lock Her Up,” like a member of the Argentine junta in the 1970s.

Here are a few pictures to remind you of that spectacle.

RNC in CLE Freak Show 2016

A few months later, I was at the Hilton in New York City at 3 a.m. after walking a gauntlet of drunks on 6th Avenue waving American flags and screaming “Lock the Bitch Up!” while international television crews dodged their spittle and pulled in close to beam the images back live to Europeans and Asians already eating breakfast and lunch.

In those early morning hours, watching the jut-jawed new President preen from a balcony on high, trailed by a pack of camera-ready women teetering on fuck-me shoes, above a sea of red-hatted celebrants, I understood that 1) I was witnessing something like the fall of Baghdad, but without any UN plane to hop out of country on and 2) this was going to be especially bad for women and girls. I was moved that night to write my book critiquing the women who support the most misogynistic American political movement of my lifetime.

Now seven years on, I understand a third fact: The hallucinatory quality, the sense of unreality, has worn off - even though the freakshow is bigger than ever. Now, it’s just us.

They were always there but the 2016 election invited them out of their hidey-holes. The quantity and velocity of transgressions against common decency today leaves many Americans in despair - but no longer surprised.

Much of what shocked us has lost its power. Can you imagine, for example, if someone told you six years ago that state legislators would drag black elected lawmakers out of the Tennessee Statehouse for protesting assault weapons? Or that the spouse of a Speaker of the U.S. House would be beaten with a hammer inside their home by a political conspiracist, and members of the other party would scoff and spread the lie that it was all a sex game?

Now, we are merely disappointed when elected officials share photos of their families holding machine guns in front of their Christmas trees. Video of Marjorie Taylor Green harassing teenage school massacre survivors on a public street, isn’t attached to every mention of her name on mainstream media now that she represents a piece of Georgia in the U.S. House. We've learned it is apparently legal for a Supreme Court Justice to take millions of dollars worth of largesse from a Texas real estate magnate who also happens to collect Hitler memorabilia (see: linens, above) and decorate his lawn with statues of 20th Century dictators (and whose brother Trammel Crow is entangled in a sex trafficking case).

MAGA political architect Steve Bannon’s “flood the zone with shit” disinformation project succeeded, aided by the Murdoch faux news op, amplified by orders of magnitude on “libertarian” tech bro platforms that refuse to accept that they are publishers. They count on neural overload to ensure that our brains can’t hold all the infringements, abuses and outrages inflicted on the body politic. We forget and we grow used to it, bit by bit.

The shit-flooded information zone has its IRL human analog. As Trump broke the window of accepted political speech, twisted, strange, grotesque living creatures have crawled through it.

I could have called this, if it wasn’t already taken, American Horror Story. But, in spite of the horror of gun carnage and criminal corruption and impunity, I’m not giving up and calling it fiction.

This Substack is about replenishing the ability of Americans to feel shock and disgust.

Every week we will go down to the grimy tent behind the ferris wheel and take a gander at another freak of American politics. Leonard Leo and his judges. Matt Gaetz and his Tallahassee teen. Marjorie Taylor Green. Ken Paxton, under indictment and still Texas Attorney General! Ivanka and Jared, enriched by Arab potentates, are pals with a spectacularly rich journalist murderer. Peter Thiel. The Michigan Militia kidnap plot fascists. The insurrectionist fascists. The J6 Prison Choir. State legislators who proudly advocate that raped children to give birth. The Judge-who-plays-doctor Matthew Kacsmaryk.

American Freakshow aims to remind ourselves that They are not like us.

We are a community of people who respect common decency and humanity, whether we lean right or left or try to maintain a spot in the center, that Irish poet Yeats, predicted would not hold.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity.

The worst are indeed intensely passionate. Like Sovereign Knight of the Military Order of Malta Leonard Leo, the most powerful man in Washington you’ve never heard of, a man who spent decades and hundreds of millions crafting a seizure of the federal court system, they count on us being less passionate. And not noticing them.

Now they can’t hide. But these self-exposed freaks of political nature are the minority.

Gazing together at the American Political Freakshow once a week, we will remind ourselves that this is not who we are as a nation. We can and will stand up to the conspiracy theorists, the assault weapons fanatics, the Christofascists in their mega-houses of worship of a strange gun-loving God and their no-tax corporate allies.

We will name, shame and reject them, and in the process, recover what is decent, and by right, ours.