The Daily Parker

Chicago-based humor magazine The Onion has won the bankruptcy auction to acquire Alex Jones's InfoWars Media:

The Onion said that the bid was sanctioned by the families of the victims of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, who in 2022 won a $1.4 billion defamation lawsuit against Mr. Jones and his company, Free Speech Systems.

The publication plans to reintroduce Infowars in January as a parody of itself, mocking “weird internet personalities” like Mr. Jones who traffic in misinformation and health supplements, Ben Collins, the chief executive of The Onion’s parent company, Global Tetrahedron, said in an interview.

While the alliance between Everytown and The Onion may seem like an odd fit, the two organizations share an interest in curbing gun violence, said John Feinblatt, president of Everytown. Mr. Feinblatt said that mission was underscored with depressing regularity in the aftermath of mass shootings, when The Onion goes viral with its oft-shared headline: “‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.”

The Onion, of course, spun the purchase in its own way:

Founded in 1999 on the heels of the Satanic “panic” and growing steadily ever since, InfoWars has distinguished itself as an invaluable tool for brainwashing and controlling the masses. With a shrewd mix of delusional paranoia and dubious anti-aging nutrition hacks, they strive to make life both scarier and longer for everyone, a commendable goal. They are a true unicorn, capable of simultaneously inspiring public support for billionaires and stoking outrage at an inept federal state that can assassinate JFK but can’t even put a man on the Moon.

No price would be too high for such a cornucopia of malleable assets and minds. And yet, in a stroke of good fortune, a formidable special interest group has outwitted the hapless owner of InfoWars (a forgettable man with an already-forgotten name) and forced him to sell it at a steep bargain: less than one trillion dollars.

As for the vitamins and supplements, we are halting their sale immediately. Utilitarian logic dictates that if we can extend even one CEO’s life by 10 minutes, diluting these miracle elixirs for public consumption is an unethical waste. Instead, we plan to collect the entire stock of the InfoWars warehouses into a large vat and boil the contents down into a single candy bar–sized omnivitamin that one executive (I will not name names) may eat in order to increase his power and perhaps become immortal.

Alex Jones, according to my social media feed, vowed to keep broadcasting until a court ordered him to stop.

Well played, Onion. Well played.

I had a completely different post in my head this afternoon, but the OAFPOTUS just nominated Matt Gaetz (R-FL) to run the Justice Department and I couldn't stop laughing for several minutes.

I expect he'll nominate high-school dropout Lauren Boebert (R-CO) to run the Education Department next.

These kinds of moves explain why I haven't worried so much about fascism as a government that couldn't find sand at a beach. As the OAFPOTUS has no competence himself, it follows that he would neither recognize nor care about competence in others. The next four years will suck, all right, but not in the ways that some of my more hysterical friends fear they will.

I haven't yet got my head around a couple of thoughts I had concerning last Tuesday's debacle. I've come to a few conclusions, but I'm still mulling the implications, and also the structure of the Daily Parker post that I promised over the weekend. It might take a few more days to write.

Meanwhile:

• The OAFPOTUS has picked South Dakota governor Kristi Noem (R) as his Homeland Security secretary and Mike Huckabee to represent the US in Israel, which have me straining not to tell the left wing of my party that I told them so.
• Timothy Noah points to a pair of US Supreme Court decisions the Republican justices wrote that all but guarantee people will bribe the OAFPOTUS, if they haven't already.
• Michael Bender pours over election data to figure out why Democrats stayed away from the polls in droves (though it has gotten better as late returns from California have come in).

Finally, the South Shore Line lost 40% of its rail cars to wheel damage over the past two weeks, and suffered 30-60 minute delays as a result, because of leaves on the tracks.

Hotel to terminal, 7 minutes (Lyft); through security, 10 minutes. Boarding in an hour. Now I just need the coffee to work its magic...

I'm also tickled that the ex-POTUS will now be called the Once And Future POTUS. At least for a couple of months.

Meanwhile, in the rest of the world:

• Andrew Sullivan doesn't like the outcome of the election any more than I do, but he nonetheless praises "the energizing clarity of democracy."
• Robert Wright lays out of plan for "fighting [the OAFPOTUS] mindfully."
• Molly White tells us to reach out to our communities, gather our strength, and keep fighting for sense and moderation.
• Proving Sinclair's Law* with only the vigor that a low-margin industry can do, landscaping companies have redoubled their efforts to slow or stop gas-powered leafblower bans across the US.
• Frog populations have crashed around the Chicago area, which is bad news for the frogs—and for us.

Finally, 35 years ago today I called my college roommate into our dorm room to watch live as Berliners took sledgehammers to the Wall. We didn't know what it meant other than we'd won the Cold War. Too bad we were still decades away from Aaron Sorkin's prescient words, "we'll see."

* "It is difficult to get a man to understand a thing when his salary depends on him not understanding it."

New York Times columnist Bret Stephens suggests that a holier-than-thou attitude from Democrats contributed to Tuesday's electoral disaster:

The broad inability of liberals to understand Trump’s political appeal except in terms flattering to their beliefs is itself part of the explanation for his historic, and entirely avoidable, comeback.

[Democrats'] mistakes of calculation lived within three larger mistakes of worldview. First, the conviction among many liberals that things were pretty much fine, if not downright great, in Biden’s America — and that anyone who didn’t think that way was either a right-wing misinformer or a dupe. Second, the refusal to see how profoundly distasteful so much of modern liberalism has become to so much of America. Third, the insistence that the only appropriate form of politics when it comes to Trump is the politics of Resistance — capital R.

The effect was to insult voters while leaving Democrats blind to the legitimacy of the issues. You could see this every time Harris mentioned, in answer to questions about the border, that she had prosecuted transnational criminal gangs: Her answer was nonresponsive to the central complaint that there was a migration crisis straining hundreds of communities, irrespective of whether the migrants committed crimes.

Today, the Democrats have become the party of priggishness, pontification and pomposity. It may make them feel righteous, but how’s that ever going to be a winning electoral look?

My social media keeps blowing up with my friends catastrophizing and much rending of garments. These are the same people who believed, without doubt, we would win yesterday. I don't know how many people asked me "how do you think we'll do?" to which I had to reply "I don't know." Because I also talk to the other side, and I knew they really felt like we talked down to them all the time.

If a motivating factor for a lot of people, white and Hispanic men in particular, was feeling dissed and wanting to stick it to the liberals, antagonizing them was a pretty stupid thing to do. Moralizing at them was even worse. Because no matter how much the other side offends your morality, or how superior you feel to them, you still need to win the election.

Democrats, including me, have complained about the POTUSE engaging in identity entrepreneurialism. But the response to that cannot be our own identity politicking. And now that our side has gotten spanked, I hope we can finally move the party back to the center.

I'm off to the Bay Area today, so I'll have four hours on an airplane to think more about how we can learn from Tuesday and win the legislature back in 2026.

Some of these may be correct, but not all of them are:

• Rafael Baer: "The whole apparatus of voting for a candidate who might not satisfy your exact needs, and probably doesn’t embody all the values you hold sacred, but might at least make some half-decent decisions for the country as a whole over the coming years, feels oddly antiquated. It is alien to the click-and-collect spirit of digital commerce."
• The Economist: "Mr Trump’s victory has changed America, and the world will need to grasp what that means. America remains the pre-eminent power. However, without American enlightened self-interest as an organising principle, it will be open season for bullies. Countries will be more able to browbeat their neighbours, economically and militarily, without fear of consequences. Their victims, unable to turn to America for relief, will be more likely to compromise or capitulate. Global initiatives, from tackling climate change to arms control, have just got harder. For a time—possibly for years—America may do fine. Eventually, the world will catch up with it."
• James Fallows: "By the standards of any presidential race in modern times, Kamala Harris ran a very “good” campaign. By those same standards, Trump ran a very bad campaign. And none of it mattered. The Republican presidential candidate had won the popular vote only once in the past 32 years. Eight years ago, Trump lost to Hillary Clinton by three million votes. Four years ago, he lost to Joe Biden by seven million. Yesterday, our fellow Americans appear to have given him an absolute majority—as I type, over 51% of the total vote, and a margin of several million."
• David Frum: "Perhaps the greater and more insidious danger is not political repression or harassment, but corruption. Autocratic populists around the world—in Hungary, Turkey, Venezuela—have assaulted institutions designed to provide accountability and transparency in order to shift money and influence to their friends and families, and this may happen in America too."
• Carlos Lozada: "Trump is very much part of who we are. Nearly 63 million Americans voted for him in 2016. Seventy-four million did in 2020. And now, once again, enough voters in enough places have cast their lot with him to return him to the White House. Trump is no fluke, and Trumpism is no fad. The Harris campaign, as the Biden campaign before it, labored under the misapprehension that more exposure to Trump would repel voters. They must simply have forgotten the mayhem of his presidency, the distaste that the former president surely inspired. It didn’t. America knew his type, too, and it liked it. Trump’s disinhibition spoke to and for his voters. He won because of it, not despite it."
• Josh Marshall: "[E]xhaustion is the greatest threat to continued opposition to Donald Trump. There’s no one election that saves democracy. That whole construct is wrong. It’s the enduring question of what kind of society we want to live in and what we’re going to do about it."
• Daniel McCarthy: "Mr. Trump’s victory amounts to a public vote of no confidence in the leaders and institutions that have shaped American life since the end of the Cold War 35 years ago. Mr. Trump has shown that the nation’s political orthodoxies are bankrupt, and the leaders in all our institutions — private as well as public — who stake their claim to authority on their fealty to such orthodoxies are now vulnerable."
• Robert Reich: "If you are grieving or frightened, you are not alone. Tens of millions of Americans feel the way you do. All I can say to reassure you is that time and again, Americans have opted for the common good. Time and again, we have come to each other’s aid. We have resisted cruelty. We supported one another during the Great Depression. We were victorious over Hitler’s fascism and Soviet communism. We survived Joe McCarthy’s witch-hunts, Richard Nixon’s crimes, Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam war, the horrors of 9/11, and George W Bush’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We will resist Donald Trump’s tyranny."
• Michael Tomasky: "If you go carefully through the exit polls and compare them to 2020, you actually see a fair amount of stability. Only one group of voters really stands out. Biden had won Latinos 65–32. Harris won them by only 53–45. And the biggest change of all is among Latino men: Biden won them 59–36, and this time, Trump beat Harris outright, 54–44. I kept wishing that I would see an ad by one of the prominent Black or Latino men who endorsed her that didn’t focus on praising Harris or even denouncing Trump in the normal, he’s-a-threat-to-democracy way. I wanted to see, say, LeBron James talking directly to young men of color about why Trump was not a tough guy at all; why he was a weakling and a bully, and explaining that a real man doesn’t lie or make excuses or disrespect women."
• George Will: "Enough has been said about the Republican Party’s eight years of self-degradation. More needs to be said about the Democratic Party’s self-sabotage, via identity politics (race, gender), that made Harris vice president. Before claiming to sniff Nazism on the other party (and its supporters), Harris’s party should deal with the stench of its antisemitic faction that is pro-Hamas and therefore pro-genocide."

Meanwhile, here in Chicago, voters elected only a couple of the Chicago Teachers Union candidates in our school board vote, as well as a couple of school-choice (read: taking public money for private schools) folks. I really disliked most of the candidates, including the one who won in my district. So that will be fun. Even though I don't have a kid in school, I do pay property tax, and I'm really tired of so much of it going to pay settlements for people beaten up or killed by cops and for a totally dysfunctional school district.

Update: Jonathan Pie has the acerbic British comedian view:

It's early, and nothing shocking has yet occurred, I'm actually watching The Bear. But some returns have come in. The Post has called West Virginia, Indiana, and Kentucky for the XPOTUS and Vermont for Harris. Again, no surprises. Early (<25%) returns in several states have the XPOTUS ahead, but as we've seen many times, Republican precincts report early, on average.

But let's see the 8pm ET returns...and, in a shock, the Post calls Mississippi for the 1850s.

To be continued...

19:04 CST: Nothing surprising. Alabama, Florida, South Carolina, Tennessee, Oklahoma turn red, and Maryland and southern New England turns blue.

20:10 CST: Still no surprises. We knew we'd lose Joe Manchin's US Senate seat, and we figured we'd pick up the North Carolina governor's mansion. And, of course, everyone has called Illinois for Harris. All of the swing states are still swinging, with Harris leading Michigan and Pennsylvania, but the XPOTUS leading Georgia and N.C. The bigs have called Ohio for the XPOTUS.

In what I am sure will turn out to be a mirage, Harris leads in Kansas and Missouri, and the XPOTUS in Virginia.

And it looks like the Florida referendum legalizing abortion through the 24th week will fail.

Nothing yet in local races, except the Democratic candidate for Illinois Attorney General, Eileen O'Neill Burke, looks like she'll win.

21:09 CST: The map still looks a lot like it did at this time in 2020. By "a lot" I mean identical. We picked up Colorado and lost Utah, for example. All the swing states show the XPOTUS in the lead but, then again, so does Minnesota. So, no one knows nothing. I guess I'll post again in an hour, at which point we should have the West Coast states.

But the three that will decide the election—Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania—won't be called for days. The one thing that I have seen in the drill-down, though, is an even starker urban/rural divide, which is not good for the country in the long term.

22:02 CST: Wow, The Bear is fantastic. I see why it got all those Emmys. Oh, and we won California while they took Idaho. Still looking almost exactly like 2020.

22:07 CST: Just a reminder that four years ago, the AP didn't call Wisconsin until 3pm Central on Wednesday. And no one called Georgia, Pennsylvania, or Michigan for many hours after that. This clearly isn't 1980, 1992, or 2004. It's, well, 2020 again. So everyone just try to sleep and check back tomorrow.

23:01 CST: Welp, we lost the Senate, with Sherrod Brown losing to yet another ultra-right kook in Ohio. Whatever else happens this week, we really have to figure out why people prefer the ultra-right kooks to sensible moderates. I'm afraid I won't like the answer.

Still too close to call the big three. But I'm not going to wait up for it. I'm disappointed in my country, but not entirely surprised.

Polls are open, votes are being tabulated, misguided youth are casting ballots for 3rd-party candidates to "send a message," and I'm just doing my thing at work.

I've got NBC's hour-by-hour guide bookmarked, though. And you should bookmark The Daily Parker; I will very likely live-blog again tonight, though I have promised myself to go to bed before 11 CST (unlike in 2016).

And here's my starting point, which is basically the consensus map minus Iowa and Arizona:

I'm not worried. Look, the Roman Republic fell in 49 BCE, and it only took Italy about 1,995 years to return to democracy. So why fret?

(Oh, dear. Re-reading my 2016 live blog, I see I ended with this: "Millions of people who voted for Donald Trump tonight will expect their lives to improve, with America returning to the imagined past of 'Leave It to Beaver.' What happens when they're disappointed? Which Visigoths do they invite to sack Washington?" Well, now we know.)

If you read nothing else before tomorrow night, read Tim Alberta's epic reporting on the XPOTUS's colossally dysfunctional campaign and the infants who run it. My favorite bit comes right at the end, with a quote from Joseph Goebbels Stephen Miller:

Backstage at the Garden, in the blur of debate and indecision over damage control, it was Stephen Miller who pondered the bigger picture. (Miller did not respond to a request for comment.) According to two people who were present, Miller, the Trump policy adviser whose own nativist impulses are well documented, was not offended by Hinchcliffe’s racist jokes. Yet he was angered by them all the same: He knew the campaign had just committed a huge unforced error. He believed that Bruesewitz had done profound damage to Trump’s electoral prospects. And, in that moment, he seethed at what this lack of discipline portended for Trump should he return to power.

The irony, apparently, was lost on Miller. He and his colleagues would spend the coming days savaging Bruesewitz for his recklessness when really—as ever—the culprit was a man whose addiction to mayhem creates the conditions in which a comedian who was once dropped by his talent agency for using racial slurs onstage could be invited to kick off the closing event of the election without a single objection being raised.

“If we can’t trust this kid with a campaign,” Miller said to the group, according to one of the people present, “how can we trust him in the White House?”

How indeed.

Only 27 hours remain until polls close in parts of Indiana and Kentucky. Which means we're less than 27 hours away from the XPOTUS claiming he won, because that's how he operates. Even if he loses by 10 million votes, he'll still claim he won all the way until January 20th, and possibly even longer.

Of course, no one will know anything interesting until at least 7pm Eastern when polls close in Georgia and 7:30pm Eastern when they close in North Carolina. Arizona's polls close at 7pm Mountain, which is 8pm here in Chicago. And even though we know who will win California's 54 electoral votes—a fifth of the required 270 to win—no one can call the state officially until 8pm Pacific (10pm here in Chicago).

Other things to keep in mind:

• If the election is close, it will take longer to know the results than if it's a blowout for either candidate.
• Rural areas, which tend to vote Republican, have orders of magnitude fewer voters than urban areas, which tend to vote Democratic. This means that early returns always look better for Republicans than later returns. Expect the XPOTUS to harp on early returns and discount later ones for this reason.
• Pennsylvania can't even begin tabulating absentee ballots until tomorrow, and it will take them days to get through all of them.
• Arizona has super-long ballots this year, especially in Maricopa County (Phoenix), so counting will take a lot longer than usual.
• Georgia plans to release official numbers as early as 8pm Eastern tomorrow night, but Fulton County, which contains Atlanta, will take a lot longer.
• Milwaukee hopes to have provisional results around midnight, but again, counting could take days. And absentee ballots can continue arriving for a week.

Bottom line: until Wednesday lunchtime at the earliest, no one will really know anything if the election is close. So let's hope for a repeat (and a reversal) of 1980 and get a huge Harris victory tomorrow.