The photo is chilling in light of what transpired 26 days after it was posted. It shows a member of the militant Proud Boys standing inside the White House and wearing a mask less than a month before members of that same group helped lead the crowds that broke into the U.S. Capitol as they sought to reverse Trump’s loss on January 6, 2021.
Tina seems nice. Glad she has a fall back career after Jersey Shore ended — I remember she was cancelled from the show for being too low-brow.
What’s up with all of these middle-aged MAGA ladies getting their extramarital freak on?
Great reporting as always, gents!
They’re all pretty strange, so I guess they just like strange.
Will she be leading ‘Death To Democracy’ chants at her campaign rallies?
Good article but I wish they didn’t use AOC in the headline. She was only a very small part if the story.
When white conservatives feel aggrieved…woah Nelly!
A colleague said to me earlier, “I feel bad for you and my son.”
ME: “Explain?”
her: “You’re both middle-aged, heterosexual white men. You’re being left behind.”
Me: [laughs] Ohh, wait…you’re serious?
It went on like this…I admire and respect everyone on here too much to keep going. I’ll just say…it was pitiful. She even said something about “Black privelege.”
I wish I was kidding.
U.S. democracy is clearly in crisis. It’s entirely possible that in less than two years dissenters will face the power of a government with an authoritarian bent; if that sounds to you like hyperbole, you aren’t paying attention.
But is America beyond the political realm also in crisis? Are the very foundations of society eroding? Many people on the right apparently think so. A recent essay by Damon Linker in The Times profiled conservative intellectuals whose writing, he argued, helps explain where the MAGA right is coming from. What struck me, reading some of their work, is the dire portrait they paint of the state of our nation.
For example, Patrick Deneen’s “Regime Change” describes America thus: “Once-beautiful cities and towns around the nation have succumbed to an ugly blight. Cratering rates of childbirth, rising numbers of ‘deaths of despair,’ widespread addictions to pharmaceuticals and electronic distractions testify to the prevalence of a dull ennui and psychic despair.” And he attributes all of this to the malign effects of liberalism.
When I read such things, I always wonder, do these people ever go outside and look around? Do they have any sense, from personal memory or reading, of what America was like 30 or 50 years ago?
It’s true that U.S. society has changed immensely over the past half-century or so, and not entirely in good ways: Inequality has soared, and deaths of despair are a real phenomenon. (More about that later.) But many right-wing critiques of modern America seem rooted not just in dystopian fantasies but in dystopian fantasies that are generations out of date. There seems to be a part of the conservative mind for which it’s always 1975.
Start with those blighted cities. I’m old enough to remember the 1970s and 1980s, when Times Square was a cesspool of drugs, prostitution and crime. These days it’s a bit too Disneyland for my tastes, but the transformation has been incredible.
OK, that’s something of a Big Apple-centric view, and not every U.S. city has done as well as New York (although it’s remarkable how many on the right insist on believing that one of America’s safest places is an urban hellscape). Chicago, for example, has done a lot worse. But between 1990 and the eve of the Covid-19 pandemic there was a broad-based U.S. urban resurgence, largely driven by the return to city life of a significant number of affluent Americans, who increasingly valued the amenities cities can offer and were less worried by violent crime, which plunged after 1990.
True, some of the fall in crime was reversed during the pandemic, but it seems to be receding again. And Americans are coming back to urban centers: Working from home has reduced downtown foot traffic during the week, but weekend visitors are more or less back to prepandemic levels.
This doesn’t look like blight to me.
What about family life? Indeed, fewer Americans are getting married than in the past. What you may not know is that since around 1980 there has been a huge decline in divorce rates. The most likely explanation, according to the economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, is that expanded job opportunities for women led to a temporary surge in divorces as women left unhappy marriages, which receded as marriages adjusted to the new social realities. I take this to mean that during the “good old days” there was a lot of quiet marital misery, some of which is now behind us.
Oh, and when we talk about declining birthrates, we should note that a significant factor has been a huge decline in teenage pregnancies, especially among women 15 to 17. Is this an indicator of moral decay?
But what about those deaths of despair? They’re real and very much an indictment of our society. But while deaths from drugs, alcohol and suicide happen everywhere, they’re happening disproportionately not in liberal big cities but in left-behind rural regions, stranded by economic forces that have caused a migration of income and employment to relatively well-educated metropolitan areas. If there’s “psychic despair” driving addiction, it seems to be the despair that comes from not being able to get a job — not the despair that comes from a decline in traditional values.
Social change is never an unalloyed good thing. I look at how America has changed over my adult lifetime and see some things I don’t like, especially the return to extreme economic inequality. But I also see a society that offers much more individual freedom, especially for women and minorities but for the rest of us too.
Not everyone considers this a positive change. Indeed, some people on the right clearly hate the America we actually live in, a complex, diverse nation, as opposed to the simpler, purer nation of their imaginations.
And if you would prefer a society with more traditional social relationships, more people practicing traditional forms of religion and so on, that’s your right. But don’t claim, falsely, that society is collapsing because it doesn’t match your preferences or blame liberalism for every social problem.
A question like that needs to be multiple-choice ending in E) All of the Above.
Best description of one of my co-workers, evah…thanks for that!
You can take middle-age MAGA sexpots outta’ the trailerpark…
I admire the force and vigor with which this cat rids itself of that affront.
She seems nice…for a succubus.
This sign, from the picture at the top of this article, is a definitive oxymoron.
And given that Trump is an absolute moron, it is certainly appropriate.
At the time, court records show, her husband and son were facing federal firearms charges, brought in part because Forte’s husband had a prior state-level assault conviction. A man who identified himself as the victim in that case wrote a letter asking a federal judge for leniency, explaining that he had an affair with Forte. The man wrote that the affair, combined with his own threats towards the husband, led Forte’s spouse to hit the man over the head with a bat.
I’m getting a weird “Not old Forte, never…He was a smashing bloke. He used to give his mother flowers and that. He was like a brother to me…I mean, he didn’t want to hit me over the head with a baseball bat. I had to insist. He wanted to let me off” vibe here.
“I see a lot of anti-Jewish stuff on there. It’s like oh boy,” Boykin said with a laugh. “That’s pretty much all over Telegram. Jeez. I’ve made the joke before, It’s like, can I go into a chat room where somebody doesn’t bring up the Jews, somebody doesn’t post Nazi symbols, or somebody has to talk about everybody being gay?
Hahahahaha! 
I mean where indeed can one go and not be inundated with racist and homophobic screeds? It’s such a totally normal and unremarkable experience. You just have to laugh…
It feels like someone needs an intervention.
Ha! I remember the reaction from Republicans when Jimmy Carter suggested the nation was suffering from a “malaise.” You would have thought he had defaced the Washington Monument. My wife often says of some of our prosperous relatives who buy whatever they want, travel when they want, and have successful children and beautiful grandchildren, “I just don’t understand why they’re so angry.”
As all her boy toys seem to be going to jail, will she be allowed conjugal visits?
The narrowing of the eyes before the bat is what makes this.