Tonight’s missive to paid subscribers is . . .

. . . well, it’s . . .

. . . it’s about 3,800 words long.

That’s all I can tell you. If I told you more, I would have to kill you.

The missive is titled: Mike Pesca Suspended at Slate for . . . Doing a Bad Thing I Can’t Talk About. The old lady who swallowed the fly makes an appearance. The only teaser I can give you is this:

The haughty way in which woke white people lecture on this issue is perfectly encapsulated in this hilarious exchange between my man Thomas Chatterton Williams and Kirsten Powers. This is worth reading all the way through.

If you want in on the fun, subscribe.

UPDATE: I did another podcast too!

Yesterday I had a brief Twitter interchange with my friend Dan McLaughlin of National Review. Dan had been talking to Tim Miller and had asserted that the Democrats have nothing to offer the 2012 Republican voter. Someone else begged to differ:

If you think the Biden Democrats have any respect for the rule of law, you have slept through the past 110 years of the party's history & ignored its entire ideology.

— Dan McLaughlin (@baseballcrank) February 23, 2021

I replied:

That’s what I would have thought until Trump came along. His disregard for the rule of law took it to a whole new level, and GOP failure to recognize this is likely what will alienate me from the party for some time to come.

— Patterico (@Patterico) February 23, 2021

When Dan replied to that by saying that Trump’s behavior should not change what you think of the Democrats, I clarified that I was engaging in a comparative and not an absolute analysis. Dan responded to that by claiming that the Democrats are “institutionally bad” while the Republicans have a problem with one person:

My argument all along is that Trump is individually bad, Democrats are institutionally bad. Republicans' problem is fixable by removing one man. Democrats' is not. It's who they are.

— Dan McLaughlin (@baseballcrank) February 23, 2021

Is that true?

Dan got some blowback for that tweet and I think it’s deserved. Several of us reminded him that a majority of the Republican House caucus voted to help Trump steal an election after a violent mob at the Capitol disrupted the counting of electoral votes. Now, we have the wave of censures at a more local level for anyone who steps out of line:

She taunted a Parkland school shooting survivor, argued that California wildfires were started by a Jewish space laser, accused Democratic politicians of running a pedophile ring out of a pizza parlor, and questioned whether 9/11 really happened…

— Fred Upton #WearYourMask (@RepFredUpton) February 24, 2021

You can’t even take action against a clearly poisonous conspiracy theorist and remain in the party’s good graces.

I try to keep in mind these days that there are good folks like Beldar (and Paul Montagu) in the Republican party. Clearly the problem with the party is not true of everyone in it. But there seems to be a majority that prefers cranks and liars to sensible people. And that’s a problem.

Maybe there are not many people like me, but speaking for myself: if the GOP wants my vote, it has to wake up and figure out how it alienated me and people like me. Demonizing the left ain’t gonna cut it for me anymore. There’s plenty bad about the Democrats — but when a party that bad starts to look like the saner option, the responsibility doesn’t really lie with me to fix it. The party needs to fix itself.