Dingus of the week: Ryan Walters
Also, the NYT stepped in Nancy culture and rouxed the day
In Oklahoma, there are easier ways to shoot yourself in the foot. But Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters wanted to do it the hard way.
This week, Walters announced that the person behind the Libs of TikTok account, Chaya Raichik, was appointed to the State’s Department of Education Library Media Advisory Committee.
If you don’t know who Raichik is, congratulations on avoiding brain worms. Now, let me give you some. Raichik is a professional harasser who posts misleading and false information that aims to prove that American institutions are woke hellscapes. Her Libs of TikTok account has over 2.5 million followers on the website formerly known as Twitter. She’s, ironically, been banned from TikTok.
Libs of TikTok has been linked to bomb threats on hospitals and schools and harassment of teachers and doctors. So who better to guide the education of the young children of Oklahoma?
Actually here is a list of people or things that would be better suited to the task of helping to educate children:
The expired milk in my refrigerator, because it has culture
The frozen dog poop in my yard, because it can sustain a small ecosystem
Trees, because they help to create oxygen rather than sucking it all up
Raccoons, because they eat trash rather than making it
Walters notes that Raichik’s qualifications include being “on the front lines showing the world exactly what the radical left is all about — lowering standards, porn in schools, and pushing woke indoctrination on our kids.”
Walters has the habit of conflating books that contain LGBTQ characters and topics with “porn.” And since the announcement, Walters and Raichik have taken to social media to announce that the libs have been owned. Look at them all mad because someone who encourages harassment might be in charge of overseeing which books get put in Oklahoma schools. Look at those libs all furious because a person with no educational qualifications and who sometimes posts outright falsehoods might be in charge of determining curriculum and content for children. The libs have been so owned they scream and cry to the empty side of the bed at night. So very very owned.
Runner up: NYT Cooking
This week, the New York Times posted a recipe for a tater tot hot dish that did not include canned cream of mushroom soup. And they called it a “casserole.” And if you just gasped and clutched the neckline of your Kohl’s top that you got on sale and with Kohl’s cash, you understand. If you are confused, let me explain that this is a slap in the face of Midwestern culture. This is an affront to women named Nancy everywhere. This is so awful, Amy Klobuchar just threw a binder at it.
The NYT is trying to yassify Midwestern hot dish culture. This is an outrage and an affront to every cropped-cargo-pants-wearing woman with a short and sensible haircut. Oh sure, make fun of her, but she is the backbone of five sports teams and three churches, and she is the only one who knows where to buy eggs for under $5 a carton. Everyone loves to make fun of Debra, until they run out of toothpaste or toilet paper and — what’s that? Well, geez, Debra has you covered. Forget the fact that the toothpaste expired in 2010. Those expiration dates are just a scam by the government to get you to pay more money.
I mean, replacing canned soup in a hot dish recipe with roux? It’s like Sam Sifton never tried to make a hot dinner for four kids before getting one kid out the door to hockey, another to dance, another to piano, and helping another with his natural habitat project for third-grade science.
And the Midwesterners are spitting. The comments are full of passive aggressive and aggressive aggressive comments.
A whole legion of women named Debra are gonna start calling Sam Sifton horrible things like “not very bright” and “probably doesn’t understand much about cooking.” And in my culture (white and Midwestern), that’s about as harsh as it gets.
In the words of my mom’s friend Linda, Sam “tarted up” a perfectly good recipe.
But listen, you don’t go to the NYT for hot dish or casserole recipes. You go to the NYT when you want to make something with tofu and broccoli rabe. When you want a hot dish recipe, you go to the source: a Lutheran cookbook from 1978. Or the now-defunct mom blog of Cheryl in Duluth, who has six sons but who stopped blogging when her husband left her for the realtor.
And now for some good things:
The cicadas will emerge and take over the world. Thank you, cicadas!
The nonprofit Food Not Bombs hands out food to unhoused people in need. And in Houston the police have decided that volunteers giving people food need to be ticketed. That’s not the good news. The good news is that a jury trial scheduled for Food Not Bombs volunteers had to be rescheduled because they couldn’t find enough people willing to levy a $500 fine for feeding the homeless.
Chicago, we love to see a local bar stay local and stay the same.
California is growing its solar capacity and yes, this is indeed the future liberals want.
We love to see people raising money for local abortion funds. If you believe access to abortion should be a human right, DONATE TO AN ABORTION FUND!
Pharmacists in Washington state will start handing out mifepristone.
It only took five years and a lawsuit, but local journalist Laura Belin finally got press credentials to cover the Iowa legislature.
My mother, Anne Hathaway, refused to cross the Conde Nast picket lines and walked out of a Vogue photo shoot.
We are planning book events!
We are slowly but surely starting to pull together book events! Right now, there is a book launch event planned for Friday, February 23, at 7pm at Storyhouse Bookpub in Des Moines. There will be divorce cake! Books! And me!
We also have an event planned for March 6 at 7pm at Women and Children First in Chicago with Laura Danger of That Darn Chat and the Time to Lean Pod.
Also, other events are in the works! I cannot wait to see you all.
What I am drinking:
Well, I can’t say this month has been off to a good start. I will not be repeating the details but as we discussed previously, last week was rough. Now, snow berms are so mad at me for being named runner-up dingus that they are fighting back. A delivery driver got stuck in a small snow berm in my driveway and it took 45 minutes to unstick him. Another snow berm jumped out at me and I ran over it and it messed up my wheel alignment. (At first this problem was diagnosed as a bent axle but it was not, praise the lord!) My kids got strep. I got sick. But in the middle of all of this, I got some very very good news. So, on Wednesday night, I took a shower, curled my hair, put on nice pants and took myself and a book out on a date.
I think you have to celebrate good things no matter how small. The world is meager sometimes with its joys. And if something nice happens you must squeeze every ounce of niceness out of it. I had a black Manhattan and a glass of pinot noir.
Last week, I was asked in the comments if there was a recipe for a drink titled Slush of Despair and I came up with this drink. A cup of freshly fallen snow, topped with tequila. It’s like my people say1: When life gives you a frozen hellscape, you take some of that snow and top it with booze. Enjoy!
Also, shout out to Lisa for sharing this perfect song.
My people do not say this. But they should consider it.
Thank you for my Friday morning laugh, even if it had a touch of hysteria to it. This week has been absolute shit (husband got covid and had to cancel a surgery he really needed; kids are slightly feral because they're tired and anxious; I have been doing all the things and I am tired) and the rage about the world has been real. I look around us and wonder how we're going to survive 2024 (and beyond) and then something like this pops into my inbox. Thank you for channeling our collective rage about (waves hand at world) into something that can still make me laugh. Your newsletter is worth every penny to me.
You have just offered me a revelation. When I was a kid we would visit my grandparents at their retirement community in Redlands, CA. Neither of my grandparents grew up in California, though. They both grew up in the Midwest. My grandmother grew up with a dad who was an itinerant preacher and they moved from town to town starting new congregations and depending on the donations of the locals for both housing and food, both of which were in short supply. They were very poor, very hungry, and very cold, because often they were only given a sod house with dirt floors in a Midwest winter because that's what there was.
Flash forward to the mid-80s and I find a veritable drugstore under the double sink in my grandmother's bathroom, which confuses me utterly. To me it represented "extra", as in having the extra money to stockpile multiple bottles of shampoo, lotion, bars of soap, and tubes of toothpaste. Bought on sale with the dedicated clipping of coupons, I knew, but still. There was no extra like that in my house. I assumed this hoarding was her response to growing up in the Depression so incredibly poor. I figured it went hand-in-hand with her very evangelical, religious preparation for the end times. When the apocalypse comes there won't be any rose-scented little soaps to put next to sinks in bathrooms and you might need them as you wait for your express lift to heaven or something. But maybe (this had truly never occurred to me) she was just your standard Midwestern white woman.