Dingus of the week: Brooke Rollins

We’ve reached the Feckless Four in the Dingus Madness Tournament

This week, the US Department of Agriculture cut $1 billion in money that was used to buy food from local farms for schools and food banks. The funding helped small farmers and provided free school lunches for kids in need.

The Guardian broke down that number, reporting, “About $660m of those funds were contained in the Local Food for Schools Cooperative Agreement Program, which provided funds to schools and child care facilities but is now being eliminated.”

“The rest were part of the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program, which provided funds to local food banks and other organizations. The USDA unfroze funds for existing agreements, but a second round of funding in fiscal year 2025 has been nixed.”

On Tuesday, Over the Moon Farm, a small farm in Cogdon, Iowa, posted on Instagram that the program allowed them to make weekly deliveries to the local food pantry and connect with underserved communities. “Over the past three years the program allowed us to scale up — bringing more animals to local butchers, buying more feed, and our business generally spending more in our local community.”

When asked on “Fox and Friends” how this move was defensible, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins insisted it wasn’t going to impact schools and called the programs,“food justice for trans people in New York and San Francisco.”

What in the Mad Libs, AI-generated hogwash? I’ve coughed up mucus more coherent than that.

She might as well have said, “Gender-critical Venezuelans doing fentanyl.” Or, “Illegal Marxist aliens taking our jobs with CRT.”

“Liberal socialist Dems murdering our biological women on the border with reverse racisms.”

And it all would have made just as much sense.

Like, apparently wokescold cancel culture went too far and we found ourselves feeding hungry children. Imagine the sheer horror.

Later in the interview, Rollins did admit that the USDA might have made errors, which she said they’d fix. “As we have always said, if we are making mistakes, we will own those mistakes and we will reconfigure,” she said. Like putting small farms out of business and making kids go hungry is just a minor oopsie.

It’s worth pointing out that Rollins previously served as ethics adviser to then-Texas Gov. Rick Perry. The same Rick Perry who was indicted (and later cleared) on corruption charges, so her idea of a “mistake” might be a little more generous.

The Rollins scale of mistakes looks something like:

Chernobyl? Just a little brain fart.

Exxon Valdez? D’oh!

The Dust Bowl? Just a lil bloop.

Kids going hungry? My B.

And really, guys, it’s like they say, no pain, no gain! Can’t make an omelet without starving a few kids, right? You can’t have your cake and share it with all those gross poors. No one has ever achieved anything of consequence without making some sacrifices, and your farm and all those poor kids are just something she’s willing to gamble with. And I, for one, find that inspiring.

This isn’t Rollins’ first dingus moment, and it won’t be her last. Last week, Rollins announced that the USDA had canceled a grant that studied menstruation in transgender men. But as CBS reported, the actual study was designed to look at the health effects of using synthetic menstrual products like pads and tampons, which seems a little important given that one recent study found arsenic and lead other contaminants in tampons.

But like, no Brooke, it’s cool, I’ll keep shoving arsenic and heavy metals into my vaginal canal five days a month to fight off socialism and the evil influence of woke. That’s cool.

CBS reported, “...the goals of the grant were to develop sustainable feminine hygiene products using regenerative cotton, wool, and industrial hemp while enhancing education through an extension program that teaches women and girls about menstrual health and reusable products. It also would have funded a fiber processing center for locally grown fibers in Louisiana — potentially benefiting a state with some of the highest unemployment and poverty rates in the country.”

Quite a move for the USDA to directly harm agriculture.

*Puts on male commentator hat* You see, folks, this is tampon string theory: Once you stop funding research into women’s bodies, you can impact the op-sec deep state and eventually partner with Putin to further the goals of the anarcho-Christian agenda.

*Takes the hat off, but considers keeping it on because I might get more newsletter subscribers if I wrote like that. But no, I must resist the evil pull of the man hat.*

No, friends, I think the real situation here is that everyone in power right now is very greedy, unapologetically evil, and dumber than a bowl of hair.

But the good news is, we didn’t really fund research into keeping women safe for years, so why start now?

The Feckless Four

We are now in the final rounds of our Dingus Madness Tournament, which has pitted the worst of America’s worst against one another to answer that burning question, who really is the dingusy of them all?

The Feckless Four pits JD Vance against Pete Hegseth in a breathtakingly stupid battle that combines the appearance of respectability with the unmistakable stench of death. And the other matchup is between Elon Musk and the Supreme Court: Who can most permanently wreck our democracy under the guise of doing freedoms?

You can see how the tournament has gone so far with this wonderfully comprehensive spreadsheet. Thank you so much to Beau Anderson for making this happen.

And remember, in any dingus matchup the real loser is America.

Also, there are some big things in store for the DOTW in 2025. But first, we have a brand new DOTW Instagram account so you can follow and share dingii across platforms.

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And now for something good

In Texas, hundreds of people waited in line to testify against a voucher bill.

Quince Mountain withdrew from Iditarod on Thursday as Jesse Holmes took a solid lead. Mountain is the only trans person to compete in the Iditarod and I’ve loved cheering him on these past few years.

Tim Walz continues to show up for Americans. Now he is on a town hall tour.

Winter is almost officially over and I think we can all agree that’s great.

Tesla’s stock continues to drop. And it simply couldn’t happen to a worse person.

Judges continue to rule against some of the awful things Trump is doing. Thank you, judges.

OH NAUR! SpaceX keeps exploding.

Also, the Trump administration was forced to withdraw their nomination for the CDC, Dr. Dave Weldon, who had made some really wild claims about vaccines. In a world where RFK Jr. heads up the Department of Health and Human Services, you have to be making some really next-level statements to get your nomination withdrawn. And honestly, I am a little impressed. What conspiracy would have to be so nuts that even Republicans would be like, “Nah, too far for me?” Did he say that vaccines made Bud Light gay? Did he say that Chick-fil-A created vaccines as a way to mind-control people into eating their soggy sandwiches? Did he posit a theory that vaccines addled Clint Eastwood’s mind and that’s why Yellowstone sucked? Man, I wish he’d said that out loud in a Senate hearing.

What I am enjoying

This week, I went from hosting a birthday party for my daughter, who turns 14 on the 21st, to New York, where I was able to celebrate the book launch of my dear friend Elon Green. His new book, The Man Nobody Killed is about the brutal murder of the artist Michael Stewart by the NYPD and the impact of Stewart’s death on artists like Madonna, Keith Haring, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. It’s an amazing book and I hope you all can read it.

While there, I got to see

Josh Gondelman

do some comedy and hang out with Megan Greenwell at the Met. I snagged a copy of her Megan’s very good book Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream.

Of course, I was out too late almost every night, and of course I am deeply exhausted because I am 42 and I need more than five hours of sleep. But I would not trade any late night filled with friends and laughter and jokes about Eric Adams for all the good, well-rested skin in the world.

While I was out, I had a drink called an Oaxaca Sour, which combines a smoky mezcal with pineapple juice and a chipotle simple syrup, and it was absolutely wonderful.

Cheers to the weekend! Also, everyone cheer for my daughter as she swims at the YMCA Regional Championship this weekend. I love to go from East Coast writer elite to Iowa swim mom in the span of 48 hours.

Also, given the horrors of 2025, I got myself back into therapy this week. And it’s so comforting to know that while boyfriends and husbands come and go, the man I will always reliably need to talk about in therapy is my father.