The First Rule Of Dunning-Kruger Club Is That You Don't Talk About Dunning-Kruger Club, #3

When being arrogant, stupid, and Conservative is actually dangerous

Besides she's off birth control now. I don't want you guys naked within a hundred yards of her."

"Uh, how are we supposed to shower?"Trey asked.

Brian rolled his eyes in annoyance. "You can shower, dumbass. Just make sure you wear a condom."

• Olivia Cunning

This edition of “This Week In Stupid” looks a little different because…well, because it does. But it’s my sandbox, and I’ll change things up if I choose to. Besides, if I did everything the same way, it would make Jack a dull boy, and we don’t need that, do we?

Dumbasses Gonna Dumbass, Knowhutimean??: We start this week with two disciples of incel champion and neo-Nazi dickweed Nick Fuentes, who decided it would be fun to creep around outside Colorado’s Columbine High School. Yeah, THAT Columbine High School. At night. Carrying (supposedly) fake weapons. While being dumbasses. The poor policeman who responded couldn’t believe anyone could be so f*****g stupid.

And yet….

Calling these cretins “Far-Right influencers” would give them WAY too much credit. They lack the intellectual power to order a Big Mac and a side of fries between them.

The Continuing Adventures of Pat McGroin: Remember “No Labels?” They’re the allegedly non-partisan group that would allow people to be no longer beholden to the major parties. Yeah, they’d be all things to all people, and life would be wonderful again. We’d all get a pony, sit around the campfire, roast s’mores, hold hands, and sing the “Horst Wessel Song.”

Or something like that.

In reality, “No Labels” has become a cheap GOP cover band. They’re looking for ways to “ratf**k” the 2024 election and siphon votes from Joe Biden and make it easier for The Former Guy.

“No Labels,” founded by former Republican North Carolina Gov. Pat McGroin McCrory, looks like an astroturf group intended to splinter the Democratic vote and hand the Presidency to the eventual Republican nominee.

You can probably appreciate why McCrory wants to avoid labels considering all the creative, highly descriptive ones applied to him when he was the Republican governor of North Carolina. McCrory signed and defended House Bill 2, which actively discriminated against LGBTQ residents and required that North Carolinians use the "bathroom assigned by their birth certificate in public places." (Politico's description is admittedly weird, as my birth certificate doesn't assign a specific bathroom to me.)

McCrory is just your typical scuzzy Republican, one most reasonable people loathed before we even had reason to fear Donald Trump. He was so reviled in fact he's the first sitting North Carolina governor to lose re-election since 1976. Yet, he thinks he can cast some shade on the popularity of the two likely presidential nominees.

He told the Washington Post, "I kind of almost feel like the political parties, which I'm still a strong Republican, are taking the public for granted as to just accepting their nominees as opposed to having another alternative."

This is something your typical scuzzy Republican would probably say when he’s trying to queer the vote.

Yeah, McGroin McGrory does leave a slime trail behind him, but he’s just arrogant enough to think he can engineer a Republican victory in 2024. And he might just be right.

Remember When Floriduh Used to be a Democracy?: On this week’s episode of “Nazis Walk Among Us,” a Floriduh school banned Amanda Gorman’s poem, “The Hill We Climb,” based on the protest of…wait for it…ONE woman.

Yes, that’s as ignorant and reactionary as it sounds, but welcome to Ron DeSantis’ Floriduh, eh?

[T]he Miami Herald identified Salinas as the Miami Lakes, Florida, mother who petitioned her children’s school to ban students’ access to the Gorman poem. Gorman read the poem, called “The Hill We Climb,” at President Joe Biden’s inauguration.

Salinas also petitioned the school to restrict children’s books about the Black poet Langston Hughes and about Black and Cuban history. After a committee reviewed her challenges, the Miami-Dade County school district opted to restrict all but one book about Cuba from grades K-5, while leaving them available to middle school students.

Salinas challenged the Gorman poem — which she says she hasn’t read in its entirety — on the grounds that it contains “indirect hate messages.” The review committee said it “erred on the side of caution” in deciding to limit students’ access.

“Erred on the side of caution?” One person complains, and a poem is removed from students’ access. And if you’re thinking “The Hill We Clim” sounds familiar, it’s the poem Amanda Gorman read at Joe Biden’s inauguration in 2021.

And the woman in question?

Yep, that’s her- Daily Salinas- and it turns out she’s a frickin’ Nazi. Stay classy, eh?

Or not.

White Still Makes Right: You remember Juneteenth, right? That’s the holiday intended to celebrate the date when Blacks in Texas found out they’d been liberated from slavery. It’s only taken 160 years for White folks to allow it to become a holiday, but we don’t deal well with change…especially when it comes to Black folks, knowhutimean?

That’s especially true in states like South Carolina, where White actors play Black folks to protect the tender sensibilities of good, God-fearing, White Conservative Christian heterosexuals. So yeah, change is hard.

Juneteenth commemorates the end of slavery in the United States. On June 19, 1865, General Gordon Granger informed enslaved Black people in Texas that they'd actually been free since 1863. Black Americans have celebrated Juneteenth for almost 200 years, but it finally became a federal holiday in 2021. Even my hometown of Greenville, South Carolina, is celebrating — well, sort of. South Carolina state offices remain open on Juneteenth. The state legislature passed a law in 2022 that grants workers a floating holiday that they can use for Juneteenth in place of Confederate Memorial Day, which remains a state holiday.

Of course, if you look at the above graphic, you’ll notice that the models in the ad look like a couple of White ‘80s prepsters. However, you’d almost never know that Juneteenth was a holiday intended to celebrate the end of slavery.

And maybe that’s the point.

These models aren't just white. They're Abercrombie & Fitch white. They don't even have Bo Derek braids.

It's as if they gentrified Juneteenth after only two years. You can almost hear the lady pictured saying, "Juneteenth use to be sooo sketchy. You'd never want to walk alone at night during Juneteenth. But now you can get great kombucha on Juneteeth."

Now in fairness, Juneteenth GVL had released several banners promoting the event that featured Black, Asian, and Hispanic people. The white couple was just one of them. The event's organizer Reuben Hays, who's Black, had said that Juneteenth is a holiday for everyone and everyone should feel welcome. The latter, of course, is still true even if Black people are centered in the marketing.

“We did not want to make this exclusively Black,” Hays said. “That is not in the spirit of unity.”

Greenville’s Fighting Injustice Together activist Bruce Wilson, meanwhile, said he was "appalled," "saddened," and "angry" — so a lot of emotions — by the poster.

"I'm the first to say that White America can celebrate Juneteenth, I just don't think White America should be the face of Juneteenth," Wilson said. "And I think that's where the disconnect is. One, I'm asking this event be boycotted if they do not feel the need to remove this banner. Secondly, I'm asking everyone to call the city manager and voice your concerns about this particular banner."

Hays said in an interview last week that Juneteenth was "a very obscure sort of holiday. I never really knew much about it. I'm not from the South, so I didn't learn about Juneteenth, really until I went to Texas on business in 2013." But it was deliberately "obscure" because most white people ignored it. Most Juneteenth celebrations died out during the height of Jim Crow, when expressions of Black joy were almost capital offenses. However, Dr. Martin Luther King's assassination in 1968 sparked a resurgence.

Growing up and attending high school and college in Minnesota, I’d never heard of Juneteenth. Even after living in Oregon for several years, I’d heard no mention of it. It wasn’t until I’d lived in Texas for several years that I became familiar with the holiday. I’m not even sure it was taught in public schools there.

Now it’s becoming a public holiday, and it’s about damned time. The end of slavery is no small thing in American history. So yes, Juneteenth was deliberately “obscure” because White folks weren’t keen on celebrating something that didn’t place their forebears in the best light.

The good news is that at least Reuben Hays recognized the faux pas and issued a mea culpa:

Juneteenth GVL would like to offer an apology to the community for the presence of non-black faces being represented on two flags representing Juneteenth. We acknowledge this mistake having been made and will correct the error quickly. This error was an attempt at uniting all of Greenville and thereby a slight oversight on one individual’s part that prevented us from fully embracing the rich potential and celebrating the depth of the black culture through the message and meaning of Juneteenth, and for that, we apologize to you the entire community.

To foster solidarity and inclusivity, we will continue to work to make all communities better. We take full responsibility for this misstep in this regard, and pledge to rectify the situation promptly and responsibly. Again, the flags in question will be removed as soon as possible.

So, even though it may not have been the case, it began to appear the Juneteenth GVL was attempting to co-opt Juneteenth as a chance for White folks to “get great kombucha.”

Yep, there’s nothing White Conservative Christian heterosexuals can’t make better all about themselves. Even when it has nothing to do with them, if White Makes Right, White can overrule anything Blacks want to celebrate.

Then again, there are always those contrarians who resent anything given to non-Whites as “special treatment,” like Congressman Ralph Norman (R-SC), who’s still convinced that he’s living in the Pleistocene Era:

First of all, our Independence Day is July 4th. Period. Independence Day celebrates the anniversary of our declared independence from Great Britain, and it’s been that way for 245 years. If you want to call Juneteenth, for example, Freedom Day or Emancipation Day then fine – that’s certainly worth considering. But calling it Independence Day is WHOLLY INAPPROPIATE (sic).

Well, sure, Independence Day was July 4th, 1776…for White folks. But I don’t think anyone asked the enslaved people owned by Thomas Jefferson how they felt about that. I’m guessing they weren’t feeling particularly independent that day.

Exit polls for the 2016 South Carolina Republican primary revealed that a majority of voters believed the Confederate flag should've remained flying over the State capitol, and 38 percent of Donald Trump's supporters believed the Confederacy should've won the Civil War. In the 2020 presidential election, 73 percent of white South Carolinians voted for Trump and just 26 percent voted for Biden.

This doesn't mean all white Republicans or Trump voters in the state are racist. But let's wait a few years before putting white folks on the Juneteenth merch. Maybe when it's an official state holiday, we can talk.

So here we are, in 2023, 158 years after the end of the Civil War (or the War Between the States, depending on which side of the Mason-Dixon Line you call home)…and we’re still struggling with the same issues. Do symbols of the Confederacy deserve to be openly displayed, even if they’re offensive to Blacks? How do we deal with the virulent racism still extant in the Deep South?

Racism isn’t confined to the southeastern tier of the United States. Here in Oregon, we have our own sordid history- Blacks were forbidden to own property in the state’s original Constitution. But it’s in the South where virulent racism has never died and remains interwoven into the warp and weft of the culture.

Using White folks in advertisements for Juneteenth is a perfect example of this. Unfortunately, that lack of sensitivity and historical consciousness continues to fuel the belief among Whites that the culture, along with political and economic power, is still theirs.

It’s a White, White, White world out there, eh?