Turkeys and Drumsticks 2022

Over at the old Right-Thinking blog, I would take advantage of the Thanksgiving Holiday to give out my awards for Turkeys of the Year and Golden Drumsticks. The latter are for those who exemplify the best traits in our public sphere. The former are for those who exemplify silliness and stupidity. I sometimes give them out to someone who is evil; but they are mostly reserved for those who regularly make me shake my head and wonder what they’re thinking. It’s a sort of “thank you” for making snarky tweeting easier. Past winners can be found here.

Some years, I struggle a bit to find five people who are worthy of being turkeys. There’s always lots of foolishness out there but people rising to a truly biblical level of such godawful public foolishness are rare. This year, my cup runneth over. It spilleth onto the table. It runneth out onto the deck. It carrieth away the dog into the neighbor’s yard. It causeth the plumber to come over and unclogeth our drains. I could have made this list three times as long. It wasn’t just that there were lots of idiots this year. It was that so many of them achieved massive prominence and got such delicious comeuppance. Let me put it this way: I didn’t even consider putting CNN+’s $300 million bellyflop into in the top five. I just threw up my hands when a bunch of media figures tried to remold a violent attack on an 82-year-old grandfather into a spat with a gay prostitute. The year was just. That. Stupid.

So without further ado, here are your Turkeys of the Year for 2022.

Elon Musk:And really, who else could it be? Between the long protracted effort to set fire to a giant pile of money and become “Chief Twit” to the numerous children popping out of wives, girlfriends, employees and random passersby to his chaotic management once he acquired Twitter, it’s been a banner year for our favorite South African immigrant. And his behavior has only made Twitter’s cash-flow situation worse.

I yield to no one in my admiration for Space-X, which is transforming the space industry. But, as I said on Andrew’s show, Musk is the embodiment of the Very Smart Person. He has lots of ideas. Some of them, like recycling rocket stages, are brilliant. Most of them, like giving out $8 checkmarks to anyone who ponies up, which predictably resulted in blue checkmarked accounts pretending to be celebrities and major brands, are terrible.

(Part of this award go the hysteria that was unleashed when Musk acquired Twitter. By last week, people were opening accounts on Mastodon and frantically posting contact information, thinking that the site would be dead within hours. It’s still going, as of this writing.)

The GOP Crazies: The GOP went into Election 2022 ready for a red wave. Why shouldn’t they have? Inflation was high, crime was up, dissatisfaction was high. And the opposition party always gains in off-year elections.

Instead, the GOP will barely gain the house majority with 6-11 seats and the Dems may actually gain a seat in the Senate, depending on how the Georgia runoff goes. The Dems also gained two gubernatorial seats. And the reason was obvious: Blake Masters, Dr. Oz, Kari Lake, Herschel Walker, Doug Mastriano, Tudor Dixon. All of these people were poorly qualified. And most of them were election deniers. In fact election deniers lost overwhelmingly in key battles for Senate, Governor, Attorney General and Secretary of State. Had the Republicans nominated moderates or even non-crazies, they would have a senate majority, with as many as 54 seats.

Vladimir Putin: At the beginning of the year, Putin was massing the mighty Russian war machine on the border of Ukraine. At the end of the year, his army has been defeated in their push in Kyiv and is slowly retreating from Eastern Ukraine. He is politically and financially isolated, calling up untested reserves and consoling himself by murdering the occasional dissident. His status as a supposed Great Leader has been massively diminished and the biggest fear people have of him now is that he’ll start a nuclear war out of sheer humiliation.

Tagging along with Putin for this place are his puppets in US media. From the beginning, they insisted that this was the US’s fault, that we were forcing Ukraine to fight a proxy war and that Putin was right on the verge of total victory. Over and over again, they have been proven massively hilariously wrong. Has this deterred them from continuing to sit in Vladimir’s lap and recite his fairy tales so he’ll pay them on the head?

Naaah.

Alex Jones: Jones is rapidly trying to hide money after being hit with more than a billion dollars in judgements following his Sandy Hook denial and his blustering incompetent legal defense. I think he’ll be fine; the suckers will gladly hand over their money to him. But we now have him on record as a fraud, someone who says outrageous things to pull in the bucks. Someone who won’t and really can’t stand by anything he ever says.

Ron DeSantis: Yes, I am aware that he is the Not Trump of the Moment, the supposed savior of the GOP who will rescue them from possible electoral defeat in 2024. He won re-election by a massive margin.¹ But he has lately become a purveyor of performative conservative BSery. He passed a law to prevent social media companies from “discriminating” against conservatives, which the Courts rightfully struck down. He passed a “Stop Woke” Act, which restricted the ability of college professors to speak on controversial issues. A court also rightfully struck that down. Then there was his stunt to drop asylum seekers in Martha’s Vineyard, which may backfire. Then there was the fight he picked with Disney after his anti-LGBT law passed, which may descend into a series of lawsuits.

Is DeSantis better than Trump? Yes. He’s not crazy and he’s actually passed laws, including some that would make Democrats happy. He’s clearly not as divisive, given that he won by a margin that Donald Trump has never and will never even approach. If it comes down to him and Trump for the GOP nomination, I won’t hesitate to support him. But he is absolutely on board with the GOP’s agenda of performative nonsense. And I expect it to get worse, not better, if he seeks the White House.

Dishonorable Mention: SCOTUS, Jordan Peterson, Donald Trump, CNN+, Meta, Anti-vaxxers, Truth Social, Chris Rufo, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Joe Biden’s comms staff, Sam Bankman-Fried. Really the whole crypto thing. The Uvalde police, Kevin McCarthy, Gym Jordan, the conservative Orbanophiles, FIFA.

And now for those who made 2022 a year worth fighting for. Despite what you may have heard, 2022 wasn’t all bad. New vaccines are being developed for Lyme disease and HIV. Fossil fuels continue to yield ground to more sustainable alternatives (including, at long last, nuclear). It was good enough year that I decided to drop the James Webb Space Telescope — which has producing stunning new insights into the cosmos — from the Top Five because I’ve already written so much about it.

Zelensky and the People of Ukraine If you had given me odds on Volodymyr Zelensky even being alive at Thanksgiving, I would not have taken them. But crises reveals who we are. And the former actor, comedian and lawyer proved himself to be a true leader, in every sense of the word. He refused to flee Kyiv. He rallied his people. He rallied the world. He carefully managed the politics. As a result, his nation has exposed the Russian bear as weaker than anyone imagined.

When the war began, Putin claimed that Ukraine wasn’t really a country and didn’t have an identity. But as Andrew so skillfully pointed out, Putin has given them their identity: they’re the ones who stood up to him. They are the ones who, after the world turned its back on his aggression in Chechnya, Syria, Georgia and Crimea, said, “No further”. Whether it was telling Russian warships to go fuck themselves or telling their soldiers to carry seeds so sunflowers would grow where they fell, they have defied this beast with a skill and a ferocity that no one expected.

The War is not over. The evil man with the bald pate and the long tables may have a few tricks left to pull. But 2022 has been Ukraine’s year. Slava Ukraini.

NATO After years of turmoil, NATO re-emerged in 2022 as a force to be reckoned with. They shored up their defenses and provided critical aide to Ukraine. Sweden and Finland applied to join, a development I never expected to happen in my lifetime. Note especially how this effort to stymie Putin’s aggression has been led by NATO’s newest members: Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Romania, Czechia. These states remember what Russian occupation was like and knew, from the beginning, that Putin could not be trusted.

Moderates When I look at the 2022 election, I find myself agreeing with Andrew Sullivan: this was a cry from the middle. As extreme as our media figures have gotten, the bulk of America seems to be moving toward a sensible moderation. Some of Congress’s biggest successes this year were on moderate bills on gun control and gay marriage. Election denialists were rejected but so were the more extreme elements of the Democratic Party. If you look at who those GOP crazies lost to, it was moderates to left-of-center across the board. The crazies have the mic. But us normies can still outvote them.

Iranian Protesters In defiance of one of the most brutal regimes on the planet, the Iranian people, led by young women, are demanding change. Despite imprisonment and murder, they are still going strong and will not back down. The leader of their World Cup team just denounced the regime after their game, no doubt incurring a significant wrath. We’ve seen this play out before and the regime has survived. But one gets the feeling that their days are numbered. On the day the mullahs fall, I hope we can welcome the new Iran into the ranks of our friends.

Bengals Fans and Chiefs Fans After defeating the Buffalo Bills in the NFL playoffs Chiefs fans donated $300,000 to a children’s hospital in Buffalo. After defeating the Chiefs, Bengals fans then donated thousands to a feed-the-poor program in Kansas City. Wouldn’t it be great if this became an NFL tradition? If fans of victorious teams donated to charities in the defeated team’s city? If I were NFL commissioner, I’d be pushing this hard.

Honorable Mentions: Elizabeth II, the Georgia Brads (Kemp and Raffensberger), Ketanji Brown Jackson, Joe Manchin, Pope Francis, DASS, Sanna Marin, bivalent vaccines, Rishi Sunak, JWST.

1. Albeit against Charlie Christ, so … not exactly the varsity there.