It’s the 200th episode of The New Abnormal, starting with a wild “flashback” to the very “first” episode in the summer of 1998, when co-host Molly Jong-Fast foresaw a future of “racist babies,” with Molly wishing “if only there was a senator with a ridiculous mustache” to being the issue to light.
Jump ahead to 2022, and co-host Andy Levy says Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson “really missed a chance there” when that senator with the ’stache, Ted Cruz, asked her why she didn’t want to define what a woman is. Jackson could have said, Levy joked: “Yes, Senator, I define a woman as someone you marry and then defend them when someone else calls them ugly,” like Trump did to Cruz’s wife—who didn’t think that, or Trump saying his dad had killed JFK, was reason enough to stop sucking up to The Donald.
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Later in the episode, the Beast’s Matthew Fuller joins the party to break down the fuckery of the Jackson hearing and its “straight racism, just the full-flavored version. I think I expected it to be maybe a little bit more coded, a little bit more dog whistle-y. Certainly I knew that they were gonna bring up stupid things like critical race theory. I didn’t expect the line of attack to be just so overtly racist,” with false suggestions that “Jackson is soft on crime, she’s soft on child pornographers” even though her sentencing practices were “well in line with the average sentences people were getting.”
“But the broader issue,” Fuller explains, “is Republicans know Democrats have all the votes. At the end of the day. I'd be very surprised if Jackson is not confirmed, and confirmed with probably a couple Republican votes. They know that, and the hearing is just about scoring points, which is why you see Cruz giving his speech and then checking his Twitter mentions. This isn’t about actually moving people. This is about raising money. This is about adding to their own clout. And it’s been frankly a pretty disgusting confirmation.”
Plus, Buzzfeed’s Christopher Miller, who’s been reporting from the Ukraine for years, considers the first month of the Russian invasion—“When Putin announced his invasion, I was in the Eastern city of Kramatorsk, near the front lines of the longer simmering war in Eastern Ukraine and (was) awoken by an airstrike on an airfield that was about 2,000 feet away from me, which is definitely 2,000 feet too close”—and the history that led to this moment.
“Over the years, I’ve seen just how strong Ukrainians are, the way in which the Ukrainians can unite against a common enemy. Their resiliency is nothing short of spectacular, and incredibly inspiring and impressive,” says Miller. “We saw glimpses of this during the Orange Revolution in 2004, again during Euromaidan in 2013 and 14, certainly in the response to Russia’s first invasion in 2014 when Ukraine’s military was weak and caught off guard and it was really up to civil society and volunteers to fill the security void. And ordinary people from teachers to historians, politicians, hip-hop artists taking up arms and running to the front in order to stop a Russian advance. We’re seeing more of that on a greater scale. Right now, you’d be hard pressed to find somebody still left behind in Kiev without a gun. Their determination, their will is incredible.”
One difference, says Miller, is that it’s “a very militarized society in Ukraine now… over the last eight years of Ukraine defending itself against Russia's first invasion, of Crimea and then Donbas, it has been trained by NATO forces. It has received Western weaponry. It has learned to fight against Russia. It’s battle-hardened, it’s tested, it’s a lot bigger. I think people underestimated the Ukrainians and and certainly overestimated the strength of the Russian military.”
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