See Me After Class
Does the administration's new embrace of pedantry reflect anxieties about its knowledge base? (Wrong!)
So who decided politics’ secret weapon is the pop quiz?
As far as I can tell, it happened about four months ago. That’s when we started seeing clip after C-SPAN clip of lawmakers asking this cabinet member or that MAGA soldier to define a legal term, identify an historic figure, say which branch of government does what, or name the nations in a regional bloc.
As someone whose kid just finished seventh grade, I can say that this is all very seventh grade.
The approach is Democrat-coded, and derives from the forensic Q&A mode of committee hearings, where people use it to create a public record, highlight inconsistencies, and create viral moments.
But in the last few months, the approach has produced three kinds of social interaction: 1) the middle-school teacher humiliating the unprepared jock; 2) the cop conducting a field sobriety test; and 3) climactic dialogue from an Aaron Sorkin script, wherein one’s ability to rattle off precise factoids from the top of their head proves not only superior intelligence but also virtue.
Which one shows up depends on the quality of the witness.
No one expects too much intellectual firepower from, say, former World Wrestling Entertainment head Linda McMahon — who is, after all, merely the head of education — so it wasn’t such a scandal when, at an education summit in April, she touted one school for offering its students “A-one teaching,” using this same modifier a few more times before people clocked that, by “A-1” McMahon actually meant “AI.” Whose meaning she didn’t know, or whose I-word she deemed taboo.
McMahon did better at a committee hearing in June, when Congresswoman Summer Lee asked if she believed that students should be taught about the Tulsa Race Massacre, a woke topic about which McMahon showed suitable ignorance. But things got trickier when Oklahoma Senator Markwayne Mullin sprung his own pop quiz on the education secretary.
McMahon clearly sized his question up as a gimme, since Mullin is not only a fellow member of today’s MAGA-fied GOP but a veritable WWE character himself, a grown-ass man who challenged Teamster president Sean O’Brien to a brawl in a congressional hearing. He even extended McMahon the olive branch of folksy grammar, saying “What was we ranked nationally, in reading and math, in 1979?”
She answered with a commiserating look: “We were very, very low on the totem pole.”
Oops: no, we wasn’t.
Her answer forced Mullin to clarify that in 1979, US students were actually ranked number one in reading and math, whereas today, he said, “we’re ranked 36th in reading and 28th in math.”
What’s notable about this pop-quiz fail is that it was part of Mullin’s attempt to commend McMahon’s efforts to make American education great again — naturally by radically slashing its budget. The fact that he located the golden age of American education in 1979, a year before Reagan went to town on public services, makes this dialogue approach a Socratic ideal for dumbassedness.
While the binary of smarty-pants Dems and simple men-of-action GOP has been operative since at least the Reagan era, the GOP is quickly driving its side toward some kind of event horizon.
In May, NH Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan famously gave DHS secretary Kristi Noem a civics-class pop quiz that Noem answered like a star contestant in a spelling bee: “Habeas corpus,” she began, “is a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country.”
While you and I know this is incorrect, I’d be curious to know which interpretation of her answer you prefer.
Is it: A) that an American politician doesn’t know the definition of this foundational legal right? Or B) that she knows damn well but is taking a page from today’s mobster White House to give the answer of a Mamet hardass or Scorsese thug. (The definition? Fuck-you’s the definition.)
Who doesn’t envy these people? Imagine what romping meadows of blissful ignorance open before someone who owes their job to a man who professes special love for the undereducated.
But there’s a whole suite of mental habits downstream from embracing MAGA axiom-one, that Trump won the 2020 election, and the further down the behavior cascade you go, the more deeply you immerse yourself in your assigned role of university-loathing, expertise-distrusting, corruption-excusing “war fighter,” the greater your need for guidance on how to pull this off in public.
This came in early May, when Trump, in an Oval Office interview, showed how to snatch an F from the jaws of an easy A.
I actually felt sorry for ABC interviewer Terry Moran in this scenario, having to endure one of Trump’s boastful tours through his lavish property, being forced to make small talk as he points out this or that classy fixture he had specially installed, having to gamely ask what that one, the Declaration of Independence, means to him.
My guess is that the softball-turned-hand grenade landed Moran on ABC’s chopping block long before he tweeted, accurately, that Stephen Miller is a world-class hater. (Welcome to Substack, Terry. Please chime in to confirm or deny.)
As today’s movement conservatives say, there are no enemies to the right. And aside from the nerdo-fascist brain trust supplying philosophy to tech-right billionaires and Clarence Thomas, there’s no shame in not knowing shit about shit.
All of which brings us to Ted Cruz v. Tucker Carlson.
As you may have heard, in an interview on his YouTube channel last week, Carlson grilled Cruz about his support for US military intervention in Iran — to which the isolationist plank of MAGA is rather famously opposed. It didn’t go well for Cruz.
You know things are hectic when the media’s loudest Trump apologist changes up so much that he almost sounds like an actual journalist. One viral clip of their exchange goes as follows:
Carlson: How many people live in Iran, by the way?
Cruz: I don’t know the population.
Carlson: At all?
Cruz: No, I don’t know the population.
Carlson: You don’t know the population of the country you seek to topple?
Cruz: How many people live in Iran?
Carlson: 92 million. How could you not know that?
This stuff made people lose their minds.
The episode sent Carlson’s channel from no. 18 to no. 5 on YouTube’s weekly podcast rankings, and to no. 2 on Spotify’s chart—largely from the riveting spectacle of a longtime MAGA blowhard talking like a Democrat or member of the lamestream liberal elite.
Cruz has a gift for humiliation that I’d call Christian if it weren’t so opportunistic. But it’s still hard to imagine his sense of betrayal at discovering himself in a space where his Biblical justification for fighting Israel’s war didn’t win him pats on the back.
What’s even more galling is that Carlson managed to cast himself as the manosphere’s geopolitical maestro by summoning the awesome power of Wikipedia.
While anyone with an audience and a research assistant can play a Sorkin hero on their own YouTube channel, Carlson’s performance is significant in sending a depth charge into MAGA’s sense of safety among its people.
Trumpologist Michael Wolff says cites White House insiders who tell him that Cruz’s Tucker downfall was “very much a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God moment for him.” That is, for one heart-stopping moment, Trump faced the possibility that people in his coalition might consider ignorance about these shithole countries “no one has ever heard of” an actual deficit.
So one week after his under-attended military parade and four days after Israel’s reckless attack on targets in Iran, Trump jumped in on the winning team by ordering seven B-2 stealth bombers to fly 7,000 miles from a Missouri air base to Iran where they dropped 12 “bunker buster” bombs on a nuclear facility at Fordow and two more of them at Natanz. After which he resumed fighting that old bugaboo from his first administration: intelligence.
This past week, Trump’s team has waged a public war on members of its own, Israel’s, and other nations’ intelligence communities, who independently reported that the Fordo site was damaged not destroyed, that the attack only set Iran’s nuclear program back by months, that bunker buster bombs aren’t necessarily sufficient and that 900 pounds of enriched uranium were removed from a bombing site and are now in the wind.
The White House handily batted these and other concerns away with whitehouse.gov’s easy-to-read binary: “Iran’s Nuclear Facilities Have Been Obliterated — and Suggestions Otherwise are Fake News.”
But just in case that didn’t work, Trump, having learned from Ted Cruz, decided to fight fire with fire by sending out his own Sorkin hero — in the form of Pete Hegseth.
On Thursday, Hegseth took the podium at a Pentagon news conference everyone who’d dare suggest that this operation was anything less than a Nobel Peace Prize-winning success.
It was a manful performance. It suggested a previous evening spent with a bottle of Jack and A Few Good Men, constructing a persona out of both Tom Cruise’s clear-eyed prosecutor and Jack Nicholson’s macho general.
“I want to recognize the pilots who flew those bombers, who flew those fighters, who flew those refuelers,” he began, an all-but-audible Hans Zimmer score swelling beneath him. “Warriors. I want to recognize the sailors on those destroyers, in those subs, on those carriers. Warriors. All of them.”
After spitting out some more details, specs, and logistics from “the longest B-2 Spirit bomber mission since 2001,” Hegseth asserted that “the courage it took to go into enemy territory flying 36 hours on behalf of the American people in the world to take out a nuclear program is beyond what anyone in this audience can fathom.”
Or as Nicholson put it: “Son, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who's gonna do it? You? You, Lt. Weinburg? I have a greater responsibility than you could possibly fathom.”
Indeed, who could fathom it? All those military terms, so clearly enunciated. The whole thing recalled that Onion story, “Man in Suit Slams Fist on Desk.” (“A man wearing a suit slammed the fleshy portion of his fist on a mahogany desk Monday in an attempt to further emphasize a terse and harsh declarative statement, nervous sources later reported.”)
But what’s really going on here?
My guess is that these fact- and figure-spewing speeches are geared to an America best represented by podcaster Theo Vonn, who as W. Kamau Bell aptly said, “is not very smart and pretends to be even less smart.” They’re for people who think a president who posts about “regime change” after a supposedly one-off strike at a nuclear program is being “politically incorrect” rather than a grave tactical liability.
They’re for people who actually believe Sgt. Houthi PC Small Group when he describes a “deception effort known only to an extremely small number of planners and key leaders,” referencing a diversionary mission that was only necessary because the Pentagon worried our president was telegraphing war plans on social media — probably based on posts like: “Everyone should evacuate Tehran!”
Maybe these new info-dense speeches are for people who don’t distinguish between the performance of intelligence and its evidence, one more product of political governance through social media, where free-floating signifiers and pop quizzes perform so well.
Maybe, as an act of resistance, we should seek truth in the essay portion of this test.
I’ll provide a couple of questions to get us started:
1) Does the administration’s shift into more pedantic modes of discourse reflect a larger anxiety about its knowledge base?
2) Does supporting a law-flouting authoritarian that history guarantees will impoverish and immiserate the nation make you dumb? Or must you be dumb to do so?
And a final one for extra credit:
3) Did we just go to war in the Middle East so that our president wouldn’t get an F?
Use evidence to support your answer. Take as much space as you need.
I’ll need these on my desk by early next week.