Jen the Libertarian

I talk about Biden's sadly DOA immigration bill and some of the really good stuff in it, the Facebook - Australia story, Ted Cruz's ill fated Cabo trip, Cuomo lying about the number of grandmas and grandpas that dies of COVID in NY nursing homes, my bewilderment at political parties hitching themselves to jackasses, and few other bits 

TL;DL - everything is kinda horrible and broken but hey we might be getting some sweet at home COVID tests and another vaccine on the US market.  

Well January sure turned out to be a weird month no? This past week capped it off with the rise of meme investing, preparing for impeachment 2.0, and a Texas court blocking Biden's 100 day deportation moratorium.  A heads up - I'll be announcing in the next week changes to my Patreon and Substack accounts going forward, keep an eye out

The Trump administration is officially over and the Biden administration is gearing up; from the executive orders Biden issued on Day One we get a glimpse into his policy priorities.   Plus, we have an impending impeachment trial and the possible formation of a Trump based political party.

The past week brought us Trump's second impeachment, details on the upcoming inauguration, and details on just how stupid (or overly confident) the Capitol rioters were.   I also discuss the upcoming battle over the next stimulus bill and how jamming a $15 minimum wage requirement in it might have poison pilled it.   Don't forget to subscribe to my Substack jenmonroue.substack.com

I don't know if this will go down as the week the GOP finally died but after losing Georgia, a riot in the Capitol building, and their leading losing his social media platforms it is on life support

Good news -- it's 2021! Bad news -- January is going to be a hell of a month   We've got a fight over if Congress will approve additional direct stimulus finds (no), a vaccine rollout that's not going so great (eh), the first shot fired in the Vaccine War (yikes), and a last ditch phone call from to get the results of the Georgia election altered (oh boy)   Next week -- the Georgia Senate runoff and the Congressional approval of the Electoral College vote.

The last full week of 2020 is officially over! This stupid dumb year is almost over!   We still have insanely high unemployment and no COVID relief package but we do have another vaccine on the horizon.   We also still have Trump and his swampy pardons, plus an unexplained RV explosion in Nashville

In the past week -Barr handed in his resignation -FDA approved Moderna's vaccine for EUA -FDA also approved a completely at home rapid COVID test kit -the federal government kinda botched the Pfizer vaccine rollout -we learned that (probably) Russian state sponsored hackers gained access to federal computer systems and has been rooting around in them since the spring

Bad news - unemployment has once again skyrocketed and the FTC wants to break up Facebook   Good news - the 2020 election legal odyssey has ended and the first batch of Pfizer vaccine is officially in distribution

We've made it to the last month of this accursed year! Yay!   However we now have Trump trying to shoehorn a repeal of Section 230 into the NDAA. Boo!   We (finally) got a House vote on the MORE Act and it passed! Yay!   And a federal judge ruled that DACA is to be reinstated in its original form posthaste. Yay but Congress need to do its job!   My Substack is where you will find other fun stuff from this week - jenmonroue.substack.com

Short week that was not short on craziness - from the jettisoned Powell still going forward with the Kraken, a nasty Third Circuit dismissal of a Trump lawsuit, to SCOTUS weighing in on NYC's house of worship attendance caps Don't forget to subscribe to my Substack - jenmonroe.substack.com 

The Trump campaign continues it push to drag out the election to the bitter end (which is coming soon), the narratives keep getting more and more absurd, and the exodus of talent in the mediasphere continues

It has been two weeks since Election Day and yet the election has not ended yet. It. Just. Keeps. Dragging. On.  Warning - there is a rant in here

Look at that; we had an election, we got the results in time for the Weekly Roundup, and we managed to not literally set the nation on fire in the process.   Metaphorically, however, the nation is kinda on fire

Here we are, in the last of the Before Times. This past week we had yet another stupid dumb tech hearing, a ruling on the TikTok ban, another police involved shooting, and some last minute voter disenfranchisement plots.   Don't forget to subscribe to my Substack, I'll be posting content there too on the Twitter - NYP situation and a few other things - jenmonroe.substack.com

I did it. I watched all the debates from the 2020 election season. This episode is a bit shorter because I don't know what more commentary I can offer that I haven't in the fifty eleven debate episodes I already made, but I do offer my thoughts on the usefulness of debates and when they should be held

We're nearing the end of the 2020 Election Season and the news cycle is not slowing down. This past week we had a SCOTUS confirmation hearing, two townhalls instead of one debate, and the New York Post trying to do an email based October Surprise Link to my Substack - jenmonroe.substack.com 

A week closer to Election Day, a week further from sanity... Don't forget to sign up for my Substack newsletter - jenmonroe.substack.com 

A quick rundown of the almost useless vice presidential debate where we learned almost nothing Don't forget to subscribe to my Substack, it is much more interesting than the vice presidential debate - jenmonroue.substack.com

It's hard to imagine Trump has ever had a worse week than the one he just had - his tax returns got leaked, he had a horrible debate performance, and he's currently receiving treatment for COVID-19. Since Trump's bad week means the whole campaign season is now in chaos, let's break it down.   Link to my new Substack newsletter (which you should totally subscribe to) - https://jenmonroe.substack.com

Well I started making these episodes for the Democratic primary debates so in order to see the series through to the end I decided to give the presidential debates their own episodes.   This debate series has...not started out so well, to put it mildly.   Link to my Substack (which you should subscribe to) - jenmonroe.substack.com

In this week's roundup - Trump makes dumb mouth noises, the SCOTUS nominee is revealed, and the grand jury makes its decision on who will face charges in the Taylor shooting. And news - I've started a Substack! Here is a link to subscribe and a post with a bit more info as to why I'm changing up the content schedule and delivery method. https://jenmonroe.substack.com 

We may be done with 2020 but 2020 is clearly not done with us. This past week saw frightening levels of overreach from the Trump administration on the TikTok acquisition deal and on what exactly should constitute US history as taught to schoolchildren. And then Ruth Bader Ginsberg passed.   Buckle up.

It was a short week but we still have stuff to talk about, like how for some reason Trump decided to tell Bob Woodward things he probably shouldn't have and the staggering number of deportations that have happened since March

Since Congress won't leave well enough alone when it comes to Section 230, we have two presidential candidates who are openly antagonistic towards Section 230, and two platforms have already changed their TOS to reflect the current environment we need to chat about S230 and its importance again. My RocaNews piece on S230 - https://www.rocanews.com/blog-posts/political-attacks-on-internet-freedom-will-lead-to-censorship

The story of the shooting of Aaron Danielson in Portland comes to a rather troubling end (?), both presidential candidates visit Kenosha and have very different experiences, and The Atlantic drops a piece on Trump that causes a mini freakout on the topic of anonymous sources.   *correction - it was not Kenosha PD that issued a statement about Reinouhl being armed it was Thurston County Sheriff's Office

Left off of the weekly roundup - Trump released his 2020 agenda and the RNC decided that their 2020 agenda what whatever Trump said.   So let's look at this Trump / GOP agenda shall we?

The past week gave us a bunch of dystopian hellscape - between the warnings of impending doom coming from the RNC to another police shooting that has kicked off riots in Kenosha, which lead to the Rittenhouse shootings   Needless to say it wasn't a very good week

The DNC finally took place virtually on August 17 - 20 and I watched the primetime portions of it and recapped it for you, and we got a surprise arrest

I bring you one of the most sordid tales of backstabbing intrigue ever. Alex Morse is the victim of one of the grossest smear campaigns I've seen in a long time and the story is a mashup of everything that's wrong with everything right now

So we now know the entirety of the 2020 Democratic ticket, a controversy / conspiracy involving the USPS and our pending mail voting tsunami, and btw we don't know who is supposed to be running DHS but we know who isn't supposed to be running it and surprise it's the two people who aren't supposed to be running it

Matt wrote a piece for Reason about his journey trying to find decent data on the safety of sending kids (namely his own) back into a brick and mortar school environment. Spoiler alert - it was quite the frustrating experience, not made any easier by the media and its current incentive structure.   And because it's us there's plenty of talk about other stuff too   Link to Matt's piece - https://reason.com/2020/08/12/media-alarmism-is-making-it-difficult-to-assess-school-reopening/

Sure everything is bad is right right now and that includes the current educational mess we find ourselves in for the 2020 - 2021 school year but there may be a silver lining here - parents across the country are going to have to join the school choice conversation   Corey and I discuss what this could all mean for school choice going forward, especially as it relates to the money spent on eduction and the options on offer going forward   Link to the EdChoice public opinion tracker Corey references if you're interested in seeing the raw data - https://edchoice.morningconsultintelligence.com/downloads/

Trump decided this is the week he's granting himself the power to decide if Tik Tok and WeChat get to operate in the US and to institute his own covid relief plan via EO (none of this seems particularly legal btw), and Beirut suffers an explosion that due to social media we all knew about in real time

As I'm sure everyone is aware YAL's Mobilize 2020 got canceled at the last minute by the city of Dallas (insert rage emoji here) so I have a brief chat with Cliff Maloney, president of YAL, to find out what happened. Stay tuned after the interview where I give my own thoughts and explanation as to why I am mad about the cancelation.

I think I can use this episode's title for every weekly roundup for at least the rest of the year... We got Q2's GDP numbers and yeah lol we're boned, Portland seems to be healing now that the feds are leaving, the Trump administration is trying another DHS DACA memo out, Congress having another useless tech hearing, and hey did you remember this is still an election year and that Biden has to name a running mate

So as everyone on Earth knows the feds were sent into Portland to do...I don't know what exactly and Nancy went to go document what was going on and report back to us 

Things in Portland aren't slowing down and neither is the trend of deploying Feds to cities who didn't ask for their assistance, the Trump administration is *still* trying to keep illegal immigrants from being counted on the Census and to keep from having to reinstitute DACA, and a return of the Covington story now that settlements are being made

Where I look into movements that have come and gone in the past (namely girlboss feminism and #MeToo) to predict the future of the current It Movement   Let's just say the future doesn't look bright    Link to Leigh Stein's Medium piece referenced - https://gen.medium.com/the-end-of-the-girlboss-is-nigh-4591dec34ed8

Things we learned this past week - root access to Twitter can be bought for an insanely low price, DHS can send CBP into Portland because they feel like it, and libertarians like to fight over dumb stuff (to be fair you probably already knew about that last one)

Jesse and I have a conversation about The Letter (which he is a signer of), the discourse around The Letter (which involves him), The Counter Letter (which also involves him), a bit about Bari Weiss (that does not involve him), and his and Katie Herzog's new (very successful!) new podcast Blocked and Reported  Blocked and Reported Patreon page - https://www.patreon.com/blockedandreported Jesse's Substack page - https://jessesingal.substack.com 

Things happened outside The Discourse over the past week, including the Trump administration trying to either force universities to open or force foreign students to go home, some more SCOTUS decisions that are quite significant, and the commutation of Roger Stone's prison sentence  It's been a busy week 

Awful lot of gaslighting and strawmannirg and willfully (?) misinterpreting certain things this week... Of course this is about The Letter but also about Taylor Lorenz and clickbait culture and the insane reactions people have had to both stories and wow things have been crazy the past few days

We had an abbreviated holiday week with featured a bit of bad and good news on the unemployment front, conditions worsening drastically in HK (and how we can't really help), and the return of a story I first covered waaaaaaaay back when I first started making content - the Shitty Media Men list  (yeah I know I missed a few presidents on that statue garden list don't @ me)

So about Parler, the hot new free speech no "censorship" platform that...well...isn't quite  Spoiler alert - yeah you might want to go ahead and delete your account before someone decides to sue Parler over something you said on the platform 

We've got unemployment claims leveling off at an alarmingly high number, Trump extending the green card ban until the end of the year and adding in some more groups of people who can't come to the US, a whole discussion about a noose, and idiots tearing down statues On the bright side we do have grand jury charges against the men involved in Arbury's death and Braun gave us a bill to significantly change QI so it's not all bad

Where we discusser her Arc Digital article of the same name plus a *lot* of other things Link to Cathy's piece - https://arcdigital.media/feminism-racism-and-the-damsel-in-distress-1aa65c5172cc

In which I discuss the reactions (or lack thereof) to the Brooks shooting, the rather momentous SCOTUS decisions we got this week, and Trump's weird failed Tulsa rally There's also talk about Bolton's book and a slightly off topic ramble about cop who lie about fast food incidents 

As the country slides even further into delirium we still manage a conversation about what to do about policing, ancoms take over a chunk of Seattle, and (sadly) we have another death at the hands of police

I don't mean this as shade toward anyone, I just wanted to get some stuff off my chest because I've been thinking about it....