It Snowed All Day
And a disclaimer
Though there wasn’t significant accumulation—just enough to cover the rooftops and trees—it was grey and very peaceful. It was a day that reminded me of one of my favorite stanzas from my favorite Wallace Stevenson poem, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird:”
XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.
Also, a quick disclaimer: If I am ever caught swallowing, ripping up, flushing, burning or otherwise destroying government documents it was not my intention to do so.
2/07/22-2/13/22
N.B. The numbers in parentheses indicate the position on last week’s list.
Here are the 70 daily top ten posts for the week:
Ben Shapiro held 21 (25) Dan Bongino held 5 (8) followed by Franklin Graham with 5 (4), Breitbart and Fox with 4 each, Sean Hannity with 3, and Steven Crowder, Charlie Kirk, and Nick Adams with one each—for a total of 45 out of 70.
The only left-leaning organization to claim a spot in the top 70 was Occupy Democrats, with 1. Last week they had 3.
NYT BESTSELLERS HARDCOVER NON-FICTION
3. The 1619 Project, edited by Nikole Hannah-Jones (1)
8. Unthinkable, Jamie Raskin (4)
AMAZON BESTSELLERS HARDCOVER NON-FICTION
10. The Real Anthony Fauci, RFK, Jr. (6)
11. 12 Rules for Life, Jordan Peterson (16). I guess the recent Rogan controversy is helping Peterson sell books as his climbed 5 spots this week.
Maus is still holding strong at 3 and 8. Let’s keep ordering it—or I should say pre-ordering as it is temporarily out of stock—everywhere. Let’s continue to do the same for The Bluest Eye and Beloved by Toni Morrison, Dear Martin by Nic Stone, All Boys Aren’t Blue by George Johnson, and The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas.
APPLE PODCASTS—NEWS
THE RIGHT AND THE ENABLERS
2. The Ben Shapiro Show (3)
4. The Dan Bongino Show (4)
5. Steve Bannon’s War Room (8)
9. Real Time with Bill Maher (9)
10. Matt Walsh
12. The Megyn Kelly Show (12)
13. The Glenn Beck Program (11)
15. The Charlie Kirk Show (13)
20. Mark Levin
THE LEFT
5. Pod Save America (10)
6. The Rachel Maddow Show (12)
18. Lovett or Leave It, Jon Lovett
And, yep, Joe Rogan, the really racist guy with 11 million monthly listeners, still has the #1 podcast on Spotify.
SUBSTACK POLITICS NEWSLETTERS
Although the top-ten is more ideologically diverse across the right-wing spectrum, it contains a disturbing number of serially wrong anti-democratic writers who have way too many followers than is healthy for our nation. Every single newsletter in the top ten has tens of thousands of subscribers.
This list won’t change much from week to week but there’s a new—and disturbing—entry this week:
2. The Dispatch Jonah Goldberg,editor-in-chief
3. TK News by Matt Taibi
5. Glen Greenwald
6. Unreported Truths by Alex Berenson
7. Common Sense by Bari Weiss, aka the “Substack grifter” (in the words of Press Run’s Eric Boehlert)
8. The Weekly Dish by Andrew Sullivan
10. Take Control: Dr. Mercola’s Censored Library, Joseph Mercola
Thankfully, this sorry collection of propagandists, purveyors of disinformation, and liars is led by the exemplary Letters from an American by Heather Cox Richardson at number 1. Unfortunately, Judd Legum’s Popular Information fell to 11, replaced by the despicable snake-oil salesman and number 1 purveyor of Covid misinformation, Joseph Mercola.
In keeping with the "eating" trope, I must mention that I subsist on all the sincere, humane, funny, timely, courageous, and refreshingly honest posts by you. You are an oracle of sorts, a voice that lifts us up in this surreal time of excruciating losses, loneliness, and a loss of existential moorings when we think about what's happening in our country. You persist, you speak truth to power, you fill us with hope, and even make us laugh. Somehow there is magic in this community of readers. It feels like home. Thank you.
The only good thing coming out of Donny being prez is that we've come to know you, Mary!