Weekend Wrap Up: June 8 - 14
The weakest strongmen, taxpayer dollars for wealthy sports team owners, tornado relief
Hey there, happy Saturday. Show Me Last Week has a YouTube channel now. My first non-vertical video was uploaded on Thursday, and it’s a short recap of what happened during the Missouri Legislatures extraordinary session this week. YouTube’s algorithm is partially driven by thumbnails, so please excuse how cringey this one is –I’m trying to build an audience.
YouTube subscriptions are free, and help let me know that it’s worth it for me to keep working on this type of content. I really enjoy the creative process, but I’ve also got a mouth to feed.
If we can agree that our government’s spending is a reflection of our elected leaders values, than the past week has put those values on display for all to see.
I was lucky enough to have a column published in the Missouri Independent this week, where I argue that Trump’s decision to send an overwhelming force of National Guard troops to L.A. shows a blatant disregard for people suffering in St. Louis after the tornado. Initial estimates put the cost of the deployment north of $100 million. St. Louis got $71 million in disaster aid.
If you prefer short-form video to reading, you can watch the video version of my column on TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube.
Edited out of the article was my call for mass protests, due to fears that States Newsroom could lose their tax-exempt status by including it as a call-to-action. Luckily, I’m not the only person advocating for such a thing. Will you be at the No King protest later today?
Well, you know who could be there? The Missouri National Guard, after Governor Mike Kehoe made the extremely cowardly decision to activate them “as a precautionary measure in reaction to recent instances of civil unrest across the country.”
Let’s be clear: these guard members will be here to purposefully instigate violence as a pretext to use force against protestors. They are being weaponized against the very people they’re meant to protect.
If you’re going to be protesting, make sure you know your rights.
I’m worried that our media and news literacy has been so successfully diminished by social media that the masses won’t believe that fascism is here until and unless Trump comes out and says “Hey, we’re a fascist country now!”
The creeping authoritarianism that the president has stoked within elected officials in the GOP reminds me of this familiar quote about climate change.
Putting troops on the ground against your own people is what a fascist would do, and it’s what Kehoe and other Republican governors across the country are doing at the behest of Donald Trump. This is obviously dangerous, but the part that scares me more is that so many people simply do not see the historic parallels here to some of the darkest chapters in our world history.
It seems that fascism will manifest as a series of state-sanctioned domestic violence that gets closer and closer to where you live until the SS comes knocking on your door.
In other news about our state government, the Missouri legislature wrapped up their extraordinary1 session on Wednesday with the passage of two bills, one of which would give the owners of the KC Royals and Chiefs $1.5 billion in taxpayer dollars for their stadiums2. But that’s only if they decide to stay.
The most embarrassing part of all of this is that Clark Hunt, the owner of the Chief’s, still hasn’t committed to staying in the state of Missouri. Even after Missouri came to the table with $1.5 billion, Hunt can still take his ball and go home. For a billionaire, that’s wherever the tax breaks are best. Maybe that’s Kansas.
The other bill that passed will give the City of St. Louis $100 million for tonado relief, which, if you’re doing the math, is less than 1/10th of what they’re trying to give Hunt in exchange for his non-commital.
I’ve talked ad-nauseam about how none of the tornado relief funding is enough for the recovery, but reading between the lines, you can see that the Democrats in the state House and Senate worked hard to get that number up, because the original bill only had $25 million for disaster relief, and what ultimately passed was $100 million. That’s a huge jump, and I’m grateful for their efforts.
Kehoe will sign these bills soon, but maybe the fact that he hasn’t yet is why Mayor Cara Spencer’s statement on Kehoe’s deployment of troops was so weak. At least Mayor Quinton Lucas has some concern for his constituents.
What I read this week
No Home, No Retirement, No Kids: How Gen Z-ers See Their Future (NY Times, gift article)
Gen Z is (rightfully) getting more despondent and nihilist as they get further into adulthood and see that the ‘American Dream’ as we once knew it is essentially dead.Never Forget What They’ve Done (Where’s Your Ed At?)
The brilliant Ed Zitron rails against the tech industry giants who killed tech. “Big tech is sociopathic and directionless, swinging wildly to try and find new ways to drag any kind of interaction out of a customer they’ve grown to loathe for their unwillingness to be more profitable.”
Many are calling it a special session, but I’ve learned that it’s technically an ‘extraordinary’ session when it’s called for by the governor.
This is what the YouTube video covers.