1. It’s been a very viral week for me.
Over the years I have written many “homophobic-Republican-is-secretly-closeted” jokes, and they tend to go viral pretty often. I have one going viral right now at the time of writing this, with over 7 million views on Twitter, and 650K views on Threads:
BREAKING: Several gay dating apps are reportedly threatening that, if the Supreme Court bans gay marriage, they’ll reveal all the closeted Republican officials and members of Congress who have accounts on their platforms.
First off, I think gay dating apps should probably actually do this. Do you think Project 2025 isn’t diligently working right now to ban, censor, or destroy everything that helps gay people enjoy life and find each other? Gay dating apps might not be around much longer. Why not fight back, and go out swinging?
While it’s definitely a polite norm to not out people, even belligerent hypocrites, I’m increasingly finding myself wondering why — when Republicans are violating every other norm in government and polite society on their Trumpian march to a regretful American form of authoritarianism — we are preserving the norms about not calling out some Republicans for being giant, fucking duplicitous dicks who literally never shut up about Christian Values to distract themselves from their hopelessly insatiable yearning for cock at the Republican National Convention after-party.
2. A second thought on this tweet.
I sometimes wonder how my jokes generally will age for future readers, and I kind of suspect this particular line of humor might not age well.
It’s funny now, at least to me and a virally sizable number of readers who have left thousands of comments cheering for a karmic outing of dreadfully repressed Republicans, but perhaps someday homosexuality will be universally accepted and the idea of hiding in the closet will become an anachronism of the gay experience. As well as a confusing, out-of-use idiom for the pendulum-pushing Wokesters of a future morality who might even call for canceling me and burning my books for the irredeemable sin of having a problematic sense of humor to joke about homosexuality at all.
I may someday be a less prestigious, and more sophomoric, victim of the censorious attitude that today inspires Puritanical Wokesters to be outraged at the N-word’s appearances in Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, completely oblivious to its 1880s publishing context and antebellum Southern setting. They’re also wildly unappreciative of the novel’s magnificent theme in which Huck decides he’d rather literally go to Hell than turn in Jim to slave hunters. The novel is a satire on racism (like my less esteemed Republicans-are-closeted jokes are a satire on contemporary homophobes)! I’d argue it’s unAmerican not to sing its praises with the earnestness of Ernest Hemingway, who once posited that, “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. … [I]t’s the best book we’ve had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.”
So to all future readers of my jokes about the conspicuous correlation between vocally homophobic, self-described “Christian values” politicians, and closeted homosexuality: consider my 2010s and 2020s context!
Right now there are literally dozens of closeted Republicans in local, state and federal governments and political campaigns who have spent decades projecting vile venom on the LGBTQIA+ community due to personal shame and guilt inspiring them to launch vicious jihads of hateful, theocratic bigotry, and they are currently going along with an attempt by the Supreme Court to claw back the right to gay marriage… all while secretly prowling for trysts on gay dating apps that spike in traffic around GOP events.
And with Donald Trump at the top of the party, you know he’s got secret files on the closeted Republicans to blackmail them into acquiescing to his fascism — ahem, a certain lifelong bachelor senator, among others. Their hypocritical homophobia is literally sabotaging a much delayed and newly obtained civil right! The only way to stay sane about it is to joke about the absurdity of it all. So, sorry future moral absolutists, but at the moment I believe my era’s rampant hypocritical homophobia deserves some satirical scorn. It’s cathartic for us.
3. Thank you so much to all my subscribers, especially if you’re a paid subscriber!
In a couple days I will pass 30,000 subscribers! If you’re not a paid subscriber, know that I leave up a 50% discount always so it’s only $2.50 a month to subscribe and get ALL my content, as well as financially support my dedication to spending all day relentlessly calling Donald Trump a dumb, gaudy, unAmerican fascist who smells like rotten roast beef.
I personally think $5 is too much to pay for every individual writer I like, and many writers I follow charge even higher, up to $8–$12 a month. An indispensable Substack experience cannot scale well when regular people cannot afford many of their favorite writers.
But a year-projection of my $2.50 rate (with the discount for paying annually) to $25 for a year’s worth of my content is essentially the digital newsletter version of buying a book from me. I’m very chill with that, and am more interested in quantity of subscribers than profit. I think that writers on Substack are holding back a little too much content behind paywalls because, I don’t know about everyone else, but I’m full of liberal ideas I want as many people as possible to read and to be persuaded by my perspective so the society shades itself a little closer to my exact hue!
(I’m also hustling nonstop Dadaist graffiti news jokes for the love of the anti-fascist game!)
4. Trump is a mob boss.
Trump keeps getting away with shaking down law firms, universities, and corporations by threatening lawsuits and regulatory oversight that too many are deciding to just settle in the hopes that the fascist hot potato lands in someone else’s arms. But the fascist threat will always follow these cowards.
And who even knows what kind of quid pro quo, pay-to-play, and spectacular corruption Trump is pulling off with his crypto grifts. It pains me to point out that Trump is routinely getting away with mob-bossing up our economy, and doing to us what Putin has done to Russians, what Orbán is doing to Hungarians, and what all dictators do in picking a few choice scapegoats in every industry to cow the rest into totalitarian obedience. Unfortunately too many of them are giving in and paying tribute to the wannabe tyrant.
This is how America descends into dictatorship: one small act of apathetic cowardice at a time.
The industries of law, higher education, and business really ought to be banding together for the good of their collective interest in not being shaken down at any moment by fascist state control. If Trump can fuck one law firm or college or corporation, he can and will fuck them all.
If only everyone in charge of these institutions wasn’t more interested in their bottom lines, their annual bonuses, and their vacation homes in the Hamptons to resist the creeping authoritarianism slowly swallowing them whole. If they’d only risk losing a little money for a few years for the good of America, democracy and the Constitution’s checks and balances on executive tyranny…
5. More people should sue the Trump family.
Hillary Clinton should announce she’s suing the Trumps for $10 billion for all the lies they have spread about her. Obama should also sue him. The lawsuits would be more for shits and giggles, but in this attention economy shits and giggles seem like the only thing that will get through to moderate, independent, and low-information voters, and attempt to persuade them that Trump is a clown.
Also, the only way to deal with a dickhead bully is to be a dickhead bully back. In solidarity with everyone else Trump picks on and tries to cheat or lie to, Democrats should troll Trump constantly. Hillary should call him “Captain Cankles” every single day, and Obama should constantly demand Trump release his DNA report to prove he isn’t part gibbon. 🥃
☕️ If you think Donald Trump is a joke, I published two books for you: Satire In The Trump Years and Satire In The Biden Years, available on Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and Kobo. Or, better yet, request your local library order a copy on their website.
I’ve also published three existentialist poetry books, Cabaret No Stare, Moon Goon, and Hotel Golden Hours available in print and on Kindle.
Because our social media platforms are being scrambled up by oligarchs, if you like my humor, diversify where you follow me so you never miss my jokes to interrupt your doomscrolling: Twitter, Bluesky, Threads, Facebook, Instagram, Spoutible, Medium, and Substack.
Browse my comedy portfolio, my graffiti news portfolio, and my poetry portfolio.
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The Halfway Post 