A Friday New York Times article titled “A Restaurant Hosted Ramaswamy After His Attack Ad. It’s Paying a Price,” has all the usual cliches of the masses versus the besieged, the woke versus the patriots, the cancel culture machine versus Main Street capital. The headline says everything except for the proper nouns: PJ Marley’s in Medina, Ohio owned and operated by local Republican couple Patty and Jon Stahl. They hosted now-defeated Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy on Halloween night and got a lot of shit for it from local residents for platforming the tech bro after he platformed a pedophile’s willing accomplice. The Stahls spent a lot of time deleting Facebook comments calling them “pedophile protectors,” getting angry calls, and so on.

The fact that this was printed 10 days after the election in which Da Vek and his GOP ticket-mates were drowned in a blue wave rather than beforehand isn’t saying anything new. Hell that “Lake America” regional bank exec’s cancelation’s failure to spark a national conflagration was, as intuited at the time by this site, indeed a warning sign of what turned out to be an apocalyptic defeat.

So if the story overall is another drop in the “2026 is the end of MAGA” bucket, there’s one stretch of the Times’s own composition of the Stahls’ ordeal – as clipped in the headline above – that still manages to stick out as a perennial Trump-era ethos from his fans: “They thought the ad was in poor taste. But as small-business Republicans, they believed in Mr Ramaswamy’s pitch that he could lower property taxes without harming schools, and thought he could find a way to bring down their rising electric bills. The couple insisted that holding an event for the Republican ticket was not about taking a side; they would have agreed to host Democrats, too, they said.”

Note how in the span of two sentences the Times carries the self-identified Republican Stahls’ support for Da Vek and then allows them some unfalsifiable escape hatch about hosting Dems. But the Times’ weasely impotence is less salient here than the far greater moral cowardice of their subjects, the cowardice embodied by untold millions of amoral fucking worms out there, all those nihilistic patricians like the Washington state business owner who in early 2020 wrote to Politico calling the Orange God Emperor “manic, uneducated, illogical… essentially a horrible person .. vulgar, amoral, narcissistic.” But because economy economy economy, “To those of us who support what he has accomplished,” the then 66 year-old man wrote, “it feels like he is our OJ.”

Trump – then facing his first impeachment – was OJ Simpson to this guy, that his very obvious guilt didn’t matter because the system – the media, Democrats – were out to get him and those who had loved his economic accomplishments (turned out Trump was just coasting on the Obama recovery).

Just like Vivek Ramaswamy’s willingness to make his opponent – who was 11 when she was first raped by her stepfather and then abandoned by her mother who stuck by the rapist – relive her trauma was “poor taste” but, well, he has business-friendly tax policies, so what’s the big deal, libs?

People were saying, ‘Oh, you’re giving Vivek a platform. I looked at it as he was giving us a platform,” Stahl said, the Times colorlessly printing the vile handwashing.

Yes, it’s depressing that it took $4.35 a gallon gas to do what fucking 34 felony convictions, an insurrection that left five dead – not including three cops who killed themselves due to PTSD, the theft of government documents, the mishandling of a pandemic that left over a million Americans dead and crashed the economy, and so many other atrocities did not. But at least it happened.

At least they are more likely than not going to have complete control of the government for six years on the very lowest possible end. Much as we’d be better off with a President Kamala Harris right now, November 3rd very well might have been almost as good. But fucking seriously, that there are still people like the Stahls out there, the ones who do NOT let $4.35 gas open the door to “You know what? My soul should remain intact without me having to lie to myself and the New York fucking Times about whether this is actually worth it. I’m done,” just doesn’t sit right.

This part…

“Hi Patty, I know it’s been a while,” Stacey Bene typed. She’d just seen a Facebook post about how the candidates were coming to PJ Marley’s. She’d taken Jazzercise classes from Mrs. Stahl more than a decade earlier, and had said, “I know the owners here” every time she returned to PJ Marley’s for a bacon burger.

Now, in hopes of persuading Mrs. Stahl to back out of hosting Mr Ramaswamy, she was going to tell her something she rarely spoke about. In a private Facebook message, she wrote, “I was raped at the age of 14.”

…sits worse.

The Stahls still hosted Da Vek, even after that. His campaign staff covered the bar’s windows with posters to block protesters from seeing inside while he spoke to MAGA voters.