Dumb of the week: Now with more fascism!

By Ben Olson
Reader Staff

​​In the War of the Dumb, there are some clear winners. Mississippi state Sen. Bradford Blackmon, a Democrat, earned a special mention this week.

Blackmon introduced the “Contraception Begins at Erection Act,” a bill that would make it unlawful for “a person to discharge genetic material without the intent to fertilize an embryo.”

The bill would seemingly ban masturbation, homosexual acts or heterosexual acts unless they’re, erm, completed in the service of procreation, fining scofflaws $1,000 for a first offense, $5,000 for a second offense and $10,000 for any subsequent offenses. 

It’s unlikely to pass the GOP-led Mississippi Legislature, and has been widely viewed as a troll move on Blackmon’s part to highlight that the majority of the bills introduced in his Statehouse targeting contraception or abortion focus solely on the woman’s role. 

“[M]en are 50% of the equation,” Blackmon wrote. “This bill highlights that fact and brings the man’s role into the conversation.”

While the bill is a political stunt, it received a Dumb mention this week solely because this is where we’re at in America: introducing bills just for the LOLs. But, it begs the question: If the bill were to advance and become law, how would it be enforced?

Republican Laura Smith, vice chair of the Towamencin Township Board of Supervisors in Pennsylvania, posted a video on TikTok in which she mimicked Elon Musk’s Hitler salute with a closed palm and arm raised in front of her.

“Just checking in on my friends who are struggling this week,” Smith said in the video before making the salute, also mimicking Musk’s words by ending with, “My heart goes out to you. Hope you’re doing OK.”

Smith later deleted the video, claiming that it had been “mischaracterized,” and that she “abhor[ed] racism, anti-Semitic (sic) or discrimination in any fashion.”

A day later, Smith announced she had resigned from the town’s board of supervisors after nationwide backlash to her video. She also resigned her position as a board member of the town’s public library.

Word to the wise: When you have to explain that the awkward gesture you made isn’t a Hitler salute, you’ve already lost the argument. 

Finally, to round out this week’s Dumbest of the Dumb, the Trump administration plunged the nation into chaos with a memo initiating a broad freeze on federal grants and loans by 5 p.m. (Eastern) on Jan. 28. Organizations struggled to make heads of tails of this presumably illegal move, thanks in part to a vaguely worded order released Jan. 27 by the Office of Management and Budget filled with pejoratives and purity tests aiming to “end wokeness” and target recipients of federal money that advance, “Marxist equity, transgenderism and green new deal social engineering policies.” 

The directive would halt hundreds of billions of dollars worth of federal funding for vital programs that cover everything from feeding kids and seniors to health care, conducting what the Associated Press called an “across-the-board ideological review to uproot progressive initiatives” in the federal government. 

Naturally, it was met with confused outrage. Meanwhile, doctors in all 50 states were not able to secure payments from Medicaid, which provides health coverage to 70 million low-income Americans. (The administration blamed an “outage,” but many including Sen. Ron Wyden, Ore., weren’t buying it.)

The chaos continued as a federal judge temporarily blocked the order on Jan. 28. Then, the next day, the OMB rescinded its memo, but Trump Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters it was just a rescission of the memo, not of Trump’s federal funding freeze. 

This isn’t governing, this is tyranny and incompetence at the highest level — and we’re only 10 days in so far.