Glimmers of non-apocalyptic hope
Money can't buy happiness, masculinity, or Wisconsin Supreme Court races
Welcome back to Hot Tip, dearest pals. By now, you likely already know about Cory Booker’s record-breaking speech on the floor of the Senate which started in March and ended in April (that part’s not important, just cool). The important part: Booker, the first Black senator from New Jersey, spoke for more than 25 hours to break the record held by segregationist Strom Thurmond, who spoke for more than 24 hours against the Civil Rights Act in 1957. Booker used the day+ to highlight the stories of Americans hurt by the Trump admin. and couldn’t eat, sleep, sit, drink water, or use the bathroom the entire time. The last time someone exerted this much energy on the Senate floor, Mitch McConnell was trying to stand up.
As Trump and his lackeys try to literally erase Black history, Booker is making it. He laid his body on the line — starving and dehydrating himself for days in preparation — and took a stand for democracy. So to Cory Booker, we here at Hot Tip want to say 1) our most sincere thanks, 2) may you set the tone for the other Dems, and 3) as a Jew who fasts once a year — and if we’re being honest, usually breaks it several hours early — I can’t imagine the kind of mental and physical fortitude you demonstrated. Get this man a Gatorade and a Survivor contract, stat.
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In politics: The two Florida special House elections unsurprisingly went for Republicans yesterday, but Democrats managed to narrow the gaps from 2024. In both races, the GOP candidates’ margin of victory was around 16 points lower than in 2024, or roughly the age of women Matt Gaetz venmos money to for no particular reason.
In Wisconsin, Judge Susan Crawford won a State Supreme Court seat and cemented its liberal majority, despite Elon Musk spending $25 million there to defeat her. Critics (me) are calling the the loss “the greatest waste of money since your MAGA neighbor bought a Cybertruck to feel more masculine.”
In health: Thousands of federal employees at the CDC, NIH, and FDA were fired this week, including entire divisions that worked on — among other things — HIV, intimate partner abuse, and lead poisioning prevention. RFK and DOGE may as well just lose the second C, because at this point it’s just the Centers for Disease.
And the incompetence didn’t stop there.
These layoffs are not only tragic, they’ll result in the deaths of scores of Americans across red and blue states. My (steadily dwindling due to Trump’s stock market) money is on a judge stepping in soon and forcing some rehires, but the chaos created has already done a ton of damage. These are the people who make sure our food and drugs are safe for consumption, track the growth and spread of diseases across the country, and research cures for rare childhood diseases, all fired so conspiracy theorist/slowly-transitioning zombie RFK Jr. can question vaccine science and demonize completely safe SSRIs. And if RFK sends me to a “wellness farm” to deal with my OCD instead of letting my take my damn prozac, I will just spend my days wondering if the dirt that got into a papercut is going to kill me, and asking everyone around me 100 times, too. Ergo, no one will get work done.
Hot tip: You can hear directly from fired health employees on Reddit, many of whom say their performance review scores were modified (!!!!) as justification for their firings. Perhaps they were deemed too efficient.
In culture: Morgan Wallen stormed off the SNL stage on Saturday night, more proof that we shouldn’t be rewarding racist behavior — looking at you, Netflix. Trans Rabbi Abby Stein’s story is coming to the stage in an Off-Broadway play. The James Beard Foundation announced its annual list of award finalists, and the best cities to eat appear to be New York, Chicago, Dallas, and — in a much needed morale boost — D.C. And Gap EVP Zac Posen has launched a high-end line called GapStudio, huge news to children of the 90s who were regularly outfitted in GAP sweatshirts against their wills. We were just ahead of the times.
Hot tip: The WHCA fucked up big time.
Amber Ruffin was all set to perform at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner before being unceremoniously cancelled by the org in order to, in their words “ensure the focus is not on the politics of division but entirely on awarding our colleagues for their outstanding work and providing scholarship and mentorship to the next generation of journalists.” But Hot Tip is calling bullshit.
The White House Correspondents’ Association — or the people who run it, at least — don’t have a great track record of standing up to let them eat eggs Trump. As the administration continues to villainize and ban the Associated Press from the White House press pool for not calling it the “Gulf of America,” the WHCA suggested the other journalists wear “first amendment pins” in solidarity with the AP. Instead, of, oh, I don’t know, walking out until they are reinstated. Also, asking people to wear pins in protest doesn’t work!!! They are quite literally the world’s smallest protest sign, and you have an 80% chance of ending up with an injury trying to put it on.
Not to mention, Trump desires nothing more than to be the most talked about man on planet earth, so depriving him of that by refusing to show up would actually work, I think. But anyway—
Amber is a Black, queer woman, all words that that this administration is so afraid of, they’ve simply removed them from records. Who could be a more powerful foil to an unqualified-golf-playing-pants-shitting racist president than this woman at the top of her game?
But the person with the best response was, of course, Amber. Watch it below.
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Why would SNL give that dude a platform?
I don’t make it for a full fast either!😎