I arrived early enough at the New Life Church of Turner Falls on Sunday to get a priority-section seat for what I was assured would be the beginning of a historic, world-changing, paradigm-shifting revolution in our very understanding of what it means to be human.
I half expected to be recognized, even among the thousands who queue up well in advance for the church’s flagship weekly broadcast, and booted out in retaliation for last week’s newsletter. Instead, I was treated to nearly an hour of pre-show programming, most of it concerned with ensuring parishioners are tithing to the fullest extent of their financial ability. (Semantic quibble: doesn’t “tithing” mean giving 10 percent of whatever you’ve got? Either you’re tithing or you’re not!)
For new subscribers — allow me to extend a grateful welcome to Trash Tabs readers and an ungrateful unwelcome to the PatriotWire trolls who have been flooding my inbox with threats and hate speech — here’s where we’re at: a billionaire lightly kidnapped me last month in an attempt to convince me he had resurrected the President of the United States from the dead, the details of which would be revealed to the world last weekend during the Sunday, July 30th 11 a.m. service at New Life.
And while that’s definitely one of the strangest sentences I’ve ever written, it is not the strangest, because the strangest is the one I’m about to write:
Our zombie president did not make it to church on Sunday.
Consider me a jilted journalist.
I expected Carron Nielsberg and Kathy Donaldson to be unhappy about me running early (and incredulously) with what they tried to sell to me as an “exclusive,” so I’ve spent a good deal of the last couple of weeks trying to get my legal ducks in a row. Thanks to the HazMedia union, I was able to work with a couple of lawyers who warned me I’d likely be subjected to the usual cease-and-desist song and dance and could even be looking at some toothless but nevertheless time-consuming litigation in light of last year’s SCOTUS ruling in Southern Baptist Convention v. Defector Media, which placed tighter restrictions on protected speech (and which Congress has used to increase federal penalties for defamation last session).
I tried to prepare for anything.
But I did not prepare for nothing.
I have received no cease-and-desist. I have not been threatened with any litigation. I haven’t even been subjected to a snarky sub-tweet from Nielsberg or a pissed-off email from one of his flaks. And it was business (and it’s definitely a business) as usual at New Life this week, with Pastor Kathy Donaldson delivering a 35-minute sermon on the Biblical argument for shooting first and asking questions later.
It’s not that my report of meeting a man claiming to be Rudy Ruiz raised from the dead didn’t get any traction. To the contrary, the daily link roundup newsletter Trash Tabs, written by my friend and fellow HazMedia alum W. K. Garron, awarded it the dubious honor of being only the “second weirdest thing a batshit tech billionaire did this week.”
While Elon Musk was busy defending the seizure-inducing “X” he illegally installed on top of the San Francisco Twitter building (PRY THE NAME FROM OUR COLD, DEAD, FINGERS CURLED INEXORABLY AROUND OUR MECHANICAL KEYBOARDS, WE WILL ONLY CALL IT X UNDER PAIN OF DEATH AND PROBABLY NOT EVEN THEN) like it was his firstborn (who are we kidding, His Muskiness has no idea what order his 823 children were born in), bitchy biotech boy Carron Nielsberg told laid-off HazMedia journo Jasmine Rebuke that he can now raise people from the dead. Conveniently, N-bergy started with dead pres Rudy Ruiz, or at least a clammy dude who Rebuke said looked a lot like him. Lesson: don’t get into a blacked-out van with an asshole unless you are really willing to be taken for a ride. (Sorry, Minne! We love you! Blink twice if you’re in trouble!)
And of course, the LibertyNow!/PatriotWire crowd jumped on the story. I started to see an uptick in the usual low-level Twitter trolling about 12 hours after publishing my newsletter last week, but things really picked up when the Sunday New Life broadcast did not turn out to feature Ruiz’s second coming. I’ll spare y’all from the state of my inbox right now, but know this: there are a surprising number of die-hard (literally?) Rudy Ruiz supporters who are still uncertain about the spelling of the man’s name — and of a number of other words, most of them also containing only four letters.
As a result, I’ve maintained a pretty low profile on socials lately; I’m trying not to stoke any more troll-fires. And honestly, I feel pretty … well, a lot of things. Mostly angry and embarrassed. I don’t know if Nielsberg knew I’d never agree to his embargo and hoped I’d run with the story on my own — which means I still got played, though I still don’t know what for — or if I managed to beat the billionaire at his own game.
I know that Garron and several other reporters who picked up my Ruiz-revival story reached out to Nielsberg and Donaldson seeking comment, to no avail. And I’ve hounded them, too — I even tried to bird-dog Donaldson outside New Life, but her entourage makes that nearly impossible. I guess it makes me feel a little better that none of us have received so much as a Glomar response. But I do also feel, well, fucked-with. Because I was! I know I didn’t dream that whole evening. And Nielsberg absolutely has a RevTech presence here in Turner Falls — I’ve driven out to Treetops Trailer Community off and on over the last few days, and those RevTech tents remain packed among the pines, though they’re now surrounded by an eight-foot construction fence that makes it difficult to see exactly what’s going on.
So I’ll keep digging. I know there’s a reason for the radio silence. I just have to figure out what it is.
Amid all of this ridiculousness, the only news that probably really matters is this: President Ashleigh Grantham has officially launched his 2024 presidential campaign. I think the politicos and pundit class always expected Grantham to announce a run; the question was simply whether he would wait a respectable amount of time — whatever that means, to whoever it means anything to — before taking over the presumptive GOP nomination from Ruiz.
Grantham, of course, is America’s oldest-ever (vice) president — he’ll turn 95 in January — and I think you’d have to need a pretty serious update on your glasses prescription not to agree that Grantham’s aged significantly in just one month of running the country, and he doesn’t have a lot of leeway in that respect. If I were the kind of political reporter who engaged in snarky asides about my subjects, I might make some kind of remark here about Ruiz’s resurrection not being particularly impressive in light of the fact that we appear to already have an undead president in the White House.
But I’m wholly above that kind of thing.
What else I’m reading right now:
“Conspiracy theories don’t have to be wacky; some are real” (Texas Public Radio)
“Barbie Hoax Targets Mattel and Fools Some News Outlets” (NYT)
“Henrietta Lacks’s family reaches settlement in extracted cell lawsuit” (WaPo)
“Alabama priest interested in demonology abandons post, reported to DA for leaving country” (National Catholic Reporter)
“Texas oak tree thought to be extinct discovered in Big Bend National Park” (KUT)
Minne Moves Home 