The Michael Sean Winters Garbage Opinion Power Rankings, Summer 2021

Honest to God, I was going to wait to write this until December but he had enough garbage opinions this summer alone.

So far in the G.O.T.H.S. project, I have never looked back on any of my subjects and said "ah man, they turned out to be all right, I shouldn't have written such critical things about them." I have said "ah man I should have waited to cover them until they did all this additional bad stuff", multiple times, about Abby Johnson. The people I tend to write about are often willfully ignorant, driven by stupidity and ego and greed, and, too often, outright noxious and out to harm other people. Michael Sean Winters isn't those things. He's a longtime columnist covering "the nexus of religion and politics" for National Catholic Reporter, an actually good publication whose reporting is often where I start when I dive into researching a new piece. He supported Joe Biden in 2020. He thinks the Pope is a real Pope and not a secret evil Freemason. He does not appear to hate gay people. So we're dealing with a very different subject today than our usual gang of idiots.

But there are two problems with Winters that are worth examining. The first is that he's an atrocious writer with a tooth-grinding tendency to use a twenty-dollar word whenever a one-dollar one is readily available, a sure sign of a person more interested in showcasing his intellect than giving a reader any useful information. The second is that his personal politics, while not hateful, are incoherent: he has likely written in "Jed Bartlett" on multiple previous presidential ballots, and while he's rightly put off by the hatred of the Republican party, he still subscribes to a weird fantasy centrism that would consider anyone under 35 years old "too woke" for his taste. He also seems to believe that the Democratic party could capture ninety percent of the popular vote by simply reversing their stance on abortion rights, which feels off given how many voters now believe Democrats to be election-stealing adrenochrome harvesters. 

Given the strength of NCR's reporting and the skill of their other opinion writers, Winters' predictable and insufferable "Distinctly Catholic" column - which runs multiple times a week - is a weird weak spot for the publication. I suppose his particular political alignment as a white Boomer anti-abortion Catholic man who still likes Democrats is a configuration that exists in nature, but I'd rather that a well-established Catholic media outlet give a paycheck to someone with a less conventional background, or someone with a less tired political viewpoint, or at least a less pretentious fucking writer. While I have questions about why Winters has managed to sustain a career for so long with such garbage opinions, I want to tackle a different question today: exactly how garbage are each of his opinions? As it turns out, they are very garbage, ranking them by how garbage they are is a significant undertaking, and some of his most garbage opinions are throwaway lines tucked in the middle of other, slightly less garbage opinions. 

So, here is the Michael Sean Winters Garbage Opinion Power Rankings for Summer 2021, featuring his eight most garbage opinions:

8. Catholics need to partner with Republicans to pass the pro-union PRO Act.

“Even in the short term, it is obvious how the Catholic Church can help organized labor in ways pro-choice groups cannot. If the Protecting the Right to Organize Act is going to pass, or even come close to passage, it will need Republican votes in the Senate. Catholic leaders can help secure those votes. NARAL Pro-Choice America can't.” -8/23/21

Michael Sean is banking on joint Catholic-Republican support for the most sweeping pro-labor legislation in a generation, which actually could work as a strategy if you just ignore the entirety of American political history since the Truman presidency. Winters says that the bishops can step up to help secure these votes, but the bishops aren’t going to twist any Republican senator’s arm to pass the PRO Act, that’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the power dynamic between senators and bishops. Former Catholic Senator Rick Santorum famously told the bishops at the 2020 Napa Institute not to “get involved in agriculture programs and economic development projects and the morality of all of those things. I think that's highly problematic and inappropriate. I think too often the bishops' conference gets wrapped around the axle on issues that frankly that are not moral absolutes and are areas of prudential judgment”. When it comes to politics, the senators tell the bishops what to do, Michael Sean. They’re the ones with the money, the power, the television networks, and the fancy wine. The bishops' only interest in political engagement is as an anti-abortion lobby, a view which they've been making very public for at least four decades now. But ok, let’s see if Joseph Strickland can help convince Ted Cruz to vote for a pro-union bill for the first time in his life.

7. The fight over Critical Race Theory proves that Critical Race Theory is a real thing that the Democrats are really pushing and that ordinary people really  care about and oppose.

“If Democrats want to recognize how unpopular some of their cultural ideas are, they have only to look to school board races around the country. The push against all kinds of diversity education is wrong-headed, of course, but it is happening. Elites in media and politics have no idea how badly their ideas play outside their own circles, especially when Fox News and other conservative media are a thousand times better than the left at reducing complicated issues to nasty sound bites designed to drive voters in a particular direction. The New Republic takes a look at the school board fights going on right now.” -8/24/21

The “critical race theory” wars at local school board meetings are not happening because Democrats alienated a key voter block by overplaying their hand of, uh, ongoing violent racial inequality. These fights are happening because the right-wing media and astroturfing groups are spending a lot of time and money to make it happen. Michael Sean would know that if he had read the piece in The New Republic that he had literally linked to in the same paragraph where he asserted the opposite idea that TNR pushes; it took me about five seconds to scan the New Republic piece to find the sentence “Republican donors and the right-wing media have seized on the phenomenon as a potential wedge issue for the suburban electorate, and they are now doing everything they can to invent a crisis where none exists.” Michael Sean says elites in media and politics should learn from this controversy, but...well, the elites are deliberately inflaming that controversy, for very specific reasons. The same TNR piece contains this passage: “Conservative candidates benefited from tens of thousands of dollars in donations, an unusual amount for a race in which only a few thousand people voted...This influx of money has also seeded multiple advocacy organizations, which have sprung up in recent months to combat critical race theory.” Again, I would expect Winters to read the pieces he links to, given that his job is to just shit out a couple of these columns each week, but maybe he was on a hot streak in his Spider Solitaire game that day. 

6. The movie The Devil Wears Prada is not about an employee dealing with a shitty boss.

"It is the 15th anniversary of one of my all-time favorite movies, "The Devil Wears Prada." I am glad there is much attention being paid to this classic, but articles like this one at Salon almost take the fun out of it. The subhead of the piece, "The real villain was exploitative work environments all along," may be accurate at one level, but can we just let a movie be a movie? Not everything has to be reduced to its sociological or political consequences, does it? Why so super-serious?" -6/24/21

I don't know what's stranger, the weird Joker reference at the end of that paragraph, or the fact that this was not the only time this summer that Michael Sean brought up this fifteen-year-old movie, as he dedicated space in another column to arguing that Streep got robbed of a Best Actress Oscar when Helen Mirren won for The Queen.

In any event, Michael Sean argues that we shouldn't focus on the workplace dynamics in a movie set at a workplace, in which the central conflict is driven by a boss' poor treatment of her employee, a boss played by the top-billed actress in the film, a boss based on Anna Wintour, whose most famous quality is that she treats her workers horribly. Even in 2021, workers at Conde Nast, where Wintour still serves as Chief Content Officer, had to march on the woman's house in order to claw their way to living wages. The Devil Wears Prada doesn’t just have a broader lesson about exploitative workplaces, it has a very specific lesson about the very specific exploitative workplace where Anna Wintour is still exploiting her workers.

Michael Sean’s refusal to acknowledge the basic reality of the plot, setting, and characters of his favorite film rivals On Cinema's Gregg Turkington insisting that Star Trek II is the one where they go to San Francisco. I guess Michael Sean was just watching the movie for the Emily Blunt quips, and I will just keep working on my workplace comedy screenplay about a writer who cranks out worthless columns for decades after apparently obtaining compromising photographs of every member of his publication's masthead.

5. Time will tell if Amy Coney Barrett is a political centrist.

"What will Barrett do on the court and, specifically, will she side with Roberts in his desire to keep the court in the center lane of public opinion, or will she be more ideologically driven like Alito and Thomas?...We will know more about the answers to those questions by the end of this month." -6/7/21

I don't know Michael Sean, I had her figured out five months before she was even nominated (in a piece which cited one of your columns!), but that’s only because she wrote a bunch of articles and judicial opinions outlining exactly what she believed and they’re all publicly available.

4. It would be fun to imagine Michael Sean Winters as the host of Jeopardy!

"Maybe I should throw my hat into the ring. But what would the categories be? "Woke ideas that will get Trump reelected" is obvious, but how would I limit the questions to only six? "Favorite pasta recipes" would be a natural, as would "Divas I adore" and "Favorite Gilbert and Sullivan operettas." A great category would be "Hierarchs in my Rolodex," but would I have to disclose the numbers on national television?" -5/10/21

Just shut up, shut up you insufferable piece of crap who aspires to be a third-tier Aaron Sorkin character, shut the fuck up, I would rather listen to all 41 episodes of Mike Richards' podcast that got him fired as both host and executive producer of Jeopardy! before I ever read another word from you again. You also seem to think a Jeopardy! board has five categories that each have six clues, which is wrong. 

Anyways my categories would be "Magic: The Gathering releases, 1998-2000", "The Offspring Lyrics", "Alternatives to Exercising", "Trombones", "Daniel Pinkwater Novels", and I can't think of a sixth one so let's go with "Potpourri".

3. MSNBC is "the voice of the hard left".

"Wednesday night, after the [Texas SB8 anti-abortion] law took effect, all the cable primetime shows began with stories about Afghanistan or other issues. MSNBC, the voice of the hard left, began each hour talking about the Texas abortion law. Rachel Maddow dedicated three-quarters of her entire hour to the issue." -9/3/21

Oh is that right Michael Sean? You hang out with a lot of black bloc activists who reminisce about their favorite bits from Countdown With Keith Olbermann? You think the vanguard party is currently being formed by a wholly owned subsidiary of Comcast cable that once aired Alan Keyes’ show for six extremely confusing months in 2002? You think every ad sales meeting begins with the sponsors of All In With Chris Hayes doing a land acknowledgement and sharing their preferred pronouns? Are they bringing Assata Shakur in to guest host Meet The Press Daily while Chuck Todd goes on vacation to the giant pile of Miracle Whip where he was born? Or has the politics of "centrism", for which you carry the banner, moved so far to the right in your lifetime that you actually have no idea what "radicalism" or "leftism" actually is, but simply cram any statement of principles into a mental hamper that you've labeled "too extreme for me no thank you!"

2. The bishops, regardless of their political orientation, uniformly believe in equal rights for all.

"Every bishop in America agrees that abortion is a great evil and that no human person should be denied the equal protection of the law." -6/9/21

I think you've missed the mark here, Michael Sean. I'll give you the first half of your sentence on abortion, but do you think every bishop in America actually buys into everyone getting the "equal protection of the law"? The reason I ask is because I think that would require bishops in southern states to speak out on the appalling voter suppression laws that their legislatures are passing, and, well, they're not really doing that. Maybe it's because some of those bishops actually do think Donald Trump had the election stolen from him and told their congregations not to trust the results. 

And I feel like more bishops would be willing to, I don't know, not give Bill Barr a big wet kiss on his mouth while he was slamming as many executions through the federal court system as he possibly could. And I feel like more bishops would be more concerned about the death of George Floyd than about property damage in the ensuing protests. I feel like they wouldn’t be desperate to kick gay and transgender children out of their schools and force them into conversion therapy. And I feel like they'd be more concerned about, I don't know, the fact that accused child abusers, as well as men who enabled widespread child abuse, are still active members of their own bishops' conference facing zero consequences for anything that they've done, and often digging in their heels to make sure the victims never see justice. Those are not stances I associate with believing that "no human person should be denied the equal protection of the law", and perhaps bringing about “equal protection of the law” for all Americans is going to require treating many of these bishops as opponents of that goal rather than assumed allies.

But none of this compares to the true moral abomination of the most garbage Michael Sean Winters opinion of summer 2021:

1. The current cast of Saturday Night Live is made up of "great humorists".

"Just when you think there can't possibly be more revelations of former President Donald Trump's abuses of power, Daily Beast reports that he asked his lawyers to look into whether or not the Federal Communications Commission could do anything about the way the great humorists at "Saturday Night Live" were treating him. I am not sure which is the preferred response, to weep or to laugh?" -6/24/21

What is this, Michael Sean? What the fuck is this? Because it's very clear from your piece that you're not talking about, like, Dan Aykroyd and Jane Curtin. You're saying that there are great humorists in the current cast of Saturday Night Live, which in this era is delivering 90 minutes of completely unwatchable sludge every week with commentary from the smirking face of Colin Jost.

What was your favorite sketch from this era of SNL, Michael Sean? Was it where Elon Musk played Wario on trial for vehicular manslaughter? Was it "DJ Balls" singing to Kenan during his sad post-divorce dinner at TGI Fridays? Was it Donald Trump playing Deal or No Deal to end the 2019 government shutdown and finally taking the deal when offered "hamberders"? Was it "Gen Z Hospital"? Was it when the fly landed on Mike Pence's head during the Vice Presidential debate but, surprise, the fly was actually Jim Carey as Jeff Goldblum as Joe Biden? What about when Donald Trump actually hosted as a presidential candidate and got to sing and dance to "Hotline Bling"? How deep does this fucking go? Last year, did you go to a theater to watch The King of Staten Island, a 135-minute Judd Apatow drama based on the life of cast member Pete Davidson, and just say "ha ha ha! Terrific!" continuously throughout even though the movie does not appear to contain anything resembling a laugh line? And to make sure you are left with no questions on my views: thinking SNL is funny in 2021 should be classified by the church as a worse evil than abortion. 

Michael Sean, throughout his columns, clearly prides himself on his sense of centrism and moderation, considering it something of an antidote to these polarized and extreme times. He's not the only columnist who thinks this way; you can find many people like him at non-religious mainstream publications like the New York Times or the Washington Post (David Brooks at the Times is a close ideological and stylistic neighbor to Michael Sean, although Brooks is slightly dumber). Here's the thing: the times are extreme, but that's precisely why extreme actions need to be taken. We're not in danger of veering away from pragmatic centrism, we missed the last exit to that miles ago.

Michael Sean would certainly oppose packing the Supreme Court because it sounds extreme; it's not more extreme than a Texas law offering bounties to vigilantes who track down women seeking medical care, which is what the current Supreme Court is signing off on. Michael Sean would oppose passing climate legislation through a one-party (gasp!) budget reconciliation process because it sounds extreme; it's not more extreme than evacuating the state of Florida, which is where our country is heading absent any meaningful action on climate. Michael Sean would be opposed to eliminating the filibuster because it sounds extreme; it's not more extreme than mass voter suppression and repeated attempts to overturn an election, which still threatens to put our country under permanent minority rule. Which, in itself, is pretty extreme.

These times do call for a radical reimagining of the possible, and a radical reimagining of power and how it gets used and who gets to use it. Perhaps this new vision can be rooted in the example of the man who founded Christianity. The church is full of activists and thinkers who can help articulate and birth this new world, but the church is also home to a crusty old guy who is dumb enough to think SNL is still funny and gets to have a national platform. Let's be smart about who we trust for insightful political opinions.

Grift of the Holy Spirit is a series by Tony Ginocchio detailing stories of the weirdest, dumbest, and saddest members of the Catholic church. You can subscribe via Substack to get notified of new installments.