It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Strings of Steel.
Once again, Muir demonstrating that this reconsideration of Israel doesn't come from a place of deep moral revaluation, it comes from him buying narratives that both confirm existing biases and frame this as another slight against whites. Because, once again, he's gotten really, really Nazi these days.
It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Great Circus Mystery.
As usual in these cases, several days of feeling angry at the Administration have shifted to Muir finding a way to transfer his anger to his imaginary cabal of leftists. Because otherwise, Muir might have to admit he was wrong about something.
But hey, he's back to trying to make Teeter happen.
It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Wolves of the North.
The fascinating thing about Muir's "uniparty" bullshit is that you get scenarios like this. When the people he supports do something that annoys him, he just rewrites reality so it isn't actually his side doing things--things that he supported in their initial phases, mind you--no, no it's that evil conspiracy that runs thing in the shadows doing it. Muir may be a fascist, but he's largely ruled by the impulses that created the Italian Regency of Carnaro, the unrecognized interwar microstate where the militias that had taken over wound up doing things like having mock battles with live grenades, because, hey why not, they're full of vital energy after all. He loves oppression in the abstract and when he thinks it's happening to his enemies, but eventually, he runs headlong into the fact that his dreamed of dictatorship is going to have build a general state capacity for oppression that could be used against him. And whenever that happens, he grows irate, because he is fundamentally a child demanding his vague and contradictory wishes be granted instantaneously and with no negative consequences for himself.
These moments are always true 'stopped clock' scenarios, Muir reaching the right conclusion for once, but based on premises that are completely self-indulgent and hypocritical. And now that I've said all that, let's enjoy Day 2 of Muir on the war path against the Administration, even if he's clearly loading his attitude with qualifiers.
It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Fighting Ranger.
...
The most amusing part is that Muir thinks this comes off as such a big win, but Mamdani has been listening to Trump spew anti-Muslim bullshit this entire time like a deranged racist grandpa at Thanksgiving. Or he would have if there was any actual continuity in this entire sequence of strips, but again, Trump and Schumer are having problems staying consistent in their personalities and goals throughout. And I don't mean between strips. I don't even mean between panels. I mean between lines.
It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Steel Trail.
And here is Muir at his most pathetic, ignoring the blatant efforts to subvert the Constitution the man he's presently following, shrieking that reforms to correct institutions that he and his have thoroughly corrupted and turned into threats are betraying the government and writing a sad little cartoon where the target subjected to this imbecilic harangue just quivers and gives up, for who can resist this transcendent truth?
Again, simply pathetic.
It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Oregon Trail.
The endless cries about the sad victimization of white men are hitting new levels of pathetic.
Also Mari's become the latest Owens girl to sprout the throat-arm. Yay.
It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Ghost City.
Muir's ability to pivot on AI in a way that's both witless AND cruel remains a sight to behold. The unlikely, imagined image of scientists losing their livelihoods to the machines makes him chuckle, for they are infected by the woke and have people who are not white guys doing things. But when he remembers the things are scanning his work, he gets so offended.
It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Eagle's Talons.
We've literally listen to this man babble pseudoscience, toss out a popular but in fact spurious quote that is, on closer look, little more than vague hatred, and now he spouts the cheap and pathetic lies of "Affirmative Action/DEI ate muh lunch!"
So, yeah, classic Hivemind member, all swollen ego and dismal intelligence.
It's the Day's Day of Days! Because With Stanley in Africa.
...
Once you move past the typical Muir whining, it's pretty clear he just wants to draw dinosaurs again. There's just so little happening in this strip right now.
Muir's long time tradition of what I like to call shoutouts to his internet homies began from the very start of the strip. Of course, where he now does things like drawing avatars of paying fans visiting the cast, back then, he was generally referring to (or in a few rare cases drawing) online Right-wing bloggers, many of them being supporters of his strip. Muir loved this group, valorizing them as 'citizen-journalists' who told it like it was, and struck back at a subversive, incompetent mainstream media that Muir was convinced was biased against the Right. He repeated their triumphs, their stories and their talking points, sometimes word for word, and when something turned against them, well, he looked away.
As was so often the case, Muir was being taken for a ride. On some level, he allowed this to happen--most people are susceptible to being told what they want to hear, and Muir was especially prone, as he demonstrated during this time on numerous subjects and would go on to demonstrate to even greater amounts. Many of his 'citizen-journalists' were astroturfed young Republican party hacks, enjoying the patronage of various Right-wing organisations in the latest wrinkle of an infotainment ecosystem that had developed during the Clinton years. Not all of them, mind you, but enough of them. These were not the, for the most part, humble average citizens doing journalism in their spare time, but actual journalists doing subsidized partisan journalism while insisting they were humble and average.
Of course, the occasional independent figure did enjoy having their signal boosted by the more connected ones. Muir offers a good example of just how this ecosystem could work--a third-rate (and I might be being kind in my ranking there) webcomic artist getting a shot at syndication that he frankly did not deserve, because his comic caught the eye of a bunch of what amounted to low-ranking party functionaries. DbD was even featured and linked on the RNC webpage for a while. Looking at Muir's shoutouts at this stage, it's clear he has a rather sentimental attachment to this world, the exact sort of thing that is meant by 'parasocial bonds'. Muir was imagining a deep spiritual connection with people who were at best friendly acquaintances, at worst, people who viewed him as a cynical means to an end.
As usual with the Mystery Business(tm) Era, this is both a snapshot of an earlier time, and a foreshadowing of what would come. By the end of the Bush years, the Right blogosphere was largely consolidating to a handful of large, carefully curated sites with well-heeled backers. Many of the techniques used to kickstart it would get used again to create the Tea Party movement, and Muir (as we will see in future installments) lapped that one right up too. But in both cases, he wound up a good example of a problem the GOP and the Right weren't counting on, that constantly radicalizing your followers and telling to listen to extremist outsiders doesn't have a clear endpoint, and they will, eventually, wind up listening to actual extremist outsiders instead of the people you've chosen to play the part. When Muir talks about 'citizen journalists' these days, it's usually a crazy person screaming about conspiracy theories that don't help the GOP that much.
But that's the future, something we'll be considering in the next installment.
It's the Day's Day of Days! Because In the Days of Buffalo Bill.
As we witness Muir's utter intellectual pliability once again, I just have to note that Mari is apparently standing nearly stock-still for the last two strips.
It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe.
It's been kind of fascinating, over the years, watching Muir shift from the classic Rand fan who was personally skeptical of religion to the bizarre hybrid area he exists in now, where he's absolutely still excited about dinosaurs, but also has come to accept that obviously, Goddidit.
It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Winners of the West.
Muir is tossing this out, a distorted version of the old PC bugaboos, because he heard for years that Trumpism and the MAGAts would lead to failure and humiliation.
And it has, so he's retreating to the sandbox where he can pretend games like this come across as tough, instead of peevish and pathetic.
It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Terror Trail.
This is a brand of Muir strip that I've seen before. He pulls this sort of smug both-siding when he sees defeat looming in the distance. Partially to create a reality where, no, no, a loss isn't coming up, the Dems are naturally inferior, they're scum, they can't win, and partially to tell himself that, nah, he's not gonna be the loser, it's the dirty GOP who just won't commit, if they were just more tuff, they'd win. And so he pretends he's not one of the guys attached to the loss, he's part of the vital resurgent new political movement that will soon claim its natural place!
It's more pleasant than admitting he's an old reactionary nitwit who's watching the program he backed collapse into disaster.
Yet again.
It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Secret Four.
The thing that really strikes you is how pathetic all this is, grumbling, whiny, brainless misogyny trying to pretend it is something tough, and thoughtful and deep.
It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Elmo the Mighty.
There is something bleakly comic about how the endless accusations of how the cast are being victimized by the perv-elite have gradually risen through the ranks.
That and how Muir doesn't seem to realize the inherent hypocrisy and projection in the charge. Once again, when he imagines a bad guy, he pretty much imagines himself.
It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Great Radium Mystery.
As Muir comforts himself that, yeah, yeah, things are going well, people are on HIS side, let's consider the many fails of this little strip.
Muir imagines he comes across as reasonable. He comes across as a bloodthirsty fascist.
Muir imagines he comes across as mature and his opponents as entitled and childish. In fact, not only does he come across entitled and childish, but his dismissal of his opponents as that underlines his moral vacuity and hypocrisy. Muir will shriek about how he is being tyrannically oppressed because his every bigoted whim isn't being indulged, but when actually tyrannical oppression is occurring, he won't merely applaud because his people are doing it. No, he'll whine that it isn't going far enough because anyone who doesn't agree with him isn't being liquidated.
Muir imagines that he comes across as calm and serene. In fact he comes across as panicked, because anyone who knows his work has seen this before--Muir shutting his eyes as the failures pile up and insisting that glorious victory is inevitable.
It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Red Glove.
Muir appears to have fallen for an online rumor hook, line, and sinker. Let's put aside the fact that the New IRA, the present group that actually occasionally does terrorism, has about 200 members, which makes its ability to perform this threat... shall we say, doubtful. The actual IRA--well, IRAs, there have been quite a few splinter groups--is a generally left-wing organization with traditional ties to the Palestinian liberation movement, who are largely more interested in getting the British out of Northern Ireland so the island can be united than this sort of blood and soil bullshit. But hey, Muir is convinced he just loves the Irish, so he falls for this. Which by the way, is largely being represented as coming from Irish and British intelligence sources. (Hell, fun fact, most of the Irish/Norn Iron bigot squad are resentful of this, and are convinced this is a government plot to tie them with being... terrorists!) But again, Muir thinks this is a cool thing, and more proof of how people everywhere are getting With It, and so we get this weird and horny gushing over the idea.
It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Bull's Eye.
Muir's ability to be self-righteous about being wretched has always been a thing, it's just that the wretchedness has gotten oh, so worse over the years.
It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Brass Bullet.
As Muir insists that people who do in fact exist don't exist, I feel I must mention that at various points in his life Vlad III Tepes was the sworn vassal of the Ottoman Sultan...
