Political researcher, commentator, and Twitter superstar Leah McElrath has brewed up a Tweetstorm for the ages. And what great luck for yours truly that her research backs up and dovetails beautifully with my own New Fascist International "conspiracy theory". Just read this tsunami of terrible truth and you'll begin to understand about Alexandr Dugin, Vladimir Putin, Richard Spencer, Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, propaganda, psy-ops, cyberwarfare, the 2016 election, and everything else connected to the Beast that we're facing down in these, the most interesting of times. - Jerky
Guess who said this was their goal: "the strategic control of the USA...and the refusal to allow liberal values to dominate us."
Alexandr Dugin is Putin's geopolitical ideological mentor. He outlined a vision for a new Russian Empire. Above is part of his strategy.
Alexandr Dugin has a Facebook page. Days after the U.S. election, he posted "So. Washington is ours."
Say you’re at a rally and you see a group of mostly white men, dressed alike and walking towards you. It’s a white supremacist group—but which one can it be? Now, thanks to the Topic Magazine article "Decoding the Language of Extremist Clothing", illustrated by Julia Rothman and written by Tasneem Raja, there's a handy dandy reference guide available to help you identify the threat! Whether it be a radicalized gaming knight of Kekistan, or one of the paradoxically disability-collecting chubbos from the Traditionalist Workers Party, this article is a virtual Audubon Society field guide to racist, hateful losers!
***
In the spirit of knowing thine enemy, you might want to consider reading this rather interesting New York Magazine interview with former White House Trump-whisperer and all-around nasty piece of work, Steve Fucking Bannon. The interview is part of the mag's ongoing exploration of the legacy of the 2008 financial crisis, which includes "a new radical politics on both the left and the right; epidemics of opioid abuse, suicides, and low birthrates; and widespread resentment, racial and gendered and otherwise, by those who felt especially left behind." Be sure to check out the comments section when you're done with the interview! A number of highly intelligent readers make minced meat out of Bannon's arguments, which -- despite seeming somewhat reasonable and maybe even appealing upon first read -- are exposed for the bellowing cant that they are.
The first thing to consider, as far as yer old pal Jerky is concerned, is the fact that these "guns" are mostly single-use, and thus, absolute crap. Why go through the
trouble of printing a one-and-done handgun when America is already awash in excellent, re-usable firearms?
On the other hand, I've seen a lot of people on the far right corners of Reddit
saying that it is every Qanon-believing, Democrat-despising, red-pilled
(((establishment)))-hating Kekistani meme warrior's duty to download, then
seed, the torrent for said firearm/file.
Well, I don't know about you folks, but it sure seems to me as though putting out a
blueprint for a relatively harmless but attention grabbing single-use printable
handgun, then sitting around and waiting to see who downloads and seeds those
files, would be a great way to locate easy-to-trigger individuals with authority "issues", in order to make any future round-ups of said undesirables more easy and orderly.
So... best to think twice before doing something which I think is probably at
LEAST as stupid and potentially self-destructive (if not as fucking disgusting
and unmitigatedly evil) as downloading child pornography.
***
Are you interested in learning The Crazy True Story of Trump Moscow? If so, then you should read the excellent and comprehensive Buzzfeed article, which begins:
All through the hot summer campaign of 2016, as Donald Trump and his aides dismissed talk of unseemly ties to Moscow, two of his key business partners were working furiously on a secret track: negotiations to build what would have been the tallest building in Europe and an icon of the Trump empire — the Trump World Tower Moscow.
Talks to construct the 100-story building continued even as the presidential candidate alternately bragged about his relationship with Vladimir Putin and rejected suggestions of Russian influence, and as Russian agents worked to sway US public opinion on Trump’s behalf.
While fragments of the Trump Moscow venture have trickled out — most recently in a report last night by Yahoo News — this is the definitive story of the Moscow tower, told from a trove of emails, text messages, congressional testimony, architectural renderings, and other documents obtained exclusively by BuzzFeed News, as well as interviews with key players and investigators. The documents reveal a detailed and plausible plan, well-connected Russian counterparts, and an effort that extended from spearfishing with a Russian developer on a private island to planning for a mid-campaign trip to Moscow for the presidential candidate himself.
***
Regular readers of the DDD know that I believe Youtube to have long ago become little more than a Far Right propaganda platform, shoving loads of conservative, alt-right, and even unapologetically fascistic talking points down our collective throats, no matter what you do to get them to stop. I have personally lost count of the number of times I've tried to use their criteria selection interface to try and prevent them from recommending videos by the likes of Sargoon of Arcade, Styxenhammer666, Stefan Molyneux, Jordan Peterson, etc, etc, etc, ad nauseum. But no matter what I do, there's always a "Stoopid Feminist is Stoopid!", or "SJW REKT by LOGIC!", or "BLM is NIGGER KKK!!!" video that manages to slither and slime its way into my recommendations.
With the above in mind, I am very grateful to Rebecca Lewis of Data & Society for doing the research and providing solid evidence to prove that no, it isn't yer old pal Jerky's imagination revving into paranoid overdrive; this is an actual phenomenon. And even though it may have more to do with algorithms than with any vast sinister conspiracy... the results are basically the same.
If you've read and digested all of the above, and you still have room for more, then how about this article about how AI can tell what your sexuality and political leanings are based solely on facial recognition software, or this article about how researchers have found that smoking marijuana can cause earlier manifestations of serious mental illness, or maybe read this op-ed piece by Rob Tibbets begging right-wing politicians and pundits to stop using his daughter Mollie's corpse as a prop for their anti-immigration propaganda. This, of course, caused a gaggle of upset right-wing commentators (like Candace Owens) to declare that if the Tibbets family was not on board for a Far Right racist crackdown on Hispanics as mass revenge for the murder of their daughter, then their skulls should be used as bricks in Trump’s wall. Such loving people.
The Republicans' (and thus America's) "Fascism Problem" isn't a fever dream cooked up by some old hippies or blue haired pansexual campus coeds. It's very real, and in some cases, very in-your-face. Let Samantha Bee clue you in with this helpful little video presentation!
***
Remember back a couple weeks ago, when Preznit Trump revoked former CIA chief John Brennan's security clearance because he didn't like what the man had to say about how he was running the country? Of course you do. The constant churn of the international shit-storm that's been brewing ever since the greasy Beast slithered into the office that was stolen on his behalf makes an awful lot of background noise, it's true, but this particular treachery was the kind of act that leaves a lasting impression no matter what else might be going on at the time.
The thing about it that really stuck with yer old pal Jerky, however, was that, in his press release about the situation, Trump accused Brennan of “erratic conduct and behavior”, of making “frenzied commentary”, and of making “wild outbursts on the Internet and television.”
Talk about the pot calling the snowball black! Exactly how deaf to the sound of his own farts does Trump have to be to say such things and not realize that he's providing us all with a perfect, world class example of that favorite right-wing self-own tactic, projection? He's literally screaming into a mirror, shaking a fist at his own fucking shadow.
***
Another news nugget that speaks to the cancer gnawing away at the heart of the Spirit of the Age... Rudy Giuliani, former mayor of New York City and current official sower of calculated confusion on any of the dozens of illegalities in which Preznit Trump and his criminal enterprise are currently ensnared, sat down for an interview with CNN's Chris Cuomo and... well... check out the transcript for yourselves:
CUOMO: I think it's a little early on that. And if fact [checking] is anything, we've never had anybody with the level of mendacity that he has. Not even close. GIULIANI: It's in the eye of the beholder. CUOMO: No, facts are not in the eye of the beholder. GIULIANI: Yes it is -- yes they are. Nowadays they are. Truth is not Truth.
So there you have it. If you've ever wondered where whence that semi-permanent, cold, nauseous, flip-floppy feeling in the pit of your stomach came from -- that feeling like you can't tell which way is up anymore -- you need look no further.
***
I realize it's been a few weeks, and I realize that the story was only ever added to the ongoing media churn as a kind of flavor additive, to spice up the data meal one way if you're a conservative and another way if you're a liberal -- with only the Far Right/Fascists and Ultra Left loons making a feast of it -- but hopefully most of you will remember the Sarah Jeong controversy, in which the New York Times' latest tech section hire had some right-wing provocateurs dig up some (this again?!) "controversial tweets" that she'd made, ostensibly disparaging "white people", over the past half-decade or so.
I'm not going to bother going into much detail on the story itself, because it's quite obvious to anyone with at least half a functioning brain what happened here: A bunch of actual racist shit-lords made a bad faith effort to get Jeong fired from the Times by smearing her as a racist, using obviously sarcastic tweets that she'd posted in reaction to actual racist attacks that she'd endured on Twitter, and it didn't work. The Times immediately cottoned to what was up and shut that shit down. End of story (minus the still ongoing low level aftershock of whining from D-level Youtube accounts and the disappointed murmurs of sand-kicking incels clogging reddit and 4Chan and the comments sections of any newspaper that's been linked to by the Drudge Report over the last five years). See the link above for a pretty good rundown of what the assault on Jeong represents in terms of the Far Right's evolving War on Reality, itself.
However, if you will indulge me, I would like to spend just a tiny bit of time on one social observer's published reaction to this cultural event, and that would be the ever reliable Andrew "Give Phrenology a Chance" Sullivan, contributor for New York Magazine and gay conservative gadfly since forever. Hell, the man kicked off his "groundbreaking" political blog a mere TWO YEARS AFTER yer old pal Jerky began his run on the late, lamented Daily Dirt, so you know the chances are good that his will be a take worthy of your time!
Sadly, you should have taken those odds, because Sullivan's piece, "When Racism is Fit to Print", for the Daily Intelligencer, isn't fit to wrap virtual fish in.
First off, Sully pretends not to know that Jeong was engaging in a game of racist tit-for-tat, throwing a mutated form of the racism daily hurled her way by the angry, frustrated meat-whites right back in their puffy, squinched up faces, in order to make them see how THEY like it, especially when coming from an intelligent and creative young woman with a playful mean streak a mile wide. Note that I'm giving Sully the benefit of the doubt, here, and assuming that he knows he's full of shit on this count, but carrying forth with it for purely partisan point-scoring. After all, what conservative is a fan of the New York Times, right?
I mean, at one point, he seriously seems to be suggesting that there might be some insight to be gleaned by "replacing the word white" in Jeong's tweets "with any other racial group"! As if precisely this variety of honking racialist cant doesn't already make up a full two-thirds of all online communication! And as if that wasn't precisely what Jeong was/is reacting to in the FIRST fucking place!
And finally, I think it is also worth noting that despite reading dozens of "think" pieces on the Jeong "scandal", I have yet to encounter anything that even comes within shooting distance of the strawman constructs Sullivan conjures up here -- "Asians CAN'T be racist claim lefties!" -- nor have I noticed anyone in real life making such a claim. And I know a LOT of very gabby, opinionated lefties.
So Sully, please... a little more effort next time, okay luvvie?
***
So there's this former CIA guy who's got some opinions you might want to know about. His name is Michael Scheuer, and he thinks... well, why not let him speak for himself? Here goes...
Finally, this week saw a significant and quickening advance toward the moment when those millions of well-armed citizens who voted for Trump, and who have been abused or wounded by Democrats, their Antifa-thugs, and their thug-civil servants for exercising their franchise to elect Trump, cannot be, in good conscience, patient for much longer.
Fortunately, they have in hand a long and very precise list of the names and photographs of those who hate and threaten them, their families, their way-of-life, their liberty, their livelihoods and their republic. No self-respecting and determined-to-remain-independent citizenry can let themselves forever be held hostage by thug-civil-servants like Strzok, Comey, McCabe, Page, and Rosenstein; worshipers of tyranny, like the Democratic members of Congress, the Clintons, the FBI, and the Obamas; apparent traitors like Brennan, Hayden, and Clapper; all of the mainstream media; and the tens of thousands of government-admitted-and-protected, violent, criminal, and illegal immigrants.
American patriots have so far, praise God, been remarkably disciplined in not responding to tyranny and violence with violence. For now they must remain so, armed but steady. But the time for such patience is fast slipping away; indeed, that patience is quickly becoming an obviously rank and self-destructive foolishness. If Trump does not act soon to erase the above noted tyranny and tyrants, the armed citizenry must step in and eliminate them.
It is, of course, far better if Trump does so, and I pray and believe he will. That said, the sheer, nay, utter joy and satisfaction to be derived from beholding great piles of dead U.S.-citizen tyrants is not one that will be missed if Trump does not soon do the necessary to save the republic. But if he fails, the citizenry must act to ensure that Hillary’s predictive words are proven correct. “If Trump wins,” she apparently said, “we will all hang.”
This is the same guy who used to head up the Osama bin Laden task-force up until 1999. So sleep well, America! All the best people have got things under control! On the other hand, if you feel that you just can't shake that spooky feeling you've got, and you're having a hard time keeping your eyes closed, then you might want to read Matt Taibbi's Rolling Stone feature on Surviving America's Kill List, featuring the harrowing true-life story of citizen journalist (and bonafide American citizen) Bilal Abdul Kareem!
Raw Story is reporting that Laura Riddick, a Republican state official in North Carolina, has been found guilty of six felony charges of "embezzlement by a public officer".
Riddick, who stole nearly one million dollars during her stint as Wake County Register of Deeds, will be spending up to seven years behind bars for her crimes, which she blames on a "bad childhood", which she says caused an undiagnosed, unnamed "mental illness" that forces her to "compulsively hoard money".
If the good folks who put together the DSM-5 have yet to christen Ms Riddick's peculiar new disorder, yer old pal Jerky would like to suggest calling it the Conservative Republican Asshole Syndrome, or CRAS for short.
No need to reimburse me, folks; it's enough for me just to know that I've helped.
