TRUMP HOLDING MEETINGS ABOUT REVERSING ELECTION VIA MARTIAL LAW

 

A IMPASSIONED OVERVIEW OF THE LAST FEW DAYS' DEVELOPMENTS

BRETT KAVANAUGH, EXPOSED (EVEN MORE)

With all the high crimes and misdemeanors, fiscal improprieties, sex (and sexual assault) scandals, fraudulent business endeavors, the never-ending torrent of lies, the criminal conspiracies both foreign and domestic, and the excursions into ever more radical iterations of fascist rhetoric and legislation that have taken place under Preznit Trump, probably the event that has most disgusted and disturbed me over the past two-plus years was the way in which Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court was handled. This is an opinion I share with Esquire's mandatory political columnist, Charles Pierce.

The degree of vicious, enraged, privileged entitlement with which Kavanaugh and his Trumpnik backers bluffed and bullied past even the barest minimum of oversight, despite his obviously being a deeply damaged and dangerous psychopath—not to mention a wholly bought-and-paid-for agent of the New Fascist International(e), guaranteed to do their bidding regardless of what judicial norms they demand he destroy, or the awful precedents they demand he help set—felt like a historically important moment, wherein the Bad Guys decided to go all in and let their emotions guide their every action, no matter how brazen, bizarre, thuggish or creepy it caused them to come across.

The biggest tell was most definitely their faces, which were frequently twisted into masks of pure, unadulterated hatred, born of the deepest, most seething contempt imaginable... Contempt for Kavanaugh’s accusers, but perhaps more importantly, contempt also for the long-established processes meant to deal with such issues, and keep unqualified, compromised lunatics like Kavanaugh (and Trump!) as far away from the levers of power as humanly possible.

For instance, my gorge still rises at the sight of pretend-tough-guy Lindsay Graham, purple-faced and shrieking his outrage, spitting incoherent venom at any camera or microphone pointed in his general direction. That was instructive, as was the cavalcade of twisted, bizarre expressions forever waxing and waning across Kavanaugh’s crimson countenance, the sheer effort he put into holding himself back from leaping across the table and throttling his interrogators (especially the women) causing him to look for all the world like a man desperately trying not to transform into a werewolf.

And now, this week, just under a year after his shameful confirmation… we're learning even more about the black-out drunken alcoholic, misogynistic frat-boy super-jock “penis prank” and perjury enthusiast with a PTSD wife, quiet, flinchy kids and a bunch of bad credit card debts most likely paid off by Far Right elements around the same time he was nominated by Trump to a lifetime appointment to the highest court of the land… and it’s looking like—SURPRISE!!!—there actually was a bunch of corroborating evidence and contemporary witnesses to all the “nasty things” multiple women were accusing him of. And the FBI “investigation” that cleared him? It never fucking happened.

And so, only one question remains, as far as I’m concerned: America… what are y’all gonna do about this shit?

CLEANING HOUSE ~ STORIES I LIKED BUT DIDN'T GET TO SHARE

Okay, so, obviously, what with my reduced output over the past few months (due to many factors, including burnout, lethargy, paying work and a general sense of hopelessness), there have been a number of stories that I'd hoped to share with y'all via my blogs, but haven't. I keep track of these stories on a scratch-pad, where I list general topics and specific reports, op-ed pieces and essays. That scratch-pad has now grown intolerably long, so I'm going to be performing a purge over the next few blog posts here at the DDD, and also at Kubrick U, The Mediavore, and Useless Eater Blog (links available, page right).

Please forgive the lack of organization as we begin with Brian Beutler's op-ed piece for Cracked Magazine, titled The Crime Is Worse Than The Coverup, from which we get the lovely image above, and which begins...

On multiple occasions in 2016, and perhaps stretching back into the previous year, Donald Trump’s presidential campaign fielded solicitations from Russian spies and cutouts offering up stolen Democratic Party emails and other assistance in the election. 

At no point, so far as we know, did anyone working on the campaign report this pattern of behavior to the FBI. After Trump secured the Republican Party nomination, the FBI warned him and his advisers that Russians would try to penetrate their campaign, and asked them to alert law enforcement officials if and when they noticed anything suspicious. They said nothing. Since winning the election, Trump has gone to great lengths to protect Russia from the American intelligence community’s assessment that Russia subverted the election to help Trump and tried to shut down all efforts to determine his level of complicity in that subversion. 

Christopher Steele, by contrast, didn’t hesitate for a second to alert the FBI when, while working for the political intelligence firm Fusion GPS, he unearthed information that convinced him Trump was compromised, susceptible to Russian government blackmail, and conspiring with Russian spies to sabotage Hillary Clinton’s campaign. 

For his trouble, Republicans have tried to run down the former head of the MI6 Russia desk as a partisan operative and a criminal, without whom the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation would never have taken hold. Despite the fact that he has never testified before Congress, Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) recently accused him of making false statements (presumably, they allege, to law enforcement officials) and referred him to the FBI for investigation.

It only gets better from that point on, containing a great deal of important information and excellent, eye-opening perspective. I urge you to read it and pass it along to any friends that you think could make good use of it. I've got it clipped and saved.

***

Next up, we have this important essay, entitled Yes, Polarization is Asymmetric, and Conservatives Are Worse, from The Atlantic, which hasn't exactly been covering itself in glory in recent months... but more about that later. For now, Norm Ornstein's essay about Pew's monumental new study (based upon over 10,000 in depth field interviews) shows how...

...in the mid- to late-1990s, we did not have anywhere near the level of public polarization or ideological or partisan animosity that we have now. In the public, this phenomenon has been much more recent (and is accelerating). But in the Gingrich era in Congress, starting in 1993, where Republicans united in both houses to oppose major Clinton initiatives and moved vigorously from the start of his presidency to delegitimize him, the era of tribalism started much earlier, while the ante was upped dramatically in the Obama years. The fact is that it was not public divisions on issues that drove elite polarization, but the opposite: Cynical politicians and political consultants in the age of the permanent campaign, bolstered by radio talk-show hosts and cable-news producers and amplified by blogs and social media, did a number on the public.

So, basically, "Bothsiderism" is most likely a result of media whoredom, prizing ratings over truth (and morality), and Republicans are really problematic, on a number of levels. Then of course there's always the issue of conservatives "working the ref", or complaining so constantly and at such high volumes about the "liberal bias" of the mainstream media that said media meekly bends over backwards to appease right-wingers and so as NOT to appear "liberal", which pushes the Overton Window ever further to the right, with the right-wingers never letting up, baying louder and louder at this phantom bias that now has ZILCH to do with reality.

And yet, tragically for the USA, it seems to have been a winning strategy for the worst of all possible elements. I suppose there's not much those of us for whom the above is plainly obvious to do, except to make sure people in our own personal circles understand the tactics being deployed against them, and understand the stakes involved. This article is probably a tick or two above "starter" level, but it's an important one for us seasoned news hounds to read and share with those we believe might benefit from reading it.

***

Seattle's The Stranger has long been one of the premiere big city alternative "free weeklies", and they continue to prove their value with excellent think pieces like Charles Mudede's Mass Shootings Reveal America Is A Civilization That's Reverted To Ritual Sacrifice. It begins:

The complete absence or uselessness of rational action to address the frequency of mass shootings in our society requires that we reexamine them in a completely different light. We cannot continue to see these deaths in the context of a pragmatic, civil debate about gun laws. That will tell us only a little, if anything at all. If you go on Twitter, you will find an endless stream of tweets with links to graphs and research that make it abundantly clear that mass shootings are very preventable. There is no mystery to their cause and persistence. But what if our society is not looking for a solution? What if it's the other way around: It fears the prevention of massacres? These are the kinds of things we now need to seriously consider.

The force that's regularly supplying Americans with bullet-ridden corpses might be much deeper and mostly forgotten, and so cannot be so easily recognized by common sense or the secular left. I propose the context that has greater explanatory power for the persistence of mass shootings in the US is religious superstition. We must stop going on and on about lacking laws that would protect our citizens; we must stop going on and on about how this or that politician has been bought. We are way beyond the point where such considerations are meaningful or productive. We must instead ask: To whom are all of these bodies being sacrificed, and why?

This is not easy reading, and it's bound to spark some intense reactions. But, as with so many of the challenges to which America and the Western World are being subjected, perhaps it requires of us to adopt a new kind of language, so as to more adequately comprehend and address. Where the lexicon of prescriptive social policy falls short, can the advanced linguistic technologies of existential phenomenology carry us closer to an answer? Yer old pal Jerky doesn't know, but he does know that, on a number of fronts, we seem to be running out of options. And as a result, many of us appear to be retreating into the relative safety and comfort of a new dark age.

Which brings us to...

***

...Bradley Babandir's overview of the Silicon Valley tentacle of the New Fascist International, as best exemplified by libertarian/Utopian billionaire vampire Peter Thiel, as revealed in the scathing new tome The Know-It-Alls; The Rise of Silicon Valley as a Political Power House and Social Wrecking Ball, by Noam Cohen (buy via this link so yer old pal Jerky gets a couple shekels in his beggin' cup). Even though it doesn't go quite as far as yer old pal Jerky does in identifying this faction as a de facto, knowing cohort of an incredibly dangerous emerging global conspiracy, it does some important dot-connecting... everything from the extremes of the transhumanistic "imagination", to their vision for a post-democratic technocracy, to their ongoing obsession with certain types of testable/computable/replicable IQ, etc. It begins:

THE PIT OF Peter Thiel’s ghoulishness may be bottomless, but scraping the sides for highlights is worthwhile. The vampiric impulses of Silicon Valley’s libertarian overlord combined with his endorsement of Donald Trump during the 2016 election make him look like a supervillain, but the really terrifying thing about Thiel is the reach of his tentacles and the number of people and companies his money and ideology have influenced. 

Noam Cohen, a former columnist for The New York Times, traces that legacy in The Know-it-Alls, a history of Silicon Valley through the people who shaped it, from John McCarthy, a pioneering midcentury AI researcher, to Mark Zuckerberg. Each of the men (they’re all men) in his focus does something essential to change the culture and economics of the technology start-up world, but this book has a long shadow on its pages. It could just as well have been organized “before Thiel” and “after Thiel.” Once he arrives, there is nothing he does not touch. 

... Cohen mostly gives his subjects the benefit of the doubt. ... This is often disappointing, especially when he deals with figures like Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates. The former’s awful treatment of workers comes tacked on at the end of his chapter, while the latter’s pervasive anticompetitive behavior is only mentioned later, in a chapter about Marc Andreessen. ... That all ends when he reaches Thiel. Cohen starts swinging and landing blows. Thiel is a hypocrite (fundamentally against government intervention in the business world, unless it’ll help him), an aggrieved figure in search of a grievance (the conservative magazine he started in college would, if no recent controversy was suitable for its purposes, concoct one), and a trolling commentator who believes, as he wrote in 2009, that “the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women […] have rendered the notion of a ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.” Cohen’s knockout comes from tying Thiel’s worldview back to those who came before him. He lays it out in the book’s most important paragraph: 

“[C]ut through Thiel’s eccentricities and harsh language and you discover that Thiel is simply articulating the Know-It-All worldview as best he knows how. In Thiel’s ideas one finds Frederick Terman’s insistence that the smartest should lead, as well as his belief in using entrepreneurism and the market to introduce new technologies to the people. There is the hackers’ confidence that technology will improve society, as well as their suspicion of ignorant authorities who would try to rein in or regulate the best and brightest. There is the successful entrepreneur’s belief that the disruption that has made him fabulously wealthy must be good for everyone. The main difference between Thiel and his peers is that he acts forcefully and openly in support of his ideas, while they are inclined to be more cautious and circumspect.” 

This changes the conversation about how Thiel relates to his peers. Like the Republican Party members who more or less vote along the lines of President Donald Trump’s agenda but criticize his demeanor, the problem that his peers have with him is not that his beliefs matched with his power are destructive but that he says aloud what others merely think. Thiel believes that, as Cohen writes, “monopoly businesses like Google, Facebook, and Amazon serve as a welcome replacement for government.”

So, basically, Thiel isn't just the absolute worst, he's the absolute worst, empowered... by access to a bottomless pit full of money, a head full of dangerously wacky notions, and yet-to-be-released communications technology so cutting edge, it's indistinguishable from mind control. In other words... nothing to worry about!

***

A few more articles of note before I pinch this one off and start brewing up a new info-turd...

• If you're having trouble coming to terms with the ideological flavors and the swiftly gelling formal contours of Cold War 2.0, then this Observer article by John Schindler -- Russia has an Ideology, and It's As Entrenched as Communism Ever Was -- does a pretty good job of explaining what so many old far lefties are having a difficult time understanding about contemporary Russia and (perhaps most dangerously) Vladimir Putin. Schindler's witty and memorable metaphors do more to help put things in their proper perspective than any half-dozen think tank white papers ever could. The fact that, once again, learned public intellectuals are confirming yet another element of my own still-developing "New Fascist International" conspiracy theory is small comfort, indeed.
• From what was, up until far too recently, one of the last bastions of "legit" leftist journalism still clinging to the ridiculous notion that "the whole Russia thing" -- whether it be, specifically, their interference in the 2016 election, or Putin's global malfeasance and bad faith dealing, in general -- is somehow overblown, we get a mea culpa of sorts in Robert Mackey's Russian Propaganda Attempts to Sow Doubt Over Chemical Attacks In Syria. He should probably be asking his boss, Gutless Glenn Greenwald, but I'll still take this necessary correction: "Assad, a dictator by any definition, and his ally Putin are both seen as bastions of anti-U.S. resistance [by the left]. The leaps of logic that some on the left are engaging in, in order to vilify Syrian rebels and civilians in favor of these two leaders, are breathtaking." Kind of makes one wonder if Jimmy Dore is even capable of feeling shame at this point.
• Here's another interesting take asking Why Are Some on the Left Falling for Fake News on Syria?, as published on Truthdig, and written by veteran global activist Sonali Kolhatkar.
• For an even more in depth and detailed analysis of the situation, check out The Syria Campaign's report, Killing the Truth: How Russia is Fueling a Disinformation Campaign to Cover Up War Crimes in Syria. 

TRUMPS NO GOOD, VERY BAD WEEK (OR TWO)

The fallout from the Helsinki summit has been so spectacularly awful for Donald Trump and his cult, it almost feels as though we are approaching a turning point of some kind. Can the American theater of New Fascist International's war on liberal democracy be experiencing the first serious rumbles of the existential doom it so richly deserves?

I probably don't have to go over all the ways in which the summit was a disaster, as I assume most of you follow the news pretty much as closely as I do, and from as wide a variety of sources. Suffice it to say that, for the first time since his election, even his fellow Republicans were aghast at how he (to paraphrase notoriously Trump-skeptic Senator John McCain) "abased himself abjectly before a tyrant" like no President in living memory.

Here's a CNN report that contains McCain's full statement, and further reporting on how other Republicans, including many Trump partisans, reacted to this pathetic, humiliating debacle:

If the Helsinki summit was the only thing that happened last week, it would still have been the worst week of Trump's regime by far... for Trump personally, as well as for his criminal enterprise. But it wasn't the only thing that happened. Not by a long shot.

For instance, there was that whole Maria Butina spy scandal and the related "Kremlin bribing Trump and compromising the entire GOP via dirty cash donations to the NRA" news, which broke just as Trump was boarding Air Force One on his way to Helsinki. That was what you might call a pretty big fucking deal.

Then, the world found out that Trump's long-time fix-it man, Michael Cohen--once a bonafide MAGA cultist who vowed to take a bullet for Trump, but who seems to have flipped once he realized that Trump wouldn't piss on him if he were on fire--was taping their conversations for years, creating a treasure trove of audio recordings... potentially devastating recordings that are now in the hands of the closest thing that the USA has to a superhero, special counsel Robert Mueller. No wonder Stormy Daniels' lawyer (and all around pain in Trump's ass) Michael Avennati can't seem to wipe the satisfied smirk off his handsome face lately.

He's also a professional race car driver!

Cohen flipping has a lot more potential fall-out than just exposing what everybody already knew about the Stormy Daniels case: that Trump did, indeed, cheat on Melania just days after she'd given birth to his son; that he knew all about the hush money payments and ordered them personally; that he lied his ass off about it and tried to hide his tracks via the creation of multiple LLCs (fraud and obstruction and, most likely, serious campaign finance crimes and potential felony tax code violations). It has the potential to expose so much more. Such as the fact that he's gone through the same cycle over and over again, with multiple women--including one we already know of, Playboy model Karen McDougal--some of whom got pregnant and were paid to "take care of it".

Trump with trophy wife, daughter-wife, and Karen McDougal (r)

And then of course there's Cohen's assertion that he was in the room when Trump gave the go-ahead for Don Jr and Jared K to meet with a Kremlin-connected lawyer who had promised to provide some ill-gotten dirt on Hillary Clinton, contradicting two years of the President's constant denials and lies about every aspect of that meeting. No wonder Trump threw one of his patented POTUS Twitter tantrums over the mildest of provocations by Iranian President Hassan Rouhani:

To Iranian President Rouhani: NEVER, EVER THREATEN THE UNITED STATES AGAIN OR YOU WILL SUFFER CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE. WE ARE NO LONGER A COUNTRY THAT WILL STAND FOR YOUR DEMENTED WORDS OF VIOLENCE & DEATH. BE CAUTIOUS!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 23, 2018

Look folks, those are only the very biggest of the developments that have come down the pike over the last week and a half or so. I've skipped over a number of important stories, like how Trump laughably attempted to claim that he meant to say "wouldn't" when he said "would" regarding Russian interference in the 2016 election, or his disastrous, slapdash "trade war" tariffs, which have led to his having to cough up a $12 billion dollar deficit bailout to offset the damage being done to farmers by his idiotic policies. There was his attempt to claim that Russia was no longer targeting US elections, his tampering with the official White House transcript of the Helsinki press conference (only corrected after a week of outrage) to hide the fact that Putin confessed to wanting Trump to win the 2016 election (which, when combined with everything else we know, is essentially a confession to election rigging). This particular "gaffe" added a soupcon of bitter irony to Trump's later claim that yes, he believed the Russians might well try to mess with the 2018 mid-terms... but on behalf of DEMOCRATS! Then he invited Putin to Washington, only to have Putin say "No thanks... but you should come to Russia though", a total power play further exposing Trump's bitch-boy status. The list just goes on and on.

But as bad as the Big Picture story of the Helsinki summit was, there was even worse crap tucked away in the details. Those of you who've been following American politics with any degree of depth beyond just the surface stories over the past two years will understand exactly how awful the implications in this unrolled Tweet-storm are, and those of you who don't, should take the time to make it so you do. READ AND GROK!!!

Thread by @DanielBShapiro: "1. IMPORTANT: Among the many outrages in Helsinki, Trump appears to have bought (or been suckered) into providing fuel to Putin's animus for […]"

So there you have it, folks. Only time will tell if this was a bad week for Trump, or for the American experiment, itself.

By the way, if you're active on Twitter and you're a sincere, legitimate Trump fan, and you're a real human being, and not a stage-managed fake persona or a bot, you should probably be aware of the fact that you are in a tiny and dwindling minority, and that you're being made to feel a false sense of 'safety in numbers' because of the huge amount of stage managed fake personas and bots currently polluting social media like meme rats spreading the MAGA plague.

Repent. The End is Nigh.

AN IMPORTANT ANALYSIS OF ALT.RIGHT TACTICS

FANTASTIC INTERVIEW IN FIRST HALF OF TUESDAY'S MAJORITY REPORT

Sam interviews author Corey Robin on the Republican grift. The conversation evolves into a fantastic history lesson re: the conservative movement, from Edmund Burke all the way up to the Trump era. VERY informative and enlightening (even if I have a handful of quibbles).

MINUTIA & INCONSEQUENTIA ~ AUG 28, 2017

Before we delve into all the links and stuff that make up the bulk of this "Minutia and Inconsequentia" edition of the DDD, I'd like to point out a few things, just to give any future readers a sense of what the situation is on the ground here in late August 2017.

On Friday, as hurricane Harvey, a category 4 storm, was bearing down on the Texas gulf coast, pushing an insane volume of water ahead of it--thanks in large part, according to experts, to the effects of climate change--President* Donald Trump took time out of what should have been an incredibly busy schedule to do three things.

BUH-BYE!

First, he--or, more likely, John Kelly--finally kicked that ridiculously under-qualified, potato-headed Nazi-loving fraud Sebastian Gorka out of the White House... and if you believe he left willingly, then I've got some Alex Jones brand powdered bone supplement that I can give you an excellent deal on. With Gorka's exit following hot on the heels of his fellow Breitbart co-conspirator Steve Bannon's ouster, that leaves only one man standing in the White House's Triumvirate of Alt Right Twats: Stephen Miller. Watch for that H.P. Lovecraft look-alike's departure in the coming days or, at most, weeks.

"HAHA! FOOLED YA!"

Second, he followed through on his earlier promise to ban transgender troops from serving in the American military by issuing a memo ordering the secretaries of defense and homeland security to lay the groundwork for the implementation of this policy by February 2018 at the latest.

Finally, with ZERO Department of Justice involvement, he issue a historically unprecedented Presidential pardon to the second most unambiguously evil lawman in postwar American history after Alabama's Bull Connor: the former, long-serving sheriff of Arizona's Maricopa county, Joe Arpaio.

It seems obvious at this point that Trump pardoning one of America's most prominent racist folk heroes a mere two weeks after the Far Right's deadly show of force in Charlottesville, Virginia was no coincidence, nor was it evidence of him being oblivious to the symbolism of it all. He knew full well how this pardon would play with the Trumpnik Redcaps. And, even more important to a revenge-obsessed hate-monger like Trump, he knew full well how much it would enrage and disturb his "enemies". Pardoning his fellow racist/Birther buddy Arpaio was a total win/win, with no downside.

It also didn't hurt that the two men have so much in common. For instance, they're both self-pitying narcissists who can't stop complaining about how hard done by they are.

Go ahead and see how long you can watch Trump's pool-boy Sean Hannity tongue-scrubbing Arpaio's butthole clean on FOX News before you have to run off somewhere to puke. If you make it to the part where the scrotum-faced toad whines, ever so ironically: “If they can go after me, they can go after ANYONE in this country!”, then give yourself a Gold Star.

Let's see, what else do Trump and Arpaio share? Oh yes! Their fondness for “watersports” and scat, as evidenced by Trump's notorious Russian “kompromat” pee tape, and Arpaio's online prison shitter porn cam. And then there's the fact that they both have zero respect for the norms, standards, and institutions of good governance, constitutional guarantees, and the law, as evidenced by both of them frequently trying to intimidate judges and attack investigators who dare to look into whatever shenanigans it is they're trying to get away with on any given day. 

Speaking of criminally negligent and/or dangerously insane law enforcement officers, Trump spent much of the weekend angrily tweeting his usual measure of nonsense and vitriol, this time threatening to terminate NAFTA, trying to bully Mexico into paying for his stupid wall, obsessing over the 2016 election... and hawking deranged Milwaukee county sheriff David Clarke's new book.

Meanwhile, this was happening:

***

As #HurricaneHarvey intensifies - remember to #PlanAhead.
☑️https://t.co/FMdmvohypy
☑️https://t.co/YL56ldeqoW
☑️https://t.co/t1s4AL3B47 pic.twitter.com/tpXmOK70ug

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 24, 2017

As long as we're still on the topic of Hurricane Harvey, it was while watching this disturbing and ridiculous Trump PSA about it that I came to a sudden realization about which world leader Trump most reminds me of. No, it isn't North Korea's boy king Kim Jong Un, as many have declared. To me, Trump acts like the former leader of Uganda: Idi Amin! There's a scene in a famous documentary about Amin, entitled Idi Amin Dada, where the former African dictator lectures a room full of doctors about how they should be doing their jobs. Absolutely full of himself, a clueless buffoon bloviating at length about a subject in which he has zero training or expertise... and yet he's being treated like the Buddha himself all the while. To me, Amin is a far better fit than Kim Jong Un.

And finally for today, here are a bunch of links to stories you may or may not find interesting.

• For a number of reasons, some of which are just as scuzzy and gross as you might have imagined, Canada's own version of Breitbart, The Rebel Media, is in the process of collapsing! Good riddance to bad rubbish is all that we here at the Daily Dirt Diaspora media family have to say about that.
• In case you were wondering about the image at the top of today's edition, that just happens to be an artist's recreation of a 540-million-year-old, anus-mouthed creature that is, quite possibly, mankind's most ancient shared ancestor! If this turns out to be confirmed, it sure will explain a lot about the past few decades, I'll tell you what.
• And last, but not least, this Atlantic essay by Julie Beck hopes to prove to you that the incredible amount of personal anxiety you're feeling over the state of the world these days is absolutely and categorically useless, in every sense of the word. So you'd might as well try to develop a sense of humor about it. 

***

QUOTE OF THE DAY

“I'd like to address myself to those people ... who waited for hours in 105-degree heat so that they could have the G-spot of their irrationality properly stroked for them. You're all suckers. You're dim and you're ignorant and you can't even feel yourself sliding toward something that will surprise even you with its fundamental ugliness, something that everybody who can see past the veil of their emotions can see as plain as a church by daylight, to borrow a phrase from that Willie Shakespeare fella. The problem, of course, is that you, in your pathetic desire to be loved by a guy who wouldn't have 15 seconds for you on the street, are dragging the rest of us toward that end, too.”

- The always eloquent Charles P. Pierce, in his Esquire essay “I Have No More Patience for Trump Supporters”, waxes poetic.

YET ANOTHER TROUBLING THRESHOLD CROSSED

If you thought American political rhetoric couldn't possibly get any more dangerously divisive, reckless, or incendiary, along comes the National Rifle Association spokesperson Dana Loesch to prove you more wrong than you probably thought possible. Take it away, Dana!

The Week's Paul Waldman explores some of the reasons why the NRA seems to have switched up their tactics. With Trump in the White House, they obviously couldn't continue terrifying their members with ominous warnings about gun-grabbing feds kicking in their doors, the way they did for eight years under President Obama... or, as he's referred to in the above video, "THEIR" President.

Instead, with the second amendment safe and sound under Trump, they appear to have decided to diversify their portfolio by choosing sides in the newly rekindled Culture Wars, thus effectively promoting firearm-based solutions to such "problems" as college students yelling at Milo Coulter, or late night comedians saying nasty things about "THE" President (as opposed to "THEIR" President).

Of course, in the grand tradition of right-wing mind blindness, some of our conservative brothers and sisters are saying that the only extremists here are those who see anything extreme in this ad! Here's Townhall's own pointy-headed Matt Vespa with a less than convincing explanation.

On Thursday, Ms Loesch appeared on FOX News' Tucker Carlson show to explain that she was talking about “fighting violence with truth, because truth wins out all the time." Which of course begs two questions: Who made the NRA the arbiters of truth? And why does the truth needs guns?

In closing, Huffpost video editor McJesse over at Twitter sez: "If you're gonna go after comedians maybe don't shoot in front of a blue background?"

@nra RT @McJesse: If you're gonna go after comedians maybe don't shoot in front of a blue background? pic.twitter.com/9LDm4rGx8D

— jpmovie (@jpmovie) July 1, 2017

A FEW WORDS ABOUT YESTERDAY'S SHOOTING

In the wake of Wednesday's shooting/wounding of the White Nationalist-courting, NRA-funded Congressman Steve Scalise (R-Louisiana) and three others by a Trump and Hillary-hating Bernie Bro during a charity baseball game practice, a friend of mine took to Facebook and wrote:

I wouldn't have believed what I read about wingnuts blaming this morning's shooting on "the left" if I did not have wingnut friends who are actually blaming this morning's shooting on the left. There is no polite way to describe their fanaticism. 

Unfortunately, he was 100% correct.

And it wasn't just thoughtless partisans reflexively spilling their ahistorical nonsense across the seething digital wastes of social media, either. The Big Boys got in on the act, as well.

Across the entire vast right-wing propaganda machine--all the way from FOX News, down through the talk radio ecosystem that is now well over 90% Far Right reactionary, through all the various right-wing and alt-right fake news sites like Breitbart and InfoWars and WorldNetDaily and TheBlaze and Daily Caller and on and on, ad infinitum, to the growing cottage industry of profiteering Youtube alt-right Patreon panhandlers sucking up as much anti-SJW loot as they can from people willing to pay good money to be told exactly what they want to hear--the refrain rang loud and clear: "The Democrats and leftists have taken things TOO FAR!

I shouldn't have to do this, because for fuck's sake, I assume most of you reading this are thinking people with functioning brains and at least some semblance of a working memory and basic analytic skills... but for anyone out there who might actually be stupid enough to think that "the left" or "Democrats" are the ones playing with rhetorical fire and courting extremists in the USA... well, here's what the FBI has to say about that.

I still have yet to see a single, solitary instance of this alleged "extreme rhetoric" that the Democrats have allegedly been engaging in. No. The home of true, violent extremism in America is almost entirely on the right. But the usual suspects, never ones to let facts get in the way of a good bullet point or anecdotal proof, are all het up over this one little incident, in which nobody but the shooter even fucking died.

Listen up, buttercups... an average of ONE HUNDRED PEOPLE are gunned down in cold blood in the United States of America, each and every goddamn day. Shot DEAD. But now, because Republicans got targeted this one fucking time... OH MY GOD! The RHETORIC!!! 

The really galling part is that this is coming from a cohort that fancies themselves "free speech absolutists", the very same people who poo-poo anyone who mentions that maybe the Republicans--with their increasingly unhinged and violent fan base and their blatantly White Nationalist "senior advisors" and their fucking Nuremberg style rallies where they demonize the media (while simultaneously pointing them out in the crowd), encourage chants of "Lock her up!" and worse, shriek "Go ahead and sucker punch that black bitch... I'll cover your legal bill!"--might want to tone that shit down.

By the way, if I were Steve Scalise right now, the person I'd be most afraid of in the world isn't the next Democrat, liberal, or even Bernie fan that he meets... it's Donald J. Trump. Because a wounded man doesn't make for even half as good a propaganda prop as a dead man, and deep down, I'm sure Scalise knows a) that Trump understands this instinctively, and b) that Trump would gladly sacrifice his life for far, far less than his death would be worth to him at this point.

She made $4,000 in two hours selling these. 

PIZZAGATE? SMEEZAGATE! REPUBLICANS ARE THE PERVERT PARTY!

Dear Friends;

Historically, 'twas ever thus that Republicans, Evangelicals, fundamentalist Christians, right-wing reactionaries, and conservative movementarians of every stripe have pushed the notion that Democrats, liberals, social justice activists, minorities, and pretty much everyone they disapprove of are either ethically dubious, morally bankrupt, or just flat-out evil. On the extreme end of this spectrum you have the conspiritard contingency, who frequently resort to accusing those with whom they disagree of literally being in league with Satan. 

The latest iteration of the Right's non-stop idiotic square dance is the corrosive alt-right conspiracy theory that goes by the name of "Pizzagate", a confection first cooked up in the online fever swamp of the Chans before the New Fascist International element within the Deep State seized upon it, weaponized it, and spun it out into the world via their bought and paid for disinfo partners from a wide variety of tightly controlled fringe fields and propaganda outlets.  

Yer old pal Jerky is still hard at work compiling evidence and crafting a gestalt take on recent events, taking all of the above into account, so I'll have a lot more to say--and more names to name--in the very near future. In the meantime, however, regarding this notion that liberals and Democrats are morally lax... I would like to present a counter-argument in the form of this list of right-wing, conservative Republican adulterers, rapists, and child molesters. 

So the next time you see some conservative commentator on FOX News, bellowing and shrieking about something or other, just remember to picture them screaming into a mirror, because that's exactly what they're doing, even though they aren't aware of it.

Cheers! 

Yer Old Pal Jerky

PS - A brief note before we begin: I did NOT compile this list, which has been floating around the Internet for ages (which accounts for how out of date it is... it doesn't even have former House Majority Leader Denny Hastert!), and which I found on a sub-page at this website, but I did authenticate all the entries, and all the facts check out.  I reproduce it here, and urge you all to clip and save it, and post it up at your own websites and blogs, so that our TRUTH can eventually win out against their LIES.

***

The Shameful Record of Republican Personal Immorality 

Conservatives promote the idea that Democrats should hang their heads in shame over people like Larry Flynt, a publisher of pornography, just because such people may have revealed that they vote Democratic. But political parties can't control or be responsible for those who vote for their party's candidates. What parties can control is whom they endorse to run under their banner for any public office. And the Democratic Party doesn't promote people like Larry Flynt for public office. Contrast that to the kinds of people the Republican Party regularly selects for positions of leadership in their party, the kind highlighted on this page.

Republican "Paragons of Virtue"

Section I - at the National level

Senator John Ensign (R-NV.) confessed to serious cheating on his wife with a staffer and caught paying hush money to the husband, his chief of staff.

Gov. Mark Sanford (R-S.C.), confessed to serious cheating on his wife after leaving his state unsupervised for a week. 

Senator Larry Craig (R-ID.), caught in a gay sex sting operation in a Minn. bathroom.

Senator David Vitter (R-LA), found to have been a client of prostitutes in D.C. & Louisiana.

Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fl.) forced to resign when he was found to be having inappropriate communications with male pages.

In Connecticut, the holier-than-thou Republican party chose the mayor of one of the state's largest cities as its candidate for the U.S. Senate. If Joe Lieberman had caved in to Republican demands in the year 2000 that he not run for re-election to the Senate at the same time that he was running for the vice presidency, then our nation would have had a Republican Senator from Conn, named Philip Giordano, at least until he was sentenced to serve his 37 year sentence in Federal prison as a result of the FBI investigating him for financial shenanigans and discovering in the process that this crooked, disgusting Republican office holder had been repeatedly molesting two pre-teen little girls related to his prostitute-mistress (in the mayor's office among other places).

Senator Bob Packwood (R-Ore.), resigned in 1995 under a threat of public senate hearings related to 10 female ex-staffers accusing him of sexual harassment.

William "Wild Bill" Janklow was promoted to many high offices in very conservative South Dakota, including the 27th and 30th Governor, 25th Attorney General, and the United States Congress. He was only removed from office when he was forced to after being convicted of killing someone with his car while speedy through a stop sign. (The superintendent of the state highway patrol, reported at his trial that Janklow had 16 traffic stops by troopers during his last term as governor, but was not ticketed due to "respect for his authority" and out of a "fear of retribution.")
But why did the Republican Party select this man to run for so many high offices in its name? In 1955, at the age of 16, he was convicted of the sexual assault of a 17-year old woman. As a juvenile offense, this conviction carried little weight under U.S. law. However, in 1966, while working as the tribal attorney for the Rosebud Sioux, Janklow–aged 27–was accused of raping his children's 15-year-old babysitter, Jancita Eagle Deer. Adult sexual offenses being more grave than this earlier recorded exploit, Janklow used his capacity as head of reservation legal services to stave off the (illegible) of formal, federal charges. He then resigned his position and left tribal jurisdiction." Janklow may be the only known sex offender and accused rapist in living memory to have occupied a U. S. governor's office. "Had it not been for the intervention of the FBI in the form of its undercover agent, Douglass Durham, it seems possible that Janklow would have gone to the state prison rather than to the state capitol. Conversely, had it not been for the unabashed cooperation of Attorney General William Janklow, the reign of terror perpetrated by the FBI against the American Indian Movement would have been much more difficult to pull off." 

Believe it or not, we're only getting started... READ ON!

DDD EXECUTIVE SUMMARY ~ MARCH 9, 2017

TRUMPCARE ROLL-OUT DEBACLE

Hoo-boy! That's sure been some impressive roll-out for Trumpcare, hasn't it? It's going almost as smoothly, and is proving almost as popular, as last month's Muslim Ban! And with defenders like Utah Rep Jason Chaffetz out there doing the media rounds in support of it, with such spectacular results, it's becoming more obvious with every passing day that the Trump White House really does run like a well-oiled machine. This machine, to be precise:

That's an automatic pig rectum remover. According to the technical specs, "a single operator can cut 1200 pigs / hour, easy to use, does not require much skill." Which means it's perfect for the Trump administration. Any members of that operation seeking a demonstration of said unit may contact yours truly via the usual avenues.

THREE REASONS PLUS ONE

In his most recent op-ed piece, former Clinton cabinet official Robert Reich suggests that there are only three possible reasons behind Trump's Twitter rampage from last weekend, in which he accused his predecessor of wiretapping Trump Tower's phones.  Each explanation, Reich declares, is more terrifying than the last.

The first possibility is that Trump is even crazier than most of us already suspect. The second possibility is that Trump is correct, but that would likely also entail him being guilty of high crimes, up to and including treason. The third possible explanation also necessitates assuming guilt on Trump's part, as it entails him making efforts to "get ahead" of revelations that he knows are soon to drop. It's an offensive defense posture and a risky gambit, indeed.

These all seem like credible explanations to yer old pal Jerky, but allow me to suggest a fourth possibility: frustrated projection. It's what he would have done were he in Obama's shoes last year. So that has to be the explanation for why his dirty deals with Russian oligarchs, mobsters, and the Great Oligarch Mobster Putin are being exposed to the scorching light of day (no matter how hard the talking heads of RT, or Glenn Greenwald, or Julian Assange try to convince us all otherwise).

Actually, after malignant pathological narcissism, projection provides a pretty solid explanation for pretty much everything Trump says and does.

INNOCENT QUESTIONS

• Why did China fast-track the granting of 38 Trump "trademarks"--including licenses for Trump brand massage parlors and escort services--and how is it that so far it's only the business press that seems to have picked up on this rather incredible (and doubtless at least somewhat illegal) development?
• When informed by journalists that some pervy sickos were using their social media platform to share questionable, sexualized photographs of kids, why did Facebook refuse to look into the problem unless and until said journalists provided examples of these images? And furthermore, when said journalists complied with Facebook's request, why did Facebook then go ahead and report said journalists to the authorities, accusing them of emailing questionable, sexualized photographs of kids?! I mean, what the fuck, Facebook?!
• Why are the alt.right/alt.left darlings at WikiLeaks trying to trick people into thinking that their latest data dump features documents showing US intel is "framing Russia" for the DNC hack, when there is exactly ZERO evidence for such a scenario? 
• Here's a fun little thought experiment for you: Say President Obama were to invite InfoWars founder and alt.right media juggernaut Alex Jones over to his house one evening in order to break bread and "discuss the state of the world". How long do you figure it would take, in minutes, before Starfucker Jones got down on his knees and sucked Obama's dick? I'll go conservative and say it takes a full half hour.

***

SUGGESTED READINGS

1. With An Insider's View: The Dark Rigidity of Fundamentalist Rural America, the folks at Alternet have given us a clip-and-save-worthy essay that serves both as a damning indictment of the dangerous mindset that has captured a sizable chunk of America's rural population, and a dire warning about the implications of ceding any more ideological ground to that already over-represented demographic. One highlight is a presentation of "the honest truths that rural Christian white Americans don’t want to accept." Until they accept these truths, nothing is going to change:

• Their economic situation is largely the result of voting for supply-side economic policies that have been the largest redistribution of wealth from the bottom/middle to the top in U.S. history.
• Immigrants haven’t taken their jobs. If all immigrants, legal or otherwise, were removed from the U.S., our economy would come to a screeching halt and food prices would soar.
• Immigrants are not responsible for companies moving their plants overseas. The almost exclusively white business owners are responsible, because they care more about their shareholders (who are also mostly white) than about American workers.
• No one is coming for their guns. All that has been proposed during the entire Obama administration is having better background checks.
• Gay people getting married is not a threat to their freedom to believe in whatever white god they want to. No one is going to make their church marry gays, have a gay pastor or accept gays for membership.
• Women having access to birth control doesn’t affect their lives either, especially women they complain about being teenage single mothers.
• Blacks are not “lazy moochers living off their hard-earned tax dollars” any more than many of their fellow rural neighbors. People in need are people in need. People who can’t find jobs because of their circumstances, a changing economy or outsourcing overseas belong to all races.
• They get a tremendous amount of help from the government they complain does nothing for them. From the roads and utility grids they use to farm subsidies, crop insurance and commodities protections, they benefit greatly from government assistance. The Farm Bill is one of the largest financial expenditures by the U.S. government. Without government assistance, their lives would be considerably worse.
• They get the largest share of Food Stamps, Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security.
• They complain about globalization, yet line up like everyone else to get the latest Apple products. They have no problem buying foreign-made guns, scopes and hunting equipment. They don’t think twice about driving trucks whose engines were made in Canada, tires made in Japan, radios made in Korea, and computer parts made in Malaysia.
• They use illicit drugs as much as any other group. But when other people do it is a “moral failing” and they should be severely punished, legally. When they do it, it is a “health crisis” that needs sympathy and attention.
• When jobs dry up for whatever reason, they refuse to relocate but lecture the poor in places like Flint for staying in failing towns.
• They are quick to judge minorities for being “welfare moochers,” but don’t think twice about cashing their welfare checks every month.
• They complain about coastal liberals, but taxes from California and New York cover their farm subsidies, help maintain their highways and keep the hospitals in their sparsely populated rural areas open for business.
• They complain about “the little man being run out of business,” and then turn around and shop at big-box stores.
• They make sure outsiders are not welcome, deny businesses permits to build, then complain about businesses, plants opening up in less rural areas.
• Government has not done enough to help them in many cases, but their local and state governments are almost completely Republican and so are their representatives and senators. Instead of holding them accountable, they vote them into office over and over and over again.
• All the economic policies and ideas that could help rural America belong to the Democratic Party: raising the minimum wage, strengthening unions, spending on infrastructure, renewable energy growth, slowing down the damage done by climate change, and healthcare reform. All of these and more would really help a lot of rural white Americans.

Read the entire essay. It's important.

2. Hey now! THIS is the stuff! "A philosophy comic about the inevitable anguish of living a brief life in an absurd world. Also jokes." If you're an under-employed, over-educated citizen of the ongoing slow-motion disaster movie that is NOW, then Existential Comics might be just the thing to put a smile on your face. Not the first one, though... that one is heavy as fuck. Thankfully, the comics get shorter, more colorful, and funnier as the series progresses. Enjoy!

3. Kooky Canadian Conservative Party leadership candidate Kellie Leitch unleashed a startling video upon an unsuspecting public last week, and it left most Canadians wondering what in the name of the Littlest Hobo was this young lady's major malfunction?! Here's the entire thing if you think you can stomach her "golly gee willikers" tomboy affectation, her tuna noodle casserole accent, and her Trump Lite brand of condescending, thinly-veiled anti-immigrant idiocy, all delivered through a face that attempts to approximate sincerity, but succeeds only in delivering a smirking sneer. The real attraction here, however, is the startling array of awkward pauses that Leitch cycles through for the duration. A partial catalog is featured in this pared down version of her original:

***
QUOTE OF THE DAY

“The short answer? A transparent, oil-based, pressure-sensitive, non-permanent attempt to fix something the easiest and cheapest way possible that never gets to the source of the problem that created the situation in the first place. Appearing to be a good solution on the surface to those meant as the audience - but at the core it is deceptive and lazy.”

- Michele Sarna's reply to a fellow Facebook user who asked "What do you mean?" in response to her comment about how every time she sees Trump using scotch-tape in lieu of a tie pin, it seems like a perfect metaphor for his presidency.

DDD EXTRAS

• I've created a new blog! The Mediavore! From Cult to Canon, from Classic to Trash, this is the place to find out what yer old pal Jerky thinks about all the latest media! Cinema! Books! Music! Comics! Television! Bullet Reviews! In-depth Analysis! If you have any suggestions, don't hesitate to send them along!
• If you want to learn about some cool and/or weird things that happened on whatever day of history that it happens to be when you're reading this, why not check out our sister-site, Useless Eater Blog? You're sure to find something of interest, guaranteed!

THE TAKEAWAY

Coming Soon: A Dossier on Steve Bannon!

WEEP NOT FOR MILO

“Glibness and superficial charm. Manipulation of others. A grandiose sense of self. Pathological lying. A lack of remorse, shame or guilt. Shallow emotions. An incapacity to feel genuine love. A need for stimulation. Frequent verbal outbursts. Poor behavioural controls. These are just some of the things that social media are encouraging in all of us. They’re also a pretty comprehensive diagnostic checklist for sociopathy – in fact, that’s where I got the list.”

***

Under protest and against my better judgment, I suppose I should write a few words about Milo Yiannopolous and his catastrophic disaster of a week. Under protest, because the full Milo saga is so twisted and byzantine it defies attempts at chronological narrative presentation. Against my better judgment, because as a non-invested observer who thinks Milo and his antics are a pox on our culture--not a serious pox like smallpox mind you, more like chickenpox: irritating, ugly, and in rare cases dangerous--I'm probably not the best person to be writing his story. 

I'm also not too keen on having to deal with Milo's fans trying to White Knight for him by exercising their l33t trolling skills against me and my paltry little hobby blog, the way I've seen them do to others, especially on Youtube, where defending Milo has become a sort of click-bait cottage industry. Anyway, hesitation aside, I guess I do have a couple things I want to say about this controversy that I haven't seen anyone else say yet, so there's nothing I can do but press on.

First things first, for you lucky few who have yet to run across Milo in your online meanderings, USA Today has a decent bio, whereas a more in-depth (and judgmental) primer can be found in James Kirchick’s excellent overview for Tablet Magazine, titled “Donald Trump’s Little Boy is a Gay Half-Jew with Jungle Fever”.  Published in June of 2016, the first two paragraphs provide an accurate and fairly definitive snapshot of Milo's carefully groomed public persona, as well as some insight into his political leanings, insofar as these bear assessing:

Milo Yiannopoulos is a fervent supporter of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Referring to Trump as “Daddy,” the ostentatiously gay British media personality provides a camp component to the presumptive Republican nominee’s fan base. What seems to excite Yiannopoulos about Trump is what seems to excite most of the tycoon’s voters: a brash, take-no-prisoners attitude. When I recently asked Yiannopoulos to name the Trump policies he favors, he replied with a very revealing answer. Trump supporters don’t care about the man’s policies, he said. “They want to burn everything down.” Suddenly Yiannopoulos’ Twitter handle, @Nero (followed by more than 200,000 Twitter users), made all the more sense. 

Simultaneously vacuous and sinister, equal parts nihilist and narcissist, Yiannopoulos is the model Trump advocate. And as Trump comes under increasing scrutiny, Yiannopoulos, who writes for Breitbart.com, has gone to great lengths defending the worst elements of his campaign. Shortly after our encounter, which took place this March over brunch in Washington, Yiannopoulos published a long article championing the “alt right,” the largely Internet-based, populist movement that has surged to prominence on the heels of Trump’s success. Among its various constituencies, the alt right is comprised of mens’ rights advocates, pseudo-intellectual “race realists,” technocratic authoritarians... and outright neo-Nazis. Speaking of the movement’s “intellectuals,” the bulk of whom write for avowedly racist and anti-Semitic publications like VDARE and American Renaissance, Yiannopoulos and his co-author described them as “dangerously bright.”

At this point, just over half a year after this article was published, some updates are required. First, and most famously, Milo had his Twitter account permanently revoked after starting an online fight with Leslie Jones, one of the stars of the much-maligned all-female Ghostbusters reboot. Secondly, he no longer works at Breitbart. 

Which is where things get complicated.

You see, the reason for Milo's very bad week is because of some things he said during two lengthy online interviews: a Joe Rogan Podcast from July of 2016, and a Drunken Peasants Livestream from roughly the same time period. 

During both appearances, sandwiched between his boilerplate "fabulous supervillain" shtick--including rampant misogyny, belittling of rape, anti-trans rhetoric, gay self-loathing, elitist classism, anti-Muslim bigotry, racist fetishization of the Black male body, evangelical Catholicism (yes, really), Trump apologetics, and countless other grotesqueries--he slipped in a defense of sex between grown men and young adolescent boys, saying it was no big deal, and that it could even have a salutary effect on the youth.

Barely anyone noticed. Even fewer cared. Months passed without incident.

Then, on Thursday, February 17, according to The Hollywood Reporter, which first reported the news, Milo was announced as the keynote speaker for 2017's annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), perhaps the most important "marquee" cultural event in the entire American conservative social calendar. His address was going to focus on his "experiences in America battling feminists, Black Lives Matter, the media, professors and the entertainment industry."

The next day, a cadre of anti-Trump conservatives known on Twitter as the Reagan Battalion were made aware of a short Youtube video featuring select portions excerpted from the videos mentioned above, highlighting Milo's questionable comments about how the "notion of consent" is "arbitrary and oppressive", how grown men having sex with 13-year-old boys does NOT count as pedophilia because the latter have fully functioning genitals, and how he's grateful to "Father Mike" for teaching him how to give great head.

The video had already been viewed thousands of times, but when the Reagan Battalion tweeted about it, asking whether it was acceptable for a self-described "conservative" institution like CPAC to be associating themselves with the likes of Milo... all Hell broke loose. 

In short order, Milo was disinvited from CPAC. He took to Facebook to defend himself, claiming that the video had been deceptively edited to put him in a bad light. Then his quarter million dollar book deal with Simon & Schuster fell through. Back at Facebook, Milo's updates took on a tone of barely contained panic. “I do not support pedophilia. Period,” he wrote. “It is a vile and disgusting crime, perhaps the very worst. There are selectively edited videos doing the rounds, as part of a coordinated effort to discredit me from establishment Republicans, that suggest I am soft on the subject.”

Unfortunately for Milo, it was all too easy to check for oneself and discover that his words were not only not "selectively edited", but that they were even worse in context. That's around the time a number of employees at the alt.right propaganda organ Breitbart--where Milo enjoyed celebrity status as the site's Chief Tech Editor, despite his "reporting" mostly consisting of his "Dangerous Faggot College Tour" appearance transcripts--were threatening to quit en masse if he wasn't fired. 

72 hours after the storm began, Milo held a press conference in which he apologized (but not really), tried (and mostly failed) to defend himself against... um... himself, and "resigned" from Breitbart. Kind of like how Michael Flynn "resigned" from the White House. 

While all this was going on--and please forgive this digression--one of the most entertaining sideshows involved watching how this right-wing super-troll and his far right fan-base reacted in real time to his being exposed by conservative activists, leading to his being dis-invited from a right-wing convention and fired from his job at an alt.right website. 

This image sums it up quite succinctly:

Yes! That's right! They blamed it all on that viscerally despised boogeyman, those loony left socialist MSM Democrat beta SJW cuck LIBERALS! 

Even more hilariously unhinged was the sprawling conspiracy theory concocted by goofy, lisping alt.right weirdo (and serial false pedophilia accuser) Mike "Gorilla Mindset" Cernovich, who lays out his insider knowledge of the insidious, multi-million dollar, years-in-the-brewing, anti-Milo plot in this magnificently cringe-inducing Youtube video:

[AND SO, OF COURSE, CERNOVICH TOOK DOWN HIS VIDEO... - YOPJ]

It's sort of amusing, in a way, watching two leading PizzaGate promoters--who based much of their idiot claims of a Satanic child sex-and-ritual-sacrifice trafficking ring on the fact that billionaire Jeffrey Epstein was known to have slept with teenage girls--passionately defend Milo's assertion that adults who are attracted to 13-year-old boys aren't "technically" pedophiles. They truly, literally know no shame.

Okay, fun time is over. Now let's get back to that press conference, which is very much worth watching in its entirety:

It's one for the ages, isn't it? At turns self-pitying, self-loathing, and self-promoting, Milo expresses delusions of grandeur and persecution, all while putting on a clinic of pitiful whining prevarication, as the whole thing soaks in the flop sweat of rank hypocrisy.

I could literally go line by line through his statement and, at each line, point out where Milo was lying, or being hypocritical, or being insufferable. For now, however, I will spare you that tedium. This blog post is already too long. Suffice it to say that the irony of Milo petulantly demanding that his words be given the kind of nuanced, sympathetic parsing, and that he be granted a level of compassion, empathy, and basic human decency that he has continuously proven unwilling to grant to anyone he deems--by dint of ideology, identity, and sometimes just ethnicity--to be somehow lesser than... well, it's rich enough to give an Iron Man Triathlete instant diabetes.

Unfortunately, irony isn’t merely another factor in this debacle; it’s the prevailing paradigm. Because it's ultimately irrelevant whether or not Milo was a victim of predatory pederasts. The same could be said of the vast majority of pedophiles currently stalking playgrounds, or rotting in jail cells. The nature of evil is that it conducts through flesh, down through generations, like electricity through wires. A victim becomes a villain who creates new victims, who in their turn become new villains.

These cycles are difficult to shake. It's why it's important to have compassion. It's also why it's important that our compassion have limits. And it's why Milo’s so-called apology is so obviously bogus. Because it’s totally in keeping with his previous, "shitlord" behavior. There's no contrition there. Shame? A little bit, perhaps discernible in his downcast gaze. Embarrassment? Maybe that's what all that bobbing and weaving was about. Annoyance? Oh yes. A ton. But otherwise, he's got nothing to give but justifications and rationalizations, with a ready-made excuse for everything. 

Consider the bolts in Milo's traditional quiver of rhetoric:

“I can say homosexuals and transexuals are defective, broken perverts because I’m a gay man!”
“I can make up crazy, hateful shit about Black Lives Matter because I love slurping on black dong!”
“I can say Jews are the root cause of civilization’s decay because my mum’s got a Jewish grandmother!”

Now, post #MiloGate, the game has changed somewhat. Originally, he felt fully entitled to gleefully declare: “It’s okay for 13-year-olds to have sex with adults because I had sex with adults when I was 13 years old, and it didn’t do me any harm!” 

Post-scandal, however, he has to declare: “I can say that it’s okay for 13-year-olds to have sex with adults, and also claim that I don’t really mean it, because I’m a victim of pedophilia, and HOW DARE YOU try to police how I navigate my trauma?!”

It gets worse. 

In defending himself and donning the mantle of victimhood, Milo has the temerity to bring up, as a point in his favor, the relentless mass harassment campaign he helped to wage against prominent GamerGate critic Sarah Nyberg. First he mis-genders Nyberg, who is trans, before going on to list her as one of the three “pedophiles” he's “outed” in his “journalistic” career. 

I urge everyone--including those of you who think you know the full story behind all this--to read Nyberg’s account of what Milo and his troll army put her through, just because she voiced an opinion that ran counter to theirs, putting a torch to the delusion that the alt.right has anything whatsoever to do with "free speech". As you read Nyberg's account, keep in mind that, in his "apology", Milo was using this as an example of the good that he's done in the world.

The irony here is that even her fiercest critics tacitly acknowledge Nyberg’s youth was steeped in real trauma, even if only because they use the details of that trauma to viciously troll, humiliate, and harass her. And yet, despite this, every indication points to her worst transgressions being confined to an online fantasy world of role play. Milo's self-confessed antics--which include attending parties where underage “twinks” serviced sugar daddies while he looked on, presumably laughing and snorting fat rails of cocaine all the while--are an order of magnitude worse.

As for the notion that being gay automatically precludes you from being a fascist, a Nazi, or a sympathizer/enabler of those ideologies, that's a dangerous and naive delusion. In this age of #Pizzagate and "OMGIlluminati!!!" panic over every Super Bowl halftime show, it’s easy to forget that there is a long tradition of masculinist gay fascism, and that a sadistic contempt for sexual consent, regardless of gender, has largely been a phenomenon of the political right, to which the endless stream of Republican and conservative Christian sex criminals attests.

There are so many people in this world more deserving of our sympathy, our empathy, and our assistance than Milo Yiannopoulos. If he had shown one ounce of contrition--just a smidgen--I would be far more sympathetic. But he hasn't even begun to atone, to make things right with all the people he's attacked so viciously over the years. 

Milo is going to have to earn his healing. I have a feeling a "fearless moral inventory" lies somewhere in his near future. Will he be up to the task? He's off to an awfully bad start, so personally, I doubt it. Odds are he'll fake his way through and, in time, fool just enough people to win back his crown as the Right's favorite "dangerous faggot" (patpend). 

But who knows? Allow me to be more generous to Milo than he has ever been to any of the targets of his hateful bloodsport rhetoric by admitting there's a tiny, microscopic ghost of a chance that he may end up surprising us all. 

But I won't be holding my breath.

***

At the beginning of this blog post is an unsigned epigram. It is the first paragraph of an essay entitled "The Internet is Turning Us All into Sociopaths", written in 2012... by Milo Yiannopoulos. I leave you now with the last part of that same essay:

"So perhaps what’s needed now is a bolder form of censure after all, because the internet is not a universal human right. If people cannot be trusted to treat one another with respect, dignity and consideration, perhaps they deserve to have their online freedoms curtailed. For sure, the best we could ever hope for is a smattering of unpopular show trials. But if the internet, ubiquitous as it now is, proves too dangerous in the hands of the psychologically fragile, perhaps access to it ought to be restricted. We ban drunks from driving because they’re a danger to others. Isn’t it time we did the same to trolls?"