FEAST UPON THEIR FEAR. LET THEIR HATRED FOR YOU EMPOWER YOU.

 

Got any other videos showcasing MAGA morons suffering from mental breakdowns as their illusions shatter all around their heads? Send them my way and I'll try to post them for everyone to see!

JUST LOOK AT THOSE FACES...

On August 1st, in this very blog, I asked the following rhetorical innocent question: 

"If the Republicans were presented with the choice of voting for either any random Democrat or Vladimir Putin... how big do you think Putin's margin of victory would be?"

I didn't have long to wait for an answer. 

On August 5th, at one of Trump's bizarre, extended "Two Minute Hate" rallies in Ohio, these two gentlemen were photographed together, looking rather proud of their treasonous attire:

Of course, coming from a crowd like this...

...I suppose any and every type of psychopathical goonery is, at the very least, possible, if not entirely predictable.

MINUTIA & INCONSEQUENTIA ~ SEPT. 27, 2017

C. Brian Smith of MEL Magazine has put together An Oral History of Rodney Dangerfield's Back To School, the 1986 cult comedy smash that most people probably don't realize outperformed both ALIENS and Ferris Bueller's Day Off at the box office that year. Smith was inspired to pull together all these anecdotes from the cast and crew (minus Robert Downey Jr, unfortunately) after attending a celebrity-studded live table read in the movie's honor, held at Los Angeles City College a couple weeks ago, with all proceeds going towards charity.

Personally, I've always had a soft spot for Back to School, a movie with tons of heart, in which even the "bad guys" aren't all that bad. And that's okay. Because for a goofy comedy chock-a-block with one-liners, Back to School is also about father and son relationships, the value of life experience over a textbook education (promoting the former without denigrating the latter), and even manages to sneak in a subversive exploration of plagiarism and other issues related to academic ethics.

Plus, it's got this scene:

All this, and the finale features the only time a Triple Lindy has ever been caught on film! What more could a movie fan ask for? Fair warning, however... only click through to the article in question if you're prepared to gaze upon an ornate vial half-filled with sweat collected from Rodney Dangerfield by his widow after his shows.  Just try not to think about taking a swig and you should be fine.

***

So have you heard about Korea's own alt.right movement, called Ilbe?

Ilbe users are the kind of people who refer to Korean women as “kimchi bitches.” They call Chinese people “cockroaches” and homosexual men “gay bastards.” They’re the trolls who binge-ate pizza to taunt a father on a hunger strike after he lost his child in a ferry accident that killed 325 high school students and teachers — or the ones who defaced memorial posters for the victims. 

They’re known for a “deep-seated misogyny” and a hatred of immigrants and sexual minorities, and they’re waging an online war on the political left — a group they call, simply, “commies.” 

But this isn’t the white supremacist “alt-right” of the U.S. — it’s a loose group of mostly digitally savvy, ultra-right-wing South Korean men. They congregate in an anonymous, 4chan-esque web forum where they can rant without social repercussions. And like in the U.S., their influence has grown rapidly in just a few short years. 

Welcome to the site Ilbe Storehouse, better known as just Ilbe, the hub for South Korea’s new far-right movement. It has risen to prominence in the backdrop of South Korea’s turbulent recent history — deep political divides, a youth unemployment crisis and backlash against liberal social values. 

Sound familiar?

It seems as though the New Fascist International has become even more "international" than even yer old pal Jerky had assumed. Keep your eyes on this one, folks, especially if you're from that part of the world.

***

You know that Black guy who shows up at Donald Trump rallies wearing t-shirts with block printing of obscure messages and website urls, holding up signs that say "BLACKS FOR TRUMP!", and who occasionally merits a shout-out from Boss Tweet himself, who once pointed the guy out and shouted "Look at my African American over there!" Well, that guy is Michael Symonette, and it turns out his personal life story is... bizarre, to say the least. In recent years, he's apparently even gotten too weird for the cult he used to belong to, and those guys promote murdering White people and think Oprah Winfrey is the Devil! But don't take my word (or the word of various news media) for it... check out Symonette's own, incredibly awesome website, where he identifies the real racists in the world today: the Cherokees!

But hey, it's not like Symonette is the first unconventional figure to be pulled towards the center of American power by the Trump administration. Check out this informative dossier assembled by the good people at Right Wing Watch, which lists some of the most dangerously unhinged Far Right lunatics who are either currently basking in the radioactive afterglow of their close association with Trump. Some of the names here will be familiar to you (Alex Jones), and some should be (Michael "Savage" Wiener), but a few will likely be new to you, as they were to me. 

Now, as you peruse this list, imagine what the reaction would be if Hillary Clinton had openly associated with individuals even half so vile, dangerous, or profoundly anti-American as the people on this list. Then come back and try to look me in the eye and tell me with a straight face that the mainstream media was "against Trump", much less "pro-Hillary".

And finally, speaking of evil, creepy fuckers, I will leave you with this thought: For seven months, Trump's Nazi-whisperer strategist/adviser Steve Bannon had Top Secret clearance, and access to America's most sensitive intelligence information. After being quit-fired, it appears that he's looking to go to work for billionaire Trump supporter Robert Mercer, who also happens to own a data mining firm with a dedicated focus on swinging elections, ostensibly to the highest bidder, but seeing as this is the New Fascist International we're talking about (in particular the Silicon Valley tentacle of that particular monstrosity), that isn't necessarily the case.

Anyway... sleep well.

THE FAR RIGHT WAR ON FACTS

If your social media presence is in any way political, you've probably noticed one or more of your "conservative" friends linking to stories trying to push the notion that Snopes.com is nothing more than a hopelessly biased source of left-wing propaganda, and that anyone using their work to debunk lies or correct errors can therefore by justly ignored.

It's bullshit of course. Numerous good faith investigations conducted by a variety of groups using a wide range of metrics have found that Snopes.com is, by every measure, the LEAST biased source of information on the Internet.

But that doesn't stop the site's growing list of detractors, who persist in their attacks in the hopes that pure repetition will succeed where anorexic reasoning, non-existent evidence, and easily debunked lies are bound to fail. Which brings up the question of where all this Snopes hate (and there is an awful lot of it lately) is coming from.

The always entertaining smart-asses at RationalWiki describe the situation thusly:

Anyone who insists that their personal myth is fact, whether that be moonhoaxers, 9/11 truthers, or bigfooters, will insist that Snopes is wrong because everyone but themselves is biased against the "truth". FactCheck.org, a nonprofit website dedicated to, umm, checking facts, reported that Snopes was completely unbiased. This of course proves that FactCheck is also part of the conspiracy.

While the above is a pretty good general explanation of what Snopes is facing these days, it ignores the fact that the louder (and far more effective) attacks aren't coming from "moonhoaxers", Flat Earthers, or other assorted loonies; they're coming from the Far Right. And there's a very big, very important difference between these two cohorts. Because the loonies, while wrong, are at least sincere.

The Far Right's attacks, on the other hand, are purely tactical. They have nothing to do with disagreements over facts. Rather, these attacks are part of a strategy to undo the damage that unbiased fact-checkers are constantly causing to their organized (and often expensive) propaganda campaigns.

Right-wing attacks on fact-checkers like Snopes are a kind of gaslighting, or inoculation against information that comes from "outside" ideologically pre-approved sources. It's a form of applied, learned helplessness, a tactic used by cults large and small to keep their brainwashed subjects in line. For right-wing and conservative propagandists, an ideal paradigm would not include "unbiased" fact-checkers, as they so disingenuously claim, but rather no fact-checkers at all.

Let's look at a recent attack on Snopes by the alt right's (formerly) favorite self-loathing homosexual, Milo Yiannopoulos, entitled Snopes Caught Releasing Fake "Fact-Check" in Defense of Democrats.

The story, which originated with a handful of reactionary Twitter Trolls before Tucker Carlson's Daily Caller and Glenn Beck's The Blaze picked up on it, involves claims that Democrats refused to take part in a standing ovation for the widow of the Navy SEAL who died during Trump's bungled Yemen raid earlier this year. However, while the secondary targets of Milo's article were those Democrats, his main target, for all of the reasons listed above, was Snopes, which he says "pushed misleading facts to cover for Democrats."

Milo's article is short, so I urge you all to read it. Then I urge you to spend a little time in the comments section, beneath the article. Really root around down there... acquaint yourself with your enemy's distinctive aroma. It may come in handy some day.

After you've finished doing that, and have subsequently showered off the residual Garmonbozia, go ahead and read the Snopes article that so many Redcap Trumpnik cultists pretended to find so... problematic.  Go ahead and read the whole thing. I'll wait right here.

Finished? Okay, so here are a few questions I'd like you to ask yourself.

Firstly, do you think Milo's description of what the Snopes entry in question was trying to achieve--including his depiction of the claims made in the articles that the Snopes team was specifically addressing--was fair and accurate?

Second, who do you think comes off better in this face-off? Far Right propagandists Milo, Beck, Carlson and their assorted hangers on, who were trying to push an obvious lie and got caught doing so? Or the team at Snopes, who used perfectly transparent methods to catch said lie, then take it apart and expose it, and those who were pushing it, for all the world to see?

Finally, do you now feel that you are beginning to better understand why the rogue Deep State faction that I call the New Fascist International* is trying to delegitimize Snopes and other such truth-telling entities?

Consider, as a whole, Trump's three recent rallies: the Youngstown 2020 campaign rally where he accused previous administrations of being in cahoots with MS13, his disturbing appearance at the Boy Scouts of America Jamboree, which he treated like a Trump Youth rally, and today's speech in front of an audience of Long Island law enforcement personnel, during which he encouraged police brutality.

To me, these precedent-shattering displays indicate that Trump is reacting to his legislative failures by doubling down on the only area where he's achieved any measurable success: the radicalization of vast segments of the population using a level of racist, divide-and-conquer demagoguery that we haven't experienced in most Americans' lifetimes.

And now we've got to contend with semi-official state propagandists enthusiastically engaging in North Korea style tone policing, monitoring and measuring people's reactions with a fucking stopwatch in order to shame them if they show insufficient levels of enthusiasm during Dear Leader's speeches? No. Fuck that noise.

Folks, we're not in Kansas anymore. And this isn't Oz, either. We're standing at the Gates of Hell, and The Donald is using one of those tiny, vulgarian fingers of his to repeatedly ring the bell. It only remains to be seen if he'll still be around by the time those Gates swing wide open.

*keep watching this space.

TRUMP CABINET SING HIS PRAISES ON TV

I saw a lot of people poking fun at Trump's weird televised cabinet meeting on Monday, in which his underlings all tripped over each other for a chance to lick the bossman's butthole clean. Even a senior US Senator got in on the act.

Then I went and watched it for myself. And you know what? 

It's not funny. 

Not one bit. 

It's fucking terrifying.

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?"

DDD EXECUTIVE SUMMARY DEC/26/2016

Tower of Faces, by yer old pal Jerky, 2015

THE MAIN EVENTS

• At the top of the world, Arctic temperatures soar to 30C above seasonal norms.
• Meanwhile, at the bottom of the world, a crater initially believed to be caused by a meteor has been found to be the result of significant and unexpected melting.
• After years of being kept artificially low for political purposes having little to do with supply or demand, oil prices have finally begun a corrective rise.  

A DEEPER DIVE

• 2016, the Year That Killed Music, claims another artist before his time as George Michael dies of heart failure at his home, at the ridiculous age of 53 years old. Matters of public restroom etiquette aside, there's simply no denying Careless Whisper's status as slow jam for the ages. Oh, and I haven't even mentioned the fact that prog rock superstar Greg Lake also recently passed away, killed by cancer at 69. The former King Crimson singer joins his ELP organist, Keith Emerson, as yet another victim of the Curse of 2016. Here's hoping ELP's last surviving member, drummer Carl Palmer, has somewhere safe and quiet to hide out in until the end of next week.
• Conservatives have always hated Snopes.com, but with the right-wing War Against Truth having recently gone into overdrive, the bullshit debunking site is now Public Enemy Number One, and efforts at taking it down have begun in earnest. But with every serious study ever conducted proving that Snopes is among the least biased sources available, what are all those poor conservative propagandists to do? Well, for starters, how about getting the Daily Mail to run an article using the messy divorce of site's founders to try to cast a shadow over Snopes' debunking efforts? Then how about getting egg-sucking shit-for-brains fascist lapdog Matt Drudge to link to that story on his website, so every knuckle-dragging, mouth-breathing, minority-despising anti-SJW Trumpnik on God's Green Earth "knows" that "you can't trust Snopes"? Finally, how about getting a semi-reputable outlet like Forbes to do a follow-up report? This will let "respectable conservatives" know that, the next time anyone tries to counter their lies by bringing up Snopes, it is hereby okay to simply furrow your brow, squint sadly, and let out a rueful Mike Pence chuckle at how misguided they are!
• Over at the Washington Post, Catherine Rampell asks: "Why did all those Economically Anxious™ Trump voters reject policies that would have helped relieve their economic anxiety? Maybe they believed any Big Government expansions would disproportionately go to the “wrong” kinds of people — that is, people unlike themselves." Yes, friends, the idea that Democrats need to drop “identity politics” and reach out to the (white) working class is bass-ackwards. Democrats did reach out to the (white) working class. But the white working class were the ones who were too busy playing identity politics to notice. And that's a fact.

SUGGESTED READINGS

1. In his Christmas Day editorial for the New York Times, Jeremy W. Peters takes a deep dive into an issue that comes up in numerous links in today's Executive Summary: the "Fake News" kerfuffle. He begins:

The C.I.A., the F.B.I. and the White House may all agree that Russia was behind the hacking that interfered with the election. But that was of no import to the website Breitbart News, which dismissed reports on the intelligence assessment as “left-wing fake news.” 

Rush Limbaugh has diagnosed a more fundamental problem. “The fake news is the everyday news” in the mainstream media, he said on his radio show recently. “They just make it up.” Some supporters of President-elect Donald J. Trump have also taken up the call. As reporters were walking out of a Trump rally this month in Orlando, Fla., a man heckled them with shouts of “Fake news!” 

Until now, that term had been widely understood to refer to fabricated news accounts that are meant to spread virally online. But conservative cable and radio personalities, top Republicans and even Mr. Trump himself, incredulous about suggestions that that fake stories may have helped swing the election, have appropriated the term and turned it against any news they see as hostile to their agenda. 

In defining “fake news” so broadly and seeking to dilute its meaning, they are capitalizing on the declining credibility of all purveyors of information, one product of the country’s increasing political polarization. And conservatives, seeing an opening to undermine the mainstream media, a longtime foe, are more than happy to dig the hole deeper.

The rest of his essay is very much worth reading, and you should also see today's "Quote of the Day" for more on this important topic.  

2. Most of you reading this are probably well aware that we either at the start--or already in the midst--of the sixth mass extinction event in the history of life on our planet. However, most of you reading this probably aren't aware of exactly how devastatingly swift this horrific process is going to be, once it goes into full swing, which could be any day now. This interactive (if somewhat unwieldy) presentation by CNN helps bring some of the issues involved into sharper focus, and has some intriguing features about diagnostic tools and potential solutions that I, personally, had never encountered before. Recommended. I urge you to share this with the young people in your life.

3. I mentioned above that we lost Greg Lake last week, and most of you reading this know that yer old pal Jerky is a massive progressive rock fanatic -- not least of which because of the majesty that is King Crimson -- so I thought I'd share something beautiful with you all, something that goes a way towards explaining my obsession with this particular genre of music. And so I hereby present Greg Lake's vocal tracks for "Epitaph", from King Crimson's debut album, the absolutely essential In The Court of the Crimson King...

QUOTE OF THE DAY

"Over the years, we’ve effectively brainwashed the core of our audience to distrust anything that they disagree with. And now it’s gone too far. Because the gatekeepers have lost all credibility in the minds of consumers, I don’t see how you reverse it."

- Somewhat repentant conservative radio talk show host John Ziegler spills the beans on how the right-wing propaganda Wurlitzer works in this incredibly important article from The Nation, entitled "Fake News is Not the Real Media Threat We're Facing", by scholar David A. Bell. If you follow only one link from today's DDD ExecSum, then let it be this vitally important exploration of what may be the single most pressing danger looming over the American experiment at this fraught and perilous stage in history.

DDD EXTRAS

• The worst natural catastrophe in living memory happens when an earthquake sparks a deadly tsunami leads to the loss of a quarter million lives. Read all about it, and more, in today's Paracultural Calendar, over at the Useless Eater Blog!
• We've got a Kubrick News In Brief update ready for you film fans over at the Kubrick U blog, where we also wish Kirk Douglas a happy 100th birthday, and short documentary explaining what makes The Shining so damn creepy!

THE TAKEAWAY

The Cult of Movement Conservatism is waging a war against reality. The battlefield is your mind, and the objective is your allegiance. The sophistication of their arsenal should not be underestimated. They have even managed to weaponize our skepticism, our cynicism, our doubts. More on this, coming soon to this space.

LINKS AND VIDEO GRAB-BAG, PLUS RE-LAUNCHING PARACULTURAL CALENDAR!

Ever wondered what it is, exactly, that Jehovah's Witnesses believe? Check out this extract from the 1986 "documentary" cartoon Witnesses of Jehovah, produced by the "good Christian film-makers" working at Jeremiah Films.

And here's the same company's animated, early 1980's take on Mormonism, which makes the sci-fi scenarios of Scientology seem dignified by comparison! Oh, how yer old pal Jerky loves watching all these Xian dolts go back and forth, tearing each others' metaphorical throats out in these goofy theological grudge matches!

***

Hey there! Hope you enjoyed the above cartoons. I just want to let you know that I have begun posting daily Paracultural Calendar updates over at my other space, the Useless Eater Blog. Actually, I have RE-begun doing so, as I started up the same thing last year, but only kept it up for about two months before giving up. I promise to go the distance this time. After all, there are only 365 days in any given year, and I already have two months done! Therefore, barring anything crazy happening in the intervening years, once I've finished, I can keep re-posting forever and ever and ever! And nobody will ever be the wiser! Muah-ahahaha! 

Actually, I also promise to start posting more, both here at the Daily Dirt Diaspora blog, and over at the Useless Eater Blog, as well. With a little luck, I'll maybe start making upwards of a dollar or two per day at this blogging game! Seeing as I've accumulated a total of just under 30 dollars in ad revenue so far from almost three years of blogging - despite some of my posts getting thousands of hits - a buck a day almost seems like a crazy pipe dream. 

Anyhoo, I'm not complaining. I've begun putting together a collection of my best writing from the Daily Dirt days (1998 to 2006) and I'll be self-publishing that in the very near future, so if you guys want to help me out, you can always buy a few copies and give them to various luminaries, opinion makers, church leaders and coked-up Hollywood celebrities to help get my name and work known out there in the wider world. Obviously, I'll be using this space to push that as yet un-named book project as soon as it's ready to roll. 

Cheers!

yer old pal Jerky