"In view of many extremely online, spiritually unwell conservatives, [Ryan] Carson’s brutal death was a form of karmic justice."

"You see, the young man had advocated for safe injection sites after losing friends to opioid overdoses. And he dedicated his adult life to working on various left-wing causes, above all the promotion of recycling and environmentally friendly approaches to dealing with solid waste. And his girlfriend had advocated for police abolition. Therefore, Carson had reaped what he’d sowed. The far-right provocateur Mike Cernovich disseminated a surveillance video of Carson’s death, beneath the caption, 'Hey bro just like chill out bro I’m on your side bro go attack the magats bro bro bro noooooo.' Other conservatives turned photos of Carson’s dead body into memes about the perils of wokeness.... [S]adistically mocking a victim of violent crime whose politics they did not like... is... morally grotesque.... Gloating over the violent deaths of people you disagree with is... vile and ineffective.... You will not persuade anyone...."

 
Writes Eric Levitz, in "Don’t Celebrate When People You Disagree With Get Murdered" (New York Magazine).

Is Peter Hotez winning the I-won't-debate debate?

Encountering his tweet this morning, I don't think so:

Joe Rogan wants a scientist to “debate” a vaccine denier. Turning him down was the right thing to do. ⁦@voxdotcom⁩ https://t.co/ouuuFuk1f4

— Prof Peter Hotez MD PhD (@PeterHotez) June 22, 2023

1. Hotez doesn't know how to reach us emotionally. The photograph overwhelms the text, and it's a dramatic, dignified presentation of Joe Rogan. The text is then read and absorbed under the influence of the photograph of the strong, serious man who is only asking for debate.

2. The text relies heavily on putting the word "debate" in scare quotes. It seems as though Hotez is making the scared-child argument that he doesn't have to debate — indeed, shouldn't debate — because what Rogan is calling a debate wouldn't really be a debate. My reaction is: Engage with Rogan over the terms of the debate so that it can be a real debate.

3. You won't even name your antagonist. He's just "a vaccine denier." First, say his name: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. He's a real person, and many of us feel drawn to him. Second, it's not accurate to call him a "vaccine denier." What does that even mean? He doesn't deny that vaccines exist and have an effect. He's concerned about side effects, inadequate testing, and corruption in the relationship between government and the pharmaceutical industry. Are you not concerned about these things? If not, I can call you a "denier." See how glib and infuriating that is?

I'm seeing a lot of adulation of Kayleigh McEnany coming from the right...

... but I watched this one in real time yesterday...



... and I thought it was clumsy and nonresponsive. I felt a little embarrassed for her. Later, looking at social media, I saw her extolled by people who, I think, are expressing their real enthusiasm.

For example, at Instapundit, there's Ed Driscoll, offering that clip and saying: "REPORTER ASKS KAYLEIGH MCENANY TO EXPLAIN OBAMAGATE AND THE CRIMES ALLEGEDLY COMMITTED, IMMEDIATELY REGRETS IT." No, I don't think that reporter regretted it, immediately or later. I think he believed he put her on the spot and followed up accurately and intensely and brought out her inability to state clearly and concisely what the "Obamagate" crimes are supposed to be.

And on Twitter, Mike Cernovich presented the same clip and remarked — again, with the all caps — "WHO IS THIS QUEEN????" To which, Scott Adams chimed in, "It’s a slaughter."

Do they know they're doing propaganda or are they simply enthralled? Or am I wrong to stand apart and aloof and resist what is a stunningly articulate spokeswoman with a true and a powerful message to deliver?

ADDED: McEnany was absolutely on notice that she needed to have a better answer than Trump, who said, when asked basically the same question: "You know what the crime is, the crime is very obvious to everybody, all you have to do is read the newspapers, except yours."

"Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr, R-N.C., sold as much as $1.7 million in stocks just before the market dropped in February amid fears about the coronavirus epidemic."

"Senate records show that Burr and his wife sold between roughly $600,000 and $1.7 million in more than 30 separate transactions in late January and mid-February, just before the market began to fall and as government health officials began to issue stark warnings about the effects of the virus. Several of the stocks were in companies that own hotels.... Most of them came on Feb. 13, just before Burr made a speech in North Carolina in which he predicted severe consequences from the virus, including closed schools and cutbacks in company travel.... Burr told the small North Carolina audience that the virus was 'much more aggressive in its transmission than anything that we have seen in recent history' and 'probably more akin to the 1918 pandemic.' Burr’s remarks were much more dire than remarks he had made publicly, and came as President Donald Trump was still downplaying the severity of the virus. There is no indication that Burr had any inside information as he sold the stocks and issued the private warnings. The intelligence panel did not have any briefings on the pandemic the week when most of the stocks were sold...."

The NYT reports. (Also: "Georgia Sen. Kelly Loeffler, a new senator who is up for re-election this year, sold off hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of stock in late January, as senators began to get briefings on the virus, also according to Senate records.")

That's the NYT. I'm seeing a much harsher attack on Burr from the right:

Senator Richard Burr must be arrested.

For real.

F-ck this guy.

Throw his ass in prison! pic.twitter.com/CrZIJopead

— Cernovich (@Cernovich) March 20, 2020

ADDED: Here's the Wikipedia artcile on Richard Burr. I just want to quote the "Personal life" section in its entirety:

Burr's car, a 1973 Volkswagen Thing, is "something of a local celebrity" on Capitol Hill. Burr has a known aversion to reporters, once even climbing out of his office window while carrying his dry cleaning to avoid them. Burr is a member of the United Methodist Church.

CC emw.

The broken windshield is an interesting touch.

Strangely, watching the video before the text, I saw it as...

This is more effective than any ad any pro-life group could run.

I was pro-choice for decades.

Then the “shout your abortion” movement happened, and I realized this was a form of human sacrifice that would make the Aztecs envious. https://t.co/jdUWTg6iFw

— Mike Cernovich (@Cernovich) February 8, 2020

... watch the video before seeing what I thought...

... I saw it as anti-abortion.

UPDATE: The short TikTok video that was embedded in this tweet no longer displays. Did the TikTok or the person who put up the video take it down? Why? I suspect that the person who made the video didn't expect to get so much attention and wasn't comfortable with it. I didn't think it was a person actually getting an abortion and smiling in the end. I thought it was a comedy sketch, making fun of parents revealing the gender of the unborn. In the video, the woman acts like she's going to reveal the baby's sex — I'm saying "sex" because how is it "gender"? — and the text says something like "It's a" and a paper is opened up to say "borted" — It's a/borted. I don't know if the person who made the video intended for it to be in the #ShoutYourAbortion genre. The reason I thought it felt anti-abortion — rather than #ShoutYourAbortion (that is, pro-abortion) — is that laughing at abortion  feels cruel. The pro-abortion position should focus on the woman and her autonomy, not on the unborn whose life is lost.

UPDATE 2: I see now that the person who made the video has set her TikTok account to private.

It makes absolutely no sense?

I've seen a lot in my life - stuff I hope others don't.

Rarely am I in AWE.....

and BEWILDERED

This tweet.....

I can't stop looking at it.

It makes absolutely no sense to make something like this public. https://t.co/K7HdJDHITP

— Mike Cernovich (@Cernovich) January 8, 2020

Trump with the Evangelicals.

Yesterday, in Miami:



ADDED: Here's a Guardian article about Trump's rally, "'He was sent to us': at church rally, evangelicals worship God and Trump":

“My administration will never stop fighting for Americans of faith,” Trump said at the conclusion of an often freewheeling 75-minute speech. “We will restore the faith as the true foundation of American life.”...

Friday’s rally, hastily organized in the wake of a stinging Christianity Today editorial last month, recognized Trump’s need to retain the loyalty of the evangelical voting bloc that propelled him to victory in 2016. Four years ago, he won 80% backing from white evangelical voters nationwide.

“In 2016 evangelical Christians went out and helped us in numbers never seen before. We’re going to blow those numbers away in 2020,” Trump said. “I really believe we have God on our side.”

And I noticed this:

This is called a “laying on of hands,” a practice done by tens of millions of Americans in worship service.

Your bigoted attitude towards mainstream religious practices is what is fueling anti-Semitic violence in New York. https://t.co/7xFnPReZ3P

— Mike Cernovich (@Cernovich) January 4, 2020

Soy.

lol this is the most display of soy in a breach attempt in history https://t.co/5YJgbu7KyB

— Mike Cernovich (@Cernovich) January 1, 2020

Who won?

Who won tonight’s Democratic debate?

— Mike Cernovich (@Cernovich) October 16, 2019

Are almost all journalists on Adderall?

Somewhere in the depths of this lengthy Joe Rogan podcast, Joe asserts that all the journalists are on Adderall. Let me see if I can find it and start you at the right point (which is near then end, after a lot of talk about the use of mind-altering substances). Okay, here:



Rogan says he watched a lot of YouTube videos of Adderall users, "who thought the whole world was against them, that they were super-competent, capable of anything. They had unstoppable confidence. They wouldn't shut the fuck up. But everyone was against them."

Then, Rogan says: "A lot of people are on it.... It's a spooky drug... First of all, journalists. I have a buddy of mine who's a writer who said almost all journalists are on it." One of the other guys says, "You get stuff done." And Rogan muses, "But it changes who you are as a person. It fucks with your head."

I like to know when someone I'm listening to is on drugs. If I don't know, and they are, they are stealing from me. That's how I see it. I'm not talking about people with a genuine mental disorder who take a prescribed drug that's supposed to get them to the medical profession's idea of normal. I respect their privacy. But somebody taking drugs to get a lot of writing done? I want a warning before I spend some of my life's precious time absorbing their addled — Adderalled — verbiage.

Searching my blog archive, I see I wrote about this subject last April, when Mike Cernovich tweeted "Yes adderall is passed around D.C. like candy, and many of your favorite journalists also do meth." Let me reread what I said back then:

I have no idea whether this is true, but I will just say that I would not watch a newsperson or commentator on TV if I knew they were on such drugs.

Ha ha. Exactly what I said today.

And yet this isn't "fake news" problem. (It's just a fake opinion that's a waste-of-time problem.)

This is satire.

But if you didn’t get the NPC reference, would you be able to distinguish this from a blog from, say, Vice? https://t.co/8IWO9UlHcg

— Mike Cernovich (@Cernovich) September 6, 2019

I'd never heard of NPC, so I thought this was a serious opinion and wasted time on it. If it had been interestingly funny, it wouldn't have been a waste of time.

How did the NYT international edition happen to publish an anti-Semitic cartoon?

Someone drew it. - Who?

Someone colored it. - Who?

Someone laid it out. - Who?

I’m sure the media will be all over this, right? https://t.co/S3UECess84

— Mike Cernovich (@Cernovich) April 28, 2019

All I can find in the NYT about this is "NY Times Apologizes for Cartoon With 'Anti-Semitic Tropes'" with the byline The Associated Press:

The New York Times has apologized for an anti-Semitic cartoon that appeared in the newspaper's international edition.

It showed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a dachshund wearing a Star of David collar and leading a blind and skullcap-wearing U.S. President Donald Trump.

The Times says the image "included anti-Semitic tropes." The cartoon appeared Thursday in print.

A tweet from the New York Times Opinion account Saturday said the image "was offensive, and it was an error in judgment to publish it."

The Times says the cartoon was provided by The New York Times News Service and Syndicate, which has since deleted it.

So I guess the direct communication from the NYT is just a tweet, and the AP reported on the tweet, and the NYT carried the AP article. Why doesn't the NYT write its own article? Answer Cernovich's questions. And give a real apology!

The Times may say the image "included anti-Semitic tropes," but presumably somebody at the Times either did not think the image was anti-Semitic or wanted to publish something anti-Semitic. I'd like to see the Times investigate which of those options is true.

If the former, who perceived it not to be anti-Semitic and exactly why? If the latter... the NYT has a dramatically serious problem and needs to undertake a remedy.

By the way, can anyone explain to me why the breed chosen as the Seeing-Eye dog is a dachshund? The dachshund is wearing a Star of David collar (and "is" Netanyahu) so that means the dog is Jewish. But if you were drawing a cartoon and wanted, above all, to convey that this is a Seeing-Eye dog, you would choose a German Shepherd. If you wanted to reject "German," you'd pick a Lab or a Golden Retriever.

The NYT international edition is edited in La Défense, an area just outside of Paris, and maybe the breeds used as guide dogs in France are different from what we use in the U.S. But would a dachshund ever really be a Seeing-Eye dog?

My effort to research this turned up stories about a blind dachshund that had another dog, a pit bull, as its guide. So I think it's fair to say that the dachshund was chosen for some reason other than to convey the idea of a Seeing-Eye dog.

But what reason? Perhaps it's just that it's a small dog. But it's not a generic small dog. It has a distinctive elongated shape, and the illustration exaggerates the long shape. But what does that say about Netanyahu's ability to lead Trump? Is it meant as a phallic symbol? Are we to consider the history of how this breed came about in the first place?

The standard-size dachshund was developed to scent, chase, and flush out badgers and other burrow-dwelling animals, while the miniature dachshund was bred to hunt smaller prey such as rabbits.

Maybe the idea was that Netanyahu the dachshund would lead blind Trump to other animals. If so, the adversaries of Israel are being depicted as animals, which complicates the analysis.

I should add that the cartoon is extremely well-drawn and eye-catching. It's possible that people at the international NYT were just dazzled into a blunder. That would be phenomenally stupid, but stupid is  the least bad explanation.

IN THE COMMENTS: Answering my question why a dachshund, wildswan notes that hot dogs were originally called "dachshund sandwiches," and hot dogs may be "seen as particularly Jewish." (There's the all-beef Kosher hot dog Hebrew National.)

And James K says: "A German Shepherd is thought of as a majestic, powerful dog. The cartoonist wanted to depict the Jew as low and slithering, hence the Dachs[h]und. Nothing more complicated than that."

"Yes adderall is passed around D.C. like candy, and many of your favorite journalists also do meth."

Yes adderall is passed around D.C. like candy, and many of your favorite journalists also do meth. https://t.co/ruZsT2Pbua

— Mike Cernovich (@Cernovich) April 4, 2019

I have no idea whether this is true, but I will just say that I would not watch a newsperson or commentator on TV if I knew they were on such drugs. And I do have an aversion to the TV news and news commentary shows. Perhaps those 2 things fit together. I would read an article even if I knew the person used meth or adderall. You're not staring at a human face. You're not hearing the human voice. You're looking at words, and it's a subtler thing, the way drugs get into the words.

Anyway, I wonder how much of the intensity and anxiety in the TV newspeople can be understood as symptomatic of drug use. When I do watch some news TV (almost always because I'm with someone else), I study and comment upon the faces, some of which have an insane and weird expression. From a summary of symptoms of chronic abuse of Adderall:

Chronic abuse is marked by severe rash, insomnia, irritability and personality changes. The most severe symptom of abuse is psychosis, which is often clinically indistinguishable from schizophrenia, according to the FDA. Toxic symptoms from taking an overdose of Adderall can come at low doses. Initial signs of an overdose include restlessness, tremor, confusion, hallucinations and panic, the FDA says. After this central stimulation, the patient will undergo fatigue, depression, and often cardiovascular and gastrointestinal symptoms....

Irritability, restlessness, hallucinations, panic.... Where do you see that on TV news commentary? Whether these people are jacking themselves up with drugs or not, it's a bad idea to fill your evening staring into these anxious faces and hearing their intense chatter. I was watching one of those shows yesterday — I won't say which one — and they were talking about the possibility that Attorney General Barr misrepresented what is in the Barr report. There was loud, fast talking; darting, over-wide eyes; and hand gestures so big that I paused the show and exclaimed that it looked like a wild late-night party. It's screwy to be sitting, relaxed and passive in your lounge chair, and letting these weird humans have their way with your mind.

I am very glad to see that MSNBC reversed its decision to fire Sam Seder.

 2 days ago, I wrote about the Sam Seder firing, in "At MSNBC, in the time of The Reckoning, there's zero tolerance for sarcasm aimed at the rich and powerful" ("I'd never even heard of Sam Seder, but apparently he had a show on MSNBC and now he's lost it, all because of a joke he made in a.. tweet back in 2009... retaliating against him for that tweet is... willfully stupid").

And I was going to blog about him again this morning, as I was reading something that Vox put up yesterday, "How the alt-right duped MSNBC into firing one of its contributors/An online community weaponized the political commentator Sam Seder’s satirical 2009 tweet."

But now I'm seeing (at The Intercept): "MSNBC REVERSES DECISION TO FIRE CONTRIBUTOR SAM SEDER."

Seder and MSNBC were set to part ways when his contributor contract expired next year, with reports indicating the departure had to do with a 2009 tweet from Seder surfaced by the far-right provocateur Mike Cernovich. After initially caving in to right-wing internet outrage over the tweet, MSNBC reversed its decision to not renew Seder’s contract....

“Sometimes you just get one wrong,” said MSNBC president Phil Griffin in a statement to The Intercept, “and that’s what happened here. We made our initial decision for the right reasons — because we don’t consider rape to be a funny topic to be joked about. But we’ve heard the feedback, and we understand the point Sam was trying to make in that tweet was actually in line with our values, even though the language was not. Sam will be welcome on our air going forward.”

Good. Maybe this is a sign that people are going to use their brains as they proceed through The Reckoning. Maybe a sense of humor and a commitment to treating people fairly will survive.

Here's Seder defending himself (before MSNBC reversed its decision):

After the left took out O'Reilly, it's no surprise to see #FireColbert heat up.

Yesterday, there was a lot of talk — including here, on this blog — about Stephen Colbert's over-the-top offensive joke "In fact, the only thing [Trump's] mouth is good for is being Vladimir Putin’s cock holster."

I considered it unfit for network TV because it's so crudely sexual, but I've seen others denouncing it as homophobic. It didn't strike me that way. I saw it as just the usual disparagement implied toward the person who is getting penetrated in a blow job, the assumption being that this is a sexual act in which one person is serving and subordinated and the other is dominating and getting all the benefit. I think that is more blow-job-o-phobic than homophobic. The person getting disparaged could be another male or could be a female.

But in this particular application of the insult, the giver of the blow job, Trump, is male, so there was an opportunity to portray Colbert's joke as homophobic. The pro-Trump Daily Caller cleverly rested its accusation on a tweet by the non-pro-Trump Glenn Greenwald in "Gay Journalist Accuses Colbert Of Homophobia." Greenwald had tweeted "Homophobia for the right cause, with the right targets, it good homophobia, apparently." Vox — decidedly not pro-Trump — didn't like it either: "Stephen Colbert tried to insult Donald Trump. He made a homophobic comment instead."

This morning, I'm seeing in Newsweek that a #FireColbert movement has sprung up:

The overnight outrage was stoked, in part, by Mike Cernovich, once branded by The New Yorker "the meme mastermind of the alt-right." On Tuesday evening, Cernovich tweeted to his 258,000 followers an exchange Colbert had with an audience member last summer. The exchange took place during a question-and-answer session that was not broadcast as part of The Late Show.

Here's the clip. The question is what question would Colbert like to ask Trump, and Colbert's answer is "What does Vladimir Putin's dick taste like?"



I don't buy the homophobia characterization. If Colbert had wanted to joke about Hillary Clinton's coziness with Putin, he could have used exactly the same jokes.

But I can see why it seems to be great fun to go big with this and try to score a firing. I understand the lust on right to take out somebody on the left. It's a game of revenge.

What I hate about Colbert's jokes is the disparagement of sexuality, the old-fashioned shame, the sexist idea that the person doing the penetrating is humiliating the other. It's at least as sexist as it is homophobic, and Colbert — for all his efforts at seeming jauntily modern — is dragging along the despicable baggage of the past.