Great Moments in Media Muppetry: A Whole Jamil of Beans

 

Editor's note: so as I mentioned the other day, I'm bringing "back" a blogging-style variation on a popular feature I used to write over on ninaillingworth.com called The Wall of Shame. The twist is that rather than take-down pieces and tweet collections I'm randomly preserving evidence of media muppet headassery, one online clusterf*ck at a time. Is that petty as f*ck? You betcha, Sparky.

Typically these will just be quick blog posts with screenshots but let's just say today's subject inspired me to get a little involved and ended in this short, heavily sourced essay. I'm not saying you *have* to click on the links in this article to enjoy this piece, but today's serving of beef will certainly be more delicious if you do. 

Let's get down to business, shall we? 

A Whole Jamil of Beans

With the realization that Downmarket Mussolini's half-assed "chicken coup" has finally ground to an unofficial halt, the online discourse is turning towards discussions about Joe Biden's cabinet nominees or potential nominees and it's going just about as well as you'd expect - it's a travshamockery. 

While articulating the full contours of that debate would be beyond the scope of this piece, the basic gist of the controversy is that after relying on the so-called progressive wing of the Democratic Party to carry his decaying mummy carcass over the line against Donald Trump in the 2020 election, Joe Biden is currently shutting out qualified progressive candidates to stack his cabinet with corpse merchant lobbyists, investment bankers, and free market fundamentalists; a series of decisions that are highly unlikely to be popular with voters in general. Naturally, while progressives and the larger American left are by no means surprised at this development, they're certainly not pleased with Biden's completely predictable betrayal and many influential voices are speaking out against Palooka Joe's new pack of minions.

In response, someone has clearly given the Neoliberal Discourse Defense TeamTM marching orders to defend Biden's picks at all costs; with results that run the full gamut between farcical and Orwellian. Of course, all of that might sound like a conspiracy theory, but thanks to Clinton campaign emails published by Wikileaks and David Brock's big fat mouth, we already have a pretty good idea that this sort of thing goes on all the time. Now obviously I don't have the time to fish out dumb tweets from every blue-checkmarked lackey working in the Dem-Booster Bullsh*t Factory, but even just a cursory examination of headlines in the mainstream and faux-progressive media is fairly instructional here:

Joe Biden’s Cabinet Picks Send a Clear Message: The Adults Are Back in Charge
Here Come the Adults: Biden’s Cabinet is shaping up to be everything that Trump’s was not
Biden’s Cabinet is ‘delightfully boring.’ Can reality-TV-addled America deal with it?
Biden's dull-by-design plan
Kelly Evans: Boring Is (Hopefully) Beautiful
Analysis: Biden prioritizes experience with Cabinet picks
'A cabinet that looks like America': Harris hails Biden's diverse picks
Joe Biden nominates first woman to lead intelligence and first Latino to head homeland security
Republicans Are Really Trying to Argue That Biden's Cabinet Picks Are Corrupt
Biden keeps the peace with first Cabinet picks
Biden Cabinet picks largely unify Democrats — so far
Progressives Can’t Find Anyone in Biden's Cabinet to Be Mad About—Yet

Progressives Cheer Joe Biden's First Round of Cabinet Picks: 'A Great First Step'

Whew, that is certainly quite a lot of bullsh*t; I'm particularly impressed at the bold declarations that progressives have no issues with Biden's cabinet in light of the numerous linked examples I featured above, showing prominent progressives being actively pissed off by those picks. This is all very interesting and you could reasonably infer quite a lot about how power networks manipulate political propaganda in the American discourse just from clicking most of the links above; but ultimately the Biden Cabinet fight between neoliberals and progressives is only the backdrop in our story - the tableau on which our tale of flak goblin dipsh*tery plays out if you will.

That's because, as it turns out there is one potential Biden cabinet nominee too odious for even some portions of the braying Biden booster bunch - bawh gawd, is that Rahm Emanuel's music?!

Yes my friends, the conniving sh*t-weasel, clown prince mandarin of the neoliberal project, Rahm Emanuel himself is reported up for some sort of position in Biden's Cabinet; presumably as a reward for eating enough kittens to secure Palooka's Joes backroom support within the Party - although at this point it's fair to say, the quest to reanimate his zombie career is not going entirely swimmingly. 

And as you can see from the screenshot above, this time it isn't just progressives up in arms; Rolling Stone senior writer Jamil Smith was among the many mainstream liberals outraged by the mere idea that Rahm might be returning to national office. And quite frankly, Smith is right; Emanuel is a scumbag lying monster who helped cover up the execution-style murder of a 17 year old African American teen named Laquan McDonald by the notoriously racist and abusive CPD aka, the Chicago Police Department. While that certainly isn't the only part of Rahms resume that should automatically disqualify him from office, it's arguably the most repugnant note in a long career full of such; and yes, as Jamil notes, including Emanuel in the cabinet would be profoundly insulting for African American voters who overwhelmingly turned out for Palooka Joe in the 2020 presidential election.  

So, what's the problem? Well, as I get older, my memory isn't always what it used to be, but for some reason I recall Jamal singing a different tune the last time a portion of the base got shafted by the elite liberal establishment - sometime back in March, or so; right after the centrist power brokers and an immensely popular former President knifed Bernie Sanders, his 2020 primary campaign, and the democratic socialist movement? 

Whoops - I betcha didn't count on becoming a walking "sowing/reaping" meme when you typed that one up huh? Smooth move ya f*cking brain genius; would you like a side order of boot to lick with that schadenfreude Jamil? But hey don't blame yourself my good man. I mean who could possibly have predicted that spuriously accusing the only truly anti-racist candidate in the 2020 Democratic Primary of taking Black voters for granted, as opposed to the guy who romanticized segregationists, helped write the racist 1994 Crime Bill and still believes cracker bullsh*t about the deficiencies of African American parenting, would at some point backfire? What kind of staggering powers of deduction would it have taken to realize that a former anti-bussing advocate who is known for peddling stories about a razor-wielding gangsta named Corn Pop and repeatedly lying about his own participation in the Civil Rights movement, might cynically discard Black voters immediately after getting elected? However could anyone in political media at all have conceivably foreseen this kind of f*ckery in advance? I mean you'd probably have to be like a senior writer who throughout his career has "explored the intersection of politics and identity" or something to figure all that sh*t out - oh, wait.

Now look, I'm not about to go off on some kind of reactionary skred about the evils of "identity politics" here, but this tweet is a prime example of high-profile Democrats and their media minions weaponizing issues of race, identity and marginalization to punch left, delegitimize anti-establishment political leaders and attack voters whose only crime is believing life would be better if there were no billionaires and we all shared our resources a little more. Furthermore, this type of divisive f*ckery is nothing new for Smith, who has clearly spent the past several years actively weaponizing issues of identity against the so-called progressive wing of the Democratic Party. and in particular, Bernie Sanders. Please keep in mind that we're talking about a guy who went from demanding Joe Biden drop out after the third debate because he's a hopelessly out of touch cracker, (while Smith himself was rather clearly in the tank for Kamala Harris, might I add) to essentially describing Palooka Joe's low-key racist declaration that "if you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black” as a teachable moment; for a then 77 year old career politician, who also happens to be a U.S. Senator, and former Vice President. I don't want to call Jamil a double-talking, puppet assclown here, but let's just say the last time I saw principles that flexible, the situation involved a shady subprime mortgage.   

Or f*ck it, maybe that's just too kind and I really do want to call Smith a goddamn minion. After all, this asinine little sh*t-puppet knew full damn well when he typed that tweet that Sanders wasn't calling African American voters in South Carolina the "corporate establishment." As he made very clear at the time, Bernie was obviously talking about a months, if not years, long corporate media "fear and smear" campaign, publicly exposed clandestine "Stop Bernie" meetings among Democratic Party luminaries and yes, the Barack Obama-lead centrist "Voltron" strategy that saw almost (thanks Liz!) every other mainstream candidate drop out and endorse Biden with Sanders on the cusp of otherwise winning the nomination contest. This is simply not an honest mistake on Jamil's part because you'd have to have been living under a rock to accidentally take Sanders out of context in this extremely precise and dishonest way - clearly as a professional journalist covering the Democratic Party nomination contest for Rolling Stone, the author knew full well what Bernie was talking about; it is after all, his job. In other words, Smith's criticism was disingenuous media muppetry at its finest; which might go a long way towards explaining why Jamil is now a senior writer at Rolling Stone instead of roundtable chair-meat at MTV News; after all, we already have documented evidence that he's a real team player. 

So, will a vampire scumbag like Rahm Emanuel end up in Biden's government in the final reckoning? I have no idea! But one thing I can tell you is that Jamil's (rightfully) angry tweets won't factor into the decision at all; because even a decaying rapist mummy like Biden knows that the grumblings of an in-pocket, lacky propagandist, just don't amount to a whole Jamil of beans.

Welcome to Great Moments in Media Muppetry, agent Smith - you've certainly earned the honor.

• nina illingworth

 

Independent writer, critic and analyst with a left focus. Please help me fight corporate censorship by sharing my articles with your friends online!

You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog

Updates available on Twitter, Instagram, Mastodon and Facebook. Podcast at “No Fugazi” on Soundcloud.

Inquiries and requests to speak to the manager @ASNinaWrites

Chat with fellow readers online at Anarcho Nina Writes on Discord!

“It’s ok Willie; swing heil, swing heil…”

Great Moments in Media Muppetry: Rupar Loses the Plot

 

Author's note: back in the early portions of 2016 (when America was still feeling its way through covert fascism, and hadn't quite gotten around to embracing overt fascism yet), I used to publish the occasional social media takedown piece or muppet evisceration, including a special Wall of Shame for the notably odious propagandists working in mainstream corporate media. 

While these posts were (mostly) fun to write, the truth is that they involved a lot of busy work and ultimately, I would go on to find better uses of my time. Despite this realization however, it has for years continued to gnaw on me that these ridiculous minions and stenographers can so easily get away with saying literally the most obtuse, crass bullsh*t online and due to the ideological slant of mainstream corporate media (Fox and Sinclair excepted for reasons of "open fascism") nobody is ever going to even remember their asinine gaffes, let alone call them out on it. And that sucks.

Unfortunately, I simply don't have the kind of time or energy for tracking the full careers of neoliberal media lackeys and their foibles that I used to - but I'm always searching for short, blog-style posts and this smells like an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone. So what I'm going to do is start (sporadically) blogging about the dumb sh*t (mostly, but not exclusively) liberal propagandists say online, one disingenuous sh*t-puppet moment at a time. I'll include a screenshot, a bit of background on the writer and if necessary contextualize why what they just typed for all the world to see is absurd nonsense and f*ckery. 

Naturally these posts will be no means be intended to be all encompassing but if I can in some small way contribute to warning the public about blue-checkmark assclowns on their Twitter feeds before they develop an emotional investment in faux-progressive, centrist politics - I feel like the (minimal) effort involved will be worth it.

Rupar Loses the Plot

So, I thought we'd start off this series by splashing around in the shallow end of Twitter for a hot minute and take a look at the social media feed of Aaron Rupar, who I've been assured is something called a "viral video guru" over at Vox (a "liberal" blogging-style company that ultimately traces much of its funding back to Comcast.) Despite being an obvious sh*tlib muppet, Aaron is often retweeted on nominally left-wing Twitter feeds and has staked out a claim as a rising star in the online liberal hack industry; primarily by engaging in the undoubtedly Herculean task of.. um, watching Fox News all day and reposting clips of dumb crap Trump or fascist network minions say into a live camera. 

Don't get me wrong, Rupar isn't a total maggot; if nothing else his contributions to mocking cracker fascist loudspeakers like Tucker Carlson make him slightly more useful than flaming dog poop in a bag, but only slightly. With the low-hanging fruit of a fascist like Trump slowly fading into the background however, it seems clear that Rupar's services are now being directed towards defending the mainstream Democratic Party establishment at all costs - including this tweet attacking (more) lefty writer David Dayen to defend one of Biden's cabinet nominees:

In terms of context here, there's really not a whole lot to add; nothing Dayen said, or Prospect published about Antony Blinken was untrue, or out of line - Blinken is in fact a corpse merchant scum-sucking lobbyist and an objectively terrible choice for Secretary of State, particularly if you're not a big fan of Israeli apartheid and the slow genocide of Palestinians. Furthermore, as many sh*tposters on Twitter were quick to point out, the vast majority of people in American society manage to make their way in private sector life without trading on their high-level government contacts in the world of arms sales and police state surveillance. While this is obviously slightly less crass, Aaron's tweet certainly calls to mind the vigorous defense of former President Obama's right to profit off protecting criminals on Wall Street with post-presidency speaking appearances because "rich white guys do it all the time" or something; although Rupar unquestionably lacks the artistry of a lackey propagandist like Trevor Noah for example. 

In the end, and for all of its staggering headassery - the tweet itself is simply rather droll; in addition to being fundamentally disingenuous. If anything, the most interesting thing about Rupar's keyboard fart here is that there's a non-zero percent chance he was trying and utterly failing to obliquely reference either the "we live in a society" meme, or a popular anti-capitalist cartoon by Matt Bors. Or maybe not, maybe Rupar is just a boot-licking assclown who legitimately thought he'd get away with this half assed dunk; based on the overall quality of his Twitter feed, it's impossible to rule out either conclusion. 

One thing we can say for certain however is that Aaron Rupar and his weak-assed attempt at throwing shade on a better journalist to protect imperial power, is now a "great moment in media muppetry" for all time - or until they make me delete this blog ahead of my show trial.

- nina illingworth

Independent writer, critic and analyst with a left focus. Please help me fight corporate censorship by sharing my articles with your friends online!

You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog

Updates available on Twitter, Mastodon and Facebook. Podcast at “No Fugazi” on Soundcloud.

Inquiries and requests to speak to the manager @ASNinaWrites

Chat with fellow readers online at Anarcho Nina Writes on Discord!

“It’s ok Willie; swing heil, swing heil…”

No Magic Man

 

Editor's note: to put it bluntly, I've spent the past ten or so days watching Downmarket Mussolini flail around in his own dogsh*t while punting (what must at this point be recognized as) the singularly most poorly-planned and executed fascist coup in the history of modern mankind. As my podcast partner noted, the shades of Bolivia and their reactionary right's similarly failed takeover on election night, were impossible to overlook. 

Unfortunately the slow-motion disintegration of Trump's ambitions and the confusion this has caused in the larger American fascist movement had locked me into kind of a holding pattern; I've got a lot of ground to analyze and put into context, but it really would be much easier for me to do so if I was sure Trump wasn't about to touch off a wave of stochastic terrorism all across the U.S. at any given moment. Furthermore there is quite frankly so much bullsh*t going on in our media and politics, simultaneously, that I'm having more than a little trouble trying to plan out all the things I want to discuss in some sort of coherent order; for those of you waiting with bated breath for the fifth and final part of the No Fugazi Podcast examination of modern fascism, it finally dropped this week. In terms of ordering my thoughts into some sort of coherent narrative for my post-election writing however, I've basically been forced to give up - if I haven't figured it out after seven days of surreal political chaos in America, I'm probably not going to figure it out after seven more, and the beast is always hungry for more content. 

As such, I'm just going to bang out pieces I consider relevant in whatever order they strike me and there might be a brief focus on "micro-analysis" snippets like the one I'm going to publish below. At some point of course I'll get a handle on a larger narrative and we can go back to the normal type of writing I do, but right now my choices feel like "accept the flow of information and ideas as they come to me" or "do nothing, paralyzed by the possibilities of the very near future" - and obviously, the latter choice isn't much of a choice at all.

No Magic Man

The following snippet of analysis is taken from the Twitter account of Luke O'Neil, a left-leaning semi-independent analyst who has appeared frequently in some fairly major publications like Esquire, and The Guardian - you can find his substack newsletter, "Welcome to Hellworld" here. 

In case it's not already clear, let me just start by saying that I like Luke well enough and I'm very fond of at least some of his work; in particular he's recently written a couple of articles about American fascism, one significantly pre-election, and one immediately before ballot day, that I think are both very insightful and worth highlighting here as a way of demonstrating why I don't think this guy is another standardized Masshole media chowderhead. Typically when I write one of these pieces focused on stray Twitter analysis, I'm taking the piss out of some corporate media minion who is babbling disingenuous nonsense and hoping the lack of editorial oversight inherent to social media will let their self-serving ravings "shape the discourse." That is not my intention here, but alas I still must pick a bone with Luke's analysis for the purposes of elaborating on a larger discussion our society is currently having in that same "discourse." 

Now, I think a rather large part of what O'Neil is talking about here (in a humorous way) is the longstanding portion of Trump's personal mythology that revolves around his supposed machismo and hyper-masculinity; which is indeed attractive to many fascists in the movement we know today as Trumpism - as astounding as that may seem to folks who (rightfully, in my opinion) don't perceive the Klepto Kaiser an avatar of either quality, except perhaps in the most negative and destructive possible conceptions of those values. 

While I won't waste too much time quibbling with Luke's implied understanding that it's awful hard to build a fascist movement or political coalition without a cult of masculinity, I would like to remind him that virtually every successful fascist leader I'm aware of simply defined themselves as the pinnacle of masculinity as they stood in the moment - including Trump. I mean we're talking about a vain, shrieking manchild who defines success by his "ratings" while openly obsessing about his lighting, his makeup, his awful hair transplant and even the perceived size of his fingers. Frankly, Hitler didn't have to be a strapping six foot two Aryan super soldier to epitomize masculinity for the Nazi movement in Germany, and neither will whichever reactionary muppet the billionaires and ruling-class ideologues behind this fascist wave dredge up to replace Trump as we go forward. Tom Cotton may not appear to "fuck" as Luke so eloquently puts it, but by the time the fascist propagandists who turned Trump of all people into a symbol of American masculinity are through a couple rounds of narrative building, every red-blooded fascist in the country is going to want to get fucked by Tom Cotton's quiet, militant masculinity and that's really all that matters to the capitalist bozos running this nazi clown convention. 

Furthermore, to whittle the masculine imagery baked into Trumpism down to the movement's sense that Trump has a lot of sex, is to in some ways misunderstand why fascism requires the embrace of toxic masculinity in the first place. Hitler never really tried to give the impression he fucked, in fact quite the opposite - his masculinity was portrayed as an austere, divine and almost alienating quality; although the idea that every woman in Germany wanted to have sex with him was still widely circulated by propagandists. What really matters to the organization of a fascist movement historically is clearly that the leader figure merely represent an idea of unrestrained masculine authority - the exact contours of that definition can and do change with every fascist leader, from Mussolini to Modi and so on; all without causing a significant suspension of disbelief in the fascist base. Indeed, one might argue that the fascist definition of manhood is largely synonymous with a fascist's understanding of their own ideology and beliefs; ergo, a fascist leader becomes manly in the eyes of the base simply by espousing fascist ideology, policies and politics - after all, those ideas, policies and political tactics are indeed rooted in patriarchal authority as a matter of course.

Frankly however, what really bothers me most about Luke's analysis here is the way it subtly plays into the idea that there is something magical, or otherwise special about Trump and as such, he himself can be perceived as a cause, rather than effect, of wholly Americanized modern fascism that's sweeping across most of the Pig Empire as we speak - an issue made all the more perplexing because having read Luke's writing about about the larger American political situation, I'm not really sure he actually even agrees with that idea.

As observers of my work who've listened to the recent five part No Fugazi Podcast series on the historical origins of American fascism will undoubtedly be aware, I also reject this framing entirely because quite frankly, I don't think Donald Trump is all that special and I don't think fascist movements have historically demonstrated that their leaders even have to be. As I noted in a recent Facebook Journal: 

 

"The simple truth is that Donald Trump's coup failed because while Trump is definitely a fascist, he's also an incompetent boob whose success as a politician has been driven almost entirely by institutional support from a larger, preexisting fascist movement inside American politics. Left to his own devices, Trump is the guy who kicked off his 2016 campaign in front of an escalator surrounded by random hired supporters carrying generic homemade signs, he's the guy who was well on his way to losing to Hillary Clinton until the Mercer family sent him Steve Bannon and a small army of digital technicians to run his online campaign and yes, he's the kind of idiot who drops a bunch of all caps tweets and then goes golfing while expecting Rudy Giuliani to inspire a chud uprising on his behalf. 

I mean we are after all talking about a man who couldn't successfully repeal the Affordable Care Act, despite having a Republican super-majority – Trump was never some kind of tactical genius, and without the support of fascist billionaires, a fascist political party and a wholly in-pocket fascist conservative media onslaught, he's just a fat fascist baby flailing around in his own pigsh*t. Trump's coup failed because after handing over a 20% corporate tax cut and a 6-3 fascist high Supreme Court, guys like Peter Thiel, Rupert Murdoch and yes, Mitch McConnell, didn't need Trump anymore – or at least didn't need him enough to justify being associated with an actual fascist coup in America. 

In other words, Trump became a liability to the very fascist movement he rode to power in 2016 and the guys running it decided to cut him loose while betting they could retain control over his 72 million some odd voters; and on the whole, I strongly suspect they're correct in that position – the swine emperor's “dark charisma” has always been massively overstated and the truth is, these folks just really like fascism, white nationalism and the idea of purging their political enemies by a variety of means."  

Look, I'll concede that Trump's status as a second tier celebrity, his deep association with the racist anti-Obama "Birther" conspiracy movement and the fact that he's the kind of crass billionaire windbag that can still plausibly appear in professional wrestling shows, were all crucial factors in helping Trump get his foot through the door of the 2016 GOP primary contest. By that same measure however, none of the principles O'Neil listed, nor a guy like Tucker Carlson will have any problem whatsoever generating enough in-party name recognition to get on the ballot and allow the fascist GOP machine and a corporate media apparatus that literally cannot help itself, to carry their words and ideas to the larger base. Nor frankly, is there a whole lot of evidence right now that the Republican Party and its media machinery actually can turn away from fascist politics at this point, even if they wanted to. 

The plain truth of it is that Trump didn't exploit a choose-your-own-adventure media environment to create a purely astroturfed far-right "independent" media megaphone spitting out fascist ideology every waking hour of the day, that was reactionary vampire billionaires like Bob Mercer. Nor did Trump spend every election since Nixon lost to Kennedy aggressively courting white voters with nativist, white supremacist and explicitly fascist ideas and ideology, that was the larger Republican Party and ghouls like Pat Buchanan. With or without Trump, the Proud Boys aren't going anywhere, the militias aren't going anywhere and the Alex Jones-fueled larger reactionary conspiracy movement isn't going anywhere. At the end of the day, Donald Trump, who is again a man who doesn't know how to close an umbrella, was just an actor, playing Führer for this larger network of rich American fascists and reactionaries. They can and will get a new one; and in the meantime, they'll keep riling up the seventy-five or so million folks who knowingly pulled the lever for Downmarket Mussolini into something that looks a lot like a more violent, more reactionary and more dangerous version of the Tea Party.

The show after all must go on even if it kills us all, and it's not like the reasons rich dudes are pushing fascist ideology in the face of climate catastrophe, have changed, or will change - it's capitalism, or a planet that supports eight billion people and the capitalists aren't interested in letting us vote on which path our species is going to take.    

- nina illingworth

Independent writer, critic and analyst with a left focus. Please help me fight corporate censorship by sharing my articles with your friends online!

You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog

Updates available on Twitter, Mastodon and Facebook. Podcast at “No Fugazi” on Soundcloud.

Inquiries and requests to speak to the manager @ASNinaWrites

Chat with fellow readers online at Anarcho Nina Writes on Discord!

“It’s ok Willie; swing heil, swing heil…”