All purpose news and politics thread part VI: This Is Not The Time For Posing

[Username taken]

Are you saying that there is a fair way to ridicule the trans community? Understand, I'm not accusing you of anything, just playing devil's advocate.

There isn't.

[numberthirty]

umm but that is not common sense at all - protecting yourself first is.

The only way that would make a single lick of sense is if it was a situation where protecting yourself came at cost of public safety.

Which is dumb to even entertain in a situation where personal safety will play right into public safety.

Politely, you are on about a nonsensical "What If?..." scenario that has right around "Zero..." to do with the actual situation we are faced with.

[worstblogever]

On this date in 2014, 2015, 2016, as well as 2017, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day posted profiles of former Texas Governor and two-time failed presidential candidate Rick Perry, pictured above accidentally cosplaying Heath Ledger in a homophobic campaign ad from his 2012 Presidential campaign. All joking aside, Rick Perry does love him some guns, even going jogging and stopping from his cardio workout to add extra orifices via lead projectiles to coyotes that offend him. He’s equally callous about ending the lives of human beings, apparently, having executed over 250 people, more than any governor in U.S. History, including Todd Willingham, who after his death, was later proved innocent of the crime of which he was convicted. Perry, however, has no regrets. But don’t worry, he does love life. At least if the life in question has yet to be born. In his last term as governor, Rick Perry signed some of the harshest anti-abortion legislation into law (it’s still being decided by higher courts if it’s constitutional or not), causing mass protests at the state capitol. This is a man, while governor, who openly discussed having Texas secede from the union, and also backed anti-government tax scofflaw Cliven Bundy in his fight against the Bureau of Land Management in 2014.

His 2012 campaign for president was supposed to be him riding to the Republicans’ rescue to deny Barack Obama a second term, but it was an unmitigated disaster, and included the revelation that his family’s vacation ranch was named with a racial slur, several campaign stops where he rambled on incoherently and made people speculate he was high on painkillers, and even how he forgot what the three government offices he wanted to shut down in a GOP primary debate, offering a meager, “OOPS” after his brain fart. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Perry claimed the unemployment number given by the Bureau of Labor Statistics every month is “doctored”, talked with Glenn Beck about the Jade Helm 15 Conspiracy Theory, claimed that the shooting at the Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, South Carolina was not a race-motivated hate crime, but an “accident” motivated by drug use, recommended people start carrying firearms in dark movie theatres to shoot back blindly at any potential mass shooters who might attack them there, and compared himself to Jesus at a campaign rally in South Carolina. As a result, Perry’s second presidential campaign only lasted 92 days before he ran out of money.

In the interests of staying relevant, and perhaps softening his image a bit, Rick Perry appeared on ABC’s Dancing With the Stars, where he hoped to learn enough footwork to not embarrass himself at his daughter’s wedding later on in the year. He was eliminated very early on because… well, he was a terrible dancer, but you’re gonna fail miserably if you try to dance to “God Bless Texas” when you’re supposed to be performing a cha-cha. There was, for a time, speculation about Rick Perry being a primary challenger for Ted Cruz in the 2018 mid-term elections, but instead, Rick Perry inexplicably took a job of the Secretary of the Department of Energy in Donald Trump’s “Cabinet of Horrors”. He had no qualifications for the job, and was going to be running a department of our government that he advocated should be eliminated completely (well, after Ron Paul reminded him). Now, we’ve established that Perry is quite the dumbass, but get this… Perry advocated for eliminating the Dept. of Energy. He then took the job running it. Perry then admitted his surprise in that he had no idea what his job was when he accepted it, and was surprised at what the Department of Energy does. So what has Perry been doing when he hasn’t used his position to help coal barons get rich?

ell, he’s stupid enough to get crank-called by Russian pranksters. Which… is at last not the worst scandal the Trump administration has with the Russians. Perry was also linked to the Trump administration’s Ukraine scandal, because of his meetings with Ukraine’s president where he may have been pressuring the country to investigate Joe and Hunter Biden to assist the Trump 2020 re-election campaign, as well as potential irregularities with the oil and gas companies in Ukraine.

[worstblogever]

Doug Ducey
It was on this date in 2018, 2019, as well as 2020, that “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day” first profiled Arizona Governor Doug Ducey, who has been in office now since 2014, who has at least lowered the bar for insane and racist Arizona Governors was already set pretty high by his predecessor, Jan Brewer. Ducey’s career prior to running for office was that he was the CEO of Cold Stone Creamery, the ice cream parlor chain, resigning from that spot in 2007 and then winning office in 2010 as Arizona State Treasurer. Our delay in profiling Ducey came to a quick end due to the above photo, where Gov. Ducey was posing with members of a supposed “Patriot Movement AZ” that’s a white nationalist group, and there’s not just members of the MAGA crowd, but they’re throwing up white supremacist hand gestures for the photo. What makes it even worse was the timing… While Gov. Ducey was meeting with these fringe hatemongers, he was simultaneously refusing to meet with education leaders during Arizona’s #RedforEd teacher’s strike.

That isn’t a one-off, either. As Ducey also spoke before Turning Point USA, another racist and anti-Semitic conservative group in August of 2018, and he answered to criticism over it by claiming that “he didn’t know” they were as bad as they are.

How racist is Doug Ducey? He came out strong to oppose removing Confederate monuments in Arizona, even though the Confederacy pre-dated his state’s existence by a few decades. He chose to put this statement out within a week of the murder of Heather Heyer and 20 others being injured in a terror attack in Charlottesville, Virginia, carried out by white supremacists and Neo-Nazis, which was carried out in the wake of their "protest" over the removal of Confederate monuments.

This guy is out of touch with the interests of actual people. While there were literally school students camping out right outside Ducey’s office to protest gun violence in schools after the Parkland Shooting back in March of 2018, he was too busy posting on Twitter about free agent players leaving the Arizona Cardinals. He’s also extreme enough on anti-choice legislation that he signed a law that would require physicians performing abortions in Arizona to attempt to resuscitate any fetus that survives the procedure… which would be amazing because fetuses are physically incapable of surviving outside the womb by definition. Their qualification of if the attempt needs to be made? If the fetus has a heartbeat. That would mean ANY abortion performed at six weeks or beyond… whether or not the fetus has developed other organs to survive.

At this point, you start to get the feeling that Ducey is some kind of spectacular ***hole. That’s probably why he and Donald Trump are fans of one another. Ducey actually praised Trump’s pardon of former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, (yes THAT Joe Arpaio) and in 2018, when Trump demanded the governors of several states deploy the National Guard to the U.S./Mexico border for what amounted to an expensive photo-op to commemorate Trump’s bigotry, Doug Ducey was more than happy to humor the idea and join in the racism. Hell, even without any influence by Trump, Ducey tried blocking the resettlement of refugees into Arizona this past year, and has been more than willing to sign whatever anti-immigrant legislation that crosses his desk.

Sadly, it’s on anti-immigrant stupidity that Doug Ducey based his re-election campaign on in 2018, as he runs against Democratic challenger David Garcia. As you might expect from an Arizona Republican running against a Hispanic challenger, Ducey’s campaign ads are a hot bed of race-baiting, and primarily attacked Garcia as supposedly wanting “open borders”, and doing everything he can to appeal to aggrieved white xenophobes. That led to Ducey coasting to re-election by a 15-point margin in 2018, and now the only thing that was going to see him removed from office is if he follows the trend of Arizona Governors who get impeached through the years.

In July of 2019, a lot of Republicans were bent out of shape about the relationship between Nike and Colin Kaepernick, who made the great offense of kneeling during the National Anthem to protest police violence, as the First Amendment allows him to do. Well, Nike had announced that it would pull shoes from the market that were Betsy Ross themed around the 4th of July, and the conservative media continued the feud, frothing at the mouth about Nike boycotts. One of the loudest critics was, Doug Ducey, who as part of a day long Twitter thread about it, was threatening to pull financial incentives towards Nike for creating jobs in Arizona. And then, two days later, the Arizona Republic photographed Doug Ducey at a charity event… WEARING NIKE SHOES.

It has been Doug Ducey’s complete mishandling of the Covid-19 crisis in Arizona that’s truly sent public opinion against him, as he’s been more focused on what the pandemic might do to the economy than what it was literally doing to kill people. His non-existent response to the crisis included transparent attempts at manipulating scientific data from public health agencies to lie and claim infection rates were slowing when the were drastically going up. Arizona’s high percentage of retirees headed to warmer climates means proportionately it had a LOT of high-risk people… Ducey was so inept that eventually he was pressured by some of the mayors of Arizona’s largest cities to at least have their own mask mandates. The cities that executed them of course, saw their curves begin to flatten over the summer. Ducey, however, rolled over like a timid terrier whenever Donald Trump weighed in, whether it was to come to campaign events in the Grand Canyon State, or just pressure about responding to the crisis in general. When, y’know, when he wasn’t attending pool parties without a mask and getting called out on it by constituents on Twitter and acting like he was the victim of a “smear attack” when he was caught.

We can’t even begin to explain how transparent it is that Doug Ducey is actively sabotaging Covid-19 mitigation efforts. If you needed any clearer proof, it probably be that he’s tried redirecting federal education funds away from public schools who enforce mask mandates for students, and giving the cash to schools that reject the safety and lives of those kids by allowing them to attend unmasked. The Biden administration has let him know, “that’s not actually a thing you can do”, and Ducey’s throwing tantrums that he can’t effectively offer bribes to administrators willing to get kids sick for extra cash, and then lying and claiming that wasn’t exactly what he was trying to do.

As the bodies have piled up in Arizona… the legacy of Ducey looks to be his inept leadership and thousands who died because he couldn’t be bothered to stop being a capitalist and give a f*** about public safety. Mercifully, his tenure comes to an end in 2022, thanks to term limits.

[JackDaw]

Are you saying that there is a fair way to ridicule the trans community? Understand, I'm not accusing you of anything, just playing devil's advocate.

Is there a fair way to ridicule any community?

I suppose at some level we all feel it’s more okay to ridicule the rich and powerful, because they are in a relative place of safety, have been relatively lucky in life and should be more able to ride a few sarcastic comments, even if those comments are unfair.

But even then…personally don’t like humour that comes from a place of hatred, that attacks with deliberate intent to hurt.

(NB I do quite like some “Insult routines”. The few Don Rickles routines I’ve seen I’ve enjoyed, for example, because it seemed…rightly or wrongly…that he was making fun of people he actually liked, and could take a similar joke about himself.)

[worstblogever]

Is there a fair way to ridicule any community?

I suppose at some level we all feel it’s more okay to ridicule the rich and powerful, because they are in a relative place of safety, have been relatively lucky in life and should be more able to ride a few sarcastic comments, even if those comments are unfair.

But even then…personally don’t like humour that comes from a place of hatred, that attacks with deliberate intent to hurt.

(NB I do quite like some “Insult routines”. The few Don Rickles routines I’ve seen I’ve enjoyed, for example, because it seemed…rightly or wrongly…that he was making fun of people he actually liked, and could take a similar joke about himself.)

Insult comedy... was designed for roasts. And the people Rickles was insulting usually were volunteering to be on the dais and roasted or knew him well enough that he was ribbing them without ill intent.

The trans community didn't get up on a dais at a roast, and Chappelle's "insult comedy" is "I don't respect, acknowledge, or adhere to your gender identity and f*** you for asking me to".

It's not a similar pass.

[worstblogever]

This would be comedian James Acaster calling out Ricky Gervais for his transphobia, and his point is relevant to Chapelle:

[Adam Allen]

There isn't.

No, there absolutely are ways to make jokes about the trans community, without it being hateful. You can mock how confusing and "gray" the gender identity and sexual attraction of trans folk can be ... because, that really is confusing, and if you move in trans spaces, some joke about it, themselves. You can mock ideas about what it means to be a man or a woman, because that also is not perfectly clear, and even trans folk have disagreements about it. Like, can you be a butch trans woman or a femme trans man? Lots of people would argue about either of those, but it's totally possible ... and there is humor to be found in it. There is humor to be found in/about the trans community. But making jokes from the outside, with hatred/derision towards anyone who does not match your own personal ideas about what gender should be ... that's where it is problematic, and that's where it is not cool, for someone with a platform as large as Dave Chappelle's, to decide this is a group that's defenseless and powerless enough, that they can just say whatever they want, without suffering any real consequence for it.

I know "privilege" is a touchy word, but I do think a major problem is Dave not recognizing or giving enough consideration of his own privilege. Yeah, he's black. But, he still talks about being upset or feeling like it was a big deal, that he walked away from 50 million dollars, when he left the Chappelle Show.

Don't get me wrong, that has to suck. But you had the option to walk away from 50 million dollars? I mean, yeah -- respect for you, that you did that. But one, there is an infinitesimally small percentage of people who would ever have that option in the first place. And two, much as I would like to respect you for having principles and integrity enough to do that, you make it really hard, when you -- as someone who has remained wealthier than the vast majority of people, and is actively accumulating millions more in wealth as I watch -- are still whining about it, 20 years later. Like dude, not saying the way Comedy Central (or white fans, or whoever) treated you back in the day was not fucked up ... but you know, lots of us are still dealing with plenty of fucked up **** in the present day, you are better off than most of us, so can you possibly recognize that and not punch down?

Yeah, being black is not easy, a lot of the time. But Dave is fucking rich as ****. He is a straight, cisgender dude who is married and has kids. He also has the ability to choose to do pretty much whatever he wants. How many people can decide to take time off in Africa, for however long they want, with no financial repercussions for doing it? He did that 20 years ago and is whining about doing it, still!

I mean, I don't hate the dude, and I'm not saying he needs to be "cancelled". If you thought his recent stuff is funny, more power to you, I guess. Humor really is subjective. But I am black, and I am gender atypical. I have had trans folk who say I should consider myself trans, for reasons. I don't, for reasons. Point is, I don't feel particularly targeted by the **** he's said in his specials -- but, as someone who has thought he has been fricking hilarious in the past, I didn't find anything he said about trans folk funny, in his recent specials.

And it's not because I don't have a sense of humor, or because I'm being a snowflake or any of that ****. It's because it's someone from a massive platform of privilege, speaking about people who are much less well off as him, with what really seems like misdirected anger. Like, dude, I'm sorry that you're not happy in your life. Go to therapy for that ****. Don't get on stage at a "comedy" special and rant about people who didn't like you targeting them in the past. That doesn't make you some daring iconoclast. It really just makes you a privileged dick.

And it sucks, because I don't think that's what he was aiming for. But yeah, that's the result.

[Adam Allen]

I forgot to add, Dave's stuff about trans folk recently kind of reminds of Cosby's "pound cake" stuff, back before everyone knew he was a rapist.

Like, Bill had been successful and rich for decades, when he decided to speak out about "black community" and acting as if he had any idea what it was like to be poor and desperate (and black). The only part he knew about was being black, and if he had any self-awareness, he would have known better than to speak about poor people as if he had any understanding about what it was like to be in their position. And I don't care what his life was like growing up -- don't know if he was rich or poor, whatever, point is that by the time he made those comments, he was decades removed from that experience.

In the same way, Dave Chappelle is black, but apparently grew up middle class, and was successful and at least comfortable with money, by his early adulthood. Does not make him any less black, but I have just been moderately financially secure, most of my adult life -- and I give full respect to the unfortunate fact that lots of "African Americans" have no real analogue for a life like mine. Does not make either or us better or worse, but I would be an ******* for expecting them to see things exactly as I do.

I have no idea what a life of success like Chappelle's would be like, and I respect that. It's a shame that he can't do the same in return.

[worstblogever]

The idea that you can't joke about the trans community...

There are trans men and women performing standup. They can do it quite effectively.

This is similar to how it would be wrong for a comedian of one minority group to target another in a routine... out of line. But black comedians can call out their own, the Latin Kings of Comedy can get their own, etc.

One of your own can discuss the realities of it, and let an audience laugh with them instead of at them.

Big difference.

[worstblogever]

On this date, in 2014, in 2015, and in 2016, that “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day” published profiles of former Colorado House of Representatives member Gordon Klingenschmitt, a.k.a. “Dr. Chaps” who in 2014, actually managed to get enough support to be elected in spite of the fact that he is, for lack of a better term, a complete goddamned lunatic. How much of a loon is he? Well, in our first profile, we went in depth on Klingenschmitt, a former military chaplain reprimanded and discharged by the Navy in 2006 for disobeying orders and attending a political protest in uniform. He also apparently while once counseling a rape victim on his vessel, discovered she was a lesbian and immediately stopped helping her through her trauma to restrain her and try to exorcise the demons out of her that were making her gay (I’m serious, he’s bragged about this). Klingenschmitt then took to the airwaves on a cable access show, where he has tried performing long-distance exorcisms on all sorts of famous people to remove demons from them, from liberal celebrities like Madonna, to politicians like President Obama and Texas State Senator Wendy Davis. The latter makes sense when you consider he claims the Bible teaches us to defend ourselves against “left-wing crazies” (I don’t remember Jesus saying that, myself). He also thinks the FCC have loosened guidelines to help demons travel through televisions to “molest and visually rape your children”, that the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. taught us to discriminate against gays, and repeatedly has claimed “Obamacare causes cancer”. Klingenschmitt, despite being pants-s***ingly insane (speaking of which, he has claimed the repeal of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” has made gay soldiers have to start wearing diapers from all the gay sex they’ve been having making them lose bowel control, because he’s that charming)… despite being that barking mad, decided to make a run for the Colorado House of Representatives. And just prior to the election, he claimed openly gay Democratic Congressman Jared Polis was “going to join ISIS and start beheading Christians” because seriously, at this point, could he really do anything to come off as more deranged? Within three months of being sworn into office, Colorado House Republicans refused to allow Klingenschmitt to participate in any committees in state government, for fear of what he might say on them, and halfway through his term, he praised the Bundy family for seizing a federal building and called on the judges who tried the case to be executed. He’s called for the repeal of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell”, arguing that we should “push gay people back in the closet”, which doesn’t make any goddamned sense because the people who have come out of it can’t put that genie back in the bottle at this point, and also claimed that a female Muslim cadet at The Citadel would lead to an increase in female service members being raped because… well, he’s insane, so don’t try to make sense of that. Klingenschmitt’s still going on his cable access show daily, where he continues to insist President Obama is a secret Muslim, argues that God preached against gun-free zones in the Bible, compares same sex marriage to “the yoke of slavery”, said that executives from Planned Parenthood have “blood dripping from their fangs” and blames polling that shows Americans are starting to accept same sex marriage on what else? Massive demonic possession. Mercifully, Klingenschmitt was defeated in his efforts to be elected to the Colorado State Senate in 2016, and hopefully will never, ever even sniff anything close to elected office again so while we’ll peek in from time to time to see what Dr. Chaps is up to over at RightWingWatch.org.

On this date in 2017, “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day” profiled Bill Nojay, a former member of the New York State Assembly who was first elected to office in 2012, and seemed to be well on his way to re-election until just a few weeks prior to the 2016 elections, he took his own life rather to go to jail on federal fraud and other white collar criminal charges he was facing (he actually won his primary days after he died). Months after his suicide, the FBI were still trying to sort out his criminal activities, which involved business dealings though out multiple countries across the globe, reached well into the seven-figure range, and were committed even years prior to his first run for office. In fact, it is believed that much of the money donated to a SuperPAC for Nojay’s first run for office was $91,000 looted from an escrow account on a construction project that was never completed for the King of Jordan. Perhaps not coincidentally given all the money the Trump Corporation and Paul Manafort are being investigated for grifting their way through in foreign real estate deals… Bill Nojay endorsed Donald Trump pretty early on in the 2016 elections, gave him advice on where his “lane” would have to be given he had no prior office or military service, urging him to run for Governor of New York instead, and eventually served as the Trump campaign’s New York Co-Chairman. Democrats were respectful following Nojay’s death, unlike their GOP counterparts who when placed in similar situations like with Seth Rich or Vince Foster, would start whipping up conspiracy theories about how the head of the ticket were responsible for his death

[worstblogever]

On this date in both 2018, as well as 2019, “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day” first profiled the U.S. House Representative from Texas’ 22nd District, Pete Olson, who has been in office now since 2008, and prior to that he spent a decade serving as aide to Texas Senator Phil Gramm for four years, and then as Texas Senator John Cornyn’s chief of staff from 2002-2007. And yes, he’s a Republican Texas Congressman, so obviously Rep. Olson’s going to have a long voting record that shows he’s anti-immigrant, anti-choice, anti-LGBTQ (Olson was actually the sponsor of the anti-transgender “Civil Rights Uniformity Act” that would have defined citizens by the gender of their birth), pro-gun, and the whole myriad of extremist ideas that come with it. What sets him apart from the rest, though? Well, our hands-down greatest WTF from Pete Olson is easily that during the 2016 presidential campaign, Olson was chatting on the radio with conservative talk show host Sam Malone, and straight up started theorizing that when Bill Clinton met Attorney General Loretta Lynch on the airport tarmac, the former president “must have threatened to kill her like the Clintons did to Vince Foster” to gain her loyalty and get FBI Director James Comey to stop investigating Hillary’s e-mails. Alright, so… first up, the Clintons didn’t kill Vince Foster, that was a suicide, and Foster’s family REPEATEDLY keep telling Republicans to stop spreading conspiracy theories about his death, because that’s just f***ed up. Second… that would be some brazen and stupid obstruction of justice attempts, and if there’s something Bill Clinton knows about, it’s having to endure bulls*** investigations without doing anything that gets you charged with obstruction of justice. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have sat down with investigators during the Lewinsky debacle, or stopped the Starr investigation from looking into his taxes… etc. (Which seems to be quite the opposite of how the current occupant of the Oval Office handles things…) Anyway, Pete Olson is a conspiracy spreading moron. This wouldn’t be a one-off, as Olson also “misspoke” during a speech in August of 2018 in front of the India House in Houston, when he claimed that the 9/11 hijackers were Pakistani in origin. Because, y’know, there’s not enough tensions between India and Pakistan, so let’s just start telling Indians that the Pakistanis did 9/11. Nice one, Pete. Back in November of 2013, though, Pete Olson was also one of 19 Republicans in Congress who were calling for the impeachment of Eric Holder for not enforcing laws related to the Defense of Marriage Act. Now, it is the Attorney General’s duty to enforce the laws in our country, however, we’ve got to side with holder on this, because the Defense of Marriage Act was overturned by the Supreme Court about four or five months prior to Olson and company’s little tantrums. Rounding things out, yes, Pete Olson is a climate change denier, citing that it’s obviously not man made because “our climate has been changing since God created Earth”. You see? That’s scientific, when you mention an invisible man in a sky to back up the science. But by all means, take a look at his decade-long voting record during his career in Congress to get an idea of how bad he is, while he votes against equal pay for women, against Wall Street reform after the banks almost imploded the global economy in 2007, against the repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell", or Disaster Relief Funding for victims of Hurricane Sandy or against the Zadroga Act to provide healthcare for First Responders of 9/11. What he will vote for includes trying to defund Planned Parenthood and National Public Radio, numerous attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, an attempt to weaken the Americans with Disabilities Act, the past two government shutdowns, and HR 7, an anti-abortion bill that makes even some Republicans pause before voting for it because of its language that tries to define the conditions for what “rape” is, in it. Texas’ 22nd Congressional District, representing the Houston suburbs, has had a shift in its partisan makeup over the past decade, trending bluer all the time. Pete Olson seems all too aware of what the portents are showing, as he opted to retire rather than face a potential loss in 2020.

On this date in 2020, “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day” profiled Nick Moutos, who was a 2020 candidate who ran in Texas’ 35th Congressional District. His prior experience before running for office was working as an employee in the Texas Attorney General’s office from 2017, where he had the bad luck to Ken Paxton as his boss (Paxton being already a corrupt dumbass himself). We’re profiling Nick Moutos as yet another Qanon conspiracy theory devotee who was running for office as a Republican in 2020. How deep down the rabbit hole did Nick Moutos go? Well, it wasn’t just he would share content explicitly supporting QAnon, including other congressional candidates taking oaths supporting QAnon. When Twitter announced that it would take action against the spread of the QAnon conspiracy theory on the platform, Moutos responded angrily, posting,“#Q must be getting close to #OutingYou as a #Pedophile or #ChildTrafficker or perhaps involved with #PizzaGate.” So… yeah, I’m sure Jack Dorsey at Twitter liked being accused of being a pedophile for shutting down the insanity. Moutos ended up finishing third in the GOP Primary for Texas’ 35th, finishing with 28% of the vote. But then the truly good news happened. Moutos’ Twitter account ended up undoing his career as a prosecutor, though, as he frequently started posting racist tweets-where he would threaten Black Lives Matter protesters and call the group’s leaders “terrorists”, calling Islam a “virus”, referring to First Lady Michelle Obama as President Obama’s “husband” and trans people an “abomination.” Yes, he was racist enough that even Ken Paxton had him shown the door, getting fired in September of 2020. He stopped posting on Twitter, perhaps not coincidentally, two days after the attack of the Capitol by Trump supporters, and has yet to re-emerge on the platform, or anywhere in politics. As such, we will set aside his profile at this time, however, to cover another kooky Republican today instead. (Current crazy/stupid scoreboard, is now 1035-50, since this was established in July 2014.


Irene Armendariz-Jackson

Welcome to what is the 1035th original profile here at “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day”, where we’ll be profiling Irene Armendariz-Jackson, who was a 2020 candidate for U.S. House of Representatives in Texas’ 16th Congressional District, as a challenger to Democratic Congresswoman Veronica Escobar. She is decidedly in the “Latinos for Trump” camp, constantly calling for the completion of a full useless border wall along the U.S./Mexico border.

She’s also the latest Republican we’ve profiled who is an adherent of the Qanon conspiracy theory. Texas Monthly saw her social media accounts linked to several Qanon accounts and would occasional use Qanon hashtags, so they decided to ask her what she knew about it… and it got vey weird, very fast:

“Conservatives know there is a conspiracy, a deep state conspiracy. The Democratic party is very much intertwined with the satanic church.”

She continued that the bodies of aborted babies are used to promote satanic worship and then described once driving by a condemned building in Omaha, Nebraska, where politicians and celebrities had sex with children. Which of course, she never reported to anyone to shut it down and can’t remember where this building is today… but whatever, right? She insisted the longer Donald Trump was in power, the more Armendariz-Jackson believed these secrets will be exposed.

“I know a lot of Americans are waking up to understand the darkness behind everything going on right now.”

She’s also spread conspiracy theories about Hunter Biden, as well as election fraud conspiracy theories in the year since the election.

Irene Armendariz-Jackson lost to Congresswoman Escobar badly in 2020, getting just 35% of the vote. She has since been banned from Facebook, but somehow thinks being removed from social media platforms will help her win office in 2022, where she’s already filed to run again. We can only take solace in knowing that given the lean of the district, it’s highly unlikely she ever does more than she did in her first run.

[Xheight]

The only way that would make a single lick of sense is if it was a situation where protecting yourself came at cost of public safety.

Which is dumb to even entertain in a situation where personal safety will play right into public safety.

Politely, you are on about a nonsensical "What If?..." scenario that has right around "Zero..." to do with the actual situation we are faced with.

I pointed to the situation because the example in front of us with Powell was a question of if he did enough to protect his person from the virus. Going to and from treatments, attending events... it isn't like it is just a cloud of bad luck descended upon him and gave him the virus. Staying home and securing facilities for the immune compromised is a matter of personal safety that all the messaging about the vax is disconnected from. The dumb thing here is thinking that doing the "right thing" for public safety was going to personally protect him.

Not being a fan of Powell to begin with this just unscored his status as Grand Dupe of failed policies. From the WMDs to the retarded Pottery Barn policy his one time integrity and token status has been used to ill purpose so it is no surprise that Covid policy showed up as a fatal flaw.

[ed2962]

No, there absolutely are ways to make jokes about the trans community, without it being hateful. You can mock how confusing and "gray" the gender identity and sexual attraction of trans folk can be ... because, that really is confusing, and if you move in trans spaces, some joke about it, themselves. You can mock ideas about what it means to be a man or a woman, because that also is not perfectly clear, and even trans folk have disagreements about it. Like, can you be a butch trans woman or a femme trans man? Lots of people would argue about either of those, but it's totally possible ... and there is humor to be found in it. There is humor to be found in/about the trans community. But making jokes from the outside, with hatred/derision towards anyone who does not match your own personal ideas about what gender should be ... that's where it is problematic, and that's where it is not cool, for someone with a platform as large as Dave Chappelle's, to decide this is a group that's defenseless and powerless enough, that they can just say whatever they want, without suffering any real consequence for it.

I know "privilege" is a touchy word, but I do think a major problem is Dave not recognizing or giving enough consideration of his own privilege. Yeah, he's black. But, he still talks about being upset or feeling like it was a big deal, that he walked away from 50 million dollars, when he left the Chappelle Show.

Don't get me wrong, that has to suck. But you had the option to walk away from 50 million dollars? I mean, yeah -- respect for you, that you did that. But one, there is an infinitesimally small percentage of people who would ever have that option in the first place. And two, much as I would like to respect you for having principles and integrity enough to do that, you make it really hard, when you -- as someone who has remained wealthier than the vast majority of people, and is actively accumulating millions more in wealth as I watch -- are still whining about it, 20 years later. Like dude, not saying the way Comedy Central (or white fans, or whoever) treated you back in the day was not fucked up ... but you know, lots of us are still dealing with plenty of fucked up **** in the present day, you are better off than most of us, so can you possibly recognize that and not punch down?

Yeah, being black is not easy, a lot of the time. But Dave is fucking rich as ****. He is a straight, cisgender dude who is married and has kids. He also has the ability to choose to do pretty much whatever he wants. How many people can decide to take time off in Africa, for however long they want, with no financial repercussions for doing it? He did that 20 years ago and is whining about doing it, still!

I mean, I don't hate the dude, and I'm not saying he needs to be "cancelled". If you thought his recent stuff is funny, more power to you, I guess. Humor really is subjective. But I am black, and I am gender atypical. I have had trans folk who say I should consider myself trans, for reasons. I don't, for reasons. Point is, I don't feel particularly targeted by the **** he's said in his specials -- but, as someone who has thought he has been fricking hilarious in the past, I didn't find anything he said about trans folk funny, in his recent specials.

And it's not because I don't have a sense of humor, or because I'm being a snowflake or any of that ****. It's because it's someone from a massive platform of privilege, speaking about people who are much less well off as him, with what really seems like misdirected anger. Like, dude, I'm sorry that you're not happy in your life. Go to therapy for that ****. Don't get on stage at a "comedy" special and rant about people who didn't like you targeting them in the past. That doesn't make you some daring iconoclast. It really just makes you a privileged dick.

And it sucks, because I don't think that's what he was aiming for. But yeah, that's the result.

And came back for $60 mil...

[Xheight]

The idea that you can't joke about the trans community...

There are trans men and women performing standup. They can do it quite effectively.

This is similar to how it would be wrong for a comedian of one minority group to target another in a routine... out of line. But black comedians can call out their own, the Latin Kings of Comedy can get their own, etc.

One of your own can discuss the realities of it, and let an audience laugh with them instead of at them.

Big difference.

And here we have the dogma of our day some sort of epistemological and unassailable status given to the experience of a class or identity rather than rational context. To put it most reductively: propositional knowledge doesn’t exist out there, in a disembodied or generic form, to be discovered intact, but rather our subjective, embodied, and socially determined experience. Our race, our gender, our social class, our sexual identity, and other determinants of both our experience of the world and how others, in turn, interact with us shape our understanding. It is no surprise that this reservation system of privilege and counter privilege is being called post-Liberlism as it undermines universality. It should give anyone pause when the word policing is used to describe norms.