It was the best of times. The best, believe me! Tremendous. We don’t win any more. We don’t win.
It may have stopped trending, and a giant DDoS attack may be slowing Twitter and much of the rest of the internet to a crawl for a lot of you at the moment, but this #TrumpBookReport hashtag is still a thing of beauty.
The premise is pretty simple: Trump’s answers to specific questions about policy questions tend to sound a lot like the bullshit answers you might expect from a high-school student who didn’t do the reading. So the question arises: What if Trump actually were a high school student who didn’t do the reading?
In the real world that you and I live in, the general consensus is that Hillary Clinton won last night’s debate. In the world inhabited by the alt-right and its fellow travelers, Trump crushed the evil Hillary even though she had help from a secret video screen hidden in plain sight on her lectern, possibly installed by George Soros himself.
Here, highlights from the Twitter feeds of some of the better-known alt-right Trump fans (and their fellow travelers).
If this man were alive today, he’d be deleting some (but not all) of Scott Adams’ Tweets
I may have given out the first Donald Trump Memorial Award for Complete Lack of Self Awareness to the wrong person earlier today. Because, as much as Matt Forney deserves the award, Scott Adams may deserve it even more. For some of the same reasons, even.
Most of us like to think of ourselves as originals. But when it comes to communicating with other human beings, we’re not quite as original as we think.
When we talk, and write, we not only use words; we use a wide assortment of stock phrases that we’ve picked up along the way. Some of these phrases are basic building blocks of language, more or less essential to communication; others are, as the expression goes, worn-out clichés. Some of these clichés are so burned into our brains that we almost can’t help using them — though we sometimes apologize for it afterwards (or even before).
I’ve gotten a number of extremely thoughtful responses from assorted alt-right twitterists to my post yesterday in which I offered an improved version of the new alt-right logo, with a Ku Klux Klanner head replacing the stylized “a.”
And by “thoughtful,” I mean “don’t read the following tweets if you’re not in the mood for jokes about murder, suicide, and the Holocaust and/or a defense of the KKK’s lynching of black people.”
I’m going to take a wild guess and say the real Hillary is … the one that looks like her? (Click on pic for source.)
So, you’ve heard about the Hillary Body Double thing, right?
If not, basically what happened is that some nitwit Trump supporters noticed that Hillary Clinton looked a bit thinner than usual at a photo-op yesterday several hours after she so famously fainted at the 9/11 memorial.
I stand corrected: In a recent post I suggested that Andrea “JudgyBitch” Hardie, after at least two Twitter permabans, had been successfully kicked off the social media platform. As was pointed out to me shortly after I put up that post, she had already returned to Twitter with a new account. Welcome the new “Janet Bloomfield,” same as the old “Janet Bloomfield.”
Juicebro lawyer/Trump superfan Mike Cernovich has been pushing the ridiculous and thoroughly debunked “Hillary Clinton is too physically frail to be President” theory for some time now.
Now he’s found DRAMATIC NEW EVIDENCE to support his dubious “sick Hillary” thesis: Photos and video footage of Hillary SITTING and sometimes LEANING ON stools at public events.
So yesterday comedian Jen Kirkman posted a little joke on Twitter, as comedians are wont to do.
Before we look at what happened after she posted this Tweet (which has now been deleted), let me just say a couple of things about the Tweet itself.
Jen Kirkman does not actually “LIKE that Hillary has murdered a lot of people,” in part because she (Kirkman) does not LIKE murder and in part because she does not believe that Hillary has, in fact, murdered a lot of people.
The joke is a clear reference to the right-wing Clinton-haters who have been trying their best, for the last quarter century, to convince the world that Bill and Hillary have been secretly knocking off their political enemies, mob style, racking up a CLINTON BODY COUNT that is now said to number 48.
In other words, the joke is not actually a joke about murder. It s a joke about the right-wing idiots who think that Hillary goes around offing people like some pastel-pantsuited Tony Soprano.
[UPDATE 8/5 Kirkman herself made clear that’s what she meant in a Tweet today.]
Unfortunately, many of those who encountered Kirkman’s Tweet on Twitter — a large number of whom seem to be former Bernie Sanders supporters who’ve gone over the Green Party’s Jill Stein — have kind of missed the point just a little, misreading it as some sort of creepy celebration of drones murdering children in Afghanistan, or something.
And instead of stopping for a second to ask themselves, “wait, is this comedian lady who does those hilarious yet disarmingly earnest segments on Drunk History really mocking or even advocating the murder of children, why would she do that, that can’t be right” many of these people decided to advocate the murder of her.
Here are a small fraction of the Tweets sent to her.
After Kirkman noted that she would be handing the operation of her Twitter account to someone else because she was tired of reading all the death threats, some of her Twitter, er, critics, did little victory dances of sorts.
And yes, that last dude is using a photo of a young Josef Stalin as his avatar. You know, the Russian dictator whose actual non-fictional not-a-joke STALIN BODY COUNT added up to something close to 20 million.
Someone even took the anti-Kirkman struggle to Wikipedia.
The people bombarding Kirkman with threats and abuse aren’t Trump fans. They aren’t Trump fans pretending to be BernieBros. If you don’t believe me, go look at the accounts of the people whose Tweets I quoted above, or go directly to @JenKirkman’s mentions now, where you can find hundreds if not thousands more Tweets like this.
These are people who, in many instances, consider themselves progressives, radicals, anarchists, “revolutionaries.” These are, in more than a few cases, proud supporters of Jill Stein, a woman whose presence in the race makes it all that much harder to defeat the unhinged Muslim-hating racist Donald Trump. That strikes me as something of an irony.
In Milan Kundera’s The Joke, set in Communist Czechoslovakia in the 1950s, a young Czech intellectual and Communist Party member is tossed from the party and sent to work in the mines after he jokingly writes “long live Trotsky” on a postcard.
These days, we’ve got Twitter for that.
NOTE 8/5: Just a reminder for new commenters: defending or excusing harassment is against the comment policy here. I’ve been lax on bans in this thread so far but that’s over now.
So Twitter has finally given Milo Yiannopoulos the boot — apparently for good — after the Breitbart “journalist” gleefully participated in, and egged on, a vicious campaign of racist abuse directed at Ghostbusters star Leslie Jones on Twitter earlier this week.
