Castle Magus

"Hi. You may have noticed a new crop of influencers like The Nelk Boys and Bryce Hall taking over online spaces. Today we’re looking at who these people are and how MAGA influencers garnered so much... well, influence."

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"The extremely partisan and vindictive crime president, looking to wet his thick beak as sloppily as possible, is now lording over every social media platform, which now happens to be one of the primary ways in which Americans get their information, the youth of which specifically following individual influencers, who may or may not be getting paid by political operatives working directly for that president to put out misinformation."

(My only minor quibble with that italicized quote from Cody Johnston there is that he used the world "misinformation" when he clearly should have used "disinformation.")

This is just dystopian shit. All of it.

It's frustrating and sad and horrible and disgusting that MAGA has been around long enough for there to be a "next generation" of anything related to it.

Also, I'd just like to state, yet again, that I loathe the entire concept of "influencers" in general. The only consolation for me is that I'd never heard of any of those "next generation" MAGA assholes, prior to this video. But then, there were a whole lot of mentions in this video of the current/old generation of MAGA assholes, too.

"Hi. Elon Musk says that empathy is 'the fundamental weakness of Western civilization.' In this episode, we look at why the right hates empathy and how they're trying to get more Americans to approve of their antisocial behavior."

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The theme of this episode seems to be "no hyperbole here."

Two things about this video.

First, this is one of the best "real life is strangerway more fucked up and broken than fiction" views of current American RWNJ politics I've seen in a long while.

Second, this is one of the best "pulling back to look at the bigger picture" views of current American RWNJ politics I've seen in a good long while. Like a photomosaic, in a way.

Just... example after example after example after example of MAGAts and Trumpanzees and Trumps going so far beyond the pale in their... well... to call it "cartoonish evil" is an unfair insult to cartoons... so... asinine dumbfuckery that they've circled the Earth (like Superman), with all those examples serving to paint the overall picture that it's not just that RWNJs don't fucking care at all anymore about how literally evil they are, it's also a calculated ploy on their part to normalize their evil. And it seems to be working on far too many people (and this is one of those "more than zero is far too many" situations).

But but but... if you dare to bow up and express the least, tiniest bit of "cruelty" back at them in response to their vileness, they shrivel up like prunes, whinge about "lack of empathy," and run away. Something something hypocritcal piss babies.

"If you're wondering how the German people were able to ignore the atrocities around them, this is how. And now, it's happening in real time here."

(Yeah, I didn't "live-post" during watching this episode. I just watched it and then wrote the above. And please, Some More News, don't make me have to create a specific "gutfeld" tag. I really, really don't want to do it.)

So, in other words, CNN, what you're telling me here is that the UK Supreme Court is just about as fucked up stupid and broken and worthless as the US Supreme Court is now, and also that there are obviously just as many transphobic shitbags in the UK as there are anywhere else. Gotcha. Good to know. *weary sigh*

"Dear John Oliver, kindly go pound sand" (EDIT) Just replaced the link to the actual Christian Post website with an archive.is version of it, because I don't want to direct any more traffic to that piece of shit website. (/EDIT)

Saw that dumbfuckery show up in my Google News app, which was shat out in response to a recent episode of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, because Google wrongly believed I wanted to see worse-than-worthless dreck from a birdcage liner like The Christian Post. Needless to say, I very quickly corrected that mistaken assumption by Google. Also reported it for being "Misleading or sensational" and "Hateful or abusive" (wish now I'd also included the "Violent or repulsive" option), which was cathartic (as is this post here), though I seriously doubt Google will actually do anything about it.

(At least this Kaeley Harms has an appropriate last name, anyway, given that she absolutely "Harms" trans people, and intentionally so, by publishing hateful horseshit like that.)

I don't have a "joe rogan" tag... hmm... not sure if even this 1:18:01 episode of Some More News that is explicitly about Joe Rogan is enough for me to bother creating a "joe rogan" tag. I mean, sure I could just plop "joe rogan" down there in the tags list and then have a "joe rogan" tag for the future, in the unlikely off-chance that I ever mention him again, but he's absolutely not worth the effort of finding and back-tagging the very rare few posts from the past in which I may have mentioned the asshat. Eh... okay, I guess I'll throw a new "joe rogan" tag on this post, for what tiny bit that is worth (even just to me, let alone anyone else).

Also, disclaimer: I have never seen anything of Joe Rogan's show myself, other than a few short clips here and there over the years of him saying stupid shit.

Anyway, on with watching the video at 2x playback speed...

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...all right, not even five minutes in, and there's some transphobia. Off to a good start.

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Side bar: "Walmart fires 6'4" cisgender woman threatened by man who thought she was trans"

Wow. So, basically, a man came into a women's bathroom at a Walmart to harass and threaten a cisgender woman, who worked at that Walmart, because he wrongly, stupidly thought she was transgender merely because she happened to be tall, and then the woman was fired from her job at that Walmart after she reported the incident. (Ostensibly because she rEpOrTeD iT tO tHe WrOnG tYpE oF mAnAgEr... what the actual fuck ...so, then, why was the manager she did report it to not also fired for not reporting it up the chain to the, supposedly, "correct" type of manager? Probably because said manager wasn't a tall woman who "looked trans.")

And, of course, this fucking happened in goddamned Florida. That tracks.

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And now, onto the COVID disinformation part of the show...

Ah, and there's the racism... hmm, turns out Joe Rogan apparently had very different views back in 2019 or whenever, compared to now...? Gee, I wonder why? Oh, right, it's because of the Trump stuff.

And here comes the Trump-specific stuff (though that's really been an undercurrent of the entire video all along)... Joe Rogan before: "The morons had a king." Joe Rogan now: "He's real." Also, it does indeed seem really weird that Joe Rogan, who apparently hates everything to do with Jeffrey Epstein, had Donald Trump, someone who really appears to have been a close, personal friend of Jeffrey Epstein, as a guest on his show, and apparently never once mentioned Jeffrey Epstein. Go figure.

Joe Rogan didn't like Tim Walz, because Tim Walz was, supposedly, "a liar." Therefore, all in for Trump I guess????? The guy who has spouted literally multiple tens of thousands of documented lies over the past decade????? Okay, Joe Rogan. Okay.

Elon Musk? A genius? The smartest person alive? Okay, Joe Rogan. Okay.

Trump is "an outsider" and "anti-establishment" in the same way that GamerGate was "actually about ethics in video game journalism." Joe Rogan, by supporting Trump, is also no longer "anti-establishment," because Trump, like it or not, is the fucking, goddamned "establishment" now. Thanks, in part, to Joe Rogan, specifically.

Ah, and there comes the anti-abortion sentiment and the homophobia, too. Keep 'em comin', Joe. They're all just beach ball issues with no actual substance or value, amirite? *eye roll*

I'm on the tail end of Gen X, having been born in 1979 (Google/Wikipedia says Gen X was from "1965 to 1980"), and believe you me, I have absolutely not undergone a "right-wing turn." Maybe I'm just an aberration, though. *shrug*

Oh, and we're even getting just a smidge of antisemitism up in here (along with some Nazi propaganda/Hitler apologia), too. The hits just keep on comin', Joe.

So, in conclusion, while Joe Rogan isn't the absolutely worst grifter/con-man/right wing dumbshit that Some More News has done a video about, he's also obviously not the greatest dude in the world, either. I don't know... maybe Joe Rogan could be one of the rare few Trumpanzees that potentially could be shamed into changing his ways by being called a hypocrite, but I wouldn't hold my breath on that. In any case, this video has not convinced me to suddenly start watching the 6000+ hours of The Joe Rogan Experience or whatever the fuck.

(They didn't manage to get through this video without at least some dumb skits involving Katy and Warmbo. Short as they were, they were still present. *sigh*)

"Hi. Donald Trump's relentless executive orders and illegal slashing of federal funding are already hurting Americans, including his own voters."

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No Warmbo, no finger puppets, no "evil Katy jumping in via a video call" or whatever, no corn slop dripping from the ceiling, no time travel, no multiple versions of Cody, none of that shit in this video. Just Cody Johnston sitting in front of a camera for an hour and twenty minutes (minus however much time the ad breaks wasted, since I skipped past those, as I always do). The only "bit" in this video was Cody refraining from saying any swear words at all, until the final minute or two of the video.

I wish all SMN videos were like this. (Aside from, perhaps, the no swearing thing, because as he proved by almost breaking that no-swear rule at several points during the video, a lot of the goddamned fucking dumbshit that Trump and Elon and their criminal co-conspirators are currently doing can only be adequately described with the involvement of intense profanity.)

(EDIT) Oh, right, I didn't note it at the time as I was watching the video, but JD Vance was apparently a person who benefited from DEI. How about that. (And, no, that wasn't a JD Vance/Peter Thiel joke.) (/EDIT)

(EDIT 2) Just a reminder that, seriously, Trump has not been in office for even a full fucking month yet. (/EDIT 2)

"In one of his most audacious moves since taking office, President Trump ordered a freeze on Tuesday on trillions of dollars in federal money — from anti-poverty programs to foreign aid — in order to purge the government of what he called woke ideology."

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Alternative link for anyone who may actually have access to the NYT.

As I've said before, for the sake of my own sanity, I'm seriously going to have to stop listening to NPR in the car[1], because the above was what was on during my drive home from the grocery store this evening. And, let's just say, I spent a fair chunk of that drive imagining lots of delightfully horrific things happening to a certain someone who sorely deserves every bit of it.

[1] - Or, at the very least, switch the station whenever I hear the hated name "Trump."

"Hi. Now that Trump is president... again... we're going to look at how he and his party are always focused on problems that aren't really problems (DEI, immigrants, and censorship) instead of problems that are (climate-enhanced wildfires, oligarchy, and actual censorship)."

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One of the comments under the video: "So is this sense of unreality what Germans circa 1933 felt?" I would say... maybe? Probably. The difference is that we should have goddamn known better, this time. Doubly so, given that we've already endured a hellish four years with Trump as the President of the United States of America before the current, likely way more hellish four years still to come of Trump as the President of the United States of America. It's not going to be great, and we're going to be trying to repair the damage caused by 2025-2029, for much, much longer than just those four years, like how we're still trying to repair the damage caused by 2017-2021 even now. Well, some of us are trying to repair the damage, anyway. Too many of us are actively, maliciously trying to cause the world to burn (both figuratively and literally).

So anyway, yeah, this is an almost hour long video pointing out all the finding out that's happening as a result of all the fucking around that happened in November 2024.

Anyway, in conclusion, to hell with Donald Trump forever, as usual.

(Beware: Warmbo is in the video. Not a lot, but still... a little bit of Warmbo goes a very, very long way.)

A post on John Scalzi's Whatever.

"You fucked around, US voters. Now you’re gonna find out.

"('I didn’t vote for him!' Well, thank you, neither did I. Got some bad news for you, though.)"

Pretty much, yeah. There's more to Mr. Scalzi's post than just that, but still... yeah...

"Hi. Christianity is big business in the U.S. Here's how megachurch pastors and televangelists enrich themselves while often further embedding themselves in right-wing politics."

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Utterly disgusting. No surprise there.

Kind of glad I don't have tags for any of these """""religious""""" ghouls. (The only one(s) I do have a tag for wasn't mentioned in this.)