Michelle Malkin’s website Twitchy recently posted the following picture, purporting to address the “media bias” present in the reporting on Trayvon Martin’s death:

The only problem, of course, is that the image on the right is not a picture of Trayvon Martin. In fact, the image seems to derive from Stormfront, a well-known Internet haunt for white supremacists. Malkin quickly apologized for the error and corrected the post, though, of course, actually the image is still quite accurate. This is indeed a fine example of media bias. Where other news sources might use the older, fresh-faced picture of a deceased boy that his family provided to the media, Malkin went with the intrepid reporting of skinheads and neonazis and used a more threatening picture of a completely different kid.

Indeed, media sources are intentionally using images that portray Trayvon in a more positive light. Typically, Zimmerman is depicted in a mugshot next to a picture of a fresh-faced Trayvon when he was younger. This “bias” is a counterweight to the bias that already exists: the bias against African Americans.

Believe it or not, people tend to view African Americans with suspicion, and to associate African American styles of dress and culture with crime and violence. Trayvon looks more “innocent” in the photo typically used because he looks more white. It is helpful to use a photo where Trayvon is made to look more white because African Americans are already subject to a whole host of biases and prejudices—some of which could, for example, cause a guy with a gun to stalk a black man suspiciously around his own neighborhood! Still, it is nice to see that Michelle Malkin is trying to rouse up these irrational biases that make African Americans more likely to receive the death penalty over white people convicted of the same crime, that make African Americans serve longer sentences, etc, because, let’s face it, showing a picture where Trayvon looks white and isn’t in a hoodie or baggy pants with a gold grill won’t conjure up irrational prejudices and associations of crime in latently racist white people!

And that’s the point: It shouldn’t fucking matter that Trayvon wore hoodies and had gold teeth. But it does matter in an implicitly and sometimes explicitly racist society. These outward displays of African American culture are misinterpreted by white people as indicators of crime in just the same way a black kid walking home can be misinterpreted as someone scouting a neighborhood for a burglary. Displaying a picture of Trayvon with gold teeth, a picture that anyone with a rudimentary understanding of psychology knows will incite racist biases, doesn’t “correct” media bias; it enflames pre-existing prejudices. Meanwhile, displaying a picture of Trayvon when he was younger—without a hoodie, or a sideways hat, or gold teeth, or any other fashion accessory popular among black youth—isn’t creating bias; it’s correcting the likely bias against an African American male by a culture that demonizes black men. A culture where even those black men that reach the highest levels of prestige and acclaim are accused of being secretly Muslim and met with constant demands to produce a valid birth certificate.

Michelle Malkin had to apologize for the picture, even though it correctly states that it is an example of media bias, because she recognized that her version of media bias, which used a fake image of Trayvon, was not equivalent in degree to the media bias she was purporting to critique. It was orders of magnitude more biased. And this point shows why, even if she had shown actual pictures of Trayvon, using an image emphasizing his “blackness” is also orders of magnitude more biased: because this sort of bias is helped along and bolstered by ages of prejudice and racism (creating stronger bias), whereas the original “bias” she critiques is fighting desperately against this historical tide (weakening the bias).

So let’s make a deal, Michelle Malkin (pictured to the left), you can accuse the “liberal” media of bias by showing pictures of Trayvon looking “innocent” (i.e., “white”), but recognize that this bias is fighting against ages of racism, and doesn’t need your “corrections” to make things fair, because any of your attempted “corrections” will only be sucked into the powerful wake of racial biases and pushed far out into the sea of racism. Let the media have its “liberal bias” of portraying Trayvon as innocent in pictures, and I’ll let you take solace in the disproportionate incarceration, death penalty judgments, and false accusations of African Americans that more than make up for this tiny fucking bias.

Correction: I made a mistake. Earlier I posted a picture of a turd and said it was a picture of Michelle Malkin. That is actually a picture of a completely different piece of shit. I regret the error.

 

Geraldo, the man best known for mustache, ‘stache, moustache, and the hair on his upper lip, has been in the news lately for his suggestion that Trayvon Martin’s tragic death is largely the fault of his hooded outerwear. The comment was briskly torn apart by several rabid wolverwines, followed by 90% of Twitter, everyone who posted that Kony video on Facebook, and that one guy who still uses LinkedIn for some reason. In response, Geraldo’s own son told him that he was ashamed of him (presumably because of his hoodie comment, although I suspect the mustache also slightly adds to the sense of shame), and thousands have worn hoodies in protest of the remarks, causing a 10% rise in hoodie stock prices and a massive 67% decrease in the sales of those large novelty mustaches they sell in places like Spencer’s Gifts or abandoned alleyways behind Geraldo’s summer home where drifters collect his hair clippings.

What everyone is ignoring, of course, is the element of truth in Geraldo’s words, seeing as how this truth has been distorted by the mainstream media and Geraldo’s own long, flowing mustache hairs. According to polls of increasingly frightened white folk, black men in hoodies are over 34% scarier than black men in Christmas sweaters, meaning that white people’s fear of black men increases from 100% to 134% when a hoodie is introduced, which is especially compelling because this is mathematically impossible – but math has never stopped the irrational fears of white people before.

The problem with Geraldo’s statements isn’t that he went too far in attributing problems best explained by systemic racism to outerwear that is worn by virtually everyone, from teenage girls to 40-year-old men in mustaches who pretend to be journalists, without any resulting gunshot wounds. No, the problem is that he didn’t go far enough.

Hoodies are frightening, to be sure, but what about all the other things that are threatening when black people wear them? What about tanktops, sneakers, baggy jeans, clothes worn completely backwards, FUBU, those puffy winter coats, those skull caps that Common wears all the time, white tuxedos, sideways hats, backwards hats, slightly off-center hats, a hat facing any direction if it has an NBA logo on it, large chains with a mohawk and beard, etc? These articles of clothing, like hoodies, also frighten innocent white people and cause their trigger fingers to twitch as their lives flash before their eyes.

What Geraldo should have done is advised black people to stop wearing any sort of clothing that is, or ever was, associated with African American culture. Not only should black youth dispose of their hoodies—they should dispose of all their normal clothing and stock up on sweater vests, tight-fitting khaki pants, flannel, sweaters featuring prominent images of chihuahuas or dalmatians, short-shorts, mom jeans, tye-dye, black hipster glasses, crocs, those weird fucking shoes that have toes and make you look like some sort of crazy person, suspenders, and ties and/or bow ties. They’d also have to do a sort of crop-rotation of fashion every few years, because once white people begin to associate sweater vests and suspenders with black people and hence with crime, black people would be forced to adopt again whatever it is in this counterfactual future white people are currently wearing (for example, hypothetically, leisure suits and Snuggies).

And that’s only the fashion. In order to truly achieve the non-threatening, white-friendly appearance of someone like Urkel, other visual cues must also be accounted for, including behavioral cues. Do not limp, swagger, strut; instead, pretend you have been pulled over by a cop for no reason and are being forced to say your ABCs backward while being made to walk a straight line and touching your finger to your nose. This reassures white people not only that you are straight-laced, but also that you are not drunk given your ability to say your ABCs and touch your nose. Instead of listening to rap music, listen to Justin Bieber (or, if you miss all the misogyny, opt for country music). Black youth should also avoid using slang. Don’t even use slang that is common among white teenagers, because the old white people with guns don’t know the difference. When dancing, do something resembling the Carlton dance, or if that fails, country line dancing. When in public, pre-emptively put your arms behind your head and shout out “I’m unarmed!” every five seconds or so, to put any white people at ease and also to make it easier for when the police inevitably try to arrest you for no apparent reason.

Most importantly, though: stay out of the sun and constantly cover yourself in flour, the whiter the better.

Geraldo was on the right track, but he clearly didn’t go far enough. Requiring a 48-hour waiting period and a transvaginal ultrasound before the purchase of a hoodie is a good idea, but hoodies are only part of the problem. By doing all the other things mentioned above, black people, you will probably never be shot again. Racism will cease to exist if you’d just use your common sense and get totally subsumed by white-person culture and rid yourselves of silly things like tradition, ethnic identity, and your natural skin color (go on, pull your skin off completely if you have to). Because, as we all know, the real problem in this country isn’t that privileged white people are shooting black people after racially profiling them and stalking them while stroking their guns so as to make the black people incredibly afraid and uncomfortable. No, the real problem is that black people look scary!

Next week, I’ll address how Geraldo’s brilliant insights apply to women, and why wearing a sexy, revealing dress, or easy-to-remove sweatpants, or threateningly sexy hoodies are various ways women “ask” to be raped, and how the only way to avoid asking for a man’s penis inside of your hoo-ha is to wear a full suit of armor at all times (but not a SEXY suit of armor) and/or grow a penis.

In this episode, Dustin addresses the important topics of the day, including Gallagher’s heart attack, the horrible atrocities happening in Afghanistan (and the screwed up priorities of the people there), Dick Cheney’s new heart, the Reason Rally, and Romney’s metamorphosis into a childhood toy. The main stories covered are:

1. The Kony2012 campaign brought a lot of awareness to a horrible warlord, but does the group that brought this to light deserve to be criticized? What are the merits of slacktivism and posting crap about Africa to your Facebook feed? Why is this guy outside naked and jizzing all over my car?
2. Trayvon Martin was shot by George Zimmerman, the captain of a Neighborhood Watch program in Florida, and more and more details seem to incriminate Zimmerman as needlessly targeting Martin based only on race and then unjustifiably shooting Martin (although sadly he may have been “justified” based on Florida’s interpretation of when it is justifiable to shoot someone). I’ll take you through the facts of the case and also discuss the demerits of lax gun regulation and how it emphasizes social norms that contribute to a more violent society.

Enjoy the show! Remember to rate this crap on iTunes or wherever the hell you manage to find this thing so that people will see your rating and be like, “Oh, maybe I should try listening to this” before they scream in terror at what they are hearing and decide never again to listen to something just because someone reviewed it on iTunes.

You’re severely drunk and conservative. You’re driving down the highway at 90 miles per hour in your Hummer, dangerously weaving in and out of lanes while popping Oxycontin into your mouth like Pez. Suddenly, you’re being pulled over by a police officer. As you drunkenly stumble out of your car, the first thing you say is, “Hey! You can’t pull me over! Look at that guy over there! He’s driving at least 70 miles per hour!”

This is essentially the strategy of conservatives defending Rush Limbaugh. After he made several untrue personal attacks against Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke when she spoke out on contraception healthcare coverage, Limbaugh was soon embroiled in controversy. The response by his defenders is mostly not to say his remarks were correct, but merely to redirect criticism onto popular liberal comedian Bill Maher, pointing out that he has called Sarah Palin a “twat”. Or, to use the original metaphor, they are defending a drunk driver weaving through lanes at 90 miles per hour by saying, “Look at this guy driving 70 miles per hour over there!”

To be fair, Maher and Limbaugh do have a lot in common. Both host popular political shows. Both are older, white men. Both like to make jokes (though Limbaugh’s are often unintentional). Both have hair and teeth. And both have said disparaging things about women. However, there are big differences between Limbaugh’s attacks against Sandra Fluke and Maher’s mockery of Sarah Palin.

The main criticism of Maher, in fact, hinges on the same mistake made in Limbaugh’s public apology to Fluke: emphasizing that the problem was the use of “bad words” over what was actually meant. Limbaugh’s apology, for example, makes it clear that he was only apologizing for using the two words “slut” and “prostitute”. Presumably, he meant to use more family-friendly words like “woman of the night” or perhaps “person who puts hee-hees in her hoo-ha in exchange for money”, but which nevertheless still mean that Sandra Fluke wants to be paid to have sex. Limbaugh seems to think his remarks were problematic not because he falsely accused Fluke of being a whore, but because he specifically used naughty words like “slut” and “prostitute”. This is confused for two reasons:

1. “Prostitute” is not a bad word, you fucking idiot.
2. The actual problem isn’t with your word choice, but with the fact that you falsely accused a woman of being a whore—based on ridiculous misunderstandings about birth control.

Rush could have called her any other synonym or synonymous phrase for “prostitute”, and there’d be just as much outrage, because no one cares that he used any particular language. His remarks were mostly made public because they were in the context of an idiotic blowhard who clearly didn’t understand how female birth control works. Essentially, he argued that Fluke wanted to be paid by the government to have sex, which made her a slut and a prostitute. That she was having so much sex that she couldn’t afford all the birth control. That this was a world-class floozy who couldn’t keep her legs shut because she kept taking all those birth controls to have all that sex!

The problem with these remarks is that they are completely false and his only evidence for Fluke being a “slut” is a ridiculous misunderstanding about how female birth control works. Most women do not use the female condom, and hence do not have to use more birth control the more they have sex. Limbaugh’s ridiculous naivety on this point only underscored the need for more women’s voices to be heard during the contraception hearings. In short, the problem wasn’t the specific language he used, but that the things he said were deliberate attempts to falsely malign Fluke’s character and do harm to women’s healthcare.

Is this at all comparable to Maher’s descriptions of Sarah Palin as a “twat”? Not really. Maher’s critics are going after him specifically because he used “bad words”. That is, in the context of Maher’s statement, if you removed the word “twat”, then there’s nothing that bad being said. Basically, Maher was making a joke about how Palin could confuse “tsunami” as the name of a country and want to invade it, and then said “Speaking of dumb twats…” as a transition. In this context, the function of “twat” is meant to convey dislike, disgust, and disapproval of her as a stupid person. If he had said, “Speaking of dumb people”, presumably there would be little offense, yet this is essentially what is meant by “dumb twat”—the word “twat” just emphasizes his dislike of Palin as a person. You could even argue that “twat” is meant to convey womanhood in some sense, so he essentially means “dumb woman that I dislike,” but that hardly means he thinks all women are as dumb as Palin.

Furthermore, Palin is a public figure, and well-known for gaffes that make her appear stupid or uneducated (for example, when asked in an interview what specific newspapers she read, a flustered Palin finally said she read them all). There is plenty of evidence to suggest she is a bit dim. Palin is also a well-known enemy of feminism, and hence of women’s rights in general. If anyone deserves to be called a twat or a cunt, it’s a public figure who constantly says stupid things and does not support women’s rights. In fact, Maher presumably calls her names like cunt and twat specifically because of her anti-woman positions when it comes to abortion and equality, so it is disingenuous to portray these remarks as attacks on all women. (Some feminists, I realize, may disagree that you can use these words in pro-women contexts, but I disagree with these criticisms that see words like “cunt” as unchanging platonic forms that cannot possibly be used in the ways we typically use other words—sarcastically, ironically, etc.—but let’s not get into that sinkhole of time and energy.)

So the problem with Maher is that he used naughty bad language against a well-known, demonstrably incompetent public figure because she stood against women’s rights and other reasonable causes. The problem with Limbaugh is different. He called a relatively unknown woman a whore without any good reason, in the context of an anti-women’s rights rant. He said she wants to be paid to have sex. When Maher called Palin a twat, he didn’t also describe her as a vagina, because he wasn’t trying to impugn her as a woman. Or in other words, Maher said a naughty word but didn’t mean anything offensive by it; Limbaugh didn’t say as naughty a word but meant something highly offensive by it.

And yes, Maher was not being anti-woman when he called Palin a twat. When I’m cut-off by someone while driving, I’ll frequently have an outburst like “Cocksucker!” This is not because I think sucking cocks is a terrible thing (in fact I think it is a wonderful gift). Nor is it meant to imply that only gay men or women who use their mouths for sexual pleasure are the types that would drive a car so badly. It’s simply an insult I blurt out at assholes who cut me off. It essentially means, “YOU ARE A HORRIBLE PERSON AND I HOPE CALAMITIES BEFALL YOU”, but is much easier to say than all that and has those nice, hard consonant sounds that make most insults sound so impressive and feel so good to say. This is the sense in which Maher is using a word like “twat”. This is NOT the sense in which Limbaugh was using the word “slut”, though, as he literally described Sandra Fluke as wanting to be paid to have sex, and he used other literal descriptors of her so-called sluttiness to malign this woman.

There’s nothing wrong with being a woman. In fact, there’s nothing wrong with being a slutty woman, or even with being a prostitute. However, Limbaugh’s remarks were meant to falsely tar a woman’s credibility by implying she had a lot of sex for money as she spoke out in favor of women’s rights. Maher was essentially just calling a politician with demonstrable ineptitude an idiot. Now, ask yourself, do you really want to say these are really examples of the same thing? Do you still want to point at the guy going 10 miles over the speed limit after you’ve been pulled over for drunk driving at 30 miles over the limit?

Review of Unedited Video Reveals He Was Just in a Deep Sleep

No, Wait – Okay, Yeah, He’s Actually Dead

No, Seriously

Andrew Breitbart—perhaps best known for unveiling Anthony Weiner’s penis to the world, helping to bring down ACORN, and for drunkenly shouting obscenities at you from a random podium that he’d brazenly overtaken—passed away yesterday, March 1, 2012, reportedly of natural causes.

Aside from his family, friends, and various sociopaths waving Ron Paul placards, it is hard to imagine many mourning his death. He was crude, crass, and willing to lie and deceive to further his vile agendas. He could be called the Libertarian version of Christopher Hitchens, except without Hitchens’ charm and wit and tolerance for alcohol. A small part of his legacy was his contribution to the development of the so-called “new media” of online news aggregators and blogs, but his larger legacy will no doubt be his role in the mainstreaming of deception in the media. That and his incoherent shouting.

Perhaps Breitbart’s greatest media accomplishment was helping to chop down ACORN before it could grow into an oak. He did so by publicizing heavily edited hidden video recordings of ACORN employees seemingly giving a prostitute (played by an actress) illegal financial and tax advice. Many of these videos, of course, show employees who are merely being sympathetic to an actress claiming to be an abused prostitute. At least one of the employees was saying deliberately absurd and verifiably untrue things because she realized she was being hoaxed by actors. (I believe she said she had killed her husband, chopped down a cherry tree, and laid golden eggs.) Another employee gave advice, but as soon as they left she immediately reported them to the police. Most importantly, ACORN as an institution did not help these actors in any way. Some of their individual employees only SEEMED to be doing so (often only because the videos were edited)—and ALL of these employees were fired, including the ones who probably didn’t deserve to be fired (like the woman who called the police). However, Breitbart released these heavily edited versions of these videos to the public and used them as examples of ACORN’s problems as an institution, rather than as the more truthful potential problems of a few employees. Funding for ACORN began to dry up as they gained negative media attention and the public began to believe the acronym stood for Accomplished Corrupt Orangutans Reading Newspapers—and there’s nothing the public hates more than educated orangutans—because, hey, it seemed like the public would believe anything Breitbart said about ACORN at this point. So what had started with an idiotic actor in a garish Halloween-style pimp suit and an actress pretending to be a prostitute secretly filming people without their permission turned into a video edited and disseminated by Breitbart to destroy ACORN.  Breitbart had harnessed his powers of deception to destroy an organization whose only fault was a few bad employee decisions among an organization that did overwhelming good to help the poor in matters of predatory lending, housing, disaster relief, and voter registration. So let’s check that scoreboard again: Asshole who deceives the media with edited videos and is essentially a worthless wart on the side of humanity: 1, Community organization that actually helped poor people and did way more good for society than Breitbart: 0.

With the success of his attack on ACORN, Breitbart naturally sought out other Left-leaning targets to destroy, as well as giving James O’Keefe, the idiot who secretly filmed ACORN employees, a larger national platform for more highly misleading secret videos in which he may or may not be wearing a ridiculous pimp hat. Breitbart’s next biggest conflict came with his allegations against Shirley Sherrod, though by this time the mainstream media had caught on to his deceptive tactics and unraveled his lies much more quickly. Sherrod worked for the USDA, and Breitbart had uncovered a video of her in which she appeared to be practicing the age-old conservative bugaboo of “reverse racism”—she appeared to be saying she would deny her services to a white farmer specifically because he was white. Once news of the scandal was revealed, Sherrod was forced to resign. However, after full, unedited versions of the video were released, it was quickly discovered that Sherrod was not being a reverse-racist or even a forward- or sideways-racist. In the rest of her talk on the video, she goes on to describe how it was wrong to feel that way, that it is her duty to help everyone in need—and indeed, the white farmers mentioned in the video even came forward to defend Sherrod and describe how she helped them.

With the Sherrod story blowing up in his face and his deceptive tactics being revealed so quickly on top of a defamation suit filed by Sherrod against him, Breitbart seemed to be quickly heading toward a future of obscurity inside the far-Right echo chamber, where only the most rabid and schizotypal of paranoid conservatives imagining attacking socialist Muslims everywhere would ever listen to him. That is, until Breitbart finally broke a story that actually turned out to be true, through some miraculous work of an improbable deity, no doubt.

Yes, Breitbart actually broke a “significant” (the story itself was not significant, but its results were) true story, and perhaps this is the one, barely legitimate reason you could ever call him a “journalist.” His one true story, of course, was about a topic of much more magnitude than a community organization aiding child prostitution or a government employee being reverse-racist. It was about the most important topic of them all: A congressman’s penis. Yes, Breitbart had reserved the one truthful bone in his body not for a story with actual real-world repurcussions, but to reveal a story that belonged right up there on the supermarket newsstands next to the article about celebrity cellulite pictures on the beach. The long story made short is that congressman Anthony Weiner had been sending pictures of his penis to various young women on Twitter. So far as we know, he did not have sex with any of them. He did not pay any of them to have sex with him. Unlike most Breitbart stories, this one seemed to be only a minor infraction, so one would think this would not result in any significant outcome—yet as with all Breitbart’s stories, the victim was destroyed, and Weiner ultimately decided to resign amidst the uproar that had spread even to his own party leaders.

In short, Breitbart’s political legacy has been the destruction of an overall force for good with trumped-up charges, the firing of a good USDA employee over out-of-context video, and the revelation that, yes, congressmen have penises, too, which somehow led to said congressman losing his job even though, technically, taking a picture of your junk is not a crime (whereas continually peddling lies to destroy organizations’ and people’s reputations IS a crime). He was a Libertarian whose main claims to fame involved hideous distortions to the news media.

But, seeing as how Breitbart just died, and for some reason it is a cultural norm to try to think of nice things to say about overall despicable people when this natural occurrence happens upon them, I suppose I will take this time to say one good thing about the man. He DID, after all, help to develop the Huffington Post and Drudge Report, which helped usher in the era of the new media. At least, this is the typical thing for which Breitbart is lauded amidst all of his disreputable credits elsewhere.

However, let us reflect on this influence in the new media. Earlier, I chastised Breitbart for promoting deception and lies in the media—but isn’t his involvement in the creation of things like the Huffington Post just as problematic on these grounds? The Huffington Post, after all, is not known for its objectivity or stellar reporting. In fact, one could see the rise of the Huffington Post, which was recently sold to AOL, as further promulgating the lack of objectivity and lack of rigorous reporting that has caused the prevalence of biased, deceptive media coverage at the expense of real journalism. While Arianna Huffington is collecting $315 million from AOL, her network of unpaid slave laborers write SEO-optimized nonsense without the means or incentives to do any investigative journalism aside from copying and pasting a New York Times article and changing a few verbs. And when it’s not rehashing news uncovered by actual reporters, the Huffington Post is giving a pedestal to New-Age cranks selling woo and alternative medicines that don’t work. In this new media, when news is broken, it is frequently the result of hidden cameras in a fake hooker’s cone-shaped brassiere whose footage is edited to make the story “pop.” So yes, let us reflect on the one “good” thing Breitbart did: and then suddenly realize it’s only one further link in the chain of his ultimate legacy of deception journalism.

So let’s not think too fondly of Breitbart, even in his death. He tried to destroy people who do good and he has proven to be a malign influence on the media. I’m not happy he collapsed this morning in Brentwood, California, yet I’m not quite sad, either.

Perhaps the biggest irony is that Breitbart, a self-described “Reagan Conservative” and critic of Obamacare, would be pronounced dead at the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center. What a fitting, symbolic end.