One of the most inexcusable problems with the modern press is that it collectively allows politicians and political parties who traffic in bullshit to do so unchecked. The whole idea of the Fourth Estate, the reason it’s specifically protected within the Constitution, is that it’s supposed to stand as a bulwark against leaders who would ostensibly lie their asses off to our faces if they could. These days, they can — and they know they can — because the media that’s supposed to protect us spend most of their time sleeping the day away under the guise of being fair and impartial. We see this constantly, most obviously whenever a news outlet simply parrots each side of the political debate rather than dissecting what’s being said to find out who the hell is telling the truth and who’s entirely full of shit.

Well, last night, as Josh Marshall over at TPM reports, something surprising and pretty impressive happened: CBS News’s Major Garrett called out the Republicans for trying to pull the wool over everybody’s eyes when it comes to the ridiculous ongoing non-story that is Benghazi. Last week, Republicans on the Hill breathlessly claimed to have found a smoking gun in their silly seven-month-long witch hunt aimed at hitting on something that would stick not only to President Obama but also to Hillary Clinton, who they know is likely going to clean their clocks in 2016. They claimed to have gotten access to a series of White House e-mails which showed that the talking points the Obama administration was going public with following the September attack had been edited and watered down in an effort to make the White House and the State Department look blameless leading up to the 2012 presidential election. Someone on the inside issued quotes to the press from these supposed e-mails and of course the political press — specifically ABC’s Jonathan Karl — being the lapdogs that they are, ran with them. The result was that, yes, the GOP looked like it was kind of right all along and the White House was hiding something.

Here’s the thing, though: The actual e-mails were released a couple of days ago, and — surprise, surprise — it turns out the Republicans had exaggerated what was in them to the point of just about creating an entirely fictional narrative. The gambit the GOP was engaging in by “leaking” the e-mails to the press was the height of political cynicism: It knew that what matters is what’s reported first, that corrections generally don’t even happen and when they do no one really pays much attention since the damage is already done. It’s impossible to un-ring the bell when you’re talking about people frothing at the mouth to believe anything negative about Barack Obama and his administration. With that in mind, the press often just stays quiet, even with the sudden uncovering of new revelations, and lets the original narrative stay in place because, well, what the hell.

Last night, though, Major Garrett reported on the information in the real White House e-mails, the information that proves that what was leaked last week — likely by a Republican staffer who’d only taken a brief look at the e-mails and was quoting them from “memory” — was mostly nonsense. The reality of what the White House was saying in the communications about Benghazi was nowhere near as damning or damaging as the right would have you believe. This should come as no surprise at all, given that these days the Republicans are the party of birth certificates, and teleprompter jokes, and straight-faced claims that Benghazi was worse than 9/11 and a non-scandal at the IRS is an impeachable offense that makes Watergate and Teapot Dome look like a pair of free tickets to a ball game provided to the local police chief, and on and on and on.

CBS did something that should be standard for any news organization, but which, let’s face it, isn’t these days. So good for Major Garrett and good for CBS. If more journalists followed their lead, the political hucksters of today’s Republican party would be forced to clean up their acts or go out of business.

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Among the minor media ventures I’ve dabbled in over the past couple of years to keep me from being evicted from my apartment have been a few stints on reality TV shows. No, I don’t fluff the ladies of Ru Paul’s Drag Race or sell my soul by greasing the idiocy of The Real Housewives of Wherever-the-Hell so that it can more easily slip into your home and poison the minds of your family. But, yes, I do have some experience putting together the relatively cheap programming that claims to be unscripted and otherwise “real” and I can therefore confirm your suspicions that this description isn’t entirely true. While most reality shows aren’t start-to-finish bullshit — although there are definitely a few that come close — many are the product of a lot of behind-the-scenes cunning by mischievous producers and clever editors who determine based on the material they have what they want the narrative to be and then massage the action to make it so. I’m not exactly giving away state secrets by divulging this, by the way; any astute viewer can pretty much figure out what’s completely for real and what’s been slightly adjusted.

Knowing this, though, and being acutely aware of some of the go-to tools in the reality TV bag of tricks, I tend to pick apart every reality show I watch, wondering what if anything was fudged and how it might have been done. That’s why, as I sat there last night watching the episode of Kitchen Nightmares that everyone’s having a blast talking about right now, I looked hard for something, anything that might let me know that what I was witnessing was fake. I actually wanted it to be phony. I didn’t want to believe that people like Amy and Samy Bouzaglo actually existed, except in the fevered mind of a reality show producer, who dreamt them up as pure 14-karat TV gold. Alas, apparently Amy and Samy are for real. Which means that the world is a shittier and stupider place than even I had imagined.

If you haven’t yet seen the show I’m referring to, do yourself a favor, drop everything you’re doing, and watch it immediately; it’s once-in-a-lifetime viewing. You all know how I feel about meme culture and what I think it’s doing to our sanity and intelligence as a nation, but social media hyper-connectivity was made for something like this. I’m terrified at the prospect of the Bouzaglos becoming celebrities — the objects of morning show fawning and maybe even the stars of a couple-you-love-to-hate show of their own — but for now the nationwide shaming these two idiots are being subjected to is the internet at its best.

If the 42 minutes of remorseless hostility, abuse of customers and employees, unethical business practices, and flat-out bug-eyed crazy on Kitchen Nightmares didn’t convince you that Amy Bouzaglo needs to be forcibly removed from society before she kills somebody and Samy Bouzaglo needs a serious lesson on the difference between a trophy wife and one that barely qualifies as an “honorable mention,” then their two-person crusade against the entire internet absolutely will. What began a couple of days ago with a damn-near-psychopathic, all-caps-locked lashing out against the “haters, bullies, and liars” who’d been bombarding them with bad Yelp reviews — and ridicule since the show aired — has degenerated into a full-on meltdown of biblical proportions. There’s been the invoking of God, threats to call the FBI, bullshit claims their restaurant’s Facebook page was hacked, and, now, even an online battle with Patton Oswalt. (Patton’s Twitter bio jokingly reads: “Mr. Oswalt is a former wedding deejay from Northern Virginia,” which Amy apparently fell for completely and attempted to mock accordingly when Patton got in on the feeding frenzy.)

Basically, while Gordon Ramsay may have walked off his own show for the first time in almost a hundred episodes, the saga of Amy’s Baking Company and its beaver-shit crazy proprietors was a dream come true for the producers of Kitchen Nightmares, the kind of reality TV fodder they go to sleep at night praying for. But what happened on TV was obviously just the beginning. What’s happened since provides a flawless example of how not to handle internet criticism and how fucked you are these days if, as a business owner, you happen to be a breathtakingly arrogant control freak who’s become far too used to keeping a tight leash on everyone around you. If you believe that you can run, say, a restaurant like a mental hospital, as Samy Bouzaglo and his Bride of Frankenuts mistakenly believe, regular customers — and potential joiners-in — now have the ability to bring you down a few dozen notches. And that’s putting it mildly.

What the Redditors, Yelpers, Farkers, 4Chaners, and general merry misanthropes of the internet are now doing is making life a living hell for Crazy Amy and Psycho Sam. If you haven’t been keeping up, because as usual it’s moving at a lightning-fast pace, in addition to the predictable vicious and comical “reviews” that have been piling up there, there have been pictures of various kinds of animal shit and cat remains posted to Amy’s Baking Company’s Yelp page (the latter because of one of the most, um, “revealing” comments made by Amy during the show, about her supposedly having “three little boys trapped inside cat bodies”). Meanwhile, for a time somebody had redirected the business’s web address to a White House petition to have Amy Bouzaglo committed, and the Reddit community went digging and uncovered what appears to be a felony credit card fraud conviction in Amy’s past. The couple says that because of the attention, which, let’s face it, they kind of brought on themselves, they’re now getting death threats. That obviously hasn’t stopped them from responding with even more of the vitriol and insanity that was on grand display during their Kitchen Nightmares appearance.

What any idiot knows in the era of social media is that you don’t feed the trolls and you absolutely don’t go out of your way to antagonize the Redditors. They will fucking eat you alive. And that’s exactly what they’re doing to Amy and Samy Bouzaglo. The internet denizens are an uncontrollable bunch; they’ll tear you to pieces even if you leave them alone, but they’ll absolutely eviscerate you if you go out of your way to bleed in the water.

It takes a special kind of delusional psychopath to think he or she can take on the internet and win. Of course, in case it’s not already glaringly obvious by now, Amy Bouzaglo and her husband are very special delusional psychopaths indeed. And yeah, it looks like they’re as real as reality TV gets.

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Yes, I’m a man, ergo my first reaction was to wonder whether I should have a brief moment of silence for the loss of a true God-given treasure to all of humanity. Thankfully, though, that only lasted a second, and then I remembered my mother and what she went through only a couple of years ago, and I considered just the kind of value our culture places on a woman’s breasts, particularly a celebrity’s — and that’s why I now stand in awe of what Angelina Jolie did.

Chances are by now you know, thanks to an incredibly moving op-ed she wrote for today’s New York Times, that Jolie recently underwent an elective double mastectomy. The reason for the surgery, as she ably describes, is that she carries a faulty gene known as BRCA1, which sharply increases her risk of developing breast cancer. What kind of danger has she been in all this time? an 87-percent chance of being diagnosed. It’s daunting and chilling to hear it put so simply: Angelina Jolie, one of the world’s most famous and most beautiful women, was almost certainly going to make headlines at some point in her life for having to face down one of the world’s most frightening killers of women. And so, in order to prevent that from happening, she made a decision I can’t even imagine. She had both of her breasts removed.

Yes, we treat a woman’s breasts as a kind of currency in our culture, but that’s multiplied exponentially when we’re talking about an actress, singer, or any other sort of celebrity. There’s simply no denying that while her abilities as an actor are extraordinary and should never be diminished, Angelina Jolie’s fame came not simply from those abilities but from her face, her body, her sexuality. Maybe that’s not what she wanted to be known for, but that’s the way it worked. I’m not exactly breaking any new ground — and I certainly don’t mean to take a sexist or merely flippant tone — but Jolie’s breasts have been an object of lust for men everywhere since she first broke big with 1998′s Gia. There’s no doubt that Jolie understands this, that her body has been, in the eyes of the vultures in Hollywood, public property and something that has the ability to sell as many tickets as her clout as an Oscar-winner.

But while people may have reveled in looking at her breasts — making her the subject of both desire and jealousy — and Hollywood may have believed them to have price tags attached, nobody but Angelina Jolie was going to have to stare down death for the sake of them as they’ve existed all this time. And so she took what she believed was the only recourse she had, a decision I have no doubt was gut-wrenching to make. On the surface the debate may have seemed like one between her womanhood and her life, but as she alludes to in her op-ed, the courage it took to assume control of both her body and her future may be the most “womanly” thing she’s ever done.

A couple of years back, my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. She underwent a mastectomy. Reading Angelina Jolie’s description of what she’s had to go through — the decision, the surgery, the reconstruction, which I know for a fact is excruciatingly painful, the initial recovery, even her own mother’s battle with cancer — it all brought back memories of watching what my mom had to go through, what I was there night and day for, trying to help her navigate. I know it ate her alive having to make that choice — the one that given her situation wasn’t really a choice — and then having to live with the results. And she’s in her late-60s. And she didn’t have considerations like the kind Jolie had. And Jolie made the decision preventatively. Again, it’s something I simply cannot imagine having the guts to do, even to potentially save my own life because there’s always the fact that that breast cancer is only “potential.”

My mother is alive today, thankfully, because removing her breast stopped the cancer that almost certainly would have taken her from us. If she had known in advance that there was even a chance she’d have to endure something that nearly killed her, I wonder if she would’ve made the decision that Angelina Jolie made years ago. My mother’s an incredibly strong woman, but I have no idea if she would have or could have gone through with it. I have no doubt, though, that Jolie’s family understands and is incredibly grateful for what she did. I’m sure the most important thing in their eyes is that she’s simply there. That she stays around and they don’t have to watch her try to fight off death. Her risk of developing breast cancer is now a mere 5-percent.

I’m sure her family thinks the surgery was worth it. I’m sure Angelina thinks that as well. Screw what anybody else thinks.

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Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A popular comic is under fire in a heated controversy involving the use of rape jokes in stand-up comedy. This probably sounds familiar if your short-term memory goes at least as far back as last July, when Daniel Tosh faced a giant helping of righteous indignation following a confrontation with a heckler at a comedy club in which he apparently made a crack about her being raped. There were calls for Tosh to be fired from his job at Comedy Central and essentially run out of popular culture on a rail, and a debate began over whether rape should ever be joked about and, if so, how to do it and how not to. At the time it felt like it was all anybody was talking about, due largely to the social media outrage machine that ramps up every time anybody gets offended in this country these days, but the respectful debate over what could and couldn’t be mined by comics for humor wasn’t necessarily a bad one.

But now comes this: Patton Oswalt is being raked over the coals by a very vocal faction of the feminist media community for his position, once again, on rape jokes. Now if you’re saying to yourself at this very moment, “Wait, Patton? But he doesn’t make rape jokes and, besides, he’s one of the funniest people in America and someone who consistently comes off as a genuinely good guy,” you should probably know that the controversy this time isn’t like those that came before it. It all stems from an opinion piece that ran late last week over at Salon — a site that’s become the premier destination for outrage porn on the internet — written by a political writer and small-time New York City comic named Molly Knefel. In “The Rape-Joke Double Standard” — and I can’t blame you if you begin rubbing your temples now — Knefel laments the fact that Oswalt eloquently spoke out following the Boston Marathon bombing but supposedly can’t be bothered to raise his respected voice in defense of the millions of women who’ve been sexually assaulted in this country. So, yeah, her disappointment in Patton Oswalt isn’t the result of something he said but something he didn’t say. Because that’s where we are now.

Patton tried to respond respectfully but tersely, in a way that didn’t give the growing chorus of perpetually aggrieved Twitter and Tumblr enthusiasts any ammunition or even the dignity of believing that their argument held much water. But it was obvious he was pissed — and he had every right to be. True, he defended Daniel Tosh last year when a third-hand description of what had happened in a comedy club between Tosh and an offended audience-member hit the internet and started an avalanche of indignation that had the potential to threaten the Comedy Central host’s job. But what Patton was speaking up about at the time was Tosh’s right to say what he did in the context of a comedy show; he was commenting on the chilling effect it could have on comedy in general if comics suddenly lived in fear of the reaction they might get to potentially offensive material, since comedy is often about confronting uncomfortable subjects and because humor itself is so subjective. Either way, to criticize someone like Patton Oswalt because he was moved enough by one despicable and violent act to offer his thoughts on it but, supposedly, wasn’t just as moved to offer thoughts just as affecting and powerful on another issue involving despicable violence is ludicrous. And that’s what Molly Knefel seems to be saying: that Patton is missing out on an opportunity — and, I suppose, shirking his responsibility — to effect real positive change simply by remaining quiet; he’s, I guess, proverbially allowing evil to triumph by doing nothing.

Since Knefel is a quasi-professional comedian, I won’t say she’s entirely unfunny — I haven’t actually seen or heard her stuff — but you still have someone telling one of the funniest people in America how to be funny and concern trolling him over his supposed cultural negligence in not taking the public stand she feels he should take on an issue that’s important to her. It’s Patton Oswalt’s job to be funny. And he’s incredible at it. It’s not his job to be an outspoken crusader for women’s rights and against sexual violence — and the fact that he’s not an outspoken crusader for women’s rights and against sexual violence doesn’t mean he’s a bad person or that, through his silence, he’s endorsing rape and denouncing women’s sexual sovereignty or anything else that’s pro-woman. It’s not his fucking responsibility to use his microphone like a weapon in the war to end atrocities committed against women by assholes — and it’s wrong to give him an oversized ration of crap for not speaking out on one particular serious subject just because you happen to think that it’s a subject that requires his immediate attention.

In the wake of the Knefel piece, Patton’s been subjected to the wrath of Lindy West of Jezebel — because, of course — who wrote a lengthy “Open Letter To White Male Comedians” excoriating comics who don’t deal in the kind of humor she would ostensibly not be irritated by. (West, by the way, famously wrote the most widely circulated of the many insufferable pieces in the wake of the Tosh miasma lecturing comics on “how to make a rape joke”; she was also behind an essay called, “Hey, Men, I’m Funnier Than You,” so you have a pretty good idea where she’s coming from.) He’s also been bombarded with tweets from Tiger Beatdown’s Sady Doyle — who for some reason is incapable of referring to men as anything other than “dudes” — letting him know that the reason he’s being criticized is that he’s “on the wrong side of an issue.” (Doyle went on to provide everyone with a list of “#goodcomics,” in other words ones she feels show proper deference to, and genuflection before, the god of her very specific brand of feminism.) Meanwhile, again, all he did was not use his public forum in a way someone decided for him that he should. Molly Knefel wrote a piece out of the blue and drew Patton Oswalt into a mini-maelstrom over — nothing.

Here’s where I say something that shouldn’t need to be said because, as with Patton Oswalt, silence shouldn’t be interpreted as a lack of human decency, but these days you have to fill in every blank lest you be misconstrued: Rape is wrong, period. It’s a sickening and contemptible act and there’s never any excuse or justification for it. It’s also a difficult subject to even broach and if you’re going to try to use it in a way that’s darkly humorous you’d better know going into it that you’re walking on very thin ice. There’s almost nothing in this world that can’t be mined for comedy in the hands of someone who’s truly talented, but a joke involving sexual assault of any kind is the sort of thing that’s just about guaranteed to offend somebody. That said, no one gets to decide for me or anyone else what is and isn’t funny and what I or anyone else can and can’t laugh at. That’s the nature of comedy. Likewise, laughing at a well-done crack involving even a sensitive subject like rape doesn’t make somebody a troglodyte or a despicable monster out to oppress women.

Patton Oswalt didn’t do a damn thing wrong. He’s a comic. He believes in being funny. He believes in doing whatever’s necessary to ensure that he and other comics like him — male and female — continue to have the freedom to take chances when it comes to being funny, because humor is so subjective and, one more time, no one has the right to tell somebody else — or to dictate as the voice of an entire culture and for the alleged benefit of society as a whole — what is or isn’t funny, what can and can’t be poked fun at as long as there’s no genuine malice intended. Patton’s history as a comic is one of brilliance, insight, and, yes, a lack of malice toward anyone; what Molly Knefel did to him was cheap and unfair and the only person it should make look bad is her. Maybe her intentions were pure, but as she so piously lectures Patton on, intentions mean shit.

Last night, my girlfriend and I sat on the couch and watched Louie CK’s live show from New York City’s Beacon Theater. It’s well-established that Louie is beloved by the people who traditionally raise hell over the use of rape jokes; he’s both the go-to defense for those who make audacious jokes that fall flat and the example used by the perpetually offended of how to do a joke “right,” because, yes, he’s just that good. It’s fair to say that not everyone can walk the kind of comedic tightrope Louie does, but it’s also obvious that Louie’s given a hell of a lot of leeway by the Molly Knefels and Lindy Wests of the world because a lot of his jokes defer to the feminist model embraced by them. While he’s hilarious, Louie does openly genuflect before the god of indignant feminism by doing bits like the one in which he says that men are the biggest threat on Earth to women; that’s music to the ears of the Jezebel staff, proof of him “getting it” simply by seeing things their way.

What’s interesting, though, is that at the end of the Beacon special, Louie dedicated the show to the great Patrice O’Neal, who died a year-and-a-half ago. For the unfamiliar, Patrice reveled in a complete lack of paralysis over whether he appeared sexist or racist or generally misanthropic. The result was dangerous, exhilarating comedy. In his last special, Patrice grilled the audience on why it wasn’t okay for men to sexually harass women at work; he called it unfair and said that all you’re doing by stopping men from commenting on how a woman looks is turning down the volume on thoughts you know are there. Louie was a fan of Patrice’s because Patrice was always willing to “go there,” to gleefully be “wrong.” He was unafraid, and while that didn’t on its own make him a brilliant comic, it’s what gave him the opportunity to be a brilliant comic. That’s an opportunity worth protecting. Louie believes it. Patton believes it.

But I’m still trying to figure out what it was that Patton did to earn him an internet chastising anyway. From what I can see, he did nothing — and I guess these days that in itself is enough for somebody to get pissed over.

(There’s now a quick follow-up to this piece here.)

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Well, that took even less time than I expected.

Yesterday, on the weekly “Bob & Chez Show After Party” that I do with Bob Cesca, I made a prediction that really wasn’t a prediction at all since it relied on nothing more than a quick examination of the past rather than any sort of supernatural knowledge of the future. We had already been introduced, just a couple of days previously, to Charles Ramsey, a man who was being hailed as a hero for helping to rescue three young women who’d been held captive in his neighbor’s Cleveland home — what turned out to be a literal house of horrors — for ten years. We’d also been treated to, to put it mildly, a colorful interview from Ramsey, whose tale of how the rescue unfolded involved McDonald’s, eating ribs with the seemingly benign neighbor, shock at the balls on that guy, and the “dead giveaway” that something was wrong next door when a pretty young white girl ran to him, a black man, looking for help. But that wasn’t going to be the end of the story, the Charles Ramsey story, I mean. Not if you know anything at all about how fame works in the age of social media.

Now let’s follow the timeline: The rescue and Ramsey interview happened on Monday afternoon. By Tuesday morning, Ramsey was already a viral superstar, his interview actually eclipsing, at some media outlets, the horrific ordeal of the women he’d helped save. In maybe 18 hours, Ramsey’s refreshing straightforwardness had made him even more of a hero than he would’ve been had he just pulled Amanda Berry to safety. If you couldn’t see what was almost certainly coming next, you’re living under a rock — or at least without an internet connection: By yesterday morning, the Gregory Brothers, America’s premiere YouTube autotuners had turned Charles Ramsey’s interview into a song, officially allowing him to take his place alongside Antoine Dodson, Sweet Brown, and Kai the impossibly stoned hatchet-wielding hitchhiker. Charles Ramsey had become a full-fledged meme, the latest all-consuming media culture fascination in a media culture that’s now nothing but fascinations like this. America is now a Meme Nation.

Warhol’s prescience, these days, seems otherworldly.

But you have to follow the pattern and if you did yesterday afternoon, you already knew what was about to happen. Not long ago, it might’ve taken days and even weeks for the next stage in the reality TV/social media celebrity cycle to make its inevitable presence known. This time around it took hours. My prediction yesterday at 3pm PST? That we’d learn something terrible about Charles Ramsey, that one news outlet or another would dig up something on him that would tarnish his heroic image. There would be a backlash, because there’s always a backlash. We build up our idols then tear them down. As it turns out, right as I was talking about what was surely to come, it was already happening — The Smoking Gun was publishing a piece that delved into Ramsey’s past and showed him to have a history of domestic abuse. Think about it: In the eyes of at least some people, those who likely wouldn’t be willing to overlook a violent past, Charles Ramsey had gone from hero to villain in less than 48 hours.

This is who we are now. 24 hour news cycles. 140 character attention spans. An entire national narrative is born, grows big and strong, then withers and dies in two days.

Now granted, thankfully in the case of Charles Ramsey there are plenty of people who are still so caught up in viewing him as a hero that they’re not willing to allow that image to be sacrificed on the altar of our cultural capriciousness. Ramsey claims that it’s his criminal past that made him the kind of man who’s willing to get involved and help someone in need rather than simply looking the other way. The narrative takes a detour and Ramsey doesn’t just become a good guy with a great sense of humor and a plainspoken demeanor that the media eat up; he’s also a redemption story, the tale of a once-bad guy made good.

At least for now. Because there could easily be another twist left in the story of Charles Ramsey.

But it had better happen soon, since by this time next week he could be a distant memory to us. Our rapid-fire culture will have moved on to something else. Some other fixation. Some other celebrity we created, hailed, viewed with suspicion, then maybe forgot about in just 48 hours.

Of course if Ramsey is as decent and humble a guy as he seems, that could be just the way he wants it.

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It’s occasionally difficult coming up with something to write about, a subject worth turning into a full column here. I generally publish four pieces a week at The Daily Banter along with several other smaller posts over at my own site, Deus Ex Malcontent, and I can’t lie and say that I’m always inspired to go on a tear or provide some insight into a subject I care deeply about. Sometimes I just have to wing it.

Thankfully, there are two topics that never let me down when I need something to write about, two subjects that are always there for me that I can count on to be amusing or infuriating enough to be able to turn into decent copy. One is, of course, CNN, because you can practically set your watch by the network doing something really inexcusably stupid; the other is the entirely predictable outrage from the professional left over one silly thing or another. To wit, today — when both of these favorite topics are coming through for me like gangbusters.

Live From Right Over Here

Years ago, when I was still doing local news, there were plenty of times when our crews would be forced to pull a little sleight-of-hand during live shots. Because of a lack of resources, and sometimes satellite time and such, our team coverage would occasionally be nothing more than a couple of people plugged into the same truck, just positioned on different sides of it so that the shots would look different and maybe, if you were lucky, you could make a two-box work during the setup or the toss from one reporter to another. Yeah, maybe it was fudging, but it was necessary and it looked good on television. Believe me, local TV is more “theater of the mind” than you’d expect; you have no idea the kind of nonsense that goes into putting together your average 5 o’clock newscast. Whether or not it’s ethical behavior, I’ll let you decide. My check cleared every two weeks so after a while I just shrugged and went with it, sometimes even patting myself on the back for my ability to pass the nightly news Kobayashi Maru.

Here’s the thing, though: That was local. Like I said, there were resource and budget constraints to consider and that forced you to have to cheat a little here and there. CNN Center in Atlanta, however, is the world’s largest ATM; under no circumstances should the network ever have to resort to the most ridiculous forms of local news trickery and when it does, it deserves to be roundly mocked for it. Case in point: the instantly infamous conversation that happened yesterday morning live on CNN’s air between Nancy Grace and Ashleigh Banfield.

Now right off the bat I could excoriate CNN, and I have in the past, for its indefensible irresponsibility in continuing to give Nancy Grace a forum on its air. The woman is a despicably unscrupulous monster, a shameless, arrogant, damn-near sociopathic peddler of cheap prurience who’s already killed one woman who hadn’t been officially accused of anything and who went on to put the lives of those involved in the acquittal of Casey Anthony in jeopardy, all in the name of lining her own pockets and increasing her own visibility. She has no place being on CNN or any network associated with it. She’s an embarrassment to respectable journalism and to decent society in general and she should probably be facing criminal charges rather than holding court nightly on a national news network.

That aside, that moment of “d’oh” yesterday came when alert viewers noticed that Grace and Ashleigh Banfield, during coverage of the Cleveland kidnapping rescue that saw them having a live back-and-forth with each other in the kind of two-box I mentioned earlier, were actually reporting from the exact same parking lot. The Atlantic published what may have been the first piece on it, pointing out the comical stupidity of CNN trying to put one over on its audience when it was obvious by the traffic passing behind both shots at nearly the same time that Grace and Banfield weren’t more than a 50 or so feet apart from each other. It doesn’t sound like that big a deal until you actually watch these two try to pretend that they’re on opposites sides of the city of Phoenix (where they were actually covering the Jodi Arias trial, by the way). All Banfield had to do was walk a few steps over to Grace’s position and they could’ve been on the same camera together, but somebody thought it was a good idea to try to fake it — and the result was the kind of thing The Daily Show often does as a joke.

But this isn’t The Daily Show we’re talking about. As the promos so often remind us, this is CNN. Although it’s getting harder and harder to tell the difference.

Bottom line: Another day, another vaudevillian-level CNN fuck-up.

The Onion Makes Everyone Cry

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but The Onion has managed to piss of a very vocal portion of the feminist media community. I’m sure your psychic wounds, along with those of the rest of our shattered nation, are only now beginning to heal in the wake of the satire site’s tweet-heard-round-the-world during the Oscars, the one that made an admittedly blistering statement about how our culture cuts apart and tears down female celebrities by jokingly calling nine-year-old actress Quvenzhané Wallis a cunt. Hopefully, a lot of intensive therapy has helped you to put the damage caused by reading that tweet behind you and I surely hope I’m not, through the unfortunate use of trigger words, bringing it all flooding back. If you need to take a few minutes to walk away, lest your PTSD start to kick up, then please feel free to do that. Remember, only together can we get through this. “2/24: Never Forget.” That day, we were all Quvenzhané Wallis.

This time, The Onion’s target was Chris Brown, who you, as a decent human being, know as an unapologetic, woman-beating dickhead, but who legions of his simple-minded jack-off fans think is a seductively romantic and profoundly tortured genius. It’s with this latter delusion in mind that The Onion proceeded to eviscerate Brown in a way he so richly deserves and as only The Onion can. If you haven’t read the story it posted on him yesterday, here it is in its entirely — because it really can’t be appreciated any other way:

LOS ANGELES—After revealing yesterday that he had recently split up with longtime girlfriend Rihanna, a heartbroken Chris Brown tearfully told reporters that he always thought the 25-year-old singer was going to be the woman he’d beat to death one day. ‘Despite all the ups and downs, I was so sure Rihanna was the one I’d take by the throat one day and fatally assault, and even toward the end I continued to hold out hope that we’d be together until the day she died at my hands from blunt-force trauma,’ Brown, 24, said in a radio interview this week, telling DJs he still has abusive feelings for his ex-flame and is hopeful that he might punch her again one day. ‘It’s hard knowing that there’s some other guy out there who gets to beat her senseless. In fact, for all I know, there might be someone out there assaulting her right now. And let me tell you, that guy is the luckiest guy in the world.’ A saddened Brown added that, should the couple not reconcile, he remains confident that the special someone he was meant to beat to death is still out there for him, and when he finds her, he’ll waste no time in slapping her.

Now, considering that everything you just read was aimed squarely at Chris Brown and Chris Brown only — and again reminding you, because it should never be forgotten, that Brown is a raging asshole who should at this very moment be getting the shit kicked out of him by the Sisters in the laundry room at Shawshank in preparation for the forcible anal penetration to come — you’d think pro-women advocates would be cheering the staff of The Onion. You would unfortunately be wrong, though. That’s because if there’s one thing we’ve learned from our insufferable social media Age of Outrage, it’s that there are some subjects that simply cannot be the subject of biting satire, no matter whom that very nasty bite is being taken out of.

From Jessica Valenti, to the Feminist Magazine, to the Global Fund for Women, to someone who simply suggested that “The Onion can go to hell,” a certain segment of the feminist media intelligentsia — though not a large one, to be fair — came out of the woodwork yesterday to sanctimoniously chastise a website whose smart humor and acid tongue almost never misfire. There was the usual indignation over the mere possibility that someone already victimized by literal abuse might be victimized all over again by what they interpreted as figurative abuse; the lectures on how unfunny the subject The Onion was viciously parodying really was (as if the site’s editors didn’t know this and that wasn’t the whole point); the allegations that there are some subjects which are simply too sensitive to even try to use to make a humorous point.

First of all, as a commenter to my site yesterday said, as a rule while everyone’s entitled to his or her opinion, unfunny people don’t get to tell truly funny people how to be funny. The Onion is generally masterful in its satire and it takes a willingness to never hold back — to always be ready to “go there” — to create the kind of vital social commentary it so often does. There’s nothing more ridiculous than having to explain the joke, but the incidents of it being necessary these days in order to avoid the call-out culture and outrage machine winding up seem to be getting closer and closer together. In this case, it’s precisely because Chris Brown continues to see himself as both a sexy, gentlemanly lover of women and the pitiable victim of a public witch-hunt — the true victim in the Rihanna beating episode — that The Onion’s attack on him is so incisive and so satisfying. Also keep in mind: There are women out there who still love this asshole, who do buy into his self-pity party and consider him a misunderstood artist, and that’s where The Onion piece acts as a kind of brilliantly worded warning masquerading as humor.

What the writers at The Onion did, as usual, was take down a cultural target that deeply deserved it. And while the overall subject is one that really isn’t at all funny, they managed to do it with almost no collateral damage. For that, as usual, they deserve applause, not condemnation.

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My favorite thing of the day comes courtesy of a friend of mine who, through what I’d imagine is a little bit of amusing skulduggery, gained a window into the barely functional brain of InfoWars “reporter” Dan Bidondi. You’ll remember Bidondi as the doughy doofus who subverted the vital question-and-answer portion of a press conference held in the immediate aftermath of the Boston Marathon attack by bombarding the governor of Massachusetts with lunatic nonsense about “false flag” terrorism and the ways in which the government was supposedly planning to hijack our precious civil liberties. You’ll also remember that not long after that circus act was broadcast on national television, a Boston resident recorded himself verbally abusing poor, dumb Bidondi in an act of heroism by a private citizen not seen since, I don’t know, maybe United flight 93.

Well, a couple of days ago, it seems that Bidondi posted a rambling status update to his personal Facebook page, one that could be seen only by his friends, in which he melodramatically casts himself as the lonely warrior standing defiantly on the bridge and single-handedly fighting off the hoards of Clusium like Horatius. The man who suffers so that we can live freely. Not the hero America deserves, but the one it needs. Our silent protector. Our Dark Knight.

Try not to shed a tear as you read — or at least try to decipher — the following. Consider this whole thing one big “sic.”

WANT EVERYONE TO KNOW! What we do at Infowars is no joke and we are not out just to get ratings..
I am not allowed to see my child no more, I am banned from my former stations, I lost half of my family & friends, all because I stood up against the criminals in our Government at the Boston Bombing Press Conference. I sacrificed allot to bring people the truth and wake them up. Just like our Founding Fathers where called lunatics, conspiracy theorist, terrorist, all because we care for our Country and our future! I too had to make that sacrifice just as they did and most of all just as Yeshua (jesus) did to bring truth to the world.
God bless and I am 100% full in to bringing the New World Order down!
- Dan Bidondi

You should know that the above quote looks like a fucking pinball machine on my computer screen there are so many colors indicating typos and grammatical mistakes all over it.

Given that I have a four-year-old daughter — who’s already better-educated and more literate than Dan Bidondi, by the way — what stuck out to me first about this little cry of defiant martyrdom was of course Bidondi’s claim that he’s not allowed to see his child “no more.” Yes, it’s easy to look at this as not simply a positive but as a downright necessity for society; it’s scary enough that Bidondi figured out how to procreate and then found someone willing to allow him the opportunity to, but at the very least we can seemingly be safe in the knowledge that his paranoid psychosis won’t be passed along to the next generation directly via his paternal influence. That said, I can’t help but feel a little sorry for Bidondi. Only someone truly mentally unbalanced would choose jousting at imaginary windmills over being with his own kid, and for taking advantage of Bidondi’s gullibility, stupidity, and feelings of detachment I blame his mentor, Alex Jones, and Alex Jones alone.

I’ve used this analogy before, and I’ve already referenced The Dark Knight once in this column, but I still can’t get over how perfectly it fits: Early in his rise to the top of the sociopathic conspiracy theory dung heap, Jones stylized himself as Heath Ledger’s Joker, presumably because he considered himself some sort of agent of chaos trying to bring down the established order. But really, if you follow the narrative of the movie, he had and continues to have something else in common with the Joker: He exploits the mentally unhinged and otherwise weak-minded to do his bidding. He’s their master and they’re his always-willing servants. Thing is, Jones has fashioned his paranoid mania into a commercial industry and he’s the one raking in the cash at the top of the pyramid. I can’t imagine a bottom-tier clown like Dan Bidondi is making a hearty living out of all this, not when he’s trying so hard to justify both to others and himself how much he’s selflessly sacrificing in the name of making the ridiculous statement he feels needs to be made.

I’ve also said more than once that the world of the conspiracy theory is where ignorance and arrogance meet, and we see that proven flawlessly in Dan Bidondi’s lament. He genuinely believes he’s in the company of the founding fathers and Jesus by speaking truth to power; he’s a barely literate dimwit who comforts himself with delusions not just of government conspiracies but of his own grandeur and brilliance in being privy to their existence, to the reality that no one else seems to see. It’s the classic behavior of, at best, the loser outcast who ironically wallows in what he believes is his own unappreciated genius, and, at worst, a paranoid schizophrenic.

I don’t pretend to be an expert on mental health issues, but I just can’t imagine Bidondi coming around on his own and finally realizing that what he’s given up everything in his life for is utter bullshit. He’s simply too far gone. But while I do actually feel a little sad for him, because he’s just that dumb, that doesn’t by any means mitigate the damage he’s causing by doing Alex Jones’s bidding and circulating this crap. He’s hurting people — victims of the Boston Marathon bombing, for example — and he’s hurting the truth, which is, in the grand scheme, even more important. He’ll never be talked out of his delusions. He’ll never believe what he sees right in front of his face. No evidence in the world will convince him he’s lost his fucking mind.

He’ll just keep right on fighting for what he thinks is the real story that’s being kept from all of us, regardless of the fact that that real story is only in that pea-sized brain inside his thick, dopey head.

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How often have we seen this back-and-forth before: a shock comic says something offensive; somebody gets offended; somebody else asks everyone what the offended party expected, given that the offensive thing was said by a shock comic; a bunch of other people chime in to say that this isn’t a very good argument and that just because somebody’s made a career out of being offensive it doesn’t make it right? I’ve been at the center of this kind of battle more than once, usually being the one who reminds people that someone paid to push the boundaries of good taste and social decorum is going to do just that; if you don’t appreciate that kind of thing then simply don’t watch or listen. Turn the other way and go about your business.

When this kind of conundrum really becomes interesting, though, is when the people who actually pay someone who’s known for being offensive suddenly respond with surprise that the person they’re paying does something that’s offensive. One of my favorite recent examples of this was Aflac’s decision to fire Gilbert Gottfried back in March of 2011. Gottfried had been doing the voice of that annoying duck in Aflac’s commercials without issue, but that changed when he decided to tweet a series of brutal — but damn funny — jokes about the Japanese earthquake and tsunami almost immediately after it happened. Basically, Aflac had hired one of the most gleefully loutish comedians in America to voice its mascot, then reacted with shock when he was, you know, gleefully loutish — and on his own time, speaking for himself and not as a representative of the company he shrieked one word for in its TV ads.

But the Gottfried incident doesn’t even come close to what Mountain Dew just did. It hired a group of guys who aren’t just known for being unapologetically offensive, boundary-busting weirdos but who have a weekly TV show declaring as much — a show produced by the crew behind Jackass — only to turn around and pull the plug on them for giving the company exactly what it had presumably wanted.

A couple of days ago, Mountain Dew yanked a new TV spot from the hip-hop troupe Odd Future. The ad is the latest in a series put together by the group and it features a crass, shit-talking goat named Felicia threatening a middle-aged white woman it had beat up in a previous spot as she tries to identify her attacker in a lineup of various members of Odd Future (all of whom are black). Like the Felicia commercials that came before it, the new Dew ad is ridiculously silly and surreal and indeed leaves you wondering what the hell any of what’s going on on-screen has to do with drinking soda, but that hardly matters; Odd Future’s bizarre and occasionally dark brand of humor is part of what made them famous and to contract the group to put together a bunch of TV ads would undoubtedly assure that each would have their creative stamp on them. You don’t bring in Odd Future to give you I’d Like To Teach the World To Sing.

So the Odd Future boys did what they usually do with this latest spot, the same kind of thing they do on their records and absolutely the same kind of thing they do every week on their Adult Swim Show, Loiter Squad, and the result was politically correct polite society losing its fucking mind. Boyce Watkins, a professor at Syracuse University and outspoken advocate on race-relations issues, called the ad, in not-at-all-hyperbolic fashion, “arguably the most racist commercial in history” and “one of the most irresponsible pieces of trash in the history of corporate advertising.” Immediately smelling a dead albatross around its neck in the form of a potential boycott by people who don’t drink Mountain Dew anyway, Pepsico, who makes Dew — apparently out of angels’ tears and unicorn pee — immediately knee-jerked, pulled the ad, and prostrated itself at the feet of the angry public. The company apologized for running the exact commercial it had paid for by the group it knew from the very beginning would create just that kind of commercial.

It can be argued that a mass-marketed campaign for a product as traditionally benign as soda is no place for truly cutting edge humor, the kind of thing that heavily relies on the audience “getting it.” The first time I saw the ad, I didn’t think it was racist at all, but that could very well be because I’m familiar with what Odd Future and its leader Tyler, The Creator — the commercial’s director — are generally going for with the art and music they make. With the Dew commercial, it’s not as if they were trying to create some kind of ironic commentary on racism and black stereotypes simply by smacking the audience in the face with a whole room full of hyper-realized black stereotypes. It’s much more complex than that. Tyler’s an instigator, a guy who sometimes plays — and plays up — the role of the hip-hop homophobe by tossing out the word “faggot” like it’s a standard greeting and who gets a serious kick out of not just stabbing American culture but twisting the knife. His material is viciously polarizing and that right there should’ve tipped the Pepsico people off about what they were getting themselves into by letting him direct a commercial for them. Whether it’s Tyler’s solo stuff or the Chappelle’s Show-meets-Jackass lunacy of Odd Future’s Loiter Squad, what these guys find amusing was always bound to scare the crap out of the average American man or woman over the age of 35.

Which leaves me wondering why the hell Pepsico enlisted Odd Future to do the ads in the first place. Why turn control of an ad campaign over to a group with a very specific comedic and creative vision, one that obviously had the potential to irritate and even infuriate some people, then deny them the opportunity to express that vision or panic when it does exactly what you damn well knew it might? If you’re worried about pissing people off, don’t even bother picking up the phone and calling Tyler and Odd Future and just get Jimmy Fallon and that precocious Capital One kid to do your spots. If you’re going to spend weeks bitching about how offensive he is, don’t cast Seth MacFarlane as the host of the Oscars; just hire Billy Crystal to read Bruce Vilanch jokes again.

There’s always the possibility that Pepsico went all-in on Odd Future precisely because it figured there might be a public backlash that it could milk for publicity. By pretending to have the stones to air Tyler, The Creator’s oddball vision, then appearing to be responsible enough to pull the ad as if it were shocked, shocked I tell you, that something so offensive had gone out over the airwaves, Pepsico gets to have it both ways. But the company has apparently decided for real that it’s not taking any more chances when it comes to hip-hop stars and its image: It just severed ties with Lil Wayne over his appearance in another rapper’s song in which he boasts, “beat that pussy up like Emmett Till.” Needless to say, the family of the slain civil rights icon isn’t pleased and, despite his attempt at apologizing, it’s now demanding a meeting with Weezy.

Al Sharpton has of course inserted himself into the whole thing. Boyce Watkins has thrown in his two cents as well.

But that’s a subject for a different column.

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I managed to make it through a 1,300 word column on Alex Jones yesterday without giving myself the kind of excruciating migraine that usually leads me to spend hours hovering near the sink out of fear that I’ll need to throw up into it at some point. Jones has that kind of effect on me, simply by virtue of his insufferable insanity and his followers’ mindless, slavish devotion. So how do I cleanse myself after that kind of horrific experience? How do I go about allowing myself a tiny break so that I might be able to regain my own soundness of mind and recharge my drained psyche? Well, there’s one way I won’t be able to do it — and that’s to write about Ron Paul, the older, more seductively leprechaun-like version of Alex Jones, but really a guy who may as well be Jones both in the conspiratorial nonsense he espouses and the sycophantic loyalty he inspires among the nihilistic hipster set.

For those who worship at the altar of Dr. Paul, go ahead and get your fingers ready to bang out angry screeds in the comment section in defense of your god, because, yes, I probably won’t be able to help myself and may wind up purposely antagonizing you at some point over the next few minutes. I’ll do this because there’s a pretty good chance you’re not very bright. Or you’re high. Or both.

Thankfully, Ron Paul has zero impact on the actual U.S. lawmaking process these days given that he left Congress in a giant poof of indignation and self-pity last November, leaving us all with one final 48-minute-long rant about fascism, fiat money, the erosion of our civil liberties, “psychopathic authoritarians,” and, of course, liberty! But despite his official departure from the hallowed halls of the institution he claimed to despise, it should have been abundantly clear that he wasn’t simply going to stroll off into the sunset to dodder away his twilight years ranting at telephone poles about the dangers of functional government. Freed from the shackles of decorum, you just knew he was going to rip the gloves off and begin spouting whatever kind of insane horseshit popped into his brain in whichever direction he felt like. That’s the attitude that led to his first post-resignation op-ed, subtly titled “You’re Not Free If You Can’t Secede from an Oppressive Government.” And that’s the attitude that no doubt led to the diatribe he threw together for his friend Lew Rockwell’s website, a piece published yesterday called “Liberty Was Also Attacked in Boston.” (LIBERTY!)

In the essay, Paul rails not against the two alleged terrorists who killed four people and maimed dozens more during the Boston Marathon bombing two weeks ago and the manhunt that followed; that would be far too conventional. Paul instead, of course, chooses to aim his ire at the men and women who most of us felt were doing their absolute best to protect average American citizens as a couple of killers armed with explosives were on the loose in Boston: the cops. Cue the “police state” boogeyman:

“Forced lockdown of a city. Militarized police riding tanks in the streets. Door-to-door armed searches without warrant. Families thrown out of their homes at gunpoint to be searched without probable cause. Businesses forced to close. Transport shut down. These were not the scenes from a military coup in a far off banana republic, but rather the scenes just over a week ago in Boston as the United States got a taste of martial law. The ostensible reason for the military-style takeover of parts of Boston was that the accused perpetrator of a horrific crime was on the loose. The Boston bombing provided the opportunity for the government to turn what should have been a police investigation into a military-style occupation of an American city. This unprecedented move should frighten us as much or more than the attack itself.”

As usual, the various police departments and state and federal law enforcement agencies called on during extraordinary events like the manhunt following the Boston bombing aren’t made up of actual people, dedicated public servants whose goal is to keep us all safe to the best of their ability. Instead, the cops are one big mechanized monster that’s always a faked safety drill away away from subduing the public and instituting martial law in the name of facilitating the one-world government takeover. The authorities — the people requesting that you stay indoors because there are potential terrorists somewhere nearby who’ve already proven that they’ll kill a well-armed cop — are the ones you really need to be afraid of. When the police instruct you to do something during a crisis situation in the name of trying to keep your ass out of the line of fire, you should immediately react with suspicion, lest you surrender your “precious civil liberties” — like the right to do whatever the fuck you want, man! — so that “the government can pretend to protect us.”

The interesting thing about Paul’s laughably melodramatic lament about the dangers of us passive sheeple being led to the slaughter by government troops, is that it mirrors almost word-for-word the wailing and gnashing of teeth that came from the usual suspects on the pissy far-left in the wake of the Boston manhunt. Falguni Sheth, a regular Salon contributor who I swear was engineered in a lab somewhere in San Francisco, she’s such a perfect example of a perpetually indignant and alarmist liberal, penned a column not long after the search for the Tsarnaev brothers ended that bemoaned the “surveillance state” and the public’s servile willingness to take orders from the police. In the fantasy world Sheth lives in, the fact that there are now cameras surrounding us almost 24/7 — some institutional, some the result of our own social media activity — had nothing at all to do with how quickly authorities managed to zero in on and ultimately neutralize the Boston bombing suspects. Like Paul, she thinks the real threat wasn’t from the guys with the explosives but from the people we pay to protect us — because, like Paul, the government is never under any circumstances to be trusted, no matter how many local citizens it may be made up of. If nothing else, the Paul/Sheth nexus proves that the political spectrum isn’t a straight line, it’s a circle — and the two extremes eventually loop back around and meet.

Yes, state, local, and federal law enforcement shouldn’t always be given carte blanche to do whatever the hell they want and there’s a reason they’re the subject of constant oversight. But only the most delusional paranoiacs, the people convinced that they need to be heavily armed and have doomsday bunkers that are well-stocked for the coming rise of the NWO dystopia, would think that the police exercising special measures under very special circumstances for all of 15-hours is cause for panic. Most people would just say thanks — and are saying thanks – to the cops for selflessly putting their asses on the line and for getting two killers off the streets.

By the way, the owner of the website Ron Paul wrote his piece for, Lew Rockwell? He used to be Paul’s chief of staff back in the late 70s and early 80s and oversaw “The Ron Paul Political Report.” That’s the newsletter that Paul tried unsuccessfully to distance himself from that featured racist, homophobic, and conspiracist anti-government writings.

Tell me whose judgment I should really be questioning here.

In fact, tell me why I should give a damn about anything Ron Paul has to say.

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I truly hate who we are these days.

No, you haven’t accidentally stumbled onto my last column here, the one having to do with small-time news doof A.J. Clemente. This, believe it or not, is an entirely different piece, but unfortunately the overarching feeling I get when discussing the subject I’m about to get into is pretty much the same: It’s a frustrating and occasionally infuriating belief that something in our culture might be damaged beyond repair, that we may have reached a point of no return when it comes to our ability to combine stupidity with arrogance and then to transmit it worldwide so that it can seek out the likeminded and create a kind of hive-mind of crazy.

Over the weekend, I watched a movie that’s both endlessly fascinating and more than a little disturbing. It’s called Room 237 and it details just a few of the various theories surrounding the making and meaning of Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 classic, The Shining. The film is a documentary and features a series of interviews with five people you hear from but never actually see, each of whom has a different take on the movie and the supposed subtext he or she believes Kubrick was intentionally trying to get across within its story.

The whole thing starts off innocently enough, with a couple of silly but harmless one-sided discussions casting The Shining as a possible allegory for the Holocaust or as sly symbolism for the ways in which humans can’t seem to escape the past. But as things proceed, the theories and speculation unleashed by the unseen speakers become more and more outlandish; it all goes farther and farther down the rabbit hole until, eventually, you begin to realize that at least one of the guys being interviewed firmly believes that, through The Shining, Kubrick was trying to tell the world that he had been involved in the faking of the moon landing. The details within the movie that lead him to this hypothesis and then confirm it over and over again are, needless to say, the kind of thing most people would look at and either not see at all or would dismiss outright. But this guy gets it. He sees what you don’t. He knows what it all means. And he’s sure the government is now afraid of him because he knows.

Yeah, completely fucking nuts.

Here’s the thing, though: Somebody made a movie about this guy, a movie that allowed him to broadcast his baseless paranoia to the world and I guarantee that it’ll only rally the equally delusional to his cause, or at the very least provide a kind of psychic safe harbor to those who embrace and espouse his particular conspiracy theory (and no doubt others like it). Now, years ago this wouldn’t have been anything worth fretting over; there have always been dumb, gullible people intent on dismissing reality in favor of some carefully crafted fantasy that they or somebody else pulled out of the clouds and spun into something that sounds plausible enough to be true. Years ago, the majority of the people who saw Room 237 would’ve been rightly laughing out loud at, or at least feeling sorry for, the man who watched The Shining and immediately knew in his heart that Stanley Kubrick was trying to confess to his role in perpetrating the biggest cover-up in human history. And I have no doubt that most people, even now, react to moon-landing guy exactly that way.

But it seems more and more like we’ve entered an age in which the beliefs of the paranoid are finding not necessarily greater acceptance but certainly wider dissemination within our culture. This is due mostly to the fracturing and democratization of media, which has created a niche press that’s often devoid of the kind of oversight and sense of responsibility that used to keep the information we received at the very least somewhat tethered to reality. Basically, anybody can say anything these days and beam it out to the world; if they’ve got enough bucks or enough bandwidth, the voices from the fringe can be as loud as those who actually give a crap about being respectable broadcasters. This is a problem. But it becomes a real problem when the fringe idiots — or worse, the hucksters who’ve learned to exploit the fringe idiots — are allowed to hijack the mainstream conversation.

A couple of weeks ago, professional lunatic asshole Alex Jones turned the vital question-and-answer portion of a news conference immediately following the Boston Marathon bombing into a farce when a dipshit pretend reporter from his InfoWars website — a site which acts as a clearing house for every kind of conspiracy theory imaginable — started bombarding the governor of Massachusetts with accusations of “false flag” terrorism and claims that the bombing was a government plot to take away our civil liberties. It was the breakthrough, I’m sure, that Jones had been waiting for: when he hit the big time by subverting a mainstream news event; when he got to see his microphone receiving equal placement alongside all the reputable press outlets in America. It was, however, for the rest of us, a moment that held a different kind of significance, a much darker one. Glenn Beck had already made a fortune and gotten himself on the cover of Time magazine by ranting like a mental patient night after night on national television and during his radio show, playing the role of the schizophrenic conspiracist. Jones, though, was and is something altogether different. He seems to truly believe the horseshit he’s shoveling and his audience isn’t made up merely of elderly white Christians, resentful of the successes of “others” and terrified of the changes they see in the world around them. His audience is those people and more, not just the outraged right-wing Christians but the nihilistic hipsters, the heavily armed preppers, the pompous outcasts, the strident and insufferable libertarians, even, occasionally, the boy-crazy tween crowd. They all, it seems, hang onto this idiot’s every word. And they’re so batshit crazy that they cannot be reasoned with.

The problem is that we now live in a country where fame is its own reward and the ability to draw attention, for many, automatically implies that there’s something there that deserves having attention drawn to it. Last week, Matt Drudge, who himself traffics in nonsense, proclaimed this “the year of Alex Jones.” Meanwhile, even though they don’t always stoop to citing him by name, our state and national lawmakers often push the same kind of crap Jones does. It may have no basis in reality whatsoever, but the politically cynical on the right know full well that an expertly promoted conspiracy theory can score huge political points with the base, which is both clueless and terrified enough to believe anything. Even Glenn Beck is back from relative obscurity to take a shot at wresting his old Mad Prophet of the Airwaves crown away from Jones, a guy he considers his archenemy. And none of this is even taking into consideration the giant fountain of crap that is Facebook and Twitter; there’s no better means of disseminating ludicrous alternative theories of everything to likeminded losers than through social media.

So what’s the result of all this groundless conjecture, this paranoid insanity passed off as information that truly deserves to be taken seriously? The world of the conspiracy theorist, the place where ignorance and arrogance meet, since there’s no bigger idiot than a guy who believes that the Boston Marathon bombing never happened, and that guy ironically always thinks he’s the smartest person in the room — what happens when that begins bleeding into the real world? Well, for some, it truly does become tough to tell what’s real and what isn’t anymore. It’s not the government, with its supposed secret machinations and subservience to the Illuminati or whatever-the-hell, that winds up clouding reality and leaving those who only skim the news trying to figure out what’s up and what’s down; it’s the sensational, irrational bullshit dispensed by Alex Jones and his mentally unhinged shock-troops.

And good luck arguing with them. Trying to make someone see reason who considers it a point of pride that he’s unwilling to believe anything his eyes see and his ears hear is like trying to explain how the Large Hadron Collider works to a four-year-old. If you honestly think that chem trails are for real and that 9/11 was in inside job, there’s just no hope for you. Debunking your views one-by-one would be useless, since the beauty of a conspiracy theory is that it’s a self-reinforcing delusion. Best to just laugh at you or call you a fucking idiot to your face and be done with it.

It really does feel like we’re living in a new golden age of conspiracy theory, but if you’re not someone who buys into this nonsense, then all hope isn’t lost; it’s just going to require a tenacious and muscular push-back from the rest of us, the sane ones, against the tide of blatant crazy. If you think virtuoso liars like Alex Jones, professional hucksters like Glenn Beck, and that poor, dumb, InfoWars meme-circulating friend of yours on Facebook are speaking the truth, then you’re probably already too far gone. But if not, then congratulations, you’ve officially been drafted into the Army of Reason.

Your country needs you. We need you. Somebody has to fight back in the name of sanity — and in the name of reality. Because maybe we haven’t, in fact, reached the point of no return in our culture, that place where stupidity and lunacy have finally triumphed.

No, Stanley Kubrick didn’t help fake the moon landing. No, he wasn’t telling us he helped fake the moon landing in The Shining. No, the moon landing was never faked in the first place. Anyone who says otherwise is a moron, although not an offensive one. If you loudly proclaim that the victims of the Boston Marathon bombing were actors, some of whom were already missing limbs in order to make the whole supposed charade look convincing, then you’re a moron and an offensive one and you should probably be forcibly locked in a room with the first Boston cops on-scene and the parents of eight-year-old Martin Richard.

Maybe that would teach you to finally believe what’s right in front of your fucking face.

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