The best column yet on the Unpresident

— 03.19.2017 10:00 AM

By Dowd, naturally:

…we’ve never watched a president so hungrily devour his own presidency.

Soon, there won’t be anything left except the sound of people snickering.

Consumed by his paranoia about the deep state, Donald Trump has disappeared into the fog of his own conspiracy theories. As he rages in the storm, Lear-like, howling about poisonous fake news, he is spewing poisonous fake news.

The Hirshhorn has a sold-out exhibit of Yayoi Kusama’s stunning infinity mirror rooms. But they are nothing compared to the infinity mirror room of Trump’s mind, now on display a mile and a half away at the White House.

Many voters who took a chance on the real estate mogul and reality TV star hoped he would grow more mature and centered when confronted with the august surroundings of the White House and immensity of the job. 

But instead of improving in office, Trump is regressing. The office has not changed Trump. Trump has changed the office.

He trusts his beliefs more than facts. So many secrets, so many plots, so many shards of gossip swirl in his head, there seems to be no room for reality.

His grandiosity, insularity and scamming have persuaded Trump to believe he can mold his own world. His distrust of the deep state, elites and eggheads — an insecurity inflamed by Steve Bannon — makes it hard for him to trust his own government, or his own government’s facts.

Yesterday at Comedy Trumps Hate, I was brought onstage to be sort-of of interviewed and provide fodder for The Monkey Toast Players – featuring no less than Colin Mochrie and Pat McKenna! – and suggested that Trump really was the enemy of all that is good and decent, and that it really wasn’t all that funny anymore. So, fight back, I urged.  Here’s a few ways to do so.

Anyway. Dodd’s column. Read it. She’s got a ringside seat to the end of America, but she still has a sense of humour. 


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Rebel Media’s McInnes, Goldy, Gunn-Reid: “Jews are ruining the world with their lies and their money and their hooked-nose, bagel-eating faces”

— 03.17.2017 04:47 PM

Here. Wow.

  • Goldy: The “Jewspapers,” the “Jew World Order.”
  • McInnes: “Jews are ruining the world with their lies and their money and their hooked-nose, bagel-eating faces.”
  • Goldy: “…we need to launch the next Crusade and reclaim Bethlehem.”
  • McInnes: “I’ve actually become more anti-Semitic since I’ve come [to Israel].”
  • Goldy: “Feminism is cancer.”
  • McInnes: “[Palestinians] keep getting extinguished by money from big Jewbags.”
  • Gunn Reid: [Laughs at whatever anti-Semitic, bigoted crap the other two say.]

The people who run the Rebel are big on “free speech.” The people who fund the Rebel, however, don’t favour anti-Semitic speech. 

Not sure where all this is going. But I don’t think it’ll end well for the “rebels,” do you?


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In next week’s column: campaigns may not matter, but words do

— 03.16.2017 09:20 AM

To wit:

Donald Trump – the combed-over, sphincter-mouthed, racist, sexist, fascistic Human Cheeto – showed all of us that Campaigns Don’t Matter.  You can run a really shitty one, like he did, and still win.

But.  But one thing, and it is deliciously ironic.  It is schadenfreude on a scale heretofore unseen in politics.  It is frigging beautiful.

You can see it in the decisions of federal judges in Maryland and Hawaii, issued late last week – but particularly in the must-read decision of Judge Derrick K. Watson, of Federal District Court in Honolulu.  In it, Judge Watson threw out Trump’s second (allegedly kinder and gentler) executive order seeking a Muslim ban.  And he did so by relying upon the words of Donald Trump himself.

Judge Watson dismissed the Trump regime’s claim that a court would need to probe the Unpresident’s “veiled psyche” to locate religious animus. Jusdge Watson would have none of it.  Repeatedly, he cited Trump statements that were helpfully found in the pages of the lawsuit brought by Hawaii’s attorney general.

“There is nothing ‘veiled’ about this press release,” Judge Watson wrote, quoting a Trump campaign document titled “Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.”

Said he: “A reasonable, objective observer would conclude that the executive order was issued with a purpose to disfavour a particular religion.” 

The general consensus, now, is that the short-fingered vulgarian – per Canadian Graydon Carter’s now-immortal phrase – will continue to be hoisted on his own petard.  As he labours to render the United States of America an Aryan Nation, Donald Trump will continue to lose in court.  That is now very clear, to every legal scholar and constitutional expert.


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When you say: “I’m becoming anti-Semitic,” are you anti-Semitic?

— 03.15.2017 09:39 AM


Not good.

That’s what Rebel Media’s Gavin McInnes said on a video, found here.

Here’s some other things he said:

  • “God, [Jews are] so obsessed with the Holocaust. … I don’t know if it’s healthy to dwell.”
  • “I felt myself defending the super-far-right Nazis, just because I was sick of so much [Holocaust] brainwashing.”
  • “…much less than six million [were murdered in the Holocaust] and they starved to death and they weren’t gassed.”
  • “[A man-made famine that killed millions in Soviet Ukraine was caused] by Jews. That was by Marxist, Stalinist, left-wing, commie, socialist Jews.”
  • “[WWII was caused by the Treaty of Versailles, which was] disproportionately influenced by Jewish intellectuals.”
  • And, as noted, “I’m becoming anti-Semitic.”

I don’t think there can be any doubt those statements are unambiguously anti-Semitic, but in case you have any doubt, they were enthusiastically promoted – and celebrated – by former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, and America’s current neo-Nazi leader, Richard Spencer:


Around the same time McInnes made his statements, another Rebel Media person, Lauren Southern, abruptly left the organization.  Southern also counts Spencer and assorted neo-Nazis and white supremacists among her fan base.  There is a lot of speculation online that she is more aligned with the National Policy Institute’s Richard Spencer than with Rebel Media’s  Ezra Levant.  Personally, I don’t know if that’s true: I have never watched any of her many (many) videos.

Now, am I fan of the Rebel web site? Full disclosure: not really.  That’s particularly the case after Rebel’s Faith Goldy defended a far-Right pedophile in a bizarre effort to slime me for, um, being critical of pedophiles.

Anyway.  Ezra and I have a long, long history.  We’ve slammed each other, we’ve sued each other, we’ve gone after each other.  When Sun News Network started up, Kory Teneycke asked us to enter into an armistice, and so we did.  It’s held ever since, and I’ve been content to let other people fight with Ezra.  Been there, done that.

And I will give Ezra credit for this much: one, he built the Rebel thing from the ground up, and he has turned it into a significant player in the Canadian media universe.  It’s not a news service, not by a long shot – it’s simply a web platform for Right-wing and far-Right-wing opinion – but it’s not inconsequential.

Two, Ezra is not an anti-Semite.  Not just because he’s Jewish – Ezra has been more critical of other Canadian Jews than Jim Keegstra, Ernst Zundel and Paul Fromm put together.  He’s not anti-Semitic because, basically, he’s not anti-Semitic.

So what, then, is he doing keeping the likes of Gavin McInnes on the payroll?  What is the truth about alt-Right heroine Lauren Southern and her speedy departure?  Is Rebel Media so free-speechy that it will now give an uncritical platform to Holocaust denier rhetoric?

Some say all this means the end of Rebel Media.  Personally, I doubt it.  They seriously underestimate Ezra Levant.

But it’s all deeply unsettling, and pretty off-brand, too.  When Ezra Levant is prepared to play host to the likes of Gavin McInnes, spouting anti-Semitic filth, well…it’s not good.

For him.


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