By admin

Copyright nhgazette

Thirteen days ago we actually thought that we already had the subject for our next Rant. Will we never learn?

On the morning of September 6th, McDonald’s most famous customer, formerly known as The Donald, posted an AI-generated image of himself, dressed up as Lt. Col. “Bill” Kilgore, squatting most improbably for a man of his true girth. Behind him: red and yellow fire, Huey helicopters, and the skyline of Chicago. A hand-lettered legend read, “Chipocalypse Now.”

The President of the United States threw in a little bonus for the literate among his followers: a text reading, “‘I love the smell of deportations in the morning…’ Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR.”

The blood-chilling intent of this ominous declaration of impending civil war against the nation’s Second City was undercut somewhat by a tonal misstep. Following all this Coppola-esque sturm und drang, were three cute little helicopter emojis, looking like they got lost on their way to the Pixar studio.

Taking understandable offense at this was a real-life U.S. Army helicopter pilot, who retired as a Lieutenant Colonel. Tammy Duckworth, now a U.S. Senator, wrote “Take off that Cavalry hat, you draft dodger. You didn’t earn the right to wear it. Stolen valor at its worst.”

A purported Chicagoan calling himself @BestDanTake quickly deployed his First Amendment right to reply. “Since you don’t know what AI images are, I figured I would put one up that I wished was true.” It shows a gleefully grinning Donald Trump, wearing a big black cowboy hat minus the Cavalry tassels, pushing Tammy Duckworth, in a wheelchair, off a cliff.

The next day NBC White House reporter Yamiche Alcindor, the daughter of Haitian immigrants, had the gall to ask the President if he meant what he tweeted: “Are you trying to go to war with Chicago?”

Trump “fired back,” according to Yahoo’s transcription of the interaction, “‘When you say that, darling, that’s fake news.’ Alcindor quickly responded, ‘Well, why would you use the Department of Defense?’”

Clearly affronted, the President dodged the question, told Alcindor to shut up, and insulted her. “Listen,” he said. “Be quiet. Listen. You don’t listen. You never listen. That’s why you’re second-rate.”

Having thus established his dominance by browbeating a Black female member of the news media, Trump backed down, saying, “We’re not going to war, we’re going to clean up our cities. … That’s not war.”

So, for the record, it was still news when, two weeks ago, the President joked about starting a civil war. But what we had thought would be a feast turned out to be merely an hors d’oeuvre.

All that foofaraw is now nearly forgotten. The relevant neurons in our collective hive brain have been overwritten, blasted, as it were, by a Men In Black Neuralizer,™ and encoded with imagery from this century’s equivalent of the Confederate bombardment of Fort Sumter.

Last week, under blue skies in lily-white Utah, before Elohim and a thousand iPhones, Charlie Kirk was asked a question about, of all things, transgender American mass shooters. Like a poker player raising a bet, in coded language, Kirk dragged race into the conversation with his last breath.

We need not dwell on the very graphic particulars of the ensuing event. We will only note that if such an institution existed, it would be immortalized as a full-scale exhibit in the Spectacle Hall of Fame and/or Infamy.*

Kirk was killed, according to prosecutors, by a young man from a good, religious, Republican family, who, no doubt due to the evil influence of leftist propaganda, had entered into a relationship with another young man transitioning to become a woman. So, there were two fatalities in Orem that day: the Republican boy wonder, and our old friend, Irony.

New post-assassination Rules of Behavior are being hammered out by the proponents of individual liberty even as we go to press. Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah has already been fired for sharing a screenshot quoting Charlie Kirk. In memory of her loss of gainful employment, we offer up this Snopes-verified quote from Kirk, uttered on April 5, 2023:

“I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational.”

Where this all goes from here may depend on whether we non-fascists are willing to do as we’re told, i.e., sit down and shut the fuck up. If not, it will only be our fault when they come for us.

On the other hand, if we do as we’re told, then everything will be just fine—presuming, that is, that we’ll be content to live in a fascist police state.

* Here we use the term ‘spectacle’ in the sense employed by Guy Debord in The Society of the Spectacle: “All that once was directly lived has become mere representation;” “[P]assive identification with the spectacle supplants genuine activity.” The spectacle prevents individuals from realizing that the society of spectacle is only a moment in history, one that can be overturned through revolution. – Wikipedia