If there really is a deity, may that deity come down from wherever and spare us.
I want us to be spared from the avalanche of intellectually risible, fear-addled ratchet-jawing by fringe media frontmen (and notice, this is all men in my posting) who seem to think that the recently released portrait of former President Obama contains all sorts of pointers and symbols to…
Well…why don’t we take a quick look at what the looney-tunes ratchet-jaws are claiming, shall we?
1. Sean Hannity
A two-fer here, since Hannity, more even than Alex Jones, appears to have come unglued about the portrait. First he wrote this Tweet, but, realizing that maybe the mask had slipped, deleted it:
Sean Hannity has deleted this now, because the classic racism was too obvious, too clownish, too blatant, too much of a self-parody. Hannity's primary job at @FoxNews is to make racism seem reasonable, so that it spreads. pic.twitter.com/h5E66AMNam
— Steve Silberman (@stevesilberman) February 13, 2018
Then he went on this rant about supposedly hidden detail in the portrait that of course, only he, the great savant, can see:
Sean Hannity says Obama's portrait artist included "sexual innuendo" with secret sperm https://t.co/zLg9D6TZ8k pic.twitter.com/4PDFa5BRlf
— Newsweek (@Newsweek) February 13, 2018
2. Alex Jones
Alex Jones claims that Kehinde Wiley secretly painted a sperm on Obama's presidential portrait to fulfill a globalist plot to make the world a "ritual of abomination"https://t.co/ZK1oXrJNB2
— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) February 13, 2018
Whisky Tango Foxtrot. cubed.
This is an effing portrait we are looking at here.
Here we have two commentators who appear to have completely jumped the shark into…who knows where?
I remain consistently amused at the level to which authoritarian dim-bulbs and their wind-up rabble-rousers consistently invoke sexual metaphor and fear trigger-phrases when talking about Other Folks Not Like Them. How many times have we read phrases along the lines of “I don’t want homosexuality rammed down my throat”? A real psychologist would have a field-day analyzing how fearful exclusionary authoritarians use THAT phrase.
And here we have more of the same. “secret sperm”? Perlease.
This isn’t a dog-whistle. It isn’t rooted in reality, or anywhere within 100 fucking light-years of reality. This is the exemplification of fear-addled, racism-soaked fantasy. The umpteenth recycling of the old fear trope that Those People Who Don’t Even Look Like Us are actually a band of marauding, primitive savages, who are in the grip of the caranlistic desire to gang-rape Your Family Members.
If this was part of a fantasy novel plot, literary agents would be laughing at it. You should too. Ridicule is the only appropriate and logical response to these conspiracy-mongering wombats.
