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July 8, 2018 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
27:33
This Week in Stupid (08⧸07⧸2018)
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Hello everyone, welcome to this week in Stupid for the 8th of July 2018.
I have some good news to start with this week.
The campaign against the copyright directive was successful in its first stage.
The coalition headed by UKIP won the vote to stop the text going forward, as Jared Batten says, and the directive will now be debated in September and amendments may be put on it.
This was fairly narrow, to be honest, there wasn't that much in it.
But now the meat of the legislation won't be debated in secret and we'll actually be able to see what they're trying to do before they just give it to us at the end.
And I'm sure that we're going to have to do something come September, but as always, I will keep you updated.
But I just want to say to everyone who sent an email to their MEP, great job.
Although this is only a small victory, it's your small victory.
So this week, let's talk about Trump derangement syndrome, because this is just the way politics is now.
Absolute deranged hysteria from the left, driving themselves ever further leftwards in an attempt to somehow make people think that Donald Trump is worse than them.
And honestly, I don't think it's working.
You probably heard about the giant Trump baby balloon that left-wing protesters are planning on flying over London to protest Trump's visit.
Well, it turns out that Trump's supporters are interested in doing the very same thing with the giant baby balloon of Siddique Khan, which, as amusing as all of this is, it's pretty bloody puerile, isn't it?
And that's coming from me.
I've got a notoriously childish sense of humour.
But is this really what we want our political dialogue in this country to be?
The funny thing is, the campaign for the baby Khan and Baby Trump balloons have both been crowdfunded to the tune of something like £30,000 at this point on either side.
This has become something of a competition as to who can have the most ridiculous political protest happening at the same time.
Why are we doing this?
The 20-foot anti-Trump balloon, which has been set up by a group describing it as anti-fascist art activists, was given the go-ahead after thousands signed a petition and raised more than $30,000.
It must be tethered to the ground from Parliament Square Gardens and cannot fly higher than 98 feet.
The giant Sidiq Khan baby balloon has raised over £30,000 and I presume they're going to be flying a giant balloon of London's progressive Muslim mayor.
I don't really know what to say about this.
Is this really the best we can do?
Even I have come to the point where I'm basically starting to think that nobody's taking politics seriously anymore.
And if we're lucky, neither will Donald Trump.
Because, I mean, at the end of the day, despite what Theresa May is doing to fuck up Brexit, and I'll do a separate video about that next week, the left has to realize that Donald Trump is the president of our strongest and closest ally.
And really, no matter what you feel about Donald Trump, he is a representative of the United States when he's here.
And I mean, you weren't protesting Saudi princes.
They don't protest the leaders of actual despotic regimes when they come to this country.
But Donald Trump is basically Hitler.
All I'm saying is perhaps your priorities are a little skewed, and the way that you're expressing yourself is something along the lines of people who belong in a nursery.
But continuing on with Trump derangement syndrome, the UK has reportedly told Trump that he cannot meet with Brexit architect Nigel Farage for reasons unknown.
The Daily Telegraph, citing a source within the British government, reports that 10 Downing Street made it clear that Trump must not meet Farage during his working visit to the UK.
Is that because Farage is way more popular than Theresa May?
Is it?
Trump has embraced Farage, who is also a Fox News contributor, and called him the man behind Brexit during the 2016 campaign.
Farage told Fox News he would not comment on any conversations he had in the White House, but the Telegraph report was utterly consistent with past behaviour from the UK government.
A Downing Street spokesman referred Fox News to comments it had made to the Telegraph, saying, It was not even aware that a meeting had been requested, and that either way we are not trying to stop one.
Honest Governor.
Trump derangement syndrome has been going on ever since he started running for president, let alone after him winning and continuing on to this very day.
Let me give you an example from about a year ago now.
The Trump effect is making me eat doughnuts without shame, says Van Badam.
The US president's public woman hating encourages other vulgar men, and no extreme or painful beauty treatment is worth seeking their approval.
Right.
So what you're saying is, you lost, you're angry about this, and you're coping by filling your fat face.
This article begins with: the fertility rate in the US has hit a record low, and it's hardly surprising.
On Twitter, Australian writer Maxine Benaba Clark bestowed this fact with its appropriate medical and sociological term, the Trump effect.
The health risks of having a child are already high, but more than 20 million Americans are also set to lose medical coverage the moment Donald Trump legislates the American Healthcare Act, which renders childbearing, let alone parenthood, an increased source of economic risk.
Of course, it's not merely the threat of financial annihilation compelling Americans to reconsider reproduction.
It's the social risks as well.
Jesus Christ, what universe does this person live in?
I mean, how prospective a parent would any sensible American wish to be given, I'm not sure this is an English sentence, There remains a 50% chance they might have a girl.
Right?
Women aren't just unduly suffering in Trump's America, but sociologists, you see, are discovering a Trump effect of their own.
The encouragement towards misogynistic bullying the president has supplied to emerging generations from his Twitter pulpit.
Oh, really?
I thought that everything was misogynist anyway, and women had it worse no matter what.
So it's not like Trump's changed this current state of affairs.
He's merely continuing it, from your point of view at least.
Politico chronicles that he has called Rosie O'Donnell fat.
A true statement.
Dumb, a true statement.
A loser?
I'm not sure if that's true.
Ariana Huffington is attractive inside and out.
Megan Kelly is average in every way.
And Hillary Clinton doesn't even look presidential.
At least he didn't call Merkel a fuckable lard ass like Berlusconi did.
But it's not the unborn I feel sorry for, if you can believe that.
My sympathies are with the existing women of America, obliged to live through this shitty epoch.
Oh my god.
It's not just restrictions on their reproductive rights, the aforementioned risks of health coverage denied pregnancy, or even the president's public woman hating that bodes badly for the American female experience.
It's also the disappointment of realizing that the endpoint of the painful physical perfection demanded of women by the dominant culture is merely the temporary approval of someone like Trump.
That sure is some paltry prize.
Today's commercial standard of feminine beauty far outstrips demand to make the heels higher and the bathing suit smaller, as Trump dictated back when he was just some rich, creepy sleezo buying the Miss Universe pageant.
Perfect hair, perfect skin, expensive perfume, immaculate makeup, youth and an endless wardrobe of appropriate outfits just don't cut it anymore.
Vigilant prevention of camel toes, VPLs, bingo wings.
I don't know what half of this is.
Muffin tops, side boobs are not enough either, nor is the vast consumer frontier of shaving, plucking, dieting, working out Madonna arms, Kardashian lips, orthodontics, nose jobs, boob jobs, butt lifts, facelifts, labia plasty, liposuction, anal bleach, or Botox.
Nipple paint isn't enough.
What the fuck are you talking about?
You fucking lunatic!
I thought you were just stuffing doughnuts into your face.
Genital dye isn't, and neither is Passion Dust, which wait for it, is a vaginal glitter bomb that causes infection.
Well, thanks very much, Donald Trump.
Look what you've done to my infected vagina.
It's not enough because it never is.
The likes of Trump forever appoint themselves to find fault because of humiliation or the threat of it keeps women in line.
Okay, but it's really women doing it to one another, isn't it?
Isn't it?
Let's be honest.
And yes, the man fat shamed Miss Universe.
So why keep trying, girls?
Seriously, why?
Why not join this donut mantra on a race to the bottom?
Be as corpulent and disgusting as you can possibly manage, because when all women are disgusting, the men will have no choice but to fuck you.
When Trump laid into Mika Brzezinski's face the other morning.
I don't care.
Bet Midland returned Twitter fire with a meme showing Trump's own visible panty line.
Oh, how did he recover from that?
Me, I hogged into an iced donut.
I've got into the habit of doing so whenever public body shaming rears its Trump-like head.
Yeah, that's the solution, isn't it?
You think I'm fat?
Well, oh.
One can hit the streets, the airwaves, and the ballot box to protest Trump politically.
I've done so before, and I'll do it again.
But my rebellion against the judge and punish woman-hating Trump espouses with his catty legions.
I'm guessing these are legions of women who are cats to you, probably attractive blonde Texan women, aren't they?
Let's be honest.
The worst kind of woman.
They tend to vote for Donald Trump.
Comes in the shape of a human woman indulging her own physical comfort without shame.
It's a march that precedes one lazy donut at a time.
And does a refusal to validate any agenda to humiliate and control women.
I promise all my sisters, it's completely delicious.
That's right.
Hashtag resist is the new slogan of Dunkin' Donuts.
That's what this is all about.
Resist Trump by becoming as fat as humanly possible.
And so you should do what this woman did this week.
Stop going to the gym because of Trump.
Oh, and now she can't open pickle jars.
Curse you, patriarchy.
So this woman begins with how she used to go to the gym, and presumably she could open the pickle jars.
But after Trump claimed victory, I went up to the gym in a foul mood.
Just fucking load up the fucking sled, alright, and let's get it over with.
I said without much grace as I strapped the belt around my waist.
I pulled the sled like a human oxen while being filmed and the gym staff cheered.
I did it, but the Trump victory soured my successful show of strength.
Yeah, I could pretend to pull a sled, but now what was going to help me when the world had been destroyed by nuclear weapons or climate change?
these women are being paid to write this by the guardian hungry and sore i repaired repaired to a restaurant down the road is that is that the way that that should be used And I'd never visited and I had never seen anyone go or come from.
The silent restaurant, no background music, no other diners, seemed like the perfect place to welcome the end of the global liberal order.
What new order had been born tonight?
An elderly waiter appeared and handed me a menu.
Why are you telling me about your dining out?
I never went back, but I also didn't return to the gym.
I associated it now with Donald Trump, the bad meal and pulling the sled.
It was the 9th of November 2016, and thinking about my fitness changed almost overnight.
In tune with the times, it became more Trump, less Obama.
In the spirit of the Donald, I drank more bottles of Coke, oh sorry, Diet Coke, don't want to pile on the calories, and eat more McDonald's.
I dropped the gym, embracing Trump's belief that we are given a certain amount of energy, and if we use it, then we're depleting a finite resource.
Right, so what you're saying is Donald Trump lives rent-free in your head, and he has absolutely defeated you.
So according to the book, Trump revealed that Trump believed the human body was like a battery with a finite amount of energy, which exercise only depleted, so he didn't work out.
When he learned that John O'Donnell, one of his top casino executives, was training for an Iron Man triathlon, he admonished him, you're going to die young because of this.
Yes, well, I don't believe Trump's actually a doctor, and I don't think I'll be taking his advice on health, and maybe you shouldn't either.
But she says, I didn't want to die young, so I didn't go to the gym.
Trump isn't the fucking oracle!
Trump has stupid beliefs too!
Trump explained his exercise routine like this to Reuters.
I get exercise, I mean I walk, I this, I that.
I run over to the building next door, I get more exercise than people think.
I walked, I this, I that, months passed, then a year.
Trump was going to be in power for another thousand years, or at least that's what it felt like.
Yes, the God Emperor has actually ascended to his golden throne.
Could I really avoid the gym for the entirety of his presidency?
I missed being strong enough to open jars and carry groceries.
Oh, the struggle of the bourgeois modern woman.
How on earth do you make it through each day?
So last week, I returned to the gym, slinking back in as if no time had passed.
I hoped that by wearing a puffy jacket and MC hammer pants, I could hide my own lack of definition as in all those McDonald's made you fat.
I presume you joined the Dunkin' Donuts Trump Resist protest as well.
But you can't hide fitness.
Either you have it or you don't.
You can either lift the dumbbell or you can wobble on your fifth rep and drop the load.
You are either strong or you are weak.
And I was weak.
Oh god, yes.
Everyone opposing Trump is desperately weak.
It's crazy.
I've never seen such a show of political weakness.
It's been the most embarrassing spurgout of all of human history.
I bet when Caesar conquered the Gauls, they accepted it with more grace than you guys have done.
The cruelest thing about fitness is that it doesn't last.
There should be the rule that you only need to get fit once.
And once you get there, you stay there.
I was fit in 2016 before Trump, but when you stop, it goes.
And it goes quickly.
Yeah, I suppose if you're in your late 30s.
It probably does.
A week or two and you have to start again with the two kilogram dumbbells and the tremor in your forearms.
I returned again this week to the boredom and pain of the gym, trying to build up back to the strength I had before Trump became president.
The struggle is Sisyphian.
Holy mother of God.
I'm sick of privileged women telling me that their lives are too difficult to get on with.
Nothing in your daily routine as a Guardian writer has changed.
Get on with it, you weaklings!
This article is from the week before this one, but it was one I wanted to cover and I never had time.
Why is Trump still so popular?
He gives his base what they want.
What an absolute startling revelation.
Donald Trump maintains popularity with his base by doing what they elected him to do.
This is a radical move.
No wonder this is causing Trump derangement syndrome.
How dare a politician actually serve his constituents?
In the past two months, I have been traveling through Europe, talking to academic and non-academic audiences all across the continent about populism.
And from Norway to Italy to Hungary to Ireland, people have been asking me the same question.
How is it possible that Americans still support President Donald Trump?
After explaining that the vast majority of Americans do not support Trump, and that he was elected with almost 3 million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton, because the United States is the only democratic country in the world where a person with fewer votes can win the presidency, I bring them the really bad news.
If things continue this way, Trump will be comfortably re-elected in 2020.
Of course, the main reason for Trump's re-election, as well as his election, is the dysfunctional political practice and system of the United States.
Okay, but who makes up that system?
Is it far-left radicals who think that white straight males should just shut up and accept their erasure from public life with good grace?
Because that's your opinion.
That's the opinion of the left in general at this point.
And unsurprisingly, it's caused someone like Donald Trump who can't be shamed into silence to end up winning it all.
After blathering on some conventional wisdom, she says, all of this does not explain why Trump is actually quite popular, and probably more popular today than when he got elected.
Today, Trump's approval ratings are at 42%, which is a mere 3% lower than when he started.
But more importantly, he's extremely popular amongst this core electorate, i.e. Republicans.
A recent Gallup poll showed that at the 500-day mark, Trump was the second most popular US president among his own constituency with 87% support, topped only by George W. Bush at 96% support, who was at the time profiting from the rally around the flag response to the 9-11 terrorist attacks.
How is this possible, I hear you think?
Oh, I know exactly how this is possible.
Has Trump not said that there were very fine people among the extreme right demonstrators at Deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia?
Yes, but he also said there were very fine people among the extreme left-wing demonstrators.
Has he not consistently undermined the independent judiciary and the media by attacking so-called judges and the fakers at CNN, NBC, ABC and CBS?
Yeah, you can start to see why he's so popular, can't you?
Has he not systematically dehumanized immigrants and minorities?
Oh my god, she's going to start standing in defense of MS-13 again.
Introduced nativist policies such as a slightly watered-down Muslim ban and made the immigration services into an inhuman authoritarian apparatus that separates crying and screaming children from their parents.
You know, the sort of thing that happens with children when they go to school for the first time.
That inhuman authoritarian apparatus that screaming children are separated from their parents by to sit in a classroom.
The point is, the fact that you can use nativist in a pejorative way demonstrates why Trump is doing so well.
The native populations of Western countries want some nativism.
They want to be helped because they have been sold out by their own globalist politicians and Donald Trump is a correction to this.
Yes, he has.
But he was also given significant tax cut which disproportionately benefits above average income Americans.
The true core of the Republican and therefore Trump electorate.
That's right.
I love the way that you phrase this.
Here's a universal tax cut.
Well, that disproportionately benefits people who have more money.
Well, I guess that's what a tax cut does, yeah.
Every tax cut does exactly that.
There's no getting around it.
What do you want?
Not a tax cut?
Do you want to pay more taxes?
Which honestly, I have seen credible, quote-unquote, left-wing pundits say exactly that.
Literally, I want to pay more taxes.
It's like, dude, I think they would accept donations.
Okay, my taxes might be low, but I'm personally going to donate X amount to the Exchequer.
I think they would accept it.
But the 2020 presidential elections are still more than two years away.
That is a long time in politics and an eternity in the Trump era.
There might still be enough time for the National Democratic Party to get their act together and become the voice of the silent majority, which is currently completely overshouted by Trump's loud minority.
I don't think that's going to happen.
I think that what they're going to do is decide that actually everyone's a secret socialist, and so if we go full socialist, this will be our ticket to success.
And I don't think it's going to be their ticket to success.
I mean, Trump just keeps winning.
For example, affirmative action.
Trump to scrap college racial bias policy.
Bravo!
That's exactly what I want to see.
I don't want to see colleges racially discriminating about the students that they allow in.
The college should only be interested in your qualifications.
The Trump administration is set to roll back the Obama-era policies promoting diversity in universities known as affirmative action US media reports.
U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions revoked 24 guidance documents on Tuesday, many involving race in schools and affirmative action recommendations.
Bravo!
In 2016, the US Supreme Court ruled in favor of affirmative action.
Justice Anthony Kennedy, who wrote the 2016 opinion, announced that his retirement from the top US court last month.
His departure gives Trump the chance to appoint a justice who more closely matches the administration's views on taking race into account in college admissions.
The Trump administration, being those massive goddamn racists that they clearly are, is expected to tell schools not to consider race in the admissions process.
Wow!
What a fucking racist!
How dare he!
He wants merit-based admission to colleges and universities?
What a bigot.
The guidelines issued jointly by the Education and Justice Department Senator Obama encourage universities to promote diversity on campuses.
Yes, thanks, Obama.
Learning environments comprised of students from diverse backgrounds provide an enhanced educational experience for individual students, the guidance reads.
And also keeps some individual students out of these universities on the basis of their race, instead of on the basis of their academic achievement.
And did we forget that Harvard was being sued for racial discrimination against Asian Americans because of Asian privilege in their opinion?
They're just too smart and hardworking.
They're not diverse enough.
And there are voices on the left that realize, as the Washington Post have published this week, that the left's contempt is going to re-elect Donald Trump.
And I think that they're right.
Democrats have a new theory for how they can win back Congress and the White House.
Just like soccer moms helped put Bill Clinton in the Oval Office in 1996, and NASCAR dads helped George W. Bush win in 2004.
Donald Trump, the theory goes, was elected because of hashtag never Hillary Voters, hello, who didn't particularly like him but despised her.
Axios reports that the Democrats are targeting the 20% of Trump's voters who told exit pollsters they didn't like him, hoping these reluctant Trump voters will help power a blue wave in the 2018 midterms and defeat Trump in 2020.
One problem with that theory, the left's non-stop, over-the-top attacks on President Trump are not peeling those voters away from him, they are pushing him further into the president's camp.
Yes, they fucking are.
There is a reason that I went to Trump Tower and got myself a MAGA hat.
I was exactly this kind of demographic.
I was just a Never Hillary voter.
I wasn't even particularly pro-Trump.
I personally kind of liked Bernie until it turned out that Bernie had the spinal fortitude of a jellyfish.
In recent weeks, Trump derangement syndrome on the left has reached critical mass.
First there was Robert De Niro's fuck Trump tirade at the Tony Awards, followed by Samantha B calling Ivanka Trump a feckless cunt on her TV show, then the owners of the Red Hen restaurant threw out White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders because she works for the president, while chanting protesters heckled Homeland Security Secretary Kirsten Nielsen at a Mexican restaurant.
Maxine Waters added fuel to the fire by openly calling on mobs of left-wing activists to absolutely harass Trump officials.
Then there were the countless Trump opponents in the media, Congress and Twitter who compared the family separations at the border to Nazi Germany.
And the Time magazine covered depicting Trump staring heartlessly down at a crime mug and girl, implying she was separated from her mother, which she wasn't.
And now come the threats to block Trump's Supreme Court nominee before he's even nominated one.
How do liberals, quote unquote, think that the 20% of reluctant Trump voters respond to these displays of unbridled contempt?
They are not outraged at Trump, but at his critics.
The unhinged hatred for the president makes these voters almost reflexively defend him, and it's true.
Let's take the example of the Congolese immigrant who decided to climb the Statue of Liberty.
This is a press release after she was released from the court.
Note the shirt that she is wearing.
Done in the name of borders, then to physically transcend those hallowed words at the base of the Statue of Liberty, give me your tired, your poor, your huddling masses.
My client is an immigrant who came to this country because of those words, and she climbed the Statue of Liberty because she believes that every time a family is separated, every time an immigrant is criminalized, we betray those words.
Isn't that amazing?
It's because children are being put into cages.
Isn't that amazing?
This woman deliberately immigrated legally from a country that is non-white to a country that is majority white and is now wearing a shirt that says white supremacy is terrorism.
Well, I can't help but feel that you've kind of terrorized yourself if that's the case.
If you've deliberately moved into a majority white country and you think white supremacy is terrorism, who the fuck made you do it?
I mean, it's not like it's complete bullshit that children are being put inside of cages, like this example that went utterly viral, and it turned out that this photo was actually nonsense.
As you can see, here is the child not inside of the cage because the cage is part of a staged protest.
The toddler was following his older sibling who took part in the Dallas cage protest along with other teens.
He got confused on how to get out of the cage and then cried when he saw his mother.
He was only in there for about 30 seconds.
The photo was taken out of context.
I posted this on my personal profile.
It is not set to public but only friends and they shared it.
This was not real.
This is the opinion of an actual Holocaust survivor on what Donald Trump is doing with the borders and the children being separated from their parents.
This is the opinion of a man who lived through the Holocaust.
Someone with first-hand experience of how the Nazis treated people.
Let's listen to what he has to say.
Please, this is not the concentration camp.
They're free.
I looked it up over there and I said myself, all the mattresses and everything food.
I said, at that time, I would think it's a counterclockwise.
To someone who thinks that America runs concentration camps on the border, can you give them a message as someone who experienced a concentration camp?
Grow up.
You know how to spell, you know how to read, how to listen, do it.
You can't compare any time by hearing this.
It's sicknik.
What about the term people call President Donald Trump?
People call other political opponents Nazis.
What do you think about that?
Sicknick.
It's just plain sicknik.
But I mean, what does this guy know?
What does this Holocaust survivor know?
It's not like he's an immigrant from the Congo, a place where nothing bad ever happens.
I mean, it's not that this week there was a UN report that revealed that boys were forced to rape their mothers and soldiers were eating men alive in the Congo or anything.
But no, people being separated temporarily at the border because they committed a crime by illegally entering the United States.
And the US doesn't even know who these people are.
It's basically the Holocaust.
Donald Trump is basically Hitler and the Nazis have taken over the United States.
Testimonies included boys being forced to rape their mothers, little girls being told witchcraft would allow them to catch bullets, and women forced to choose gang rape or death.
The report said that one victim told us that in May 2017 she saw a group of militia, some of whom sported female genitals as medals.
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