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Political features and current events

What Comes Around Trolls Around #Boomeranger

by Mick Zano • February 7, 2022

The R-meme-rebound is a real thing. You come up with an idea or that ‘aha’ moment emerges, in witty form, so you share your well-crafted meme on social media. Then you can set your watch to see how long it takes that same, yet opposite sentiment to swing back around the political horn. This occurs after its lovingly repackaged by MAGA trolls, of course …you know, those same folks who think Grammarly is a communist plot to overthrow sentence structure. Typically, they just switch the Rs to Ds or Trumps to Bidens and then publish. Good work if you can get it. And it’s not just memes, this trend also occurs amidst rightwing journalism, or what’s left of it. On my ride down to Tucson last weekend, I caught some lovely AM radio and was struck by the ongoing conservative tendency to pay it backward. This isn’t some new tactic but, seeing as how I don’t watch Fox anymore, it’s great to take the pulse of our brain-activityless brethren once in a while. Somewhere south of Nacho Grande I was amazed to hear the phrase Biden crime family bandied about. The Biden crime family? Roll that one around in your mouth for a while. I was among the first to go with a Trump crime family theme here on The Discord, but only because Trump was already a well-established mob boss with a crime family in tow. In a related move, all politicians excel at naming bills after the diametrical opposite of their intent; the Patriot Act comes to mind, or a Save America Rally, or Right to Work, which translates as: here comes the HR guy with the box for your stuff. Yikes. On that note, I lost so many jobs recently I believe it’s inversely impacting Biden’s jobless numbers. Just say’n.

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by Mick Zano • January 21, 2022

I know what you’re thinking, how could you find the least insightful MAGA meme on the internet? How could such a thing reliably even be measured? Don’t overthink this one, folks, because this is a story about non-thinking beings. I do believe this social media gem is worth reviewing, as it packs more Foxal matter, per syllable, than should be humanly possible; it’s also a further indicator of the extreme damage to the MAGA mindset. But a warning comes with this one: this contains about 20% less insight than most republican statements, which could break mathematics as we know it. And I still need that sometimes, like deciding when I should stop doing illicit substances prior to scheduled drug screenings, and the like. The sentiments embedded in this tweet are also part of the reason Biden’s approval ratings are tanking. I am not defending Biden in this piece so much as pointing out the mountain of false assumptions that passes for conservative thought these days, aka the usual.

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by Mick Zano • January 7, 2022

It isn’t really just the republicans, is it? I mean, sure they are the main cause of our woes, at least in my adult lifetime, but what is the deal with the liberal response to this cogent threat? Then I thought, hell, even most of the media seems oblivious to our current plight. Some journalists are honing-in on the appropriate level of dystopic hysterics, but the centerpiece of today’s news headlines should be some binary variation of either: Democracy Is In Peril!, or Mother Earth Is Going Tits Up! As things heat up (literally), I’m growing weary of the other distractions, right or left. Today, I found two related articles from the New York Times: Republicans Are Succeeding Because We No Longer Live In A Democracy, and Imagine It’s 2024, And Republicans Are Declaring Trump President. Nice. But on this, the 4th day of January, I find myself already at my 2022 NYTs article-limit so please let me know what you think about those *Cough*. I then switched to The Atlantic, typically a Zano Nation safe space, but today I read The Myth of Tribalism : Beware of the false notion that group solidarity leads inevitably to conflict. Dear Atlantic, can I call a Mulligan and get an additional free article this month? What’s your exchange policy?

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by Mick Zano • December 15, 2021

The mounting threats to our nation are endless, yet it’s easy to get mesmerized by the garden snake variety and ignore the cobras in the room. Republicans can’t even see the cobras at all, without the aid of a mirror. For this piece, let’s adopt a Deafcon system, because you’re all kind of deaf (the 12 Discord readers excluded, of course). R thinks we’re on the verge of communism and D believes we’re slipping toward a dictatorship. First off, the threat of becoming a communist nation is about a 1 on our Likert (1-5 threat scale). Mounting CRT concerns or no, there’s no clear path from Bernie to Stalin, unless you think Finland is about to annex Norway. From the progressive perspective, we are a social democracy striving to be a more functional one—social safety nets over failed military campaigns, a desire to direct our tax dollars to people over corporations, and other crazy stuff like that. On the fascism or despotism side of the equation, however, we are currently at DeafCon 3, and we will shift to Deafcon 4 in and around 2024. The next elections will not be pleasant and the possibility of a peaceful transition of power is waning. Again, this will look nothing like 1864, but the fallout could prove equally devastating. This is why, today, I am turning to both Christ and church, aka I’m moving to Christchurch, New Zealand.

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by Mick Zano • December 9, 2021

Is Hillary or Trump going to jail? Yep, I failed to squeeze everything into last week’s installment of our ongoing Trump-Ukraine-Russia-Dossier saga (TURDs), because the sketchy links keep arriving at Discord headquarters at a truly dizzying pace. There’s so much, real and imagined, crammed into these two mega messes. On one side a top Mueller deputy prepares to release another Special Counsel director’s cut, and down in MAGAville we’re inching ever closer to Hillary-dossier culpability—which, if you haven’t heard, comes in the form of an aide who allegedly crafted the Dossier’s content. It appears my blogvesary and I are in agreement on some details, which is good for Poke and Zano but horrible for Team USA. After several years of debating these dueling scandals, we agree there’s significant smoke on both sides of this crapola. On the Trump-Russian collusion front, no actual conspiracy-fire existed and yet this doesn’t excuse Trump’s crime spree. We also agree that there’s a lot of smoke on the Spygate front, which includes a nonexistent FISA process (thanks Patriot Act), circular leaks by the intelligence community (thanks Patriot Act), nonstop mainstream media coverage of a conspiracy phantasm (thanks Rachel, et al), and a dud of a Dossier at the heart of this mess (thanks Hillary). The Steele Dossier really is ground zero of this schitznik, and it’s totally stinking up the joint. Sorry, that’s my friend Pokey’s job.

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by Mick Zano • November 5, 2021

This discussion on BLM and Critical Race Theory occurred on 10-29. Pokey will start us off today: BLM is an organization derived from Marxist ideology, as proudly acknowledged by its founders. After Marxists witnessed the real-world consequences of their ideology—as expressed by the tyrannical governments of the Soviet Union, Cuba, and Communist China—Marxists changed their strategy. Instead of investing in armed revolution, they began infiltrating institutions of higher education; the Frankfurt School for one. These schools of thought continued developing into what is now Critical Race Theory.

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by Mick Zano • October 27, 2021

The following is a Covid discussion on insights into the pandemic. This original discussion between The Discord’s Mick Zano and Pokey McDores occurred on 10-24 with the aid of a Yiddish translator, a tv with closed captioning, and a chimpanzee named Frappy. Pokey will start us off:

In order to really understand this subject, we must begin at the origin. All Covid related issues must be viewed through the lens of its origin. Three months after the coronavirus was discovered, many science journals stated definitively that Covid developed naturally and did not come from a lab. We now know this premise is false. At the time, these false ‘scientific statements’ were used to justify the censoring of information that ran contrary to their narrative. All official medical spokespersons made public statements discrediting this theory and it has since surfaced many of these spokespersons were actually involved with the funding of experiments to enhance bat coronavirus so that it could infect humans.

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by Mick Zano • October 11, 2021

Here we go, kids! Mark your calendars. Hundreds of thousands of troops are currently refusing to get vaccinated, we have China poised to ‘reintegrate’ Taiwan, and we have global supply chains slowing to a crawl. Smoke ’em if you got ’em, unless they’re moored off the coast in a cargo ship. As for the pandemic, in a functional society the WHO would make the recommendations and we, as adults, would follow those guidelines. After all, you can’t be on a plane with TB, but where do you draw the constitutional line in these trying times? If you haven’t noticed, this is clearly not a functional society. I was against the vaccination mandate for precisely this reason: trust in the government is at an all time low and polarization is at an all time high. Am I vaccinated and did I want us to reach herd immunity? Yes. Did I think it was ever going to happen, or was worth the trouble? No. Are things as bad as 1860? Tough to say, because I was a very young blogger then, but I have been watching and reporting on this particularly malleable and potentially volatile demographic for decades. The GOP’s steady involution is kind of like reading Origin of Species backward. If huge swaths of our troops and police force refuse to get vaccinated, we have a problem. What do you do you do with these folks? I’ve been asking myself this very question for a long time. Of course, top republicans and the former president himself recommend getting vaccinated, but the monster the right-winger’s created, as predicted, has broken through the chains and is heading for the windmill again (which we now know causes cancer).

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by Mick Zano • September 14, 2021

Neo-liberalism, as best personified by Reagan and Thatcher, is officially dead. Amen. But I’m not here today to bitch about zombie politics, although I loved Trickle Z and 30 Days of Right. Lately, it’s this Maddow-level-green version of liberalism that is really getting my goat. The issue with identity politics and all of its joyous facets isn’t new, but our society’s culture-warrior rot runs far deeper than I imagined. Today, a dysfunctional progressive movement is not in its infancy but has reached its misinformative years, which at least matches the emotional maturity of the average canceler. Cancel is an infection across the industrialized west as highlighted by Canada’s well-established racism tribunals and Japan’s Olympic committee’s recent decision to banish anyone who farted in public since 1972. If you don’t want to read my blog for sensitivity reasons, fine, but please spare me the fines. Look, I both understand and predicted an overreaction to all the horrors of MAGAville—or Brexitville, or all of the current global nationalistic horrors abound—but such a response must be grounded in constitutional principles. There’s no wiggle room here. It certainly seems like some libs want to ditch our founding documents because “Jefferson owned slaves, man.” You’re cancelled. I identify as an Ubermensch, but the term ‘Superman’ is acceptable. Mensch is German for ‘people,’ so use the word ‘Superman’ at your linguistic, or cancel-vulnerable, peril.

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by Mick Zano • August 20, 2021

This post is a response to a James Fallows article over at The Atlantic. Fallows has published a series of articles comparing the fall of Rome to the US’s current trajectory. I called the US’s point of no return a couple of years ago here on The ‘Cord. Although Fallows started his US- deathwatch around that same time period, he falls short of any direct prediction surrounding our fate. He is still waiting for that point of no return—or some Ceaser crossing the rubicon moment—as if it’s still somewhere in the future. I think Fallows has the right idea, but I am not sure why he has to see a guy fiddling in front of a burning city to climb out onto this particular eschatological limb.

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