Our long national nightmare was more vividly rendered thanks to these folks.
Here are 13 people we’d love to see go away in 2016.
1. Dumbass Trump.
You know that joke
about how Dumbass Trump is like a comments section that came to life and
ran for office? Yeah, well, turns out the joke is on all of us—every
single sane one of us from coast to coast and around the world—since he
just keeps rising higher and higher in the polls. Dumbass Trump’s
campaign is a towering shit-pile made out of hateful comments about Latinos, African Americans, women of all races, Muslims, the disabled, Asians, Jews,
and too many individual people to get into. It would be wonderful to
wake up on January 1, 2016, to find he’s returned to whatever gaudy
gold-and-diamond encrusted hole he climbed out of, but it seems
unlikely. A girl can dream, though!
2. ...and his supporters.
Surveys show
Dumbass Trump’s base is mostly white wingnuts with only a high
school education. By and large, his fans think there’s nothing wrong
with this country that getting rid of all the blacks and gays and
Mexicans couldn’t fix. Sixty-one percent
of them believe Obama is a secret Muslim (as if it matters either way)
and that Trump’s plan to ban all Islamic immigration to the U.S. is a
step in the right direction. During televised interviews, they prove they’re absolutely batshit and then top it off by lying about being new to politics. Over the last few months, the thugs at Trump’s rallies have assaulted a Latino protester, spit in the face of another and used racial slurs, fists and kicks against a black activist. They have shouted out for “white power,” and at a more recent
campaign event, reportedly yelled the following at protesters: “kick
his ass,” “shoot him,” “light the motherfucker on fire,” “white lives
matter,” and “Sieg heil.” Trump’s security officers beat up one immigrant protester and threw another woman to the ground. And two Boston men
who attacked a homeless Hispanic man, punching him in the face and
urinating on him, stated they were inspired by Donald Trump’s rantings.
In short, like their leader, Donald Trump’s followers are the absolute
fucking worst.
3. All the wingnut pretender candidates, actually.
While
it’s true that Dumbass Trump’s horribleness just barely makes the rest
of the wingnut lot seem like decent people, it's also true that every
Republican contender is still absolutely terrible. Fiorina
knowingly lies again and again about that heavily edited Planned Parenthood video and then acts surprised when some lunatic commits a terrorist act based on her lies. Huckabee seems to think his racism, transphobia and Islamophobia is just adorable. Christie tells us to be afraid of Muslim children, scaremongers about Black Lives Matter and creates heart-touching videos expressing empathy for drug users even though he’s dedicated his career—and
the early days of his pretender campaign, even! —to supporting the
futile war on drugs, and by extension, the mass incarceration it has
caused. Rubio plays to homophobes by pretending he can overrule
the Supreme Court on marriage equality. Carson is a spontaneous “crazy quotes” generator who doesn’t understand that solid pyramids cannot serve as grain containers. Jeb expresses admiration for racists and dog whistles that African Americans are just looking for handouts. And Cruz went ahead with a pro-gun rally two days after the San Bernardino shooting because god forbid he show a little empathy if it might cost him a few gun nut votes. (A pox on his racist birther dad while we’re at it.) At least we’re lucky enough not to have to share a dorm room with him, I guess.
4. Martin Shkreli.
Also
known as “Pharma Bro,” Shkreli become widely loathed after raising the
price of Daraprim, a drug that helps both AIDS and cancer sufferers,
from $13.50 a tablet to $750 a tablet. He announced he would lower the price but then changed his mind and said —I’m paraphrasing here — fuck you, pay me. (He later told Forbes that he should’ve jacked up the price even more.) Shkreli’s company recently bought
KaloBios Pharmaceuticals, which sells benznidazole, a drug used to
treat Chagas disease, a tropical parasitic infection. Previously, the
medication was given out for free by the Centers for Disease Control,
and a round of treatment in Latin America cost between $60 to $100. Now,
Shkreli is trying to get FDA approval
for the drug, which is primarily used by poor Latino immigrants, so he
can raise the price by as much as 150,000 percent. Did I mention Shkreli
allegedly sent an ex-girlfriend he hadn’t spoken to in years a text
offering $10,000K to go down on her? Smooth operator, right? No wonder Bernie Sanders refused Shkreli’s campaign donation, opting instead to give it to an AIDS charity, and Wu-Tang donated
the reported $2 million Shkreli paid for their single-issue album,
“Once Upon a Time in Shaolin,” to the Hip-Hop Chess Federation. Shkreli
was just arrested for securities fraud,
so things aren’t looking so great for him at this point. I suppose
that, depending on how the trial goes, he might be the person on this
list most likely to actually disappear from the public eye soon.
5. R. Kelly.
This
year, R. Kelly was given the much coveted closing spot on the Soul
Train Music Awards. He got a standing ovation, and host Erykah Badu gave
him a glowing introduction
which included crediting him with having “done more for the blacks than
anyone.” This statement is problematic for a bunch of reasons,
including that it’s phrased like something Donald Trump would say. The
main issue, though, is that many, many young girls, some as young as 14,
have accused R. Kelly of sexual abuse, and there is endless evidence to
suggest he is guilty. This includes a video of Kelly having sex with an
underage girl and then peeing on her face and in her mouth. Had even
just that one girl, among the dozens of Kelly’s accusers, been blonde
and blue-eyed, I’m pretty sure the singer would be breaking rocks in the
hot sun right about now. But they were all African American girls from
Chicago’s South Side, and as Jim DeRogatis, whose excellent reporting
brought the allegations against Kelly to light, once said, “The saddest
fact I've learned is nobody matters less to our society than young
black women. Nobody." Instead of jail, Kelly is walking around free,
putting his gall on full display by chastising black people
for not buying his new record in significant enough numbers. Here’s
hoping the lack of a new hit convinces him to just shut it, already.
6. Daniel Holtzclaw.
If
you are looking for yet more proof that black women are valued less,
welcome to the case of Oklahoma police officer Daniel Holtzclaw. The
media, with few exceptions, seemed to find Holtzclaw’s indictment and
trial for the rape and sexual abuse of 13 African American women
unworthy of coverage. Which is precisely what Holtzclaw banked on when
screening for his victims: that no one would believe, or even care
about, stories of a cop committing sex assault against poor black women,
many of whom had criminal records. Those women knew that too, which is
why almost none of them reported him. ("What kind of police do you call
on the police?” one teen survivor asked at trial. Another told
investigators, “I didn’t think anyone would believe me. I’m a black
female.”) Holtzclaw’s last victim only happened to be driving through
the neighborhood he stalked, but she didn’t live there. A middle-class
African American woman with no record who lived across town, she had the
privilege of thinking she might be believed.
On
December 10, an all-white jury defied widespread expectations and
convicted Holtzclaw on 18 of the 36 sexual abuse charges against him,
recommending a sentence of 263 years. The media, suddenly interested,
widely reported the decision, and images of a sobbing Holtzclaw appeared
everywhere. Seeing Holtzclaw cry reminded me of this old South Park
episode, which is to say I have never cared less about the distress of
another human being. He’s currently on suicide watch. The women he
violated will have to live with his crimes for the rest of their lives.
7. Josh Duggar.
The
arbiter of sexual morality and family values in his role as executive
director of the Family Research Council—an organization that spends most
of its time decrying marriage equality and gay rights—Duggar’s
hypocrisy really knew no bounds. This is a man who spent years spreading myths about how gay marriage is a threat to traditional 'christian' family values and doing the whole
“think of the children!” thing. Meanwhile, between 2002 and 2003,
Duggar molested four of his own sisters and a babysitter. He apologized,
but he couldn’t have been that sorry, because from February 2013 to May
2015, he paid for an account on cheating site Ashley Madison. Busted yet again, Duggar released a statement:
"I have been the biggest hypocrite ever. While espousing faith and
family values, I have secretly over the last several years been viewing
pornography on the Internet and this became a secret addiction and I
became unfaithful to my wife...The last few years, while publicly
stating I was fighting against immorality in our country, I was hiding
my own personal failings.” He’s currently in a long-term rehab situation of some sort, where he is hopefully being taught some CBT that will help him STFU.
8. George Zimmerman.
In just the last year, the man who murdered Trayvon Martin engaged in the following behaviors:
- Allegedly threw a wine bottle at an ex-girlfriend and faced charges of aggravated assault. The charges were dropped when the woman recanted her story.
- Retweeted a photo of Trayvon Martin’s dead body.
- Responded to an insult on Twitter: “We all know how it ended for the last moron that hit me. Give it a whirl cupcake.”
- Tweeted the message: “Cops lives matter, black slime doesnt [sic].”
- Made a painting of the Confederate battle flag with the explicit purpose of selling it so the proceeds could be divided between himself and Andy Hallinan, a guy who banned Muslims from a shooting range he owns. The two also planned to sell signed copies for about $50 a pop.
- Tweeted that Obama is an “ignorant baboon” and used a homophobic slur.
- Tweeted a nude photo of his ex-girlfriend along with her phone number, writing, “She cheated on me with a dirty Muslim...She’ll sleep with anyone.”
9. Antonin Scalia.
Earlier this year, Antonin Scalia had a public hissyfit in the dissenting opinion to a recent SCOTUS decision upholding Obamacare. (Like a hack comic, he actually included a joke
about the sexual habits of hippies, but somehow restrained himself from
identifying rock and roll and television as “fads.”) That was bad, but
Scalia’s shining moment of awfulness came more recently, when he
basically stated that black people are stupid. Here the quote in all its lengthy, awful glory:
Abigail Fisher — a woman too mediocre to have her own entry on this list — will likely prevail in her anti-affirmative action case, thanks to attitudes on the court like Scalia’s. (Clarence Thomas probably gave him a fist bump after the above bit of nonsense.) And yet, as the Daily Beast notes, Scalia himself failed to get into Princeton and blamed his rejection on the fact that he wasn’t a WASP, saying he was “an Italian boy from Queens, not the Princeton type.”“There are...those who contend that it does not benefit African Americans to get them into the University of Texas where they do not do well, as opposed to having slower-track school where they do well. One of — one of the briefs pointed out that — that most of the — most of the black scientists in this country don’t come from schools like the University of Texas…They come from lesser schools where they do not feel that they’re – that they’re being pushed ahead in — in classes that are too — too fast for them…I’m just not impressed by the fact that — that the University of Texas may have fewer. Maybe it ought to have fewer. And maybe some — you know, when you take more, the number of blacks, really competent blacks admitted to lesser schools, turns out to be less. And — and I — I don’t think it — it — it stands to reason that it’s a good thing for the University of Texas to admit as many blacks as possible.”
10. Sean Toon.
Remember the McKinney pool incident? The bystander video
of the scene caught an adult male cop named Eric Casebolt menacingly
waving his gun at children, manhandling and slamming a 15-year-old girl
to the ground, and sitting on top of her as she sobbed. That whole scene
was instigated by Sean Toon and his wife, who several witnesses
say yelled racial epithets at the teenagers and then turned around and
called the cops on the kids they insulted. After the whole thing blew
up, Toon made a big show of walking around with signs praising the police for “keeping [him] safe,” and did a tour of talk shows
to commend the officers. But as he played the role of scared upright
citizen—a part made possible thanks to white privilege—his arrest record
surfaced. Turns out back in 1999,
an 18-year-old Toon and some friends were arrested for brutally
slaughtering a bunch of animals, which is the kind of thing you hear
about serial killers doing. He was sentenced to 285 days in jail and
fined $300. That same year, Toon was charged with “aggravated assault
with a deadly weapon” and sentenced to 75 days in jail. What I’m saying
is that Sean Toon is an ex-con with a record of violence against both
people and animals, and he very likely participated in a racialized
attack on a group of kids whose crime was being black at a party in his
neighborhood. In fact, those kids had a lot more reason to fear him than
he ever did to be afraid of them. I hope this entry is the last time
any of us have to read about him ever again.
11. Jared Fogle.
The
tapes of Jared Fogle, former Subway sandwich shop mascot, talking about
his sexual desires toward young children, his sexual abuse of kids, and
his methods for seducing his young victims are absolutely chilling. In
one recording, he states, “I had a little boy, it was amazing. It just felt so good. I mean, it felt—it felt so good.” In another,
he talks about how “fun” it would be for he and the women he mistakenly
thought was his accomplice to have sex with a child. “I think that girl
from the broken home could be a possibility,” he suggests. He even asked that same woman if he could put a camera in her own kids’ room. It’s horrifying. Fogle was recently sentenced to 15 years in prison for possession of hundreds of child pornography videos and sex with underage children.
12. Kim Davis.
Despite
being divorced three times, Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis appointed
herself the moral authority on love when she refused to issue marriage
licenses to same-sex couples. Davis went so far as to cease issuing the
licenses to all couples, gay and straight, just to avoid providing them
to same-sex pairs. She was arrested, which led to her being hailed as a
martyr by the right, who believe it’s totally cool for cops to shoot
black people who so much as get mouthy, but white homophobes who break
the law are a national treasure. Mike Huckabee suggested god had come down to Earth and shape-shifted into the form of Kim Davis! Her fans held a rally where some said she should be president! The pope met with her! (Though later, he was kind of like, 'Kim who?')
Davis is still clerk of Rowan County. In November she lost another of
her numerous appeals to block same-sex marriage in Kentucky.
13. Michele Fiore.
Cliven Bundy
supporter and Nevada Assembly member Michele Fiore loves guns. She
loves them so much she cast herself as the central gun-wielding
character in a wall calendar
titled “Michele Fiore’s 2016 Walk the Talk 2nd Amendment Calendar.” She
had her entire family—save for a few babies—pose with guns in the photo that graces her Christmas card this year. And to top it off, she said that she’d like to fire bullets into the heads of Syrian refugees, because Michele Fiore is a total nightmare:
“I’m about to fly to Paris and shoot ‘em in the head myself. I am not OK with Syrian refugees. I’m not OK with terrorists. I’m OK with putting them down, blacking them out, just put a piece of brass in their ocular cavity and end their miserable life. I'm good with that."In 2016, I would like never to hear about Michele Fiore saying anything, much less publicly threatening the lives of total strangers.
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