LGBTQ news and entertainment
Grok, the chatbot created by Elon Musk’s social media platform X, ripped into an antisemitic tirade Tuesday and invoked Adolf Hitler, days after Musk touted updates that would reduce its reliance on mainstream media sources and train it on information that is “politically incorrect.” Continue reading “CEO Resigns After X Chatbot Goes On Full Hitler Rant”
Some news items you might have missed: • The Advocate: Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde, the Washington, D.C., Episcopal bishop who asked Trump to have mercy on on frightened LGBTQ people earlier this week, presided over a service honoring gay hate-crime victim Matthew Shepard at the Washington National Cathedral in 2018. Continue reading “Rev. Mariann Budde Honored Matthew Shepard + More News”
White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer, during a press briefing, told reporters that Syria’s Bashar al-Assad is worse than Hilter, because even Hitler didn’t use chemical weapons on his own people.
Hello? Gas chambers???
Via the New York Daily News:
“We didn’t use chemical weapons in WWII. We had someone as despicable as Hitler who didn’t even sink to using chemical weapons,” Spicer declared as he attacked Russia for backing Bashar Assad’s brutal regime in Syria.
He dug himself deeper when offered a chance to clarify a few minutes later. “When you come to sarin gas, he was not using the gas on his own people the same way that Assad is doing,” he said to shock in the White House briefing room. Hitler infamously used hydrogen cyanide known as Zyklon B at Nazi death camps targeting Jewish and other people.
You know, maybe this isn’t the best job for Sparky Spicer. Maybe some kind of desk job where you don’t put your foot in your mouth in front of millions of people…?
If you have to clarify your comment about Hitler, you probably shouldn’t have said it from the get-go.
p.s. Happy Passover from the White House
Spicer on Hitler: “He brought them into the Holocaust centers” What’s a Holocaust center? Jews were put in concentration camps, gas chambers pic.twitter.com/0OGQf0V1yh— Bradd Jaffy (@BraddJaffy) April 11, 2017
.@HallieJackson From the print pool, what appears to be a 4th Hitler clarification from Spicer, which adds a sentence at the end not there previously pic.twitter.com/lxZDJb2rwt— Bradd Jaffy (@BraddJaffy) April 11, 2017
.@brianstelter on Spicer Hitler comments “even by Sean Spicer standards this is a pretty shocking one” https://t.co/wU0LbKq7Tg #hitler— Brooke Baldwin (@BrookeBCNN) April 11, 2017
No matter how many times someone repurposes this clip with next captions, it makes me laugh.
No, seriously – stop and watch this.
One of the internet’s most popular parodies takes on Donald Trump’s immigration flip-flop.
This. Is. Fabulous.
(h/t JoeMyGod)
Over the weekend I posted about a “pledge” Republican front-runner Donald Trump has begun asking his supporters at rallies to speak aloud while raising their right hands.
Despite comments that this all looks eerily like a “Heil Hitler” salute, Trump continued this at campaign stops today.
Abe Foxman, former director of the Anti-Defamation League, gave a statement to the Times of Israel explaining why he found this “pledge of allegiance” to Trump is so disturbing:
“As a Jew who survived the Holocaust, to see an audience of thousands of people raising their hands in what looks like the ‘Heil Hitler’ salute is about as offensive, obnoxious and disgusting as anything I thought I would ever witness in the United States of America,” he told The Times of Israel.
“We’ve seen this sort of thing at rallies of neo-Nazis. We’ve seen it at rallies of white supremacists. But to see it at a rally for a legitimate candidate for the presidency of the United States is outrageous.”
“It is a fascist gesture,” Foxman said. “He is smart enough — he always tells us how smart he is — to know the images that this evokes. Instead of asking his audience to pledge allegiance to the United States of America, which in itself would be a little bizarre, he’s asking them to swear allegiance to him.”
Former Mexican President Vicente Fox doubled down on his criticism of Republican front-runner Donald Trump, this time saying the Trumpster reminds him of Adolf Hitler.
From CNN:
“Today, he’s going to take that nation (U.S.) back to the old days of conflict, war and everything. I mean, he reminds me of Hitler. That’s the way he started speaking,” Fox told CNN’s Anderson Cooper in a phone interview on “Anderson Cooper 360.”
“He has offended Mexico, Mexicans, (and) immigrants. He has offended the Pope. He has offended the Chinese. He’s offended everybody.”
Fox’s comments come one day after he delivered a scathing response on Trump’s plan to make Mexico pay for a wall between the Mexico-U.S. border.
“I’m not going to pay for that f***ing wall,” Fox said in an interview with Fusion’s Jorge Ramos.
Fox isn’t the first to compare The Donald to Hitler. Several pundits across political media point to Trump’s divisive rhetoric and note what they say are similarities to the methods Hitler used during his rise to power in Germany.
In response to the exceedingly extreme racist and racist rhetoric coming out of some current GOP presidential candidates – Donald Trump in particular for his comments calling for a ban on Muslims entering the U.S. – the Agenda Project has started the launch of an ongoing “Anti-Fascism” campaign, aimed at exposing this type of language as that of fear mongering, bigoted fascists that America should fear if we have learned anything from 1930’s Germany.
“We have to ask ourselves: what kind of country do we want to be? One that stands up to hatred and lives up to the principles enshrined in the Constitution and inscribed on the Statue of Liberty or one that rules by fear and subjugation of individuals we deem different,” said Erik Altieri, president of the Agenda Project, “We must unite against this bigotry or we risk losing everything we represent as a nation.”
The spot uses imagery from WWII Germany inter spliced with interview comments by Trump.
An Alabama chapter of the Ku Klux Klan allowed a BBC news crew to follow their activities to explore and better understand racist attitudes in the U.S. following the murders of 9 church-goers by a white supremacist in Charleston.
From Alternet:
As Klan members assemble 3,000 fliers to deliver to a predominately black neighborhood, the BBC interviewer notices a photograph of Adolf Hitler on the wall.
“Adolf Hitler, he was one of the smartest men there ever was,” a Klan member explains. “The so-called concentration camps like Auschwitz and so forth, they say they were death camps. But these death camps, they gave the so-called people that were being killed cigarettes, there was coffee, there was a movie theater, a library, even a swimming pool in Auschwitz.”
“And if you’re going to sit there and kill all these people then how come all these things would be in there?” he continues. “It’s more like a summer camp.”
“Sorry,” the stunned interviewer interrupts. “You’re telling me Auschwitz was like a summer camp?”
“Well, they had a swimming pool, a movie theater and everything else,” the Klan member insists. “You know, you don’t see in prisons today any kind of swimming pool being in the middle of the prison hall.”
“So what do you think the Jews were doing in Auschwitz?” the interviewer asks.
“Swimming,” the white supremacist replies. “And working. Because they didn’t want to do any work, and what Hitler was trying to do was he was trying to teach them to work, trying to rehabilitate them, if you will.”
“Where did you hear this?” the dumbfounded interviewer wonders.
“It’s all history,” the Klan member says.
Although the BBC interviewer continues to press, Klan members eventually tire of the subject and head out to distribute their fliers.
“In Britain, inciting racial hatred carries a possible sentence of seven years in prison,” the narrator explains to the British audience. “Here in the U.S., the First Amendment guarantees free speech. Even for blatant racism.”
“More than a million prisoners died at Auschwitz,” the narrator adds. “The vast majority of them were Jewish.”
Watch the clip from BBC 3 below. Warning: the clip makes frequent use of offensive racial slurs.
Some news stories you may have missed:
• Celebrating the upcoming 4th season of Where The Bears Are, here’s some bears to celebrate!
• There’s a new book by Dr. Seuss – What Pet Should I Get? – for the first time in 25 years.
• This is the gayest workout I’ve ever seen – and I’ve seen some seriously gay things in my life.
• Donald Trump secures the highly coveted endorsement of Dennis Rodman.
• Big surprise! The Louisiana shooter was a fan of Hitler, the Tea Party and hated black people.
• John Cena’s performance in box office hit Trainwreck is a revelation.
