Maybe what’s happening in America today will seem funny to some other culture in some future time—how it happened that in the depths of America’s decline, Liberals, the great opposition to everything mean and ruthless in this culture, couldn’t muster up a get-together for anything better than a mock-in. Led by a clown.

I confess, I couldn’t hack it. I came to the rally–saw those two pastry chefs from the Mythbusters show get all the Liberal Elites to hold a post-modern human wave, an ironic human wave allowing all the self-conscious Liberal Elites to play like Real America, while salvaging their vanity because it was all ironic and post-modern… And to make sure that everyone knew they were not really human-waving but rather meta-human-waving, the Mythbusters duo deconstructed the human wave. And all the Liberal Elites smiled and laughed knowingly, because all 150,000 were in on the biggest inside-joke wankathon in American history. And that was it for me–I was outta there. (more…)

Will Wilkinson: Libertard With Sadditude

Ever since Yasha and I first broke the story about the Koch brothers financing the Tea Party Campaign in February of 2009, I’ve been wondering: Have all those billions that the Brothers Koch invested into their libertarian brain-washing project paid off?

The answer: You betcha.

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The full version of this article is published on the New York Observer Online.

So far, the debate over the proposed Islamic center near Ground Zero has unfolded along predictable lines, with the man at the center of the project, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, drawing attacks from the right painting him as a terrorist sympathizer with ties to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood.

But meanwhile, links between the group behind the controversial mosque, the CIA and U.S. military establishment have gone unacknowledged. (more…)

This article was first published in The eXile on April 27, 2000.

The nonviolent teach-in at a church in Colombia Heights just begged to be sneered at. You couldn’t help it. Here in the church basement, hundreds of protest-eager students ranging from Phish groupies to Tower Records clerks were being prepped for slaughter by a pair of butch mentors and their lanky male sidekicks, all elders of the great Seattle riots. Since there were several such teach-ins across Washington D.C. for days leading up to the anti-IMF protests, you could assume that thousands were being trained for non-violent action, facing down not only America’s entire security forces apparatus (FBI, Secret Service, U.S. Park Rangers, D.C. Metropolitan Police, and the National Guard to name a few), but also the enmity of the mainstream press, as well as Washington’s vile, physically-repulsive professional class. The poor Vegan hippies were going to get stomped on by the greatest state police apparatus that the world has ever known, and they had no idea. (more…)

This classic “prank” first published in the summer of 1999 ranks as one of the eXile’s least-successful pranks (which paradoxically made it x-tra annoying) on our longtime nemesis Michael McFaul–formerly a top Clinton USAID official in Moscow, Carnegie Endowment and Hoover Institute tool, and currently Special Assistant to President Obama and Senior Director for Russia and Eurasian Affairs at the National Security Council.

Our fling with McFaul goes way back, and even though he’s an Obama bigshot, he hasn’t forgotten us, as revealed in the Wall Street Journal in 2008:

Michael McFaul, professor of political science and director of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford University, and a frequent target of attacks from the Exile, said he was “sorry to see the paper go” though he didn’t always agree with its politics. The Exile frequently assailed Mr. McFaul for his 1970s-style haircut.

Indeed. And now…the prank: (more…)

I just found out–belatedly–that one of my childhood heroes, Jack Tatum, died of a heart attack a few days ago. When Tatum played for the Oakland Raiders in the 1970s, he was the most intimidating football player of his time–not in a hammed-up telegenic way, but in a disturbing way that made people, including fans of the sport, nervous. Tatum was serious about his violence, and sadistic, and gratuitous–but not a loudmouth. After knocking countless opponents unconscious year after year, Tatum put his most famous hit on wide receiver Darryl Stingley, snapping two of his neck vertebrae and nearly severing his spinal cord. The hit left Stingley paralyzed for life from the neck down, and sealed the NFL’s squeamish loathing of Tatum and the old Oakland Raiders forever.

Tatum never apologized to Stingley for that hit–and why should he have? Instead, Tatum wrote just two years later, “My best hits always bordered on felonious assaults.” To this day, it’s hard to find a video of the Stingley hit–even in the recent ESPN tribute to Tatum, naming him the #6 Most Fearsome NFL Hitter of All-Time, they’re still too unnerved to even mention the notorious Stingley paralyzing:

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This article first appeared in The eXile on June 1, 2007

For months now, our overseas readers have been asking us, “What’s a gopnik?” They have a vague idea of what a gopnik looks like, thanks to our Face Control page: tough Russian dudes with bad skin and blank fuck-if-I-care expressions. They’re the guys who look more comfortable squatting than standing. But more than anything else, they’re the last males on planet earth who can get away with wearing those 20s-style leather gangster caps without looking like drama school fags rehearsing for a musical. (more…)