Whittle Away

For some "conservatives", this could mean they start to turn back to a more mainstream version of their former selves.  Kinda where I used to be - before Willie Horton, and that horrifying clusterfuck at the '92 Republican convention in Houston.

(Yeah, OK - prob'ly not. A guy can dream)

Vox:

Notorious conspiracy theorist Alex Jones claims a “form of psychosis” caused him to believe that the Sandy Hook massacre was staged.

For years Jones, the founder of InfoWars.com, peddled a conspiracy theory about the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, where a gunman brutally killed 20 children and six adults in 2012. Jones has repeatedly claimed the massacre was a “giant hoax” carried out by “crisis actors” in a broad scheme to trample on Second Amendment rights.

In a video released Friday, Jones acknowledged in a sworn deposition stemming from a lawsuit filed by the families of Sandy Hook victims that the school shooting was in fact real. Jones blamed the “trauma of the media and the corporations lying so much” for triggering his extreme distrust in news and information.

In any field - any market at any time in history - there's always been a struggle to be seen and heard. They started calling it "clutter" as Mass Media was coming into its own, and if you want to get your message out, and make it stick so as to make yourself memorable to the consumer, you have to figure out ways of cutting through all that clutter.

In a media universe that exists in cyberspace, the clutter has grown to a level that drowns out all but the loudest voices - or the weirdest - or the most adamant - or the ones that are just plain adamant about their weirdness to the exclusion of everything but the part that might be useful for cutting through the clutter.

Anyway, one by one, the darlings of Wing-Nutopia are showing themselves to be even worse phonies than the "librul media elites" they say they love to hate.

And it's kind of encouraging that the courts are proving again to be the means of making some of these dicks behave less dickishly.

Of course, that means we're right to be worried about what Mitch McConnell is trying to pull - stacking the Judiciary with Daddy Staters who're more than a little sympathetic to shutting us off from our 1st amendment right to petition for redress.

And so it never ends.

There's no such thing as Once-n-For-All, and we have to stay in this fight no matter what.