Last Call For Welcome To Gunmerica, Con't

Another pair of mass shootings over the weekend in Gunmerica, one of them in Louisville, still reeling from another mass shooting earlier last week.

 

At least two people were killed in a shooting at a park in Louisville, Kentucky, over the weekend, less than a week after a mass shooting at a bank in the city left five people dead.

Two people died and four others were injured after shots were fired into a crowd at Chickasaw Park in Louisville on Saturday. Police responded to reports of the shooting around 9 p.m., and two victims were pronounced dead at the scene.

Louisville Deputy Chief Paul Humphrey said at a press conference on Saturday night that while there were hundreds of people in the park at the time of the attack, police had no witnesses to the shooting. Humphrey also said it was unclear who opened fire.

“I want to speak directly to whoever the shooter is,” Humphrey said. “Turn yourself in. The best thing for you to do is to turn yourself in. We know that this will not end well. The best-case scenario is for you to turn yourself in and stop this.”

Louisville Mayor Craig Greenberg (D) also reflected on the gun violence in the city over the past week, saying it had been “an unspeakable week of tragedy.”

“On Monday, we lost five of our fellow citizens to a horrific act of workplace gun violence,” Greenberg said. “And now, five days later, we’re at another scene of a reckless act of gun violence.”

 

Meanwhile, another mass shooting happened last night in Alabama.

A celebration turned violent in downtown Dadeville Saturday night as a shooting left four dead and more than 20 people injured according to investigators on scene.

Witnesses tell WRBL the gathering was a Sweet-16 Birthday celebration at Mahogany Masterpiece Dance Studio, and the shooting happened around 10:30 Saturday night. We are told the majority of those injured are teenagers. That information has not been confirmed by law enforcement. We do not know if a person(s) of interest or suspect(s) is in custody.

Sources tell WRBL multiple law enforcement agencies are working feverishly in multiple jurisdictions on the investigation. Law enforcement’s limited disclosure of information regarding the mass shooting, the victims, and the suspect(s) has left some members of the community feeling increasingly frustrated. WRBL is told ALEA is leading the investigation, not local law enforcement. ALEA releases the following statement Sunday morning around 8:15:

At approximately 11:45 p.m. Saturday, April 15, Special Agents with the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency’s (ALEA) State Bureau of Investigations (SBI) launched a death investigation at the request of the Dadeville Police Chief. The investigation is a result of a shooting which occurred at approximately 10:34 p.m. near the 200 Block of Broadnax Street in Dadeville, located in Tallapoosa County. Currently, there have been four confirmed fatalities and multiple injuries. The following agencies responded to the scene and are currently assisting with the investigation: The Dadeville Police Department, Tallapoosa County Sheriff’s Office, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) and the 5 Circuit District Attorney’s Office. Nothing further is available as the investigation is ongoing.

 

Gunmerica will never stop until we stop the GOP, period. A majority of states are now open carry/permitless carry and more will die.

 

Gunmerica forever!

Black Lives Still Matter, Con't

After both of The Justins were returned to the Tennessee House last week after being ejected by state Republicans, at least one Republican had robocalls thanking them for expelling "Antifa terrorists" from the legislature.

 

A new robocall is falsely accusing the three Tennessee Democratstargeted by Republicans for expulsion from the state legislature of being violent "Antifa" radicals.

Audio of the call, which was obtained by the Tennessee Holler, describes Tennessee Democrats Justin Pearson, Justin Jones, and Gloria Johnson as "radical activists posing as elected officials” who purportedly "led an angry mob of Antifa intending violence" to the Tennessee State Capitol building earlier this month.

The robocall also falsely claimed that law enforcement officials confiscated "pipe bombs" from demonstrators protesting against the three Democrats' expulsion.

According to the Tennessee Holler, the calls were funded by right-wing organization Enlighten Tennessee, whose stated goal is to "preserve the Conservative economic principles which make Tennessee the greatest state in the country to live."

Gloria Johnson, the one Tennessee Democrat who survived the expulsion vote, reacted angrily to the robocall, which she decried as "disgusting."

"Antifa? Pipe bombs?" she asked incredulously. "I guess parents brought them in strollers with their babies and toddlers. I didn’t know they made brass knuckles for children. This is disgusting, disgraceful, and it’s going to get someone hurt."

Johnson also hinted at legal action against the call and revealed that she's "already have had my lawyer on the phone" to talk about options.

 

Republicans both inside and outside the state have repeatedly said that the expulsion of Justin Pearson and Justin Jones was justified because of their "terrorist, insurrectionist actions".  Now we see people are trying to get the Justins lynched.

Black Lives Still Matter. Even in Tennessee.

Sunday Long Read: Power Dril Nation

This week's Sunday Long Read is Nate Rogers's profile of legendary Twitter zeitgeist poster Paul "dril" Hochney in The Ringer, the man behind one of the most surreal and witty accounts of the last decade, making the trenchant observations of a digital world one shitpost at a time.

 

Dril is a real person, or so I had been told. Sitting in the House of Pies in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles, I was waiting for him to join me in a booth—but I didn’t know who was actually going to show up.

It was the quiet midafternoon hours at the diner, which is a relic of when the area was less upscale, and it still partially attracts an off-key clientele of misfits and bozos, some of whom are alone and in no hurry to leave. (As I sat, an older man in oversized overalls walked by carrying a seat cushion; it was unclear whether he worked there.) This venue was the most readily available approximation of Dril’s world that I could think of.

While I waited, I pulled up Dril’s Twitter account and looked at a recent post: “The fact is,” he wrote, “people arent doing a good job wiping their ass these days. And its attracting all manner of stray dogs and coyotes to our towns.” The likes were ticking up and up in real time as they moved toward their eventual zenith of almost 17,000. By Dril standards, this wasn’t even a particularly popular—or deranged—post.

With 1.7 million highly engaged followers, Dril is one of the more powerful Twitter users and, by default, one of the more powerful figures on the internet. Active since 2008, the Dril account—simultaneously known by the profile name “Wint”—with its grainy Jack Nicholson avatar, has been responsible for countless viral posts, just as beloved for the vivid scenes they induce as for the baffling grammatical and spelling errors they contain. Many of his tweets have become part of the permanent online lexicon: “‘im not owned! im not owned!!’, i continue to insist as i slowly shrink and transform into a corn cob”; “issuing correction on a previous post of mine, regarding the terror group ISIL. you do not, under any circumstances, ‘gotta hand it to them’”; “i am selling six beautfiul, extremely ill, white horses. they no longer recognize me as their father, and are the Burden of my life.”

To most people, he is nothing; show the unaffiliated some of his posts, and they will likely just generate confusion and possibly anguish. (“Uh, so, I think I’ll stick with gardening. Where bull poop helps good things grow, and the tweets come from birds, not nitwits,” read one of many upset people in the comment section of a recent Washington Post feature about Dril, inadvertently adopting their own Dril-esque cadence in the process.) But to a large sect of the Very Online, he is king—the undisputed poet laureate of shitposting, the architect of a satire so effective that it has become impossible to tell when Dril stopped mocking the way people speak online and when we, instead, started speaking like Dril online.

For almost 10 years, he was entirely anonymous. Like a decent number of the people in the so-called “Weird Twitter” scene that Dril is still vaguely a part of, he doesn’t put his real name on the account—but as time has gone on and his popularity has grown, it’s become nothing short of miraculous that he’s kept up the mystery. He’s a pyramid-obsessed phantom. He’s banky. Still, over the years, some of his digital curtain has begun to part—largely spurred by his being doxxed in 2017, when his identity was revealed to supposedly be that of a man named Paul.

Around the same time, Dril started a Patreon, released a book, Dril Official “Mr. Ten Years” Anniversary Collection, and had an Adult Swim television show, TruthPoint—a surrealist Infowars parody in which he manifested behind a cheap old man mask and bantered with self-professed “manic pixie stream boy” cohost Derek Estevez-Olsen. Dril also began doing an interview here and there, but never anything substantial, and always in character. I reached out to him via email, and when he replied, the name attached to the account was “paul d.” But I still wasn’t totally sure that he wouldn’t walk into House of Pies with his mask on, throw a plate against a wall, and then walk out.

“I’m Paul,” he said, once he found me and after I began by asking whom, exactly, I could say I was speaking to.

Paul Dochney, who is 35, does not, in fact, look like a mutant Jack Nicholson. He has soft features and a gentle disposition and looks something like a young Eugene Mirman. It’s difficult to say what I expected to find sitting across from me, but it wasn’t this. Looking at him, you’d never presume that this was the person who made candle purchasing a matter of financial insecurity.

He opted to stick with water—not a terrible decision at the House of Pies, but also, I worried, a choice that theoretically allowed him a quick exit at any point. For a while, I got the sense that he might have been deciding how much to reveal to me in real time, based on how the conversation went. But one thing he was clear about from the beginning: It was all right to end this game of living in the digital shadows.

“I mean, my name is already out there,” he said, acknowledging the fact that, after the doxxing, he had at separate points confirmed his name on both Twitter and Reddit. “It’s in my Wikipedia article. Maybe people need to grow up. Just accept that I’m not like Santa Claus. I’m not a magic elf who posts.”

In some sense, anonymity has served a creative purpose. “Practically, it’s a good tool,” Estevez-Olsen told me later in a phone interview, “because when you make a post, you don’t want to be like, ‘From Paul Dochney, I fuck flags’ or whatever. You want to have some distance from it.” (He would know: “Estevez-Olsen” is itself a TruthPoint stage name that he asked me to use for reasons of privacy.)

But the secrecy has also lingered because of the types of personalities Dril naturally attracts to his orbit. “Most people are normal,” Dochney explained. “But there’s, like, three or four weirdos who just ruin it for everyone.” Jon Hendren, a fellow titan of Weird Twitter who is known by his subtle handle, @fart, told me that he had seen some disturbing messages people had sent Dochney in the past—that he wasn’t being paranoid or dramatic. “It’s gotta be kind of surreal,” Hendren said. “And it’s got to be kind of difficult to live with.”

 

Before Elon Musk brings Twitter to a grinding halt with pieces of it falling off like a cartoon Ford Pinto, it's nice to know that yeah, social media in the 2010's and early 2020's was pretty good with people like dril in it.

 

Right before, you know, it all went to shit.