Tuesday, June 28, 2016

Fantasies of Ball Gags and Gimps: Alex Jones Talks With Roger Stone About the 2016 Republican Convention in Cleveland


We are now in the fourth week of the June fundraiser here at Indomitable/WARN/We are Respectable Negroes. It is one of two fundraisers that I conduct annually. The other is in December.

I would like to thank all of the kind folks who have thrown some money into the virtual collection bowl. It is much appreciated. Thank you emails are forthcoming. As you know, I am not compensated for my work here or the podcast. Both are labors of love, labors that I learn and benefit from in ways that I cannot easily express. If you can, are able, and willing please do throw some pennies, gold, silver, into the Paypal logo on the top of the screen on the right hand side bar.

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I spent much of the afternoon at the doctor. She asked me questions, lectured me on my bad habits, and took a whole bunch of blood samples. In the two weeks since I made my trip to the emergency room, I have felt a bit improved in my energy and overall sense of self. Once I receive the blood work back next week, I will have a more precise understanding of my advanced state of decrepitude. As readers and friends may know, I was sent to the emergency room two weeks ago because of a very high blood pressure reading. In order to stay calm earlier today, I thought of something that made me laugh. My inspiration? Right-wing conspiranoid nut Alex Jones' recent interview with Donald Trump adviser, Bush confidante, and professional Nixonian dirty tricks man Roger Stone.

The 2016 Republican primary race is a human zoo. It features(d) religious fundamentalists, a sleep inducing and fabulist-delusional black brain surgeon, a professional wrestling heel inspired con man carnival barker, and various other characters who could easily star in a comedy by Mel Brooks or Woody Allen about American politics.

The 2016 Republican presidential primary race has also been a mix of the scatalogical and puerile. Thus, it is a showcase for the juvenile and the immature.

If primaries are supposed to be a way for the public to evaluate a political party's prospective nominees for a given office then the 2016 Republican primaries have shown that the GOP's base is more interested in electing a "Fratboy-in-Chief" than they are a serious person with the temperament, intelligence, and competence to serve as an effective President of the United States.

This year's presidential campaign has also been a focal point for the twisted and unhealthy psycho-sexual obsessions of  American movement conservatism where discussions of "political" cuckolding are infused with insecurities about white men's phalluses and castration anxieties in a moment when a black man is president.


As I wrote earlier:
Obama’s election was unsettling for conservatives. It drove many on the White Right to conspiratorial and delusional thinking, such as “Birtherism,” and also stirred up other more “old school” types of white racism, because the idea of a black man in the White House, as the United States’ President and symbolic embodiment of American power, was irreconcilable with a Herrenvolk logic that views “real Americans” as white by definition and tradition. The right wing’s fears of changing racial demographics,the mating of conservatism and racism, and the Republican Party’s creeping fascism in the present meant that Obama, as well as his cabinet and other appointees who were female and non-white especially, represented a particularly potent threat to embattled and insecure toxic white masculinity.
Much of this is just a function of the psycho-sexual aspects of authoritarianism more generally. Nevertheless, it is important to highlight as but one more example of how extreme and outside of the standing norms of mainstream politics American conservatives have drifted since the 1960s.

By even that low bar, Alex Jones and Roger Stone have set a new standard for political perversity. Their claims that Donald Trump is not a racist, is immensely popular among blacks and gays, and embodies the will of the American people is a joke. I doubt that even Jones and Stone actually believe such foolishness. In all, the both of them are working the angle to separate Right-wing fools from their money.

But their pivot to discussing being forced to perform fellatio on "liberals" and the "Democrats" (i.e. some imagined tyrant that is going to take over America) and then to wearing BDSM ball gags at the Republican convention as a type of "protest"--meaning something they are likely both intimately familiar with and may do for pleasure--is too natural.

To wit, the New Yorker's fascinating 2008 interview with Roger Stone...which begins in a Miami sex club:
A sign inside the front door of Miami Velvet, a night club of sorts in a warehouse-style building a few minutes from the airport, states, “If sexual activity offends you in any way, do not enter the premises.” At first glance, though, the scene inside looks like a nineteen-eighties disco, with a bar, Madonna at high volume, flashing lights, a stripper’s pole, and a dancer’s cage. But a flat-screen television on the wall plays porn videos, and many clubgoers disappear into locker rooms and emerge wearing towels. From there, some of them go into a lounge, a Jacuzzi room, or one of about half a dozen private rooms to have sex—with their dates or with new acquaintances. Miami Velvet is the leading “swingers’ club” in Miami, and Roger Stone took me there to explain the role he may have played in the fall of Eliot Spitzer, the former governor of New York.
Stone, to his credit, flies his freak flag high:
Stone served as a senior consultant to Bob Dole’s 1996 campaign for President, but that assignment ended in a characteristic conflagration. The National Enquirer, in a story headlined “Top Dole Aide Caught in Group-Sex Ring,” reported that the Stones had apparently run personal ads in a magazine calledLocal Swing Fever and on a Web site that had been set up with Nydia’s credit card. “Hot, insatiable lady and her handsome body builder husband, experienced swingers, seek similar couples or exceptional muscular . . . single men,” the ad on the Web site stated. The ads sought athletes and military men, while discouraging overweight candidates, and included photographs of the Stones. At the time, Stone claimed that he had been set up by a “very sick individual,” but he was forced to resign from Dole’s campaign. Stone acknowledged to me that the ads were authentic. “When that whole thing hit the fan in 1996, the reason I gave a blanket denial was that my grandparents were still alive,” he said. “I’m not guilty of hypocrisy. I’m a libertarian and a libertine.”
I am a very sex positive person. I find Roger Stones' political skulduggery and allegiances contemptible. I would love to have a few beers (or martinis) with him. I imagine that Stone is quite an amazing and skilled raconteur.

Perhaps, Roger Stone's and Alex Jones' vision for the upcoming Republican convention in Cleveland will come true? Ball gags, gimps, assorted sex toys, and the coronation of the American Il Duce Donald Trump. What a vision...and one that in many ways embodies the hypocrisy and psychosexual anxieties of the Republican Party in the Age of Obama. 

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