As you may or may not have heard, the actual-factual White House correspondent for the dumbest site on the internet was arrested for assault on Tuesday.
Lucian Wintrich, the White House correspondent for the far right, White House-credentialed website Gateway Pundit, was arrested Tuesday night after grabbing a woman at a talk he was giving. The altercation happened at the University of Connecticut during a talk Wintrich was giving a talk called “It Is OK To Be White” after a woman appeared to grab papers off the podium.
There's so much to unpack here. I don't want to. You can't make m—what's that? I have to anyway? UGH. Fine. But I’m lodging a formal protest, I’ll have you know.
So here's the short version: The thing called “Gateway Pundit” is, as previously mentioned, the dumbest site on the internet. It is a far-right blog run by the Dumbest Man On The Internet, Jim Hoft, and is known not so much for being a conspiracy site as for being the most gullible set of rubes on the planet. They're the sort that regularly publishes goofy hoaxes in the earnest belief they're real—not sophisticated fake-news efforts, but things more along the lines of "the scorch marks on this piece of rye toast clearly indicate that Hillary Clinton did Benghazi." It is, as a site, renowned for its dumbness. It became popular among conservatives in ye olden days of George W. Bush for reliably propping up whatever the conservative argument of the moment required propping up, often with obviously faked "documents" or other would-be SUPER IMPORTANT PROOF that would last about three hours before being debunked in comic fashion. A decade later, it's still a running internet joke; Jim Hoft is, indeed, the Dumbest Man On The Internet, and there is not a close second.
The Trump White House gave these jackasses White House access because, and how I wish we were kidding here, Trump's team became enamored of the Dumbest-Man-On-The-Internet website. Finally, a site with as loose a relationship to the truth as Trump’s own pie-hole; Team Garbage Fire found Team Pundit Garbage Fire, and they set off to make lovely Garbage Fire Jourmalizm Press Room Babies together.
Lucian Wintrich is the guy who landed that "White House correspondent" role. If you are a C-SPAN viewer you may have been witness to his Dumbest Site On The Internet questions during White House press events. If you have, you have my sincerest sympathies. I recommend booze.
Alas, here is where today’s story begins: Wintrich has a side gig giving extremely dumb speeches to, for example, College Republicans. This is not surprising; College Republican groups have taken it upon themselves to, in the Trump era, invite all number of white nationalists, white supremacists, obvious trolls, unsubtle advocates for violence, brick-stupid conspiracy mongers and so forth in what passes for "edgy" when you are a young conservative suffering a new life crisis from landing in a new home where black Americans and gay Americans and people who speak more than one language are all allowed to use the same classrooms and it is new and frightening and nobody wants to date you. Nearly all of these college Republican events appear to be booked for the sole purpose of goading other students into outraged responses so that the pasty white young Aryan pretenders holding the events can declare how oppressed they are and oh-what-kind-of-world-do-we-live-in where you can't bring advocates for mass deportation or ethnic cleansing or resegregation or clearly fraudulent hoax-peddlers masquerading as truth-tellers without those people getting yelled at by people who, say, actually know the topics the hoaxers are hoaxing about and don’t like being lied to, or maybe just don’t feel like tolerating racist crapsacks because this ain’t the 1840s, buddy.
So Lucian here shows up to give a speech titles "It Is OK To Be White," which is a real damn odd topic for a supposed White House journalist to be opining on during his evening hours. His speech didn't go well. There were indeed, as expected, objectors. And, thus, an on-scene police presence.
One woman snuck his written speech or notes off his podium while he was distracted talking to someone else. Wintrich saw her. He went after her, and in an effort to get his papers back lunged for her, grabbed her around the neck and, well, got himself arrested on the spot. It's all on video.
I am also going to point out here that young Lucian Wintrich appears to have showed up for his speech wearing a fucking bow tie. That is not terribly significant, I realize, but appears to be a universal signaler among ambitious conservatives of a person who believes his IQ to be 50 points higher than it actually is. It is the Tucker Carlson effect—or, rather, affect. No, I can't explain it either. There may be a secret handshake involved; there may have been an instruction to wear bow ties that miraculously appeared on some particularly well-browned piece of toast. Religions have been founded on less.
So anyway, the White House correspondent for the Gateway Pundit blog, and that is a real phrase that we find ourselves using in 2017, along with things like "the president retweeted European fascists today" or "the Secretary of State is currently engaged in a snit with the president's daughter" or "Alabama Republicans say corporate tax cuts are much more important than whether their candidate is a serial child molester," got himself arrested for assault during a speech about political correctness and how much you suck for not having enough of it, or too much of it, or something.
That is a thing that happened. It's real. He will likely not suffer career consequences at the Dumbest Site On The Internet, because by next Thursday they will have convinced themselves the person he attacked was in fact not a real person but a Space Lizard Here To Help Hillary Do The Benghazis, and he will likely not lose his White House credentials because Team Trump is a garbage fire from top to bottom and it will take a hell of a lot more than physically assaulting a woman on camera to get kicked out of that club. They don’t even abandon actual bona fide child molesters, so this will count for jack squat.
Now if Lucian had gotten three scoops of ice cream on a day when Donald Trump only got two, now that would have gotten his credentials revoked right quick. But he didn’t, because they warn you about that when you get your press pass.
There. I have explained it all, as obligated. Now I am going to go take a long nap and pretend this never happened, because holy hell, America, the things you put us through on any given Wednesday.