Pop Culture

Donald Trump Jr., Sentient Pond Scum, Is Selling T-Shirts Mocking the Fatal Alec Baldwin Shooting

The shirts, making light of a tragic event in which a real person lost her life, read “Guns don’t kill people, Alec Baldwin kills people.”

Last week, a horrifying tragedy occurred on the set of an Alec Baldwin movie in which the actor, reportedly told that a prop firearm he’d been handed did not contain any live rounds, accidentally shot and killed cinematographer Halyna Hutchins and injured director Joel Souza. In his first public statement following the incident, Baldwin tweeted, “There are no words to convey my shock and sadness regarding the tragic accident that took the life of Halyna Hutchins, a wife, mother and deeply admired colleague of ours,” adding that he is “fully cooperating with the police investigation to address how this tragedy occurred” and “in touch with her husband, offering my support to him and his family. My heart is broken for her husband, their son, and all who knew and loved Halyna.” If there’s a normal way to respond to such an awful, inexplicable event, this is it. Know what isn’t? Selling merchandise mocking an episode in which a real person lost her life. Anyone choosing to do such a thing would obviously be a huge psychopath, more than likely raised by a huge psychopath—which is why, surprise: Donald Trump Jr. is currently hawking T-shirts making light of the tragedy.

Insider reports that the ex-president’s son and namesake, who’s been gunning to succeed his father as the biggest asshole on Twitter, is offering shirts on his website that read, “Guns don’t kill people, Alec Baldwin kills people.” Obviously we will not be linking to such crap, but if you’re as terrible a person as Don Jr. and want to walk around in public with this “joke” on your body, you can choose to sport it in black, navy, heather gray, or military green, and it’ll set you back $27.99.

According to the Independent, Junior shared a photoshopped image of Baldwin wearing the shirt on Instagram, where he also shared a meme that said, “Let’s all watch Alec Baldwin blame the gun,” with the caption, “It’s only a matter of time.” (This line is actually a weird self-own of gun nuts like Junior, who love to claim, “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” after various mass shootings when, in fact, it is the guns that are the problem.) Apparently confronted about being an opportunistic jackass, Junior took to Instagram stories and wrote, “Screw all the sanctimony I’m seeing out there. If the shoe was on the other foot Alex Baldwin would literally be the first person pissing on everybody’s grave trying to make a point. F*ck him!” Last week he posted a meme with the caption, “That look when an anti gun nut kills more people with a gun than your extensive firearm collection ever has.”

Strangely, Junior has not had anything to say about the fact that his father was responsible for thousands of Americans losing their lives last year to COVID, and won’t lift a finger to encourage people to take steps to die an easily preventable death right now. Perhaps “Guns don’t kill people, pieces of shit named Trump kill people” is too long for a shirt?

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So this Mark Zuckerberg guy is pretty awful, huh?

One day he’s letting U.S. politicians lie in ads and defend Holocaust deniers, the next he’s carrying water for Vietnam’s Communist party as it cracks down on dissent. Per the Washington Post:

In America, the tech CEO is a champion of free speech, reluctant to remove even malicious and misleading content from the platform. But in Vietnam, upholding the free speech rights of people who question government leaders could have come with a significant cost in a country where the social network earns more than $1 billion in annual revenue, according to a 2018 estimate by Amnesty International. So Zuckerberg personally decided that Facebook would comply with Hanoi’s demands, according to three people familiar with the decision, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe internal company discussions. Ahead of Vietnam’s party congress in January, Facebook significantly increased censorship of “anti-state” posts, giving the government near-total control over the platform, according to local activists and free speech advocates.

And while criticizing the Vietnamese government is apparently a no-go fo Zuck, hate speech gets the green light:

[Whistleblower Frances] Haugen references Zuckerberg’s public statements at least 20 times in her SEC complaints, asserting that the CEO’s singular power and unique level of control over Facebook mean he bears ultimate responsibility for a litany of societal harms. Her documents appear to contradict the CEO on a host of issues, including the platform’s impact on children’s mental health, whether its algorithms contribute to polarization and how much hate speech it detects around the world.

For example, Zuckerberg testified last year before Congress that the company removes 94 percent of the hate speech it finds before a human reports it — but internal documents show that its researchers estimated that the company was removing less than 5 percent of hate speech on Facebook. In March, Zuckerberg told Congress that it was “not at all clear” that social networks polarize people, when Facebook’s own researchers had repeatedly found that they do. The documents — disclosures made to the SEC and provided to Congress in redacted form by Haugen’s legal counsel — were obtained and reviewed by a consortium of news organizations, including The Washington Post.

In her congressional testimony, Haugen accused Zuckerberg—who started Facebook‘s predecessor so college student’s could rank women’s looks—of repeatedly prioritizing growth over the public good, an allegation echoed by other former employees that, naturally, the company denies. In a statement, a spokeswoman for Facebook told the Post “We have no commercial or moral incentive to do anything other than give the maximum number of people as much of a positive experience as possible. Like every platform, we are constantly making difficult decisions between free expressions and harmful speech, security and other issues, and we don’t make these decisions inside a vacuum—we rely on the input of our teams, as well as external subject matter experts to navigate them. But drawing these societal lines is always better left to elected leaders which is why we’ve spent many years advocating for Congress to pass updated Internet regulations.”

Get ready for Elon Musk to be even more insufferable than he already is

Elsewhere!

Democrats trim Biden’s social spending plan as they rush to strike a deal this week (CNBC)

FDA review puts younger kids’ Pfizer vaccine on path to possible approval within weeks (Washington Post)

Moderna says interim data shows its vaccine produces immune response in young children (Washington Post)

Jan. 6 investigators privately question Bannon associate (Politico)

The Charlottesville ‘Unite the Right’ trial begins today (Washington Post)

Yes, There Has Been Progress on Climate. No, It’s Not Nearly Enough. (NYT)

Prosecuting Steve Bannon Is an Easy Call (Bloomberg)

Trump SPAC drops 11% after huge gains on social media merger news (CNBC)

You Could Be Competing With Bots to Buy Gifts This Christmas (Bloomberg)

Extreme couponers were sent to prison in $31.8 million fraud scheme (CNN)

Woman takes 23 family members on blind date to test man’s generosity (NYP)

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