Q Toon: Exit Stage Right

Far-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos found himself the latest victim of the Leopards Eating Faces Party last month.

ICE arrested British-born Yiannopoulos at Louis Armstrong International Airport on Friday for overstayng his visa. Fellow fascist Laura Loomer is claiming credit for ratting Yiannopoulos out to the Feds; he was arriving in New Orleans for a concert by Kanye "Ye" West, with whom Yiannopoulos has been associated in recent years.

Identifying as gay in the '00's and ’10's, Yiannopoulos made a career out of being an offensive internet troll, insulting women and Muslims, and basically anyone to the left of Emperor Palpatine. As a columnist for Andrew Breitbart's website from 2014 to 2017, Yiannopoulos had been an early and vocal advocate for Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, especially his anti-immigration plans. 

In February of 2017, he was forced out from Breitbart, cancelled at CPAC, and lost a book contract, after audio surfaced of him defending some sex between teens and adults as “perfectly consensual” and calling some teen-adult sexual interactions “coming-of-age relationships." Exactly the sort of "groomer" stuff conservatives have long used to vilify LGBTQ+ people.

Since then, he has decided that he is no longer gay, telling a Catholic anti-abortion website that he was "living as brothers" with his then husband. (To nobody's surprise, that marriage has not lasted.) In 2022, he signed up to be an intern for then Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene; he also got in on the ground floor of Kanye West/Yeezy/Ye's 2024 abortive presidential campaign.

According to the Department of Homeland Security, Yiannopoulos entered the U.S. legally in 2019 on a tourist visa, which he overstayed. A final order of removal was issued for him after he missed an immigration hearing in July. 

Yiannopoulos last summer tweeted of masturbating to videos of ICE raids, so it is impossible to muster any vestige of sympathy for the guy.

Besides, England agreed to take him back. It's not like ICE dumped him in South Shitholestan somewhere.

Deciding how to draw Mr. Yiannopoulos wasn't easy, by the way. The guy has changed his hairstyle more often than Cher, and has packed on the pounds and shed them back off. In most photos, he's wearing glasses or shades, which didn't seem appropriate for the setting of the cartoon. I opted for his signature 2017 look, but in what is either his passport or current mug shot, he appears to have quit bleaching or dying his hair, and sports a modest mustache with a modicum of jaw-line whiskers.

Has to be a mug shot. You have to can't have stuff in the background of a passport photo.

Speaking of Cuckoo's Nests

See if you can figure out what was in the script without watching/rewatching the sketch.

Q Toon: Diss Belief

MSNBC host Joy-Ann Reid opened her program last Saturday by apologizing for some posts which apparently appeared on her weblog in the '00's — or perhaps some hacker managed to go back in time and put them there. She "genuinely do[es] not believe" that she wrote them herself.

In the posts on her now-deleted blog, which lives on on the Wayback Machine, she (or her impostor) refer to Senator Lindsey Graham and then Governor Charlie Crist as "Miss Lindsey" and "Miss Charlie," alluding to rumors of their closeted homosexuality. Other posts complain about "Brokeback Mountain" and two men's lips meeting in a Snickers ad that ran during the 2007 Superbowl. There's also a post making fun of Harriet Myers's supposedly lesbian hair-do.

“In December I learned that an unknown, external party accessed and manipulated material from my now-defunct blog, The Reid Report, to include offensive and hateful references that are fabricated and run counter to my personal beliefs and ideology,” Reid said. “The manipulated material seems to be part of an effort to taint my character with false information by distorting a blog that ended a decade ago.
“Now that the site has been compromised I can state unequivocally that it does not represent the original entries,” she continued. “I hope that whoever corrupted the site recognizes the pain they have caused, not just to me, but to my family and communities that I care deeply about: LGBTQ, immigrants, people of color and other marginalized groups.” 

This kerfuffle has the aura of having been generated to distract interested parties away from more significant media misbehavior (say, e.g., Sean Hannity's intimate relationship with Team Trump). Twitting Graham, Crist, and others for rumors of homosexual orientation is fairly common (who, me?); and when Reid's supposed posts about them were dredged up last December, little notice was paid to them.

So someone kept digging and came up with the Brokeback and Snickers stuff, which make it sound as though she believes us LGBTQ folk need to keep our PDA's private. If the posts are genuine, they call into question Reid's ally cred with LGBTQ issues (PFLAG is rescinding a Straight for Equality award they were planning to give her next week). If they're not, it can only mean that Russian, Breitbartian, or Gallifreyan hackers are sophisticated enough to fool the various experts who claim that the posts can't possibly be forgeries.

Gay journalist and Glenn Greenwald is one of the people pushing the Joy Reid allegations. Perhaps his buddy Edward Snowden can clear things up for us.

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Meanwhile, as followers of this blog know, I draw my syndicated cartoons several days before I post them here; so this week's cartoon was created without the foreknowledge that Kanye Kardashian-West would be under fire this week for musing that 400 years of slavery was a "choice."

I think Ms. Reid is probably relieved that Kanye is not in her corner.

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P.S.: Nothing on the internet ever really dies.

Words Cannot, Part CXLVII

Cheap Toon: North West Heir Lines

Observant fans of this blog will notice that the image in this week's sneak peek doesn't appear in this cartoon. This week's Q Toon will come out in due time. Meanwhile, I made a snarky little comment on Facebook a few days ago, and then decided to draw a tawdry little cartoon about it.

Yeah, I know: with the Supreme Court poised to rule on marriage equality today, having just opened the doors so that Dixie Republicans can impose all the Jim Crow voting laws passed by their Republican brethren up north, there are more important things to spend valuable drawing board time on than the peculiar name some celebrity couple have saddled their baby with. But let's lighten up for just one moment here before all hell breaks loose, okay?