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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 25, 2023

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This is nothing compared to other Ukrainian public relation efforts.

First there was picking American transgender woman as official spokesperson for Ukrainian army, who then went on unhinged rant threatening to kill "Russian propagandists" all over the world.

(speaking in English, not Russian, so it is clear that it were not Russians in Russia who were target of this threat)

This speech is there, it is something you will hear from mouth of cartoon Evil Mastermind(TM) in corny B movie, just before Action Hero(TM) storms in and drops the villain into his/her/their/zir/xir own shark tank.

Someone in charge then noticed this does not make Ukraine look exactly like Avengers team and decided to suspend Cirillo.

So sanity prevailed and all will be good (optics) from now?

Well, Zelensky just decided to make honorary "ambassador of Ukraine", of all people, Marina Abramovic, world famous performance artist.

It sounds like 4chan fake news prank, but it is real, reported by mainstream media(and then vanishing from their pages).

Ukraine knows well what it is doing, Ukraine tries hard to signal it is on the right side and win hearts and minds.

Hearts and minds of people who matter, not yours.

edit: links

Think you mean this as a reply, rather than a top level thread.

First, his main target, John Podesta, isn't even the guy that owns any of the artwork he portrays as sick and demented. That would be Tony, his brother. Second, the two pieces of artwork that were pictured in Tony's house are quite milquetoast. I'd say something like the Garden of Earthly Delights is far more disturbing than anything Podesta has in his home, but I doubt MartyrMade would find that painting objectionable.

I think the thing that gets me about Pizzagate is that (like the Tim Ballard / Sound of Freedom stuff) it completely misunderstands who the victims of the 'real life' versions of these things are. They're pretty much never middle-class white American or Western European kids. This is the 'Taken' fantasy. When rich and powerful people commit this kind of sexual abuse, they go abroad to do it, the victims are powerless people from third-world countries born into impoverished families in remote communities usually already connected in some way to organized crime. Nobody super rich is risking jail by abusing white american kids in the basement of a DC restaurant, just like no child trafficker is risking a mega police operation, arrest and a long, long, long time in jail by kidnapping Liam Neeson's rich white American daughter off the streets of Paris. Even Epstein switched very quickly from preying on Manhattan private school girls to largely pursuing penniless (often illegal) Hispanic migrants in the dirt poor West Palm Beach suburbs.

But sex trafficking of poor Guatemalans or Cambodians is a lot less interesting to the conservative audience than blonde whites having it happen to them, so storytellers are forced to improvise.

Does the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, to the extent that it even exists as an unironic and coherent one, claim that the primary/exclusive victims of the pedo cult are "middle-class white American or Western European kids"?

Considering the Clinton Foundation activities in Haiti are somewhat central, no, I don't think it's every been limited to middle class white Americans (but I repeat myself).

I'm pretty familiar with Pizzagate and I don't think it was ever a widespread assertion that it was primarily Haitian kids getting abused in the Comet Pizza basement; the Clinton Haiti stuff was more an additional, related Qanon obsession.

Let's not mix up what is being claimed. I am not claiming that Haitian children were the primary victims. I am saying because the Haitian children are a common part of the story, it cannot be that American children are the primary victims.

I also think you're trying to differentiate between two things that are the same. The Pizza from pizzagate was Comet Ping Pong, yes, but it was also the tens of thousands of dollars of pizza and hot dogs that Obama had flown in from Chicago. It was the creepy coded messages in the Podesta emails. And it was the Clinton Foundation's in retrospect disturbing focus on children in Haiti.