The Most Loathsome People in America: The Double Dirty Dozen (Equal Opportunity Douches)
More: The Most Loathsome People in America: The Double Dirty Dozen
The following is AlterNet’s own selections and rankings of two dozen from America’s 50 Most Loathsome Americans by Ian Murphy of the Buffalo Beast.
24. Sean Hannity
Charges: Left the seminary upon realizing he could abuse, manipulate, and molest more people as a conservative broadcaster. The sneering, self-righteous poster boy for every right-wing nontroversy (see Benghazi and Fast & Furious), Hannity’s something of a Piltdown Newsman. One can easily imagine him a 19th century Boston cop, bashing brown folks and loving it. But in this age of media saturation, even bullies like Hannity must prostrate themselves and grovel occasionally at the feet of reality. After hyping Tucker Carlson’s black-cent “bombshell,” and then stubbornly realizing it was nothing, he had Fox’s resident melanin-haver Juan Williams join the panel to flog him. That way, Hannity cleverly avoided looking foolish.
Smoking Gun: Look at his jaw; he always seems like he’s about to bite someone.23. Dinesh D’Souza
Charges: An intellectual imposter whose career’s swung casually between vicious conservative think-tank lackey and moronic Christian apologist. He reached a fraudulent low last year with the release of2016: Obama’s America which, through the prism of Potemkin journalism, imagined the fake horrors awaiting America at the end of Obama’s second term–like unstoppable Sharia Law. According to D’Souza’s armchair psychoanalysis and “super serious” scholarship, this impending doom springs from Obama’s need to fulfill the anticolonialist dreams of his father’s ghost with the help of John Edwards and an Ouija board. Or some such.
Smoking Gun: “In a sense, through the earth itself, he communes with his father and receives his father’s spirit.”22. Sam Harris
Charges: As the former’s confused reason for Fox News dogma, and the latter comedy for cackling, Sam Harris has official overtaken Ricky Gervais as the world’s funniest atheist (they’re tied for most annoying). He recently added Muslim profiling and NRA talking points to a sophist’s portfolio already bulging with hawkish appreciation for war and torture. Populated with more strawmen than a Kansas corn field, Harris’s post-Sandy Hook paean to firearms justified the death of 20 children because, well, Sam Harris is scared of sharp objects, and he’s too dimwitted to imagine a nonlethal knife-deterrent.
Smoking Gun: “Fantasists and zealots can be found on both sides of the debate over guns in America.”21. Frank VanderSloot
Charges: Overly litigious gay-bashing billionaire Mormon CEO of Melaleuca, Inc., a cultish pyramid-selling “Wellness Company” that promises its “partners” “total financial freedom” for “families trying to get out of debt”–likely incurred from purchasing overpriced Latter-day douche and snake-oil supplements in bulk to pawn off on other pious dupes. The natural grifter to co-chair Romney’s national finance committee, he dumped $1 million into Mitt’s Restore Our Future PAC, and even makes casino creep Sheldon Adelson seem like a nice guy.
Smoking Gun: He ostensibly believes that the Garden of Eden was located in Jackson County, Missouri, and that Native Americans are actually Jews.20. Penn Jillette
Charges: Humiliating himself as Donald Trump’s dancing business-monkey. Featured on a not-so-secret list of sexist creepers within the skeptic/atheist community. He’s an intolerably smug know-it-all who actually knows very little. A devout Randroid and Glenn Beck fan, he’s to the rationalist movement what John Wayne Gacy was to clowns. His thankfully defunct, eponymously titled show “Bullshit,” operated under the tired formula of dirty hippy debates Cato Institute whore, and we learn that second-hand smoke is as safe as Gerber’s. Magic! The Anti-Lorax, Jillette’s an environment-hating buffoon who denied anthropogenic global warming until as late as 2008–because he was too scared of the “political climate.” At least Teller has the decency to never speak.
Smoking Gun: “Voting for our government to use guns to give money to help poor and suffering people is immoral self-righteous bullying laziness.”
