#2640: John Cardillo

John Cardillo is a wingnut’s wingnut, former Newsmax host and boss of a munitions company called M42 Tactical. To most people, Cardillo is probably best known for his spectacularly inane and backfiring attempts to smear those who disagree with him politically (we apologize for linking to Huffpo, which remains a shithole). To us, he is most notable as an antivaccine activist and critic of various Covid measures based on stupid conspiracy theories. “Fuck Fauci, fuck Bill Gates, fuck Gates’s vaccine profits, fuck your stealing our rights, fuck your destroying our economy” sums up Cardillo’s position pretty well. His repertoire of antivaccine PRATTs includes e.g. the old appeal to package inserts and citing conspiracy theorist Joseph Ladapo’s regurgitation of anti-vaccine pseudoscience as an authoritative source.

 

With regard to content, Cardillo is primarily a wingnut shitposter, and his commentaries tend to consist of nonsense promoted by other wingnuts, just with added rage and confusion; Cardillo is primarily not a wingnut bullshit producer but a wingnut bullshit amplifier. It’s thus hardly surprising that Cardillo has also voiced his concerns over e.g. climate change, or as he puts it, the left’s “climate change nonsense” – science is all politics to someone like Cardillo, and the facts are relative to political allegiance. But he does have an audience, apparently, even though he’ll hardly convince anyone not already committed to conspiratorial wingnut nonsense – like the audiences of Newsmax.

 

Cardillo is, like other wingnuts, quick to appeal to conspiracy theories to explain away events that would otherwise put wingnuts and white supremacists in a bad light: When Florida man and ardent Trumpist Cesar Sayoc sent pipe bombs to prominent Democrats and Trump critics in 2019, for instance, Cardillo was quick to appeal to false flag conspiracies (“Investigators need to take a serious look at far-left groups like #Antifa when investigating the bombs sent to Soros, Obama and the Clintons. These smell like the false flag tactics of unhinged leftists who know they’re losing”), trying desperately to maintain them even after the case had been solved and Sayoc arrested.

 

Diagnosis: No, this isn’t much of a post, but we don’t really feel any temptation to try to engage with Cardillo’s soundbite shitposting. Other wingnuts bring the nonsense, Cardillo contributes a beatbox and sound effects.