Monday, May 6, 2024

#2768: Brenden Dilley

Brenden Dilley is a MAGA “life coach”, professional asshole (I really have a deep appreciation for pettiness) and rightwing broadcaster on YourVoice America (a popular stop for media personalities on the MAGA clown circuit, such as Roseanne Barr), Periscope, (occasionally) YouTube and Twitter (“a shitty, disgusting, pedo-filled fucking communist organization”, according to Dilley after having been repeatedly and persistently banned), whose fame rests primarily on his promotion of QAnon conspiracy theories. According to himself, he did initially doubt the authenticity of QAnon posts until an unspecified member of the Trump family at one point confirmed to Dilley that the QAnon conspiracy theory was legit. (Dilley subsequently went on to apologize to the Trump family.)

 

Dilley, however, has managed to become a rather seriously influential figure in American political life. He is the unofficial leader of a “troll army” that is currently attacking Trump’s enemies on social media, and he has gained direct access to the Trump campaign and even Trump himself. Dilley and his Dilley Meme Team were also behind the video So God Made Trump, with AI-genereated narration in the voice of the long-dead Paul Harvey, which Trump himself posted to his social media accounts.

 

Trump

Most of all, Dilley is an unconditional sycophant of Trump and all things Trump; according to Dilley: “Part of what makes President Trump special is that we finally have somebody we can build legend around and you need that in culture”. You see, Trump is “a legitimate, high IQ genius” and his performance as president is without historical peer: “This is prime Michael Jordan, this is prime Tom Brady, this is prime Joe Montana, this is prime [Wayne] Gretzky.” He has accordingly mocked the left for not grasping the “simple science” that Trump, ”the golden-haired Adonis that he is”, has “God-tier genetics”. Indeed, the only apparent flaw of Trump’s presidency, as Dilley sees it, is that Trump was not “nearly as authoritarian as we hoped he would be” while in office: Dilley explicitly wanted Trump to be a dictator and “wanted him to rule with an iron fist”, and is accordingly sad that Trump ostensibly “would not abuse his powers” but would remain “respectful of the rule of law”. So, as a lead-up to the 2020 election, Dilley demanded that as soon as Trump won, he should immediately invoke the Insurrection Act and round up members of the press and his political enemies for prosecution and execution: Trump supporters had better start developing a stomach for death (or, as Dilley put it, “testicular fortitude”) when Trump and his team finally manages get in position to be “firmly imposing the law of the land”, for death is “what it’s going to take”.

 

When Trump in fact lost the election, Dilley was of course quick to call “fraud”, e.g. by challenging anyone to disprove his easily disproven claim that 130,000 fraudulent ballots were brought in for Biden in the middle of the election night in Wisconsin, or flatly asserting, without anything remotely resembling sources to back it up, that “Joe Biden probably got 10 to 15 million fraudulent votes.” He also quickly declared that Trump “is not going anywhere” because his supporters “are more than prepared to do everything – and I mean fucking everything – to preserve our constitutional republic and to protect our president.” Indeed, Dilley remained confident for a long time afterwards that Trump is going to win”, however: “You can scream ‘illegitimate’ all the way up until 2025, when Trump will probably get reelected again because he’s going to petition for a third term because you motherfuckers kept trying to rig the first two terms.” He would just wait for the hand of God to prove that heroes and legends still exist in America. Just in case, however, Dilley had even prior to the 2020 election been lifting weights and taking testosterone to prepare himself for having to fight off “Chinese super soldiers” if Joe Biden became president. We admit that Dilley’s response to his own prediction makes one somewhat curious about what Dilley imagined such encounters were going to look like.

 

The reason Trump lost – or come across as having lost – is, of course, that Trump, despite his qualities, has powerful enemies; the reason the “most of the powerful leaders in America and around the world” wanted and want to stop Trump from assuming the presidency again isbecause he cracked down on their ability to fuck and traffick children from 2016-2020.” Others were too cowardly or treasonous to step forth: In 2020, Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, for instance, becameofficially a traitor to the United States of America” for certifying the state’s election with Biden as the winner.

 

Weighing in on the big discussion of potential Taylor Swift endorsements in 2024, Dilley warned Swift not to endorse Biden or else it will be necessary for MAGA to “punish that bitch”: “Right now, there’s been no commitment, so for now, we are essentially courting [Swift]. There are people that you are courting; once they make the wrong choice, you punish.”

 

Biden

As for Biden himself, well: who he? During Covid times, Dilley wondered whether Biden continued to wear a mask not to prevent the spread of COVID-19, but to make it easier to hide the fact that “it’s different people playing Joe Biden” (Dilley himself refrained from wearing a mask during Covid because he was actually hoping to give the virus to “your fat, disgusting, fucking gross liberal mother”; he also claimed that his refusal to wear a mask was a hill he would “die on”, which, had it happened, would probably not have had the rhetorical effect he was aiming for). In any case, the person playing Biden is being instructed, through a covert earpiece, on what to say and how to act by that gay, lispy fuck former Rep. Barney Frank. In 2020, Dilley vowed not to pay taxes or obey laws if Biden became president – “I’m not fucking living under an illegitimate presidency” – but it’s unclear to what extent he’s followed up on that.

 

Post-truth

As one of the most explicit champions of a post-truth political discourse, Dilley is at least explicit about spreading fake news, however: “I don’t give a fuck about being factual,” says Dilley but rather “make shit up all the time.” He can do so because his “objective is to destroy Democrats, OK? To destroy liberals, liberalism as an idea, Democrats, and anything that opposes President Trump. That’s my goal.” Brenden made that particular comment in connection with his unconditional praise for Trump’s baseless accusation that MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough had something to do with the 2001 death of a woman who worked in Scarborough’s congressional office; Dilley rather urged his listeners to start “investigating” whether Scarborough may have also been involved in the 1996 death of JonBenét Ramsey because why not? Given his audience’s cognitive situations, they’d certainly be able to come up with something to convince themselves. And then again, Dilley has anyways urged his listeners to harass reporters and politicians “all the time” anyways. It’s little wonder that the Trump campaign has warmed to this fellow.

 

Fans

In 2020, Donald Trump Jr. sent Dilley an autographed copy of his book along with a personal note thanking him for his “support to #MAGA.” Donald Trump Jr. isn’t Dilley’s only significant fan, however; after Dilley declared, in 2020, that he was just waiting for the “green light” from Trump to start gunning down protesters over the murder of George Floyd (or, really, anyone he disagrees with), Republican then-congressional candidate Buzz Patterson appeared on his livestream program to tell Dilley that he loved him like a brother. As for the protestors assertion, Dilley’s position was presumably also influenced by his assumption that the killing of Floyd and the resulting protests were deep state, false flag psy-op aimed at preventing Trump’s reelection. Other fans of Dilley include the aforementioned Roseanne Barr and Aubrey Huff.

 

There’s a decent Brenden Dilley resource here.

 

Diagnosis: It’s easy to believe that you can write him off as merely a laughable clown, but although Dilley is a laughable clown, he is, like many clowns, pretty scary: Dilley’s style and content is Trump’s, just with added anger, coherence and cursing, and his brand of post-truth rhetoric – silly as it may seem to anyone minimally reasonable – has established itself as the cultural identity of a rather larger amount of people than most civilized people would like to think. Dilley’s popularity  and influence is not at all surprising, and that’s the scary part.

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