Mediaboss Marketing

Photo: AFP via Getty Images

On September 11, 2001, Donald Trump honored the then-unknown number of dead in lower Manhattan by pointing out that the collapse of the World Trade Center meant that he now owned the tallest building downtown. To commemorate the events 20th anniversary, he visited a fire station and police precinct in New York City before flying back to Florida to guest-host a novelty pay-per-view boxing match with his son.

The former president, a promoter at heart, mostly stuck to vague bromides that couldnt get him in trouble as he provided color commentary during four underwhelming bouts at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Hollywood, Florida. I think tonights card is going to be very successful, he said, when asked about his expectations for the evening. He is like a totally different fighter, he said, seconds after a co-host made the exact same observation. I like to do that, he said, when asked if he liked to eat lobster. Perhaps the most shocking aspect of the night is that Trump hung on for the whole undercard without getting visibly bored.

Though he largely behaved himself, a few non-boxing jabs inevitably came through. When asked at the beginning of the broadcast about 9/11, Trump said that the anniversary was made even worse because of a very bad week from President Joe Biden. He praised the state of Florida for the way they ran the election clean. Describing the way that referees decide boxing matches, he said, Its like elections: It could be rigged. Donald Trump Jr., during a particularly boring moment in the first bout, said that right now, the audience likes politics better.

It was an astute observation: During the first two fights, the only real noise from the crowd came during outbursts in support of the former president. Cardboard banners dotted the casino arena: Bring back #45 and Trump won. (Im watching the signs, said Trump.) The home audience that paid $50 to stream the fight also got access to a live chat in which viewers talked about QAnon, Hunter Biden, Joe Biden sucking, Pepe the frog, Trump actually winning the 2020 election, and Jeffrey Epstein not actually killing himself.

Theres a reason the boxing wasnt really the main event: Celebrity fights, of the sort featuring aging heavyweights, jacked influencers, and retired NBA players, are a sideshow of the sport itself designed purely to make money. (Other than Anderson Silvas first-round knockout of Tito Ortiz in the third bout, many of the boxers on Saturday night spent more time trying to avoid boxing than actually boxing.) Into this world enters President Trump, a man whos never been afraid of a weird opportunity to make money. His presence was a perfect addition to the resurgence of novelty fighting: a domain full of shady financing; alleged sexual assaults; aging stars who are trying to mount a comeback; and guys who really like Florida.

In some ways, he never really left the sport. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Trump hosted several marquee fights in Atlantic City, including Mike Tyson vs. Larry Holmes and Evander Holyfield vs. George Foreman. Since the 80s, Trump has been friends with World Wrestling Entertainment CEO Vince McMahon and once shaved his head in the battle of the billionaires at WrestleMania. McMahons wife, Linda, served as the head of Trumps Small Business Administration and worked on his 2020 campaign, while Ultimate Fighting Championship president Dana White is also a close friend. If his observations on Saturday night werent particularly insightful, it was clear that this world claimed him as one of their own. To his credit, Trumps best moments were his recollections of his Atlantic City days, and he seemed genuinely animated when Jorge Masvidal, a UFC champ who campaigned for him in south Florida, stepped into the announcers box.

George Foreman, Donald Trump, and Evander Holyfield promote an Atlantic City fight in April 1991. Photo: The Ring Magazine via Getty Imag

After his year of almost nonstop assaults on American democracy, its very strange to watch Donald Trump talk boxing, enjoy himself, and be in charge of absolutely nothing for a few hours. This bizarre appearance on a mostly tedious three-hour stream felt like a peek into another reality: one in which the 45th president accepted his electoral loss last November, and instead of flirting with a second run, he spent his time chasing quick cash in man-o-sphere appearances events that can be outrageously fun and stupid if you choose to engage and completely inconsequential if you do not.

As the night wore on, it got more absurd. Before Evander Holyfield got in the ring with former UFC champ Vitor Belfort, the audience was asked to observe the anniversary of 9/11 for a ten-count of the bell. The silence was broken up by a woman yelling, Feel that fuckers! Shut the fuck up! the crowd screamed back. The memorial bell tolled as the audience booed and a woman in short shorts walked around the ring with an American flag.

Once the fight started, Belfort more or less beat the pulp out of the 58-year-old Holyfield until the sad display was called off before the second round. (Holyfield wasnt actually supposed to fight: He was subbed in after Oscar de la Hoya got COVID at the last minute; his last opponent was in a charity fight against Mitt Romney in 2015.) When he was interviewed after the fight, Belfort called Jake Paul a bitch and demanded that the celebrity-boxing moneymaker fight him for $25 million on Thanksgiving. Trump, after avoiding the crowds chants requesting he give a speech, closed out the event with an address to his many supporters in the casino. This is like a rally, he said. We love you all. We love this country.

Daily news about the politics, business, and technology shaping our world.

Originally posted here:
Trump Guest-Hosting a Boxing Match on 9/11 Was a Vision From an Alternate Reality - New York Magazine

There are some things so difficult to countenance that it can seem simply easier to believe they didnt happen: that one man could put a bullet through the presidents skull, that human beings could stand on the moon, that a seemingly average man might walk into a school and kill the children inside. And, throughout history, many people have chosen simply not to believe those unfathomable events, telling themselves stories that help make the world make sense, albeit more sinister.

So when the first plane and then another collided with the Twin Towers 20 years ago in lower Manhattan, it opened a wound so unfathomable in its horror that it seemed necessary to tell a new kind of story one that helped make sense of the tragedy, even as it distorted it. The conspiracy theories began almost as soon as the attacks had finished, and they have stayed with us to this day.

The theories themselves are so well-worn that they have progressed all the way to memes: the common refrain that jet fuel cant melt steel beams, once an earnestly communicated part of conspiracy lore, has now become so hackneyed that it is almost meaningless. But there are many others, which either tend to suggest that that the US could have intervened but decided not to, or that it actually orchestrated the attacks itself.

At the same time, however, they borrowed from tropes and ideas that had existed for centuries before, and which have continued to prove popular in the decades since. For the most part, 9/11 conspiracy theories are the same as those that went before, and those that followed, with the nouns swapped.

Perhaps the most distinct facet about the 9/11 conspiracy theories is the way they were pushed through formats that are familiar now in everything from advertising to the arts. In 2005, as the early viral internet we know today was finding its feet it was the year of the first Pepe the Frog drawing, the beginnings of Chuck Norris facts and the Million Dollar Homepage there appeared a video known as Loose Change, a documentary that presented the central ideas of the 9/11 conspiracy theory in a way that sent it swiftly across the internet.

Korey Rowe, the Iraq and Afghanistan veteran who made the film with friend Dylan Avery after returning from those wars confused and disillusioned, has drawn a straight line from the film to the various conspiracy theories that surround us today.

Look at where its gone: you have people storming the Capitol because they believe the election was a fraud. You have people who wont get vaccinated and theyre dying in hospitals, he told the Associated Press. Weve gotten to the point where information is actually killing people.

One of the legacies of 9/11 was to give prominence to the idea of the false flag attack

(Reuters)

It can be easy to blame the internet. Experts are divided on whether technology has really made people more given to believing in conspiracy theories.

9/11 conspiracy theories existed, and the internet existed, says Joseph Uscinski, a professor at the University of Miami and author of books on conspiracy theories. But it wasnt the case that conspiracy theories somehow couldnt grow before the internet; thats just completely false, and it reflects a really rosy view of history.

We had multiple red scares in this country, Freemason breakouts, Illuminati panics, crushing and drowning witches all before the internet.

One month after Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, 55 per cent of Americans believed that the assassination was pulled off by a conspiracy rather than a lone gunman. That number increased to 80 per cent in the 1970s, and stayed that way for three decades; we havent seen 80 per cent numbers on anything in the internet era.

The view that the internet is to blame either for promoting or discouraging conspiracy theorists looks at the problem from the wrong perspective, Mr Uscinski argues; people are not simply blank slate lemmings walking around that can have their mind changed by any piece of information they run into, whether that emerged from the internet or the printing press. Instead, conspiracy theory belief is a worldview and interpretation of the world like any other.

Theres no evidence whatsoever that people believe conspiracy theories more now than they did in the past. We can only see it more.

Perhaps one of the more potent legacies of 9/11 conspiracy theories is the establishment of a career that has continued to flourish: the professional conspiracist. And perhaps nobody has embodied that more than Alex Jones.

Alex Jones feeds the disbelief and accusations that surround major tragedies

(Infowars)

Jones was already a relatively successful radio host by the time of 9/11, and some of that success was built using the same playbook he would use after the attacks. Before 2001, he had focused on other traumatic events and claimed to know the truth of them the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, for instance, and the Waco siege that had happened two years before and helped inspire it. While the late 1990s are sometimes depicted as a prelapsarian time of social harmony and reliable information that was broken by 9/11, those events and the response to them show that the foundations were there already.

And while 9/11 helped establish the Alex Jones brand as it exists today, it was only one stop on his road to underground domination. He has applied the same format of disbelief and accusations that the media story is a hoax to everything from school shootings to the Capitol riot.

He has been able to do so because one of the legacies of 9/11 was to give prominence to the idea of the false flag attack, a theory that an organisation or country conducts an operation under the banner of another. While that idea has been present for centuries its name derives from the very real flag that would flown on navy ships it became increasingly popular after 2001.

It is a way of explaining what the motivations were for, say, George W Bush to the extent that you believe that the president and certain aspects of the military industrial complex would be interested in allowing or organising an attack on US soil because it creates an enemy that you can go fight for whatever nefarious purpose you have, says Mark Fenster, a law professor at the University of Florida and author of the seminal book Conspiracy Theories. And that has just become a trope that explains everything now.

And so the Sandy Hook shooting massacre becomes not the horrible slaughter of kindergarten students by a teenager, but instead a fake operation through which Barack Obama could impose stronger gun control laws. The Capitol riot on 6 January was not an insurrection against Congress by the far right, but the intentional creation of chaos and violent mayhem to be used against conservatives.

20 years of conflict and terror since 9/11

Some of todays conspiracy theories have become far more involved than the ones that cropped up after 9/11, with their adherents behaving more like those interested in myth or religious texts than scholarly study. Those who believe in QAnon, for instance, gather their beliefs primarily through the almost-sacred texts that are posted by the mysterious Q, not by endlessly replaying videos and conducting experiments to understand whether the official story makes scientific sense, like those who believe in 9/11 conspiracies.

Others today are laced with a specific kind of irony, that does appear to have been born out of the internet. Accusations that Beyonc is a member of the Illuminati seem at once earnest and something of a joke; the slogan Epstein didnt kill himself emerges from both a sincerely held belief and has become enough of a meme that it could be slapped on beers and novelty Christmas jumpers.

At the same time, those conspiracy theories have deadly consequences. Covid and anti-vaccine conspiracy theories often borrowing from those same health-based scares that have spread for centuries continue to prove popular both online and in person.

Each age has its truths, its lies and its conspiracy theories. As much as the truth of 9/11 defined those first years of the 21st century, the conspiracy theories around them have helped colour the lies the world has told itself for the last 20 years.

Read more:
How 9/11 influenced the way conspiracy theories spread today - The Independent

This very moment in menswear seems to be characterized by a woozy, high-style embrace of past and future. Eras warp into each other, and everything old blurs into everything new. Some of today's most advanced-fashion looks feel like they could have been plucked out of a decades-old Eric Rohmer filmunless they came from the 1980s closet of Billy Crystal. Were into slouchy suits and breezy collared shirts and glossy penny loafers, sometimes all at once. Its enough to make your head lovingly spin as you stand in front of your closet.

There is, however, one bizarre throughline to our anything-goes fashion moment, and its the Muppets. Yes...those Muppets. Not all of them, exactlyjust a few choice onesbut still. You probably didn't expect to hear that Kermit the Frog, Gonzo the Great, and Pepe the King Prawnalongside a few of their felt palsare dressing like modern-day street style stars. But the proof is incontrovertible.

Kermit in a fetching three-piece.

The Muppets Are Stylish movement started out like so many bizarre-but-undeniable ideas before it: as funny memes and stray tweets, building year after year until theyd acquired the patina of truth. The official Kermit account tweeted a photo of the fuzzy frog in an autumnal brown outfit with a blazer thrown over his shoulder, and the fashion memes starting flying. Gonzo's looks started drawing comparisons to those of Harry Styles. "Looking for pics of dripped out muppets," read one tweet.

Then, just last week, self-proclaimed fashion rulebreaker Gonzo made a splash in a loud yellow suit, looking like he stepped straight out of an Engineered Garments collection. It was as if everything clicked into focus and I finally saw the light. All of a sudden, I couldnt deny that Pepe,the always-spunky prawn, in his funky patterned camp-collared shirt (Bode-esque, isn't it?) and gold chain, was the spitting image of some hip urbanite crossing through Dimes Square on a hot summer day.

Bet you didn't think you wanted to dress like Gonzo.

Go here to read the rest:
Menswear Has Finally Caught Up to the Muppets - GQ

An image that QAnon followers have reportedly taken interest in (US Government/Potus/Instagram)

Followers of the QAnon conspiracy theory believe an image of Joe Biden shows that Donald Trump was recently in the White House, and was in fact US president.

The image, which shows the Democrat taking a phone call in the Oval Office, features a figure reflected in a window to the right of the US president, Mr Biden.

It was shared to Mr Bidens Instagram account last week, from where it was taken and shared to Telegram, a messaging platform favoured by the far right and followers of QAnon.

The conspiracy theory alleges that a cabal of Democratic sex traffickers conspired against Mr Trump when he was in office, and after his defeat to Mr Biden that the Republican will return as president, or has already returned.

As reported by Newsweek, the image of Mr Biden was shared by a popular QAnon account, We The Pepe. The name references the cartoon character Pepe the Frog, which has been appropriated by the far right.

The account argued that the former US president could be seen in the reflection in the Oval Offices window, and told its more than 750,000 followers: Did you see whos in the reflection?...Go see for yourself.

Another QAnon account, MelQ, also shared the image to more than 140,000 followers on Telegram, as did others on the messaging platform.

According to Newsweek, the image was widely taken by followers of QAnon that Mr Trump was not only in the White House, but was secretly in charge of the US a tenet of the conspiracy theory.

Did they just photoshop mumbles Biden into a picture that was taken while DJT [Trump] was in office. Asking for my fren [sic] that questions everything, a Telegram user allegedly wrote of the image.

QAnon supporters currently believe that Mr Trump will return to office in August in the wake of his 2020 defeat to Mr Biden.

It is in the latest date for Mr Trumps resurgence offered by followers of QAnon, after a string of theories and predictions about the former US president.

Read More

Story continues

July 4, Juneteenth and the meaning of national holidays

Fauci warns Delta variant will produce two Americas for vaccinated and unvaccinated

As wildfires rage, Biden will raise federal firefighter pay

The rest is here:
QAnon spreads Biden photo online claiming it shows Trump is secretly in the White House - Yahoo News

The infamous Internet meme Pepe the Frog will be immortalized in non-fungible token (NFT) collectible form by the frogs original creator Matt Furie. Of course, Pepe has been featured in blockchain art before and a series of cards were created via Counterparty in 2016. However, despite the number of NFT rare Pepes on the web, Furie says when it comes to his famous frog, Everything else is a bootleg.

Nothing beats the real thing, the creator of the notorious Pepe the Frog Internet meme told the Washington Post (WP) this week. Matt Furie is well known for creating Pepe the Frog back in 2005 in a comic called Boys Club. When the picture hit the web, it went viral on Myspace, Reddit, 4chan and Tumbler, and later was recognized as one of the most popular memes of the last decade. Now Furie is getting into the non-fungible token (NFT) collectibles game and hes bringing Pepe with him.

Furie has launched a web portal called pegz.fun and it features animated 2-D and 3-D creatures that Furie crafted. Users can even sign up for plops which seem to be an airdrop of some kind featuring Furies NFTs. One of the NFT pegz features a colorful depiction of Furies famous Pepe the Frog character. While speaking with WP, Furie said a lot of NFT artists were creating interesting pieces.

The NFT world is new, and there are a lot of optimistic people creating cool things, Furie said during his interview. Pepe does not have the baggage here that he does in the real world, and I like working with utopians and optimistic freethinkers. There are so many possibilities, the Pepe creator added.

Now, Pepe is no stranger to blockchain as Bitcoin.com News has reported on the crew who created a series of Rare Pepe blockchain-based trading cards in 2016. The creation of these cards on Counterparty was after the Anti-Defamation League deemed Pepe as a hate symbol.

When NFTs started making headlines again in 2020 and into 2021, an NFT called Homer Pepe sold for $320,000 in February 2021. Furie briefly touched upon the flurry of Pepe NFTs that were invoked before his pegz concept during his WP interview.

Everything else is a bootleg, and Im very inspired by bootlegs in my life and in my art, Furie said. But nothing beats the real thing, he added. Pepe the Frogs creator further noted:

This new space is laying the groundwork for the Internet 3.0. In the future, youll be able to trace memes back to their source.

The popular NFT artist Matt Kane spoke about Furies entrance into the NFT space and applauded the meme pioneer. Matt Furie created Pepe, which inspired Rare Pepes, which provided us the proof-of-concept on which the modern NFT scene became based, Kane remarked. So for Matt to have had such a successful entrance to NFTs, it created a beautiful circle.

Of course, Furies other colorful pegz designs are just as fun as the frog, according to the Internet meme creator. We want to throw a rave in the metaverse for disco Pepes, lizards, tongue-waggling-whachamacallits, blobbies, gooies, pricklies and everyone, Furie concluded. Viral media is inside of our heads, our subconscious. It never ends. Its best to make friends with the worms in our minds and to dance with them.

What do you think about Pepe the Frog creator Matt Furie jumping into the world of NFTs? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.

Image Credits: Shutterstock, Pixabay, Wiki Commons

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only. It is not a direct offer or solicitation of an offer to buy or sell, or a recommendation or endorsement of any products, services, or companies. Bitcoin.com does not provide investment, tax, legal, or accounting advice. Neither the company nor the author is responsible, directly or indirectly, for any damage or loss caused or alleged to be caused by or in connection with the use of or reliance on any content, goods or services mentioned in this article.

See the article here:
Pepe the Frog Creator Launches NFTs Featuring the Infamous Internet Meme Blockchain Bitcoin News - Bitcoin News