It is time once again for another of my Saturday posts where I talk about news stories that either broke after I finished this week’s Friday Five, or a story having been linked and/or commented upon in any of my previous posts has had new developments. Let’s go!

So, yesterday I included a link to a story where a guy who is frequently on CNBC as a financial expert said that it would be better for the economy if everyone just got sick the people who are going to die from COVID-19 just did so and got it over with so the rest of the world could get on with business. He didn’t literally quote the line from A Christmas Carol where Scrooge tells the two well-meaning gentleman taking donations for the poor that people who would rather die than go into the debtor’s prison that, if they would rather die, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population,” but he came close. Well, since then he has tried to backpedal a bit: Rick Santelli Sorry He Said You Should Get Sick And Die, For The Economy. Of course, since this is hardly the first time he has said that we shouldn’t care about people who have had bad things happen to them, I rather doubt his sincerity.

Let’s move on.

Earlier in the week I logged into the blog to work on a post, and I saw that my clicks were way, way up. So I looked at the list, and two old blog posts about disgraced former Congressman Aaron Schock (and self-loathing closet case) were getting a whole lot of hits. I had already seen the news stories where he finally came out of the closet (again, I’ll get into that), so I shouldn’t have been surprised—yet I was. Anyway, because one particular old Weekend Update post on the subject always gets lots of hits whenever Schock is in the news, I have taken to adding updates to the bottom of said post rather than keep making new posts just for him. I did so again. I’m gonna just quote it here for starts:

Update 7: Now, here it is March 2020, and Schock has decided to really come out. He means it, this time, because there is a really long post about it on his Instagram. As Joe Jervis notes on Joe.My.God: “The post goes on for several self-pitying pages.” He still doesn’t apologize for all his anti-gay votes and campaigning. The closest he comes is saying if he were in Congress today he would vote differently on LGBT issues. But he also reaffirms several times that he still supports the rest of the Republican agenda. In the self-pitying parts he blames his anti-gay votes on feeling the need to fit in with his Republican colleagues, which I’m going to give myself a silver star for, as I have predicted on this blog that Schock would eventually come out and blame the pressures of being closeted for all his hateful speeches and votes.

Since making that update, I keep seeing news outlets carrying the story of Schock coming out, and a lot of them are reporting it as if it’s just a sort-of-famous person coming out and isn’t he brave? Except, of course, he isn’t.

Those self-pitying pages of his really long Instagram post are filled with, “woe is me, my bigoted parents/friends/former colleagues have all rejected me” since he was caught on camera making out and groping guys in public, and his really bad attempt at coming out last August by actually asking a couple of other gay republicans to pretend to leak some of his pictures and conversations trying to hookup with men for sex online (and then renouncing it).

Millions of queer people have been rejected by family members. Some of us even had close family members threaten to beat us or worse (even if we came out after moving out on our own and becoming productive members of society). But most of us didn’t run for political office on extremely anti-gay platforms, vote against LGBT rights, give hateful speeches in Congress and on the campaign trail calling for rollback of what rights we had clawed out in some jurisdictions at the time. And most of us weren’t so comfortably well off that we could afford more than one multi-million dollar homes. I’m sure he’s not quite as wealthy as he used to be, but he has the funds to go to across the continent to attend the music festival where he was groping those guys, and later to Mexico where he was videoed putting money into the g-string of a male stripper. So I’m having trouble feeling sorry for him right now.

During each of the six years he was in Congress (from 2009-2015), several hundred kids were bullied because people suspected they were queer to the point that they committed suicide. Even more kids each of those years were thrown out on the streets by religious parents. Speeches Schock made in those years and votes he took contributed to the hostile homophobic environment that causes that bullying and rejection. So he has to do some atonement before he’s entitled to any sympathy.

I’ll let someone else say it: A Message to Former Congressman Aaron Schock — Welcome, I guess?

I will admit, at first I wanted to rant, “Girl, bye. Take your Republican, anti-LGBTQ ass outta here and go rub suntan oil on some WeHo dummy who doesn’t know he’s sleeping with the enemy.” But I thought better of that. I thought, “No, I should take the high road. What Aaron needs is help, because attractive, rich, gay, white celebrities never get help.”’

…So Aaron, I want to help you. I want to offer you the help you don’t deserve and that you never gave anyone else you oppressed. Privilege, right? It’s great.

It’s funny, and he has some good suggestions.

And now, for a different kind of self-loathing gay man: Ex-Judge Guilty Of Buying AR-15 For Nazi Boyfriend. I tried to follow the link that is inside that story to read the longer piece at the Pittsburgh Gazette, but the website asked me to whitelist the site to proceed. So I did, and in order to whitelist you have to then refresh and guess what, they then tell me that I have exceeded my free stories for the month. That is a really badly programmed paywall. Anyway, to avoid a paywall you can get some more details here: Retired Judge Admits To Buying AR-15 For Felon With Nazi Obsession.

It’s not crazy enough that a retired federal judge, of all people, illegally bought at least one semiautomatic rifle for the convicted felon who also happens to be a neo-Nazi. It’s that the judge, who is a man, and the neo-Nazi, who is also a man, are in a romantic relationship. Why do so many self-loathing gay white guys embrace Hitler? The original Nazis hated the gays (please go google “night of long knives” and “history of the pink triangle” if you’re not familiar). And neo-Nazis hate the gays, too. WTF?

The feds found a rather large cache of weapons, ammunition, and Nazi memorabilia. Some people just have way more money than sense, I guess.

Anyway, I wanna close this by quoting a hilarious tweet from more more than a year ago which explains why the image I linked above recommends composting rather than eating the rich. Take it away @Foone:

friendly reminder since this is going around again: DO NOT EAT THE RICH!
it’s called bio-magnification, people! the rich are at the top of the food chain, so they accumulate toxins from their food at a greatly increased rate.
Instead, /compost/ the rich.