Perez Hilton

No, Don’t Fire Jesse Williams; Just Mark Him As The Ignorant, Racist Hate Merchant He Is

/ Jack Marshall / 103 Comments
He may be a racist asshole, but he doesn't play one on TV...

He may be a racist asshole, but he doesn’t play one on TV…

African-American actor Jesse Williams attracted national attention at the BET Awards last month as he accepted the  BET Humanitarian Award. Williams launched into the racist black activist version of Authentic Frontier Gibberish, sending out sufficiently loud anti-white dog-whistles that he received a standing ovation from the throng. In response, a petition was placed on Change.org demanding that he be fired from his role on the inexplicably long running ABC medical drama “Grey’s Anatomy”:

“Jesse Williams spewed a racist, hate speech against law enforcement and white people at the BET awards. If this was a white person making the same speech about an African American, they would have been fired and globally chastised, as they should be, but there has been no consequences to Williams’ actions. There’s been no companies making a stand against his racist remarks and no swift action condemning his negative attitude. Why was Burke’s character fired from Grey’s Anatomy after his inappropriate homophobic slur, but nothing for Jesse Williams? Why the one-way street? Why the support for a hater? Why the hypocrisy? #AllLivesMatter All humans bleed the same color. #EqualConsequences4RacistBehavior”

The reference to “Burke’s character” ( Helpful Tip: When you are making a pitch in a petition, take the time to check your facts so people know what the heck you are talking about) was a reference to African-American actor Isaiah Washington, who was fired from his role as Dr. Preston Burke on  “Grey’s Anatomy”  in 2007 for using homophobic slurs in public, including The Golden Globes telecast, and on the show’s set.

Petitioning to have someone fired for their political opinions is an ethically-dubious enterprise at best, but the allegation of a double standard is apt, because it is a double-standard. The culture nourished by Barack Obama and his political-correctness obsessed regime accepts anti-white rants as legitimate and honorable, but holds the expressing of anti-gay sentiment as grounds for shunning and destruction. Writes professional gossip columnist, celebrity worshiper  and silly person Perez Hilton:

“True, Isaiah Washington did ultimately get fired for saying hateful homophobic slurs — but comparing that to Williams’ uplifting speech about equality (that had everything to do with why he was on stage accepting his humanitarian award in the first place) doesn’t make much sense at all.”

Let’s clean that up a bit, shall we? Hilton, who is not only gay but incredibly gay, thinks that homophobic slurs are disgusting and therefore should forfeit the right to make a living, but anti-white diatribes are “uplifting,” so the comparison doesn’t make sense to him.

Here is what Williams said at the BET Awards; let’s see if you find it uplifting. I’ll interject the comments I might have shouted out during the speech had I been there and was willing to be pummeled to death, including notes, probably unnecessary, where Williams descends into Authentic Frontier Gibberish (AFG), social justice warrior dialect class: Continue reading →

Dunces, Heroes, and Fools In The Wake Of The Great Nude Actress Hack

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments
Perez Hilton Yecch.

Perez Hilton
Yecch.

You should know by now that about a hundred actresses have had their nude photographs hacked from private accounts and posted for the world to drool over. As is often the case in such incidents, the ethical instincts, or lack thereof, of various individuals have been exposed in the wake of the event:

Ethics Dunce: Perez Hilton.

No surprise here: Hilton, a web gossip columnist and a different species of hack than the ones at issue, showed himself to have dead ethics alarms. After eagerly posting the uncensored photos  of Victoria Justice and Jennifer Lawrence on his celebrity gossip blog, Hilton was condemned far and wide on social media, so he first proved he didn’t get it by keeping up the photos but censoring the women’s naughty bits, and then taking them down entirely, explaining that “At work we often have to make quick decisions. I made a really bad one today and then made it worse. I feel awful and am truly sorry.”  Continue reading →

Savage Nightmare: Into the Valley Of Spin, Deceit and Lies

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

When Perez Hilton is the MOST ethical participant in a chain of internet lies, spin and deceit, you know you’re in trouble.

The dishonesty in the world of blogs and partisan websites is so pervasive, the determination to deceive so great, and the willingness to distort, confuse and misinform so ingrained and shameless, that an objective understanding of some politically-charged events become literally—and I mean literally literally, and what Joe Biden means when he says literally, which is “figuratively”—impossible. Does this fuel the destructive partisanship that causes public discourse to be about “gotchas” and point scoring rather than collaboratively addressing societal problems? Absolutely.

I fell into this muck today when I made the mistake of visiting the Breitbart website for the first time in months, to see what it was evolving into now that Andrew has left us. Eureka! Here was a post by Ben Shapiro saluting Perez Hilton, the petty and reliably ethics-challenged gossip columnist (there is no such thing as an ethical gossip columnist) for breaking ranks and criticizing Dan Savage for his anti-Christian, abusive rant to high school journalists in what was supposed to be a speech about anti-bullying initiatives. This signaled to me that Hilton had an Ethics Hero designation in his immediate future, for properly chastising unethical conduct by an ally: like Savage, Hilton is gay and active in anti-bullying efforts.

Shapiro wrote:

“Hilton has long been an advocate of anti-bullying, and it is heroic of him to stand apart from the rest of the media, which has buried Savage’s bully tactics or brushed them off as unimportant. Savage, as Hilton points out, has lost his credibility as an anti-bullying advocate with such actions. And yes, Hilton has cut a video on behalf of the It Gets Better Project.

“It wasn’t any of the big time celebrities who have endorsed and supported Savage’s It Gets Better Project who stood up against him. It wasn’t folks like Jane Lynch or Neil Patrick Harris or Josh Duhamel or James Marsden or Janet Jackson or Jennifer Love Hewitt or any of the dozens of other stars who could have done so. It wasn’t the folks in the mainstream media, who have completely ignored the story, or justified Savage’s behavior. It wasn’t the elected leaders who have used government resources to direct traffic to Savage’s program who stood up to Savage’s bullying here. It wasn’t President Obama or Vice President Biden or Secretary of State Hillary Clinton or Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack or the Department of Justice or the White House Staff or Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius.

“It was a gossip columnist.”

The Perez quote cited by Shapiro to justify this extravagant praise was this:

 “UGH ….Savage later called the walk-out “pansy-a**ed” which, from someone who helms an anti-bullying campaign, is obviously a very negative thing to say ….Can’t we just be good and kind to each other? Isn’t faith in love and honesty and kindness all any of us really need?” Continue reading →

Ugly Consequentialism: The Daily Beast Backs Perez Hilton

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

I am developing a real dislike for the Daily Beast. Tina Brown’s slick news aggregating website has gone out of its way to slander innocent dog breeds, features self-promoting hypocrites like John Avlon, and generally displays the ethical instincts of Piers Morgan, which is to say, none. Today it gave us an update on Serene Branson, who was mocked by blogger Perez Hilton and others for having an obvious, and frightening, on-air neurological event that caused her to be unable to speak coherently. Entitled “Line-Flubbing Grammys Reporter Fine”—trivializing as “line-flubbing” what was clearly nothing of the sort; people don’t get checked out by physicians for flubbing lines—the Daily Beast’s commentary noted that paramedic could find nothing wrong, so “Laugh away.”

This is the ugly face of consequentialism, judging the ethical nature of conduct based on what happens afterwards. Perez Hilton’s cruel amusement at a reporter finding that she cannot form intelligible speech is now retroactively fine and dandy, because Branson hasn’t—so far—keeled over or gone blind. So laugh, jerks, laugh…until she does keel over, tomorrow, or next week, or next month, in which case the ridicule becomes unacceptible to The Daily Beast.

Another human being who is panic-stricken as her body turns on her is not funny, and it is a sign of callousness and a deficit of compassion to laugh at the sight of it, whether or not the apparent catastrophe turns out to be minor after all. But the Daily Beast is proving that it is a playpen, occupied by reporters, columnists and editors with the ethical sophistication of gradeschoolers.

______________

UPDATE 2/15/11 (From AOL News):

“Despite Branson’s insistence that she’s fine, doctors who have examined the now heavily circulated footage of the incident continue to express concerns.

“This is what we call a class neurological event,” Dr. Keith Black, director of the Neurosurgical Institute at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, told NBC’s ‘Today’ show. “She was obviously aware that she was having difficulty.”

According to Black, Branson’s episode was likely the result of a transient ischemic attack, essentially a “blockage in blood flow going to the brain,” or a “mini-seizure located in the language area.”

The New York Post also spoke to doctors who viewed the tape, and they said that Branson’s garbled speech could have resulted from “aphasia, which affects the ability to articulate, and that it could have been brought on by a mini-stroke, a tumor or a circulatory issue.”

Ethics Dunce: Blogger Perez Hilton

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

There is snarky, and there is vicious and cruel. Perez Hilton, the over-the-top celebrity blogger who always amasses enough points to be in the running for Media Creep of the Year, hit rock bottom over the weekend, showing a level of humanity, empathy and caring we identify with the people who ridicule  ALS sufferers and terminal cancer patients, and who find watching heart attacks and strokes amusing.

“MUST WATCH!!!” “Grammy Reporter Fail!” wrote Hilton, about a frightening video showing CBS reporter Serene Branson suddenly finding herself unable to speak coherently on the air as she reported on the Grammys, and obviously experiencing some kind of neurological episode that was a lot more serious than being “tongue-tied.”

“Someone call an exorcist!” joked the blogger, who called Branson’s cisis “HIGHlarious.”

[This post originally included the video footage, but CBS has pulled it.] Branson gets a few words out, then you can see the fear and panic that starts to come into the young woman’s expression as she realizes that her thoughts are no longer being formed into words. She utters a stream of jibberish  very reminiscent of the sounds made by the swimmer at the beginning of “Jaws” who is being attacked by a Great White shark, and then the station cuts her off. If watching another human being in peril and terror is “HIGHlarious” to you, “Ethics Dunce” is an understatement.

Hilton quickly pulled his first post on the incident when it began drawing fire, and so far, doctors haven’t been able to determine what caused the incident…so Hilton obviously thinks he’s in the clear.

He’s not. Even if we never know what happened to Branson, she was frightened and something bad was obviously happening to her. I’m sure she’s still terrified, and should be: my law school room mate, last year, had a mysterious episode that seemed like a stroke, but the doctors found nothing, and sent him home. Two days later, he dropped dead.

Yuk it up, Perez.

Jerk.