Taki's Mag

Invisible Children's Jason Russell

Two weeks ago a super-fabulous yet nominally heterosexual slacktivist named Jason Russell achieved instant celebrity when his half-hour propaganda piece about ruthless African warlord Joseph Kony became the most viral video in Internet history. In the film, KONY 2012, Russell demanded Kony’s arrest by the end of the year.

An arrest came last Thursday morning, but not of Kony—San Diego police briefly detained Jason Russell before handing him over to psychiatric authorities. In a heavily trafficked area of Pacific Beach, CA just before noon, several witnesses reported seeing a naked man mincing and flitting around the street while wagging his finger like a disapproving Mick Jagger. He was reportedly screaming at passersby, pounding his fists on the pavement, interfering with traffic, and vandalizing cars. According to at least one witness, Russell was openly masturbating in the warm California sun. At press time, it remains unclear whether the alleged masturbation and car-vandalizing were separate incidents or were instead fused into one very weird act of vehicular sexual assault.

My initial reaction to the sudden upsurge of Konymania two weeks ago was a jaded shrug—it’s Africa, what did they expect?—but Russell’s recent display of nude-ass beachfront grandiosity made me reassess the Kony craze as yet another example of social-media-induced mass public psychosis. Russell merely couldn’t be satisfied with helping the World Police catch the Big Bad Wolf. He had to squeeze a reality-TV meltdown into the whole rancid burrito.

I’m not sure whether people are actually getting dumber or if technology’s merely making it more obvious. People these days see politics as one big rock video. They eagerly swallow simple slogans as if they were gobbling free psychiatric medication. Just as brainless cyber-dolts were mindlessly bleating HOPE and CHANGE four years ago and WE ARE THE 99% six months ago, suddenly everyone and their lesbian aunt was chanting STOP KONY two weeks ago. They’d obviously been spoon-fed this mantra from forces on high who want to “bring us all together” under the smothering umbrella of “one world.” Likewise, they all happily swallowed the notion that this was a real grassroots people’s movement rather than another scary digital-age manifestation of expertly manipulated useful idiocy.

Fully aware that it may permanently rob me of basic cognitive abilities, I decided to watch the KONY 2012 video not once, but twice. Lawdy me almighty, what a cloying, treacly, gag-worthy one-world Coke commercial it is. (Witness my favorite screenshots from the film HERE.) White beta males dance the funky chicken with actual living Africans, Godwin’s Law is repeatedly invoked both consciously and unconsciously, and the filmmakers blame money for everything while also soliciting money. Taking half a second to dig one millimeter below the surface reveals the whole project to be a scam justifying authoritarian globalist military intervention in Uganda.

Mere moments after the film begins, it quickly becomes apparent that not only was Jason Russell eager to see Joseph Kony captured, he was also determined to capture far more screen time than Kony. The film is less about how bad Joseph Kony is and more about what a great, caring, loving, humanitarian, compassionate, understanding, sincere, humane, swell, righteous, groovy, empathetic son-of-a-gun Jason Russell is. As the film’s director, Russell’s approach was openly masturbatory.

Russell also narrates the film, and from the moment he opens his obviously moist and well-hydrated lips, he radiates thermonuclear waves of gayness. That boy just barks GAY like a tiny French poodle. This would hardly be an issue if Russell didn’t creepily exploit his young son as a theatrical prop/beard throughout the documentary. It also wouldn’t bear noting if Russell’s organization, Invisible Children—never trust a grown man who works for a place with the word “Children” in its name—didn’t receive funding from anti-gay Christian groups as well as align itself with Ugandan pastor Martin Ssempa, sponsor of a “Kill the Gays” bill as well as a critic of “anal licking” and a public simulator of gay fellatio. Russell also appeared at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University—Falwell once published a newsletter suggesting that a Teletubby named Tinky Winky was a homosexual—to enthuse about his dream of making Broadway musicals and how “We can have fun while we end genocide.”

So maybe Jason Russell, whom Invisible Children’s website describes as their “grand storyteller and dreamer,” suffers from some deep internal conflict which might have caused him to peel off his clothes and leap around like a psychotic pink gazelle once he started receiving massive public attention. His mannerisms are so in flagrante delicto homo, it almost seems righteous to want to gay-bash him out of the closet for the sake of everyone’s sanity.

Real-life Africans wound up throwing rocks at the screen during a recent outdoor showing of KONY 2012 in Northern Uganda, complaining that all the film’s heroes were white and that neither Kony nor his Lord’s Resistance Army have been spotted in their country since 2006. An open letter to Russell from a Northern Ugandan advocacy group calls KONY 2012 “inaccurate, offensive, and harmful propaganda,” suggesting that its timing “has more to do with your commercial interests than humanitarian interests” and wondering whether “Invisible Children is more about defining the American do-gooders (and making them feel good), rather than the Ugandans.” Other African writers said that “Invisible Children’s Approach…has unpleasant echoes of colonialism” and “The White Savior Industrial Complex is not about justice. It is about having a big emotional experience that validates privilege.” An American girl who says she was born in Uganda went on YouTube to call Russell’s film “bullshit.”

Kony may be a sweaty little cockroach, but he’s hardly a giant threat. He may in fact be dead, and his Lord’s Resistance Army has dwindled down to only a few hundred, all of them exiled from Uganda. While encouraging US military cooperation with Uganda’s government (Obama installed 100 military “advisors” there last October), grand storyteller and dreamer Jason Russell’s KONY 2012 makes no mention of the fact that Uganda’s current election-thievin’ dictator Yoweri Museveni has stacked up millions of bodies during a bloody reign reaching back to the mid-1980s. It fails to note that Museveni’s forces have reportedly engaged in rape, amputation, electroshock torture, disembowelment of pregnant women, and the forcible enlistment of child soldiers before Joseph Kony even got in the game. It doesn’t mention that Museveni once set up concentration camps to imprison two million of the huddled Northern Ugandan peeps that Jason Russell claims he’s trying to save. Russell’s film makes not a squeak about other genocides actively occurring in Africa.

KONY 2012 emits not one prissy peep about the undeclared war between the USA and China for Africa’s resources, including oil reserves recently discovered in Northern Uganda. It doesn’t discuss the fact that all 28 of the people the International Criminal Court has publicly indicted, including Joseph Kony, are Africans. It makes no mention of US efforts to establish a military presence throughout the Dark Continent via its AFRICOM agency.

Then again, one shouldn’t expect too much from a closeted evangelical metrosexual naked hipster filmmaker from Southern California. During this somber moment of reflection as the men in white coats evaluate his mental condition, we must never forget that Jason Russell once suggested issuing T-shirts that said AFRICA IS SO HOT RIGHT NOW and AFRICA IS THE NEW PINK.

When dealing with Africa, it’s important to never forget that you’re dealing with Africa. Maybe it’s best to let Africans deal with it.

Jason Russell’s handlers at Invisible Children dismissed his public freakout as “an unfortunate incident,” a mere “personal health issue” caused by “exhaustion, dehydration, and malnutrition.” His wife/beard Danica Russell claimed her hubby “did some irrational things brought on by extreme exhaustion and dehydration.”

If I had known that public masturbation can cure dehydration, I never would have guzzled all those Diet Cokes.

I pray for Jason Russell. I pray that for an encore, he does something even funnier than running around naked while diddling himself.

If Joseph Kony is alive somewhere, I suspect he’s laughing. And masturbating. And somehow I’m certain he has the good sense not to do it in public.