C U Next Tuesday: The DTK Thread

Maybe Josh Homme had a go at him when he was a 14 year or something?

Josh Homme was on Toast of London, which is more than DTK can ever claim.

There's a quite influential gossip blog, which turned QAnon-adjacent a few years ago, that pushed a lot of stories about Neil Young (his divorce, then the marriage with Daryl Hannah, then the usual child-molesting stuff) and Dave Grohl (responsible for Taylor Hawkins' relapse). It wouldn't be much of a shock if DTK was taking for granted some stuff tailor-made for stay-at-home MAGA moms, lost between two "Meghan is a stupid, fat, attention whore" stories that totally happened.

It is.

The drift happened in a couple of waves. I guess it was originally a small (but fun) gossip site that posted second-hand or third-hand stories, once a day, until it got the attention of a failed screenwriter and musician, some guy living in Virginia, with a lot of addiction and mental health issues, who was into catfishing. He posed as the close friend to a few Hollywood heavyweights (including Robert Downey Jr), and the blog writer started to rephrase as many stories as the guy would provide for free (which turned out to be a lot). The speculation about various Hollywood stars moonlighting on a gossip blog to expose horrible truths about classic Hollywood (including a notorious Kirk Douglas/Natalie Wood story) put the site on the map.

As I've said, the main "source" had a lot of issues that were mirrored into his stories. They took a darker turn, and that's where the child molestation material became prevalent. And there was also a lot of projection, the various "personas" he adopted having more or less the career he wished for himself. Even when the "source" took breaks for some reason, the writer made up similar stories or relied on other people who could spew the same bullshit. And the material turned out to be like catnip for the same crowds (mostly rightwing housewives, failed actresses who still hold a grudge against the industry and liberals) who got attracted by conspiracy theories, and later joined the QAnon communities. But before the exposés on Weinstein, the site didn't know anything more than what was posted on anonymous message boards, stuff about the casting couch that was then some open secret, even if the reality consisted of assaults, rapes and other violent acts. Catering mostly to its female audience and contrary to what it later claimed, the site wouldn't so much attack Weinstein as a bunch of actresses who were accused of sleeping with him and benefitting from his help to have a place in the industry. There's a huge lot of misogyny involved.

The final step was when the blog owner realized that he would never succeed in monetizing the place as a mainstream gossip blog (similar to a well-written blog such as DListed or Pink Is the New Blog, for instance) but that he could cater to a very dedicated crowd, eager to buy subscriptions or to send donations to get more of the same. The blog owner also got in cahoots with a rightwing hedge fund manager interested in boosting the conservative agenda and depicting Hollywood as a place where nobody could be trusted. The guy in question had produced a documentary called "An Open Secret", about a Bryan Singer associate who had used his ties to a production company to assault teenage boys during the dot-com bubble. The original director for the documentary shot it more as a story about the victims and surviving, the producer reframed it as an indictment on liberal Hollywood, where these things are common place, "everybody knows" and is an accomplice to that system.
The site started to claim that Steven Spielberg, David Geffen or Tom Hanks are at the center of huge trafficking and molestation rings, that they are also responsible for various murders covered up as suicides or accidents, that various Rothschilds are also involved (there's a lot of anti-semitic dog whistling there). Every celebrity who would be vocal against Trump would get a series of blind items accusing them of crimes. Today, it's much more of a Meghan Markle hate fest but Bill Gates, the Clintons and the ghost of Jeffrey Epstein are never far away.

As I've said, the prolific "source" for the site fancied himself at one point to be a musician and was a fan of Kurt Cobain and Chris Cornell. He couldn't accept that they had taken their own life and tried to find scapegoats for their deaths, including the widows. Once again, it was like catnip to the readers who are happy to blame a gold digger or a woman for anything that goes wrong. Eventually, the "source" took his own life the way his heroes did, but the current "writers" have kept on spinning the same stories, sometimes adding David Geffen or Dave Grohl as a cause.


And that's a sample of the cesspool where people like DTK get their facts on celebrities. Maybe not directly, but this gossip finds a lot of echoes especially in rightwing places, even when 99% can be easily dismissed as total bullshit.

That's actually a very weird and telling thing in the rightwing galaxy on the web. Most "news" can be sourced from highly questionable, rare few places. For entertainment, it comes from this site, "Lord Doomcock" (aka the Overlord DVD YouTube channel) and only a few others. Usually, it's some unique report, coming from unnamed well-informed sources. Then, the chain of transmission is very revealing, as you have a bunch of Twitter accounts who repeat and amplify some of the details, but still fail to provide anything that could be verified. But it gets the illusion that there are "multiple" reports over an Indiana Jones advance screening that was catastrophic. At some point, it gains some critical mass, and a whole lot of these idiots then regard some allegation put together by some troll in two minutes as the truth, persuading a few other people in the process.

There's a Twilight Zone episode where a young woman is pursued repeatedly by an older woman on a horse every time she goes out. The twist is, of course, that the older woman is actually herself, trying to tell her younger self not to make the same mistakes. If I were to pursue my younger self around the late nineties, it would be not to think and say that the Internet would be a major factor in bringing knowledge, culture and enlightenment to the people. Because I was fucking way off.