So Your Dentist Is In the Ku Klux Klan?

“I think my dentist is a Klansman.”

She was the CEO of a major company in Tennessee. She was, and is, white. We were friends and she had just gone in for a routine teeth cleaning. Always trying to mitigate the obvious I suggest perhaps she is mistaken.

“Well…,” I said. “I mean, how do you know? Maybe he just has Confederate flags around or something…”

“He has a framed certificate that says he’s a Klansman,” she frowned. “Right next to his diploma.”

Hmmm… “Does he do a good job with your teeth?”

“I guess.”

I shrugged.

It may not seem connected but I sense it very much is in this day and time. So stick with me here. If you can.

That is, it’s absolutely mystifying, the flow of celebrity in America along the “true believer” vs. “cynical opportunist” gyre. The assumption, if you’re trending toward cynical opportunism is that angles are everywhere. And everyone is playing them.

True belief though? Rubes and suckers.

But that’s not how true believers see it and so when you get the chance to get a glimpse inside the head of a true believer it can be a lonely scared place where, ultimately, you might be left just feeling a little sorry for them if anything else. Witness: Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, et al.

This is almost decidedly not political though. I mean when Jay-Z, whose business acumen has made him a billionaire, started to carry water once upon a time for the corporate lords at Barneys vs a 19-year-old kid who had been braced for a “shop lifting”, which he had not done, how did Hov manage to fall down those stairs? After so many years of not?

And the woefully unfunny Kevin Hart? How was it that he managed to get even less funny all while amassing the kind of wealth that would make Croesus blush? His belief? In self? Probably very true. Nothing cynical at all about his boatloads of cash.

How does it happen that as we trundle toward Nuremberg November…you would wake up and roll your entire $40 million net worth on…meh?

The list goes on and staggeringly on…Mayweather, bouncing checks and according to reports is broke. From an inflation-adjusted $1.57 billion in April, to bouncing checks and warrants for his arrest in June. Bill Burr fucking off to Saudi Arabia to fete with murderers.

Or former fight champion Dustin Poirier, retires, gets drunkenly arrested at an airport, pleads for help. No angles worked here. Just a very real collision with the fact that life is both, simultaneously, too long and too short, and finding purpose to drive it when you’re previously stated purpose has shifted, can…disorient.

“Most men die pretty soon after retiring.” The debby downer was a cop friend of mine, pimping the questionable but supported idea that doing nothing for people who are used to doing something, cynical or not, can be bad for your health.

This is not about that though. This is about the mechanism whereby, in recent head-scratching news, a man whose job it was/is to read the room decided to read the room, where he was comfortably ensconced as a 2026 Jerry Seinfeld, sans any kind of edge at all, and just blew it the fuck up.

Nate Bargatze, we hardly knew ye.

Unsure of the whys but his 100-foot cliff dive into either stupidity, OR, that which radically undercut his “bipartisan” public image as a family friendly comedian, all came crashing down in the face of his attendance at The Presidential Maniac’s UFC 250 Freedom Bullshit.

The weirdness doesn’t end there. Convicted anal rapist and $200 millionaire Conor McGregor appears on the execrable Jimmy Fallon show?!?!? Like anal rape is not real?

How does it happen that as we trundle toward Nuremberg November where there will either be a government coup, OR the good will make right this evil wrong and vote the grifters out, you would wake up and roll your entire $40 million net worth on…meh?

Who signed off on this? True believers? Because it sure as shit wasn’t the cynical opportunism wing. And in the face of every ugly look that could have possibly happened — Michelle Obama being called a man by a fat fuck no one knows, the wife-beating Dana White extolling the virtues of free speech while firing Black and Latino employees who exercise it (where’s Stitch Duran or Burt Watson?) — Bargatze was there among the oligarchs. Doing the photo op thing.

A stated claim that he was just a fan and just wanted to see the fights flies in the face of him just having a home with just having a television in it where he could have done just that.

Nah, this was about making the scene. Something I have had the occasion to do on at least 30 different fight cards. Back when fights were not political rallies for stumbling policy failures.

But what scene? This wasn’t fight fans, who were largely absent. These were just fellow travelers currying favor with a guy who at this point is a future defendant in an entire host of trials. Why would you choose to do this now?

There’s a dissonance here that can’t be missed. But it doesn’t sit in the wheelhouse of cynical opportunism. These risks run counter to the angles. These are products of true belief and as such need to be adjudged quite differently.

The weirdness doesn’t end there. Convicted anal rapist and $200 millionaire Conor McGregor appears on the execrable Jimmy Fallon show?!?!? Like anal rape is not real?

There’s a dissonance here that can’t be missed. But it doesn’t sit in the wheelhouse of cynical opportunism. These risks run counter to the angles. These are products of true belief and as such need to be adjudged quite differently.

Or at least this is what you think until the realization that the ringmaster here is none other than the, shadowy is not the word that should be used even if it works, the 65-year-old billionaire Ari Emanuel, CEO of the WME Group, as well as CEO and executive chairman of TKO Group Holdings, which owns the UFC and WWE.

And…a Democrat and brother to Rahm.

WME stands for William Morris Endeavor and it’s a talent agency, among other things now. But talent and how to use it is not a product of belief as much as it is angles. Which is to say, there are angles here that have not been seen or explored.

However which way they are pointed, and whatever the impetus, be it mid-life crisis, retirement blues, the naked face of fuck-you-ism, the love of lucre, the message from the ruling class oligarchs, klepto-bros and robber barons has got to be that we will do whatever the fuck we want to whoever we want, just about whenever we want.

And what are you going to do about it?

Apparently not one g-ddamned thing. Not until November at least.

So, your dentist, favorite comedian, singer, actor, athlete is in the Ku Klux Klan? What are YOU going to do about it?

But if books are still your thing and you still do books, please do the one Uncle Barry is doing, The Inimitable Sounds of Love: A Threesome in Four Acts…or the memoir A Walk Across Dirty Water and Straight Into Murderer’s Row, from Amazon…Or the Bookshop.Org dealie: Here?

And if you’d like to book a book show? Please DM.

And…….HEY HEY HEY…and because rust never sleeps.

BOMB A LIL JOY has a new record out too…

It’s called BABY BLUE. Go and BUY it.