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Trump shamelessly mocks Ford at rally as more Kavanaugh dirt surfaces

If President Trump's statement Tuesday morning that it's a "very scary time for young men in America" had you screaming into the void, just wait until you watch him mock Christine Blasey Ford.

At an evening rally in Mississippi, Trump ridiculed Ford's emotional Senate testimony against his Supreme Court pick Judge Brett Kavanaugh, who Ford says sexually assaulted her when they were in high school in the 1980s. 

SEE ALSO: No matter what happens now, history's judgment on Kavanaugh is already clear

While Ford has said she is certain it was Kavanaugh who trapped her on a bed, groped her, and covered her mouth so she couldn't scream for help at a summer party, as his friend watched, she has also noted that other memories from the night are hazy. She doesn't remember how she got home, for example. It's common for sexual assault victims to remember the attack in great detail, but experience other memory gaps.  

President Trump maliciously used that handicap against Ford at the rally.

WATCH: President Trump mocks Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, who has accused Trump's Supreme Court pick Judge Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct, during rally in Mississippi. https://t.co/pZfWN8IFMV pic.twitter.com/81YEs8oXr5

— MSNBC (@MSNBC) October 3, 2018

"How did you get home? I don't remember. How'd you get there? I don't remember. Where is the place? I don't remember. ... And a man's life is in tatters," Trump stated, mocking Ford's testimony from last week. 

Trump's cruel tirade came after Kavanaugh's former classmates revealed stories of excessive drinking in his youth. Since the Senate hearing, in which Kavanaugh dodged questions about whether he had a drinking problem or ever vomited from drinking too much, news has surfaced of a 1985 bar fight and a 1983 letter in which Kavanaugh called himself and his friends "loud obnoxious drunks with prolific pukers among us." Kavanaugh categorically denies Ford's allegations.

After Ford's measured testimony, Kavanaugh came out raging, at times shouting, crying, and disrespecting Democratic senators as they grilled him. It's been reported that Trump pushed his Supreme Court nominee to be more furious about the accusation. And if it was anger he wanted out of Kavanaugh, Trump got it. Not that it was a good look. Kavanaugh's tone on Capitol Hill that day has been widely criticized, especially when compared to Ford's collegial nature. 

The Senate is expected to vote this week on Kavanaugh's confirmation as the FBI wraps up a short-term investigation into Ford's account. Ford first told her husband and therapist about the assault, naming Kavanaugh, in 2012, long before he was nominated for a life-time appointment to the highest court in the U.S. She's also been the target of threats from Trump supporters since coming forward and has had to move and hire a security detail.

Trump's remarks in Mississippi also follow a bombshell New York Times report highlighting Trump's various tax schemes, some which could be considered fraudulent, in the 1990s. 

It looks like bad news after bad news for Trump. 

WATCH: Jennifer Lawrence, Reese Witherspoon speak out about sexual harassment in Hollywood

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Trolls thought I was a man. That saved me.

This post is part of Me, online, Mashable's ongoing series digging into online identities.

I was locked in my friends’ bathroom on the phone with my thesis adviser and staring at Reddit. It was snowing pretty hard and though there was a window with some theoretical light streaming in, I felt like I was under a blanket, the flashlight of my attention pointed at a screen that I refreshed and refreshed and refreshed. I was discussing the critical thesis component required for my graduate degree, an MFA in creative writing. It was titled Masculinity and the Making of the Modern Nerd. It was a mess.

“Does that make sense?” my adviser asked, or something like that. I don’t know, exactly, what she’d said, other than the paper didn’t work, because I was preoccupied. We need a Kotaku In Action Action, a user typed. And they were typing it about me. Refresh, refresh, refresh.

“Yes, I think. Sorry, something weird and bad is happening right now?”

She paused. “Are you okay?”

“I think so? I think I’m fine.”

SEE ALSO: The email problem no one is talking about: mistaken identity

I’d been the Geekery Editor at Autostraddle, a popular website primarily by and for queer women and non-binary folks, for some years. I’d both written about Gamergate and assigned others to write about it. My entire first novel? It was (and still is) about the phenomenon of weaponized nerds, radicalized young men (primarily white and western) terrorizing women over games. At Autostraddle, I’d written an essay in 2016 praising one of the central targets of Gamergate for doing as much good as can possibly be done in the wake of a harassment campaign against her, and then moving on with her gosh darn life like a woman on a mission. 

I’d thought my biggest crime with this piece was writing it just a bit too saccharine; I was lavish with my compliments. The gamers on Kotaku in Action apparently thought it was more egregious than that — perhaps the worst offense in the entire world: that I might not be a "real nerd" at all.

I struggle to explain Kotaku in Action every time I have to, because it truly defies explanation and has the many heads of a hydra collective. It’s the Reddit forum that perpetuated GamerGate, a place to coordinate targeted rape- and death-threats against women in the games industry — when a user says “Kotaku In Action Action,” it is likely to these types of activities they are referring. 

It is synonymous with the alt-right (and strategically so). It’s full of (mostly) dudes with no sense of culture or community outside their homogenous gaming forums; these rootless young men long to be a part of something bigger, something greater and so, Kotaku in Action it is. A place on the internet that’s part of the Manosphere and also includes Pick Up Artists, Incels, and Men’s Rights Activists. A place so toxic that its creator recently tried to shut it down, calling it a “viral cancer,” and Reddit, in its infinite wisdom, decided to save it. A place that I’ve spent years researching in service of my fiction; I often say it is the butthole of the internet, and I’ve spent the last four years giving the world wide web a proctology exam.

When I was first alerted to the thread, I was scared. I’m no stranger to a good hate pile-on—I do work on the internet, after all, and writing for the queer community often means antagonizing some harsh critics, both without and within. The GamerGaters, though? I’d spent two years flying under the radar of these fine, upstanding gentlemen internet terrorists. I wrote for queer women, for non-binary folks. I thought that must be the reason why: They were uninterested in what I had to say because I was never saying it to a mainstream audience, to the normal set of gamers, and so I never got hit. I thought I must not be a threat; that wasn't quite it. I was wearing armor. Armor I had no idea I'd ever put on.

I was filled with too much nervous energy after seeing the thread to stay in my apartment, so I went to the Strand and stress-bought a Virginia Woolf Saint Candle, a Moleskine notebook I didn’t need, and a book on drawing happy people. When it was time for me to get back to my own space, I found I didn’t want to. My head was filled with all the stories, the doxxing, the SWATting, the things that can happen if you walk through the digital world as boldly female. It’s dangerous to go alone; I didn’t want to be alone. I told my Dungeons and Dragons group what was going on — I figured they’d be the most likely to understand, being a group of gamers. And that’s how I wound up locked in my dungeon master’s bathroom, talking to my adviser as I watched the comments build up on Reddit.

The guy spends way too long jerking himself off in the first paragraph about how much of a nerd he is.

When I was growing up, in the 80s, geek and nerd was a derogatory slur. I don't get the desire to identify with labels the popular people tried to shame us with... Anyhow, the term "geekery" makes my skin crawl. I guarantee you this guy knows fuck all about the history and intricacies of the various so-called "geek" interests.

I'm guessing he was alone for Valentine's Day.

They were mean — but they weren't threatening. There was only the one. The rest — just grousing. I'd seen much worse happen to other folks. To more feminine folks. Refresh, refresh, refresh.

I came out as trans last fall, but I’ve looked like this for a long time: close-cropped hair, chest flattened by a binder, every stitch of clothing I own from the men’s department. My fellow queer writers had seen me coming for years. But at the time this was happening in 2016? I was still white-knuckled from clinging to the sisterhood. Even though I’d get “excuse me, sir?” while walking about in public, right up until the point I opened my mouth to speak. Even though, more than once, folks had been very concerned when they happened upon me in the women’s room. Even though literally all my (repressed) internal barometers pointed to “not a woman.” 

I love my family, my queers; we are a people used to existing in the strange gray area. We are a people used to taking slurs from the mouths of hate-filled adversaries and tattooing them on the soft muscles of our hearts, making celebration and community out of words meant to hurt us. I figured I was just a failure at femininity; that the definition of woman was broad and that my masculinity fit within it. Those are all true things, they’re just not true for me. Still, it was shocking to see, this assumption that I was a man — a popular man, at that! 

It's annoying to me when popular hacks call themselves nerds. Especially because having been a nerd back when the word meant social outcast. It was them who came in and caused all beatings and insults.

Back in my friend’s bathroom, my adviser asked, incredulously, “They think you’re a guy?” 

“I think so,” I replied and I read her some of the comments.

“How?”

I explained it to her; it had happened before, this confusion. When I identified as a woman, I published under the name “Ali,” which, for half of this world, isn’t a woman’s name at all. My photo was next to my byline and people didn’t really read what the website was about if they found it from an outside source. I wrote largely about technology; my longest-running column was titled Queer Your Tech. A lot of folks (wrongly) consider that some “boy-stuff.”

She didn’t believe me until months later, when I was taking over her website from her former designer (I maintain the websites of a few authors I know). As he was passing me all the information I needed, he conducted the entire transaction calling me “he” in all the emails. HE THINKS YOU’RE A DUDE my adviser texted me, privately. In digital space, where I never have to open my physical mouth, where I am simply a collection of characters on a screen, no one ever looks at me with their eyebrow raised; no one ever corrects themselves. I am whatever I am assumed first to be. And I’m doing and saying the “boy-stuff.”

“Yup,” I responded. “I told you.”

Eventually, I did come out of the bathroom. I waited. These were tamer than the reports of what happened to the women who crossed the GamerGaters. I was expecting the worst — surely, if it hadn't happened yet, the worst would be coming and it was only a matter of time. I waited through the night for something to happen. 

And nothing ever did.

“Do they even know you spent the entirety of seventh grade eating lunch in the guidance counselor’s office because you were too unpopular to eat in the cafeteria?” my friend Laura said from my couch the next day. “You — you’ve never been cool. Except to me, you were cool to me.” Laura and I have known each other since the fourth grade. She stuck with me through my obsession with the musical Cats and my childhood assertion that I was an alien from Saturn. And now, she was volunteering to be my questing buddy. To keep her eye on the thread, to make sure I was safe, so I wouldn’t have to keep refreshing it.

“It’s taking everything I’ve got not to jump on and say something to these people.”

“Don’t do that. That’ll make it worse.”

What I meant was: Don’t do that, they’ll figure out I’m one of the things they hate. Because I’d developed a hypothesis, one that keeps proving itself even now, years later. I said things they disliked, disagreed with. They called me an SJW (social justice warrior), but I looked masculine enough that the Kotaku in Action Action never materialized. 

Looking like a dude was armor; it played on the subconscious prioritization of all things manly. I’ve watched queer femme authors get harassed so intensely that they have to leave the internet, and many of them aren’t even trying to poke the GamerGaters. The cause isn’t in the content, or the severity of the imagined offense. It’s in the gender presentation of the author. Those that the heteronormative world deems masculine people can talk; those they deem feminine people better watch their backs.

And the things about the way I present online one might perceive as feminine (allying myself with women, the over-prooving of my right to speak on a subject) were but small scratches in an armor built of clipper cuts and and computer-speak. “Boy stuff.” The reason I was never considered a threat wasn’t because of who I was speaking to; it was because of who I was — ultimately, not like those “other girls.” Weaponized nerds use their masculinity as a sword; now I know I can wield masculinity as armor to go questing in the darkest caves, in the buttholes of the internet. My masculinity allowed their eyes to slide right over me. Allowed isn’t even the right word; encouraged, perhaps. 

Two years later and not much has changed. It’s still happening; I am one variant, one echo of it. It wasn’t the masculine half of #PlaneBae that got chased off the internet, for instance. This isn’t a phenomenon isolated to me, or to queers, or to 2016, or to GamerGate. This is just the way it is, out there, on the internet. I could’ve identified as trans at the time this happened, instead of as a woman, and it wouldn’t have mattered. It’s the nature of being squeezed into two dimensional space while being squashed by the patriarchy. I am whatever people assume me first to be. I am safer online because of it.

A.E. Osworth is the Managing Editor of Scholar and Feminist Online at Barnard College and Part-Time Faculty with The New School’s Creative Writing Department, where they teach digital storytelling. You can find their writing at Autostraddle, where they contribute regularly, and Argot Magazine, where they are a columnist. You can also catch up with them on Twitter or Instagram.

WATCH: Meet the 10-year-old drag kid shaping the future of drag youth

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Dennis Rodman cries over Trump-Kim summit while hawking PotCoin. This is 2018.

It was a historic moment many didn't expect to see: President Donald Trump shaking hands with North Korean Leader Kim Jong-un.

And soon after, another stunner was broadcast live on TV: Dennis Rodman crying over the Trump-Kim summit while wearing a red MAGA hat and a shirt promoting his sponsor, the cryptocurrency PotCoin.

"Today is a great day," former NBA star Dennis Rodman says in an emotional interview in which he describes his relationship with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un https://t.co/atvQwe7jo0 pic.twitter.com/dEgQf3kBtE

— CNN (@CNN) June 12, 2018

It was A LOT, and left many wondering: Is this real life?

I'm watching Dennis Rodman cry on TV about North Korea and Trump because apparently I died and woke up in crazy land.

— Ben White (@morningmoneyben) June 12, 2018

I’ve seen Trump and Kim meet, and just watched Dennis Rodman break down and cry about it. Today is a very strange day. #TrumpKimSummit

— Fiona Clark (@fionaclark10) June 12, 2018

I just watched Dennis Rodman cry on live television about facilitating a historic meeting between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un. Read that sentence again.

— J.E. Skeets (@jeskeets) June 12, 2018

20 minutes ago I was watching a historic handshake between two unpredictable leaders. Now I’m watching Dennis Rodman cry in a MAGA hat on the same network. Is this real life?#NorthKoreanSummit

— Zachary Gorelick (@ZacharyGorelick) June 12, 2018

I am watching Dennis Rodman cry on TV while advertising his marijuana based cryptocurrency, thanking Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam for introducing him to North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un... while Donald fucking Trump negotiates denuclearization... Is this real life? Pls tell me no

— Laura Jane Watkins (@pinkyswearing) June 12, 2018

As he wiped tears from his eyes, Rodman praised the Singapore meeting as a "great day for everybody" and recalled the criticism hurled at him when he visited the authoritarian state years ago as he spoke to CNN's Chris Cuomo. 

"I took those bullets. I took all that. I took everything everyone came at me, and I'm still standing," Rodman said, referring to the hate lobbed at him every time he visited the hermit country known for human rights abuses and toying maliciously with nuclear power. "Today is a great day for everybody Singapore, Tokyo, China, everything. It's a great day. I'm here to see it. I'm so happy."

This isn't the first time Rodman's cried over North Korea. He shed tears while apologizing for his visits to the country during a 2014 ESPN interview, vowing to not return. And yet he kept going back. (While traveling to North Korea last June, he was spotted in the Beijing airport wearing a PotCoin shirt, too.)

Rodman went on to say that the White House called him, noting that the president was proud of him. It was quite a sharp turn from Trump's 2014 diss, in which he called Rodman delusional.

Dennis Rodman was either drunk or on drugs (delusional) when he said I wanted to go to North Korea with him. Glad I fired him on Apprentice!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 8, 2014

Ouch. What a difference four years makes. 

WATCH: Kim Kardashian is in, but these people were uninvited from the White House

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A party parrot mystery has been solved. Thank you, internet.

Sometimes, when you least expect it, the internet will solve a mystery for you. 

Last year, I spent weeks looking for the creator of the original party parrot, a dancing emoji with a cult following. I went deep on Google. I spoke to the Disciples of Sirocco, a group of Redditors who helped fuel the bird's popularity; the creator of a party parrot website; and fans who made oddball variations on the original. No one knew who made Party Parrot #1.

Then, just this week, I got an email from a Florida man claiming to be the person I had been looking for. What's more, he says he made the original emoji in December 2009 and uploaded it to Something Awful, a website popular in the 2000s for its comedic blog posts and forums. He had no idea his work had turned into a meme until he read my story on Tuesday. 

SEE ALSO: Cult of the party parrot: How a ridiculous bird became an emoji hero

"It was a pretty interesting rabbit hole to fall down," Geiger Powell, a 33-year-old graphic designer, told me over the phone. "I was just so blown away by the whole thing. There's just so many of them. I'm pretty stunned by that."

While party parrot sightings have been made on Twitter and there's a large subreddit dedicated to the animated emoji, its real home is Slack, a messaging service used by 8 million daily active users in more than 100 countries. There are plenty of party parrots that one can upload to Slack, including pizza parrot, blonde sassy parrot, Guy Fieri parrot, and mustache parrot. But Powell has never used Slack. He uses another messaging service that doesn't support emoji for work. 

Just some of the many party parrots on cultofthepartyparrot.com

Image: Cult of the Party Parrot

Party parrot lovers had guessed that the ridiculous emoji was a play on a September 2009 viral video of a Kakapo parrot named Sirocco trying to mate with a zoologist's neck. The resemblance was uncanny. Sirocco flaps his wings and bobs his head in a circular motion. The first party parrot has the same long, flat beak that looks like a sunflower seed and oonce-oonce club moves. 

The critically endangered Kakapo from New Zealand is a fat, flightless bird that's not great at mating or fending off predators. It's just the type of bizarre animal the internet loves. There are only 148 left as of August 2018; there were 153 as of July 2017. 

While Powell's original was green like Sirocco, party parrot as the internet at large knows it flashes bright with neon hues. Powell doesn't know how his green creation got the colorful makeover, nor where the name came from. His original was just called "parrot." So there's still some mystery here.

Party parrot arguably hit peak memedom in late 2016, early 2017. Powell's 2009 version was first uploaded to a college football discussion on a Something Awful forum. Someone shared the video of Sirocco's failed mating session to the forum, and Powell decided to fashion an emoticon for the site. The same day he uploaded it, the forum was obsessing over former NFL player Tim Tebow crying on the sidelines during a Florida Gators game. Amid all the Pac-10 talk, someone chimed in: "I'm quite behind, but what's with the parrot?" It just became a thing. (Something Awful forums are behind a paywall, and the conversation has been archived.)

On Something Awful, you have to pay to host an emoticon that can be called up by a code. Another user paid $30 and the :parrot: code lived on. (The nomenclature was to the point, but not as fun as party parrot's alias.) 

But in that football forum, the parrot love was fleeting. It was only after it took on new forms elsewhere that the meme exploded.

"It was over within a week or so, people's excitement for that, so it's bizarre what happened over the years when other people got obsessed with it," Powell said. 

Powell's not alone when it comes to sparking a meme and having no idea you helped fuel an online obsession ... until one day you happen upon a link and your jaw drops. There are those who've been able to capitalize on becoming a meme, like the Damn Daniel teens and Chewbacca mom, and on the other side of the coin, those who get exploited for little to no financial gain.

Learning about the plethora of party parrots this week has left Powell wondering about the internet as a meme machine and prompted some self-reflection. He cohosts a podcast about internet subcultures called Report this Post, and he plans to talk about this experience on an upcoming show.

It's made him think about what else he's posted online that may have taken on new life, as well as memes he's participated in that are unknown to the originator. 

"I wonder what over the years I've obsessed over that was also someone else's creation," he said. "To be disconnected from it, something that you made so long ago and goes out there, it's like letting a child out into the world to explore."

WATCH: Watch robots invade a quaint English model village

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National Ice Cream Day PSA: Beware the ice cream machine on 'Chopped'

As we hunt for free ice cream on this glorious holiday, National Ice Cream Day, let us not forget that not all ice cream stories end well. Especially when Chopped's involved.

The long-running Food Network show pits four contestants against each other as they compete for a cash prize. They go through three cooking speed rounds, whipping up an appetizer, entree, and dessert using random ingredients provided in a basket — you can get everything from sardines paired with watermelon to mud pie and potato chips. 

SEE ALSO: The absolute best and worst ice cream truck treats

The dessert round decides the game, and even though there have been more than three dozen seasons of this reality show, contestants still make the mistake of using the ice cream machine.

Stay away from the ice cream machine! The ice cream machine will only bring you sorrow. 

One of the following is bound to happen:

You go for the ice cream machine only to be foiled by another contestant who got to it first, and there's only 10 minutes left before you have to present the dessert and ahhhh why did you want to make ice cream out of fruit cake anyways?

You get to the ice cream machine before your competitor, and breathe a sigh of relief as you begin pouring a hot mixture into the machine. Wait! The ice cream base can't be hot. It'll ruin the ice cream. There goes $10,000. 

Everything seems to be going well, you've managed your time, and you've got the ice cream machine all to yourself. You put the ingredients in and move on to doing other stuff, like making a nice boozey sauce to impress the judges. You come back to check on your ice cream, and it's just soup. It didn't work. What happened? Noooooo!

This time, ice cream's looking good. It's spinning in the machine and has the right consistency. You use a spoon to scoop the ice cream out and oh no, what happened to the spoon? The ice cream machine ate it! 

That spoon scenario really happened and is even featured in the show's "Most Serious Mishaps" video on Facebook. 

There are memes dedicated to the ice cream machine and its evil ways. A recurring judge on the show has even admitted Food Network only has one machine for the drama.

“It’s really for creating that level of semi-chaos," said chef and restauranteur Marcus Samuelsson, according to Food & Wine. "It’s really like cooking on a treadmill. It’s not easy at all.”

No it's not. Make your life easier and avoid that machine.

I don't think I've ever watched anyone have a favorable outcome when using the ice cream machine on Chopped.

— Say Chels (@renegadewriter) July 11, 2018

You know you’re setting yourself up for failure if your in the final round of chopped and you try to make ice cream

— GABE (@GabeLashley00) July 13, 2018

not listening to tim : project runway :: using the ice cream maker : chopped

— this cannot continue (@woodswake) July 13, 2018

Of all the gods that govern the Chopped kitchen, the Risotto gods are second only to the ice cream gods in terms of cruelty

— Mike Golic Jr (@MGolicJR57) June 6, 2018

chopped contestant: ugh my ice cream is basically soup let’s hope putting it in the freezer for the last 4 minutes will help it solidify !!

— liz (@peachyliiz) July 10, 2018

The ice cream machine on Chopped is bad. I stress whenever a poor soul believes they can beat the odds and impress the judges with a cool, creamy treat, it's not gonna happen. Make something else! 

So on National Ice Cream Day, which, like every year, is on the third Sunday of July, please take my advice future Chopped competitors: Beware the ice cream machine.

WATCH: Turn frozen fruit into delicious soft serve with this DIY dessert maker

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