He set up a website, Facebook and Twitter pages, and a Gofundme account. Then, apparently, he took some lumber from his aborted float, built a cross, nailed himself to it, and started giving interviews.
Straight and LGBT Americans alike, Brian Talbert of Albemarle, North Carolina is standing up for you!
What- exactly- is Brian Talbert doing for us, America?
He is fighting Charlotte Pride to bring his dream- your dream and ours- to life. He says the Pride Parade organizers are denying Brian Talbert-
When he closes his eyes, Brian Talbert can see each detail of the float he had planned to build.
It was going to be 27 feet long, have “a bunch of American flags,” a replica of the Statue of Liberty, “female impersonators” and the “most patriotic music anyone has ever heard.”
The design would be so powerful, Talbert said, that nobody at the 2017 Charlotte Pride Parade would ever forget it.
“You were going to look at this float and be filled with pride for being an American,” Talbert told The Washington Post.
He expects you to raise him $100,000 in tax-free gift money that he doesn't have to give back or explain where it went, or for what.
By one crude measure, you might to better investing in Pentagon faucets: Brian Talbert's vision of a 27-foot float festooned with flags, fags and drag costs out at $3,703 a foot.
No, wait: the $100K is to bully his way, a la the President's legendary arts of the deal, into the event by way of a lawsuit he might not win (the President is legendary for his pretrial cave-ins and dismissals, like the $25 million Trump U settlement, or the tossed-out suit against someone who said the President really isn't a billionaire) even before local courts larded with Republicans appointees and elected judges.
We as a minority within a minority know discrimination first hand. We are having to fight it from those who know what it is like to be discriminated against. It is an out numbered fight. We need all the help we can get in order to fight the majority within the minority. Help keep our voice heard.
No one knows Brian Talbert's (including Talbert himself?) actual float cost (in 2013 Time reported Detroit Thanksgiving Parade floats cost $30,000 to $100,000 each to build; based on what Talbert seeks to raise, his would come in- appropriately for a lifetime memory- at $99,981).
On the other hand, Brian Talbert might argue, if every single one of the 130,000 people who attended last year's festival came again this year and saw his your vision- his your float- and remembers it forever, that's only 76.9 cents per priceless memory. Amortized over the anticipated lifespans- even accepting the traditional Republican view that all gay men are dead by around age 43- well, it's damn near free!
It's not gonna happen.
So far, 188 of the 320 million Americans Brian Talbert is building his float for have peeled off $6,713 so he can sue Charlotte Pride for pride of place aboard his float, the one no American will ever, ever forget.
It's gotten 215 Facebook shares.
Brian Talbert's Buy Me My Lawsuit campaign had a good first day: $3100.
Day 2- yesterday- the pace slowed. He scored $2200 more.
Today as of 9.30 am, 39 people have given $1413 over the last 24 hours: 1.62 people an hour throwing cash at a solution in search a problem.
The overall average gift is $35.
At this rate, Brian Talbert needs 73 days for you to buy him his float and a golden ticket to the Wonka Factory Tour.
The registration deadline is August 1: 52 days away.
Brian Talbert got turned down May 16. He frittered away 21 days, and that time would have gotten him to 73, if not to a court order to make room for the float.
What did he do with that time? Did he try the time-honored Republican free market solution and seek corporate or fat-cat individual patrons?
When you look at their criteria, it seems like there is plenty of room for negotiation. Did he meet with anyone at Charlotte Pride to look for a way to resolve their issues with Gays for Trump's application?
Nope.
He set up a website, Facebook and Twitter pages, and a Gofundme account. Then, apparently, he took some lumber from his aborted float, built a cross, nailed himself to it, and started giving interviews.
And he did it in the first week of June- LGBT Pride Month- even though Charlotte's parade is not until August 27.
This whole thing is a self-aggrandizing, attention-seeking scam. I called it that yesterday and I stand by it.
But don't take my word for it. Eugene Volokh is a constitutional law professor at UCLA, former US Supreme Court clerk, and a highly respected conservative who supported television and movie president Fred Thompson for real president in 2008 (he was prescient, if not on the right bandwagon).
Two days ago, in The Washington Post, he wrote,
Talbert is apparently raising money for “a lawsuit against Charlotte Pride for discrimination,” but that would not be money well spent. First, Charlotte and North Carolina do not ban discrimination by parade organizers based on political affiliation. Only a few jurisdictions include political affiliation on their lists of prohibited bases for discrimination.
Second, even if a public accommodation law did ban such discrimination, it couldn’t apply to parades organized by nongovernmental organizations. Such parade organizers have a First Amendment right to exclude groups from their parades based on the messages the groups convey about their members’ sexual orientation, political affiliation, religion, race and whatever else to make sure that a parade conveys just the speech that parade organizers want to convey. That’s what the Supreme Court held in Hurley v. Irish-American Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Group of Boston, Inc. (1995), when it said that the organizers of Boston’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade had a First Amendment right to exclude the gay/lesbian/bisexual group. And the same applies here.
That's a story you can't find on Deplorable Pride's news tab.
Yesterday, Brian Talbert's story was all over conservative media. Breitbart News marked it a trending story.
Today, it's at the very bottom of the Breitbart page. Out of the billions and billions served, only 581 people commented. Most of them were don't share Brian Talbert's vision of a 27-foot float festooned with flags and drag queens, one impersonating Melania Trump. Most of them make clear they don't even like The Gays.
Today, the number of stories of Gays for Trump- all three of them, as I reported yesterday- has dwindled to a handful.
One, by blogger David Cary Hart, a financial expert writing as The Slowly Boiled Frog, pretty well sums up this Brian Talbert Festival of Self That You Need to Pay For:
Hart continues:
Perhaps Talbert thinks that Trump issued a Pride Month proclamation. The reality is that Trump seems to have gone out of his way not to do so in order to pander to those Conservative Christians. Some of those folks think that we deserve to be killed, or "smoted" or whatever they call it based on those ancient screeds that they hold so dear.
Talbert is now planning to sue Charlotte Pride for discrimination. Deplorable Pride's GoFundMe page (no, I am not going to link to it) is now dedicated to Talbert's legal fees, raising about $5,000 with a goal of $100,000. I seriously doubt that a Trump supporter is part of a protected class which means that Talbert and his donors should find better outlets for their energy and money. I might recommend The Trevor Project but there are many possibilities.
Talbert is unlikely to be pleased until he can cause Charlotte Pride to piss away some money that could be used for far better purposes. Cranks can be expensive.
There seem to be two reasons why a gay man would support Trump: ▣Stupidity and a ▣craving for attention. On his Facebook page Talbert writes: "The Republican Party is the only party that has a proven track record of standing with minorities." I think that we can check off the first box. The parade float, the lawsuit and the coverage suggest that we can check off the second box as well.
So now I have probably fed Talbert's personality disorder by way of the Google News alert that he most certainly has. This would be fine if his self-destructive behavior affected only him. That is not the case. Maybe he can get Peter Thiel to send him some money. Meanwhile he can revel in his victimhood. Just like his conservative Christian counterparts, these folks love to be miserable. Talbert is one miserable fag.
Brian Talbert's Gays for Trump- the "group" denied the permit to execute his vision for all Americans by Charlotte Pride- is not a Greensboro group- also called Gays for Trump- but its head was also all over the media yesterday supporting the other Gays for Trump. BTW, the one in Greensboro also has a Gofundme page, to raise money for Gays for Trump booths at Pride Events all over America. As of yesterday, it had hoovered up over $13,000.
So two groups with the same name, 65 miles apart, both raising money for memorializing their martyrdom in the name of the President, with no apparent nonprofit legal structures, and overlapping leadership cadres: what could possibly go wrong?
Perhaps I overstate. On rereading, the business model Gays For Trump and Gays For Trump is operating under looks a lot like the way their idol goes on holiday in hotels he owns, to play golf on courses he owns, then pockets tax money as fees and rack rates charged his protection and #AltRight Entourage.
Or the kids' cancer charity scam. Pay us to do what we want with your money.
And I haven't even gotten to Brian Talbert's Other Vision: his Deplorable Pride website, which promises a Deplorable Pride Ball (Details to Come!) and a Deplorable Pride Pageant ($2500 Prize! Paid in Full At Crowning!). No dates, no places. A blind email contact box.
He's defying the old proverb about throwing good money after bad. He wants you to throw your good money away for him. Gofundmes for ball and pageant are sure to follow, along with hefty admission fees.
What's Brian Talbert invested in all of this? He's got a Twitter feed (free) and a Facebook page (also free) and a day and a half of press coverage (free). And he's already up six grand.
And a dream:
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*Maybe not so much so: Forbes reported Santa's float in the 2016 Macy's Thanksgiving Parade was "60 ft long, 22 ft wide and 3.5 stories tall."
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