Sunday at the Church of Deplorable Pride: Brian, Son of the Lord Donald Trump, and his Apostles get word from on high: "Bye, Felicia."

The intelligence of that creature known as a crowd is the square root of the number of people in it.

-Sir Terry Pratchett, Jingo (1997)

Don't talk out loud. You lower the IQ of the whole street.

-Benedict Cumberbatch, in Sherlock, Season 1 (2011)



Pride Weekend came and went in Charlotte, and the *resident of the United States didn't lift a finger to give succor to his angry, frustrated, irrelevant, ludicrous, money-grubbing, infighting, incoherent, and semi-literate acolytes of the Piedmont, Deplorable Pride.

Even their self-obsessed leader- who combines an #AltRight focus on far right ideology with a seven-grade boy's ability to articulate it, knows Sunday he was the Hindenberg of gay Republicanism in Charlotte.

There is a conservative case to be made by LGBT Americans. God knows I tried to make it in the 1990s. And the GOP will never change as a result of missionaries sent by the Democrats, the Libertarians, or the Greens.

So there was a window back in May. Derek Van Cleve, whose idea Deplorable Pride was, saw that.

But he signed on an idiot friend, Brian Talbert, who soon grabbed DP's junk the way his White House idol says he does pussy, and ran with it.

There was never any evidence of attempts to mediate a resolution with Charlotte Pride, as grown-ups do. That probably would have worked.

But Talbert, the social media boy, saw another glittering green light across the water: money.

DP was ruined when Talbert set up a money beg for $100,000 on Gofundme.com in his own name and refused to say what the money was even for. He got testy when asked, and complained that any real patriot would know whatever he spent it on would be right and proper because he had a 100% track record for saying he was 100% truthful and transparent.

It was all bullshit, of course, and in due course, Talbert posted an update that he was transferring the $7730 to his personal account, there to do whatever he deemed necessary to advance his cause.

Some accused him getting sniffy about where the money went, but that is a fraught term. All we know is, we asked, and got banned from DP's Facebook comment section. Then Talbert erased the exchange, which we'd screenshotted.

Within a few more weeks Talbert forced Van Cleve out in an airbrushing worthy of the KGB. He re-christened himself "Founder" of the group and announced he would be elected to Congress in 2018.

DP's mantra was that Charlotte Pride was mean for excluding them from an event that claims to be a festival of diversity, and in that, at least they were consistent. They said this with straight faces right through the weekend, after a week of extracting and flinging their own poo at other Republicans:

One assumes Dear Leader Talbert- who pushed out DP's co-founder, Derek Van Cleve, in a putsch at the group's one-month anniversary- was aping the *resident's brainwave of alienating those whose support- and attendance- he so desperately needs in the run-up to his Big Moment in the Sun. It didn't work any better Uptown than it has in the upper house of Congress.

But spite is the Bitcoin of the two-bit. Philosopher Eric Hoffer said, "It is doubtful if the oppressed ever fight for freedom. They fight for pride and power-  power to oppress others. The oppressed want above all to imitate their oppressors; they want to retaliate."

Brian Talbert said, “The repressed has become the repressor. I’m enjoying every minute of it.”

While Texas drowned in four feet of rain Sunday, the *resident lolled at Camp David and interspersed self-congratulatory, boy-with-his-finger-in-the-dyke relief campaign claims with tweets about his travel plans, his 2016 election win in Missouri, abandoning NAFTA, tax cuts, and a book review.

He sure coulda sent some tweet love Talbert's way as his pinball attention span caromed from one now to the next.

He didn't. If he ever knew of DP's comically inept two-month existence, he'd long since forgotten it. The *resident doesn't do hapless Losers.

And losers they are, except for scamming $7730 out of 211 dopes on the false Gofundme promise of a lawsuit to force Charlotte Pride into giving them space for a float made up like the Temple of Trump (with a drag First Lady competing with the Statue of Liberty for pride of place amid a depilated gaggle of Ivankas and Kellyannes and Hopes and Sarah Huckabees, all in blue-sequined "#MAGA evening wear").

Now, in the sour, cold-coffee and pizza-rinds and smoke-butts of a bad morning-after, even the fundraising grift has been recast.

Overnight, it miraculously reset itself as a new, $10K scam. 

The old cash tally is gone; long live the new con game with $155 and another bitch from Dyspeptic Brian:

After 3 days of fighting back and forth with GoFundMe they have released the hold on DeplorablePride.org's donations. I had to threaten to sue them in order to get some action. I guess that is what you have to deal with when you are Conservatives dealing with a Liberal company. Do not worry, starting next week your donations will be put to use in assuring that the Conservative voice stays strong and heard! I will also be filing a complaint against them for causing all this BS and still taking out $616 out of your donations for this. #Gofundmeshameonyouforplayingpolitics

DP failed at everything else they promised: counter-Pride events, a Pride boycott, internet media programs, their ghastly and tasteless flatbed altar to the boorishness and vulgarity of their paragon, and the parade route lined- "every foot"- by straight Trump supporters who like gays.

None showed up. That's because there aren't any straight Trump supporters who like gays.

Almost no one showed up for DP's counter-protest, either.

That's because there are almost no gay Trump supporters. Talbert's ragtag band's numbers were, at best, barely past the ten in a crowd of over one hundred thousand. And that's in spite of the allure of time with Talbert in the best locale:

Others may have clamored for the spot, but no one did for Talbert's trash-talking,  police-guarded pen of zanies, moon-calves, and mountebanks who believed being in the parade would have meant more people noticed they were in it than in fact noticed they were at it at all.

A second group, Gays For Trump, incurred DP co-supremo Talbert's wrath for threatening to drive down from Greensboro and crowd his action.

One can see why. GfT knows event-planning. Take their July 4 rally on the DC Mall, which beat DP's Pride Whine Tasting by 50%:

In the event, no one so far has reported that GfT even showed up. They were just yanking Talbert's chain:

Here's what early reports said of DP's first and last stand at Trade & Tryon:

WCNC-TV ignored DP entirely.

WSOC-TV:

Officers monitored a small group of protesters near the parade stand who remained peaceful.

Fox46 News:

[R]oughly a dozen Trump, LGBTQ supporters protest[ed] alongside the annual parade in uptown.

The Charlotte Observer:

Craig and her friends posed for pictures at the intersection of Trade and Tryon, just a few feet away from a group of people waving Trump flags who arrived in the intersection as soon as the last float of the official parade had passed.

“Banning voices is un-American,” one poster in the Trump group read.

The Charlotte-based group Deplorable Pride had promised to protest the parade after being denied a place in it – a decision that attracted national attention a few months ago. Deplorable Pride was estimated at the time to have about a dozen members.

Most parade attendees appeared to pay little notice to the Trump group, though a few argued across a metal barrier.

The Observer's video report is below.

It includes hilarious footage of an apparent press aide to co-founder Brian Talbert explaining how Talbert- who was busy, a few feet away, waving a sign, had been wronged by Charlotte Pride: