Dem
47
GOP
53
Not that we're judging, mind you.
Sergio Furnari is, ostensibly, an artist. And he is also a prime illustration of the old adage that a fool and his money are soon parted. After the murder of Charlie Kirk, Furnari decided that what the market really wanted was a large, expensive statue of Kirk as he was just moments before a bullet took his life. So, Furnari sunk tens of thousands of dollars into his vision, finished the work, slapped a price tag of $100,000 on it, and waited for the buyers to start lining up.
The problem is that they did not line up. Nary a one. Furnari has not gotten a single offer, not for full price, not an opening bid, not a lowball offer. Well, that is not entirely true. He has reportedly received quite a few offers from people who are willing to urinate on the statue. Maybe the artist should try to monetize that. (Z) once went to a county fair where someone had bought a junker for a few hundred dollars, and was letting people swing a sledgehammer at it, three swings for five bucks. People were lining up. That guy made a mint.
The remarkable thing is that Furnari doesn't even like Kirk, and takes particular umbrage with Kirk's views on Palestine. How can you possibly believe you understand the mindset of cultists if you are not yourself a member of the cult, or at least cult-adjacent? That would be like one of us deciding that what people in Argentina really want is a book about Juan Manuel de Rosas, the strongman politician who died in 1877. How could we possibly know if there's a market for that? Hence our observation about a fool and his money. By the way, Furnari thinks the problem is that people are, to use his word, "cheap."
That said, even people much closer to Kirk's orbit are having trouble squeezing what they want out of his death. For a period of time, immediately after the shooting, there was much supposition on the right that Kirk would be a martyr, and that his death would unify MAGA in opposition to the evil lib'ruls responsible for his death. Basically, JFK for the 21st-century-bigot set.
Needless to say, this is not what has happened. Kirk was actually on the fringes of the Republican Party and of MAGA (and we mean "fringes" on multiple levels). His passing was not all that important in many corners of MAGA-world. And the places where it WAS important are populated by wild-eyed conspiratorial types, like Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson. And so, instead of unity, the folks who are still thinking about Kirk's death are arguing bitterly among themselves over how their pet conspiracy theory is obviously right, and everyone else's pet conspiracy theories are obviously loony.
This, by the way, is what always happens with extremist movements. They eventually break down into different factions, each of them pointing fingers at the others for not being extreme enough, or for being extreme in the wrong way. Could very well be a preview for what happens with the larger MAGA movement once Donald Trump exits the political stage. (Z)