Sad Losers Grow Fu Manchu Mustaches to Emulate Their New Hero, Jacksonville Jaguars QB Gardner Minshew

Gardner Minshew is a rookie pressed into sudden service. He's doing well, giving the team some hope.

Minshew sports a Fu Manchu, seventies-porn-actor style mustache.

To emulate their new hero, legions of incel manbabies are also sporting Fu Manchu mustaches, the Wall Street Journal reports.

The team is feeding the mania. The Jaguars began offering what it dubs the "Minshew Mini Pack," which includes tickets to the team's next two home games, a bandanna, fake mustache and the chance to take a picture on the field with the gear.

Can't wait to hear the names of some of the piss-pants jock-sniffing toddlermen growing a mustache to look like another dude.

Amy Ekdahl remembers exactly how she learned that her husband had joined the craze, and she wasn't happy about it.

Ekdahl? That name sounds familiar.

Must be someone else.

John Ekdahl has had a thick beard for as long as they've been together.

John Ekdahl? Eh, must be another guy named John Ekdahl. There's no reason to think that Ekdahl roots for the Jaguars.

Except for living in Florida. And constantly tweeting about the Jaguars.

And showing a love for Garnder Minshew that clearly crosses from homoerotic to just plain ol' gay.

He decided to get rid of all of it--except the mustache--after Mr. Minshew led Jacksonville to a win over the Tennessee Titans. He didn't consult his wife.

Ms. Ekdahl learned about it when she checked her phone and saw he had sent her a picture. "My heart dropped," she recalls. "I was enraged all day."

Her friends at work expressed similar shock and asked her how old her husband is. "Too old to be doing this," she told them.

Mr. Ekdahl, though, has no plans to shave it.

Anyway, so just kidding with the incel manbaby stuff. That actually is the John Ekdahl, former coblogger.

It's a cute story, but... it's very revealing. Not about a minor trend in facial hair. But about how the media gets its stories.

The reporter saw people tweeting about the Fu Minshew mustache and started typing up a, well, let's call it a "news story." Where did they get Ekdahl's name from? They saw him tweeting about his Fu Minshew on Twitter.

The media is just 90% about taking tweets and hashtags and typing them into stories and calling it brave reporting and truth firefighting.

The other 10% is typing up evidence-free conspiracy theories peddled to them by Adam Schiff.

Emily Jashinksy just wrote about that.

Political Twitter is easily distracted by stories with a dangerously unbalanced ratio of news value to entertainment value, even more so than the cable networks. (I'm not excluding myself from this.) Because the conversation is driven by coastal journalists who use our accounts for social and professional purposes, there's a premium on media gossip, insular Beltway chatter, and amusing viral content....

The problem is that news outlets also use Twitter as an assignment editor, which has the effect of artificially inflating the importance of such stories--in newsrooms, boardrooms, and living rooms. Tweets have consequences, even the silly ones. That’s well-worth considering before getting sucked into the largely irrelevant Twitter pile-on of the moment.

That's via Steven Green at Instapundit, who cites this tweet from Salena Zito, pointing out that for many, real life is now nothing more than a series of tweets and notifications:

On That Point: Ironically enough -- or perhaps inevitably enough -- the media had previously seized on a John Ekdahl tweet to fabricate a "TWITTER OUTRAGED!" non-story "story."

Somewhat related: The Ohio State marching band celebrated Neil Armstrong Day with a routine about the moon landing.

posted by Ace of Spades at 02:42 PM

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