by James A. Bacon

I devote much of my writing on this blog to calling out the freaks and nihilists on the far left. Normally, I’m content to let regime media do the same for the wackos on the far right. But once in a while, a story about derangement on the right crops up that can’t be ignored.

I missed this particular story when it first surfaced in March. But it is so utterly depraved that when I finally encountered it, I could not let it pass. Maybe the far-left eco-nihilists are right: humanity is such a cancerous blight on the planet that it deserves to die off.

Michael Macartney, a 50-year-old Chesapeake man, is a former motorcycle gang member and prison inmate. Back in March, in the anodyne words of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Eastern District of Virginia, he pleaded guilty to conspiracy to create and distribute “animal crushing videos.”

What, you might ask, are animal-crushing videos?

The BBC, whose investigative work broke the story, provides some details here.

Macartney was part of a global ring of sickos that organized chat groups and distributed videos depicting the torture, murder, and sexually sadistic mutilation of monkeys. Collaborators in Indonesia would perform and film the demented acts upon request.

“They had a poll set up,” Macartney told the BBC. “Do you want a hammer involved? Do you want pliers involved? Do you want a screwdriver?”

The U.S. Attorney’s Office filled in Macartney’s role.

Macartney received over 300 electronic payments from coconspirators for the purposes of promoting, creating, obtaining, receiving, and distributing the torture videos. On one occasion, Macartney raised additional funds for a bonus payment to a videographer who, at the request of the co-conspirators and on short notice, created a video of a juvenal monkey being tortured with a jar of ants, leading to the monkey’s death.

There was nothing political about the monkey-torture network. But Macartney showed his colors in a BBC photo by posing in front of a Confederate battle flag and a Trump 2020 banner.

It would be egregiously unfair to smear Trump voters and Southern-heritage supporters with guilt by association with pond scum like Macartney. (My apologies to pond scum for the comparison.) But it’s important for conservatives of all flavors and varieties to repudiate the perverts who haunt the fringes of their movement. The sickos may expropriate some of our symbols and rhetoric, but they are not us. They defile us, and we repudiate them.

We are seeing more monsters like the monkey-torture ring these days because the Internet has empowered them. Pre-Internet, deviants were isolated in their perversions and, as loners, they were more hesitant to violate societal norms. Thanks to the wonders of the Internet, though, they can connect with others like themselves and organize their depravities as they never could as solo sickos.

Just think what someone equally depraved could do if they got their hands on a bio-weapon. To cite the nightmare scenario of Mustafa Suleyman, AI entrepreneur and author of “The Coming Wave,” contemplate the odds of a small group using AI to design a superbug that it unleashes upon the world.

When I was growing up in the 1960s, the main thing we worried about was perishing in a nuclear war. Life was so simple back then. Now there are multiple ways for humanity to run off the rails. A driving force behind Elon Musk’s business enterprises is the fear that human folly and perversity will lead to humanity’s extinction. That’s why he’s so determined to implant a colony on Mars.

Where can I buy a ticket?