At this point, all they're missing is for "Yakety Sax" to start playing.

The police eventually turned up, and it looked like Loomer was going to get the attention that she craved. And then Twitter announced that they couldn't care less about pressing charges, and invited Loomer to spend as long as she liked on their doorstep.

It took two hours for her to crack, when she asked a police officer to cut her free. She didn't get her Twitter account back, sure, but the real win was the friends she made along the wa- oh wait, no, everybody spent the day dragging her for being a baby.

When someone pointed out that this would probably lead to people dying, Defend Europe responded by saying that they were only going to monitor the NGOs and report any wrongdoing. Incidentally, one of the people aboard the Whitest Pearl was Lauren Southern, a right-wing vlogger and human/mayonnaise hybrid who months before had been arrested by the Italian coast guard for blockading an NGO vessel ... and firing flares at it.

Pictured: a bunch of normal, level-headed folks.

But not everything went according to plan. The initial launch of the C-Star was delayed for several days after the mayor of Catania, Sicily refused the ship permission to dock in the city's port, which meant they had to scurry over to Cyprus in order to catch their cruise -- at which point further protests forced them to abandon plans to refuel in Greece and Tunisia. The C-Star's engine then broke down, and while the crew eventually radioed the coast guard and asked for help, this arrived in the form of Sea Eye, an NGO whose ship was sailing nearby, looking for refugees to rescue. The racists turned them away, apparently preferring a slow, agonizing death on the high seas.

The C-Star was eventually repaired and sent on its way, but at one point in the journey, the captain was detained for failing to prepare a crew manifest, which seems a little odd. Isn't "write down the names of your crew" the easiest job a captain has? Why wouldn't he prepare one? Well, that might be because he was using the trip as a cover for human trafficking. When the C-Star stopped over in Cyprus, authorities boarded and found 21 refugees -- refugees who, according to reports, had paid the captain and crew 10,000 euros each for safe passage to Italy.

Despite somehow managing to increase the number of refugees in Europe, Defend Europe eventually declared the mission a success. Although, let's be real, the bar for "success" for these folks couldn't get any lower if they accidentally ate a buoy.

Hoekstra then changed tack and denied ever having called the story "fake news," despite the fact that he had just been recorded saying exactly that. We suspect that someone tried to play this off as a five-dimensional chess move designed to trigger the libs, but at what point is this sort of thing more easily explained by these people being hapless buffoons?

Impressively, the situation got worse. After the interview went viral, the Dutch media went in for the kill at Hoekstra's first official press conference as ambassador. The assembled journalists pressed him for nearly two hours for details about the apocalypse outside, or failing that, to name a single politician -- hell, even a make of car -- that had been immolated by the apparently all-powerful caliphate running things in their country. Hoekstra couldn't answer, and some days later, he copped in a newspaper interview to having made the whole thing up to impress his right-wing buddies.

Mermaids UK is a charity that provides resources to children living with gender dysphoria (whereby someone becomes distressed or anxious because there's a "mismatch between their biological sex and gender identity"). In December 2018, the organization was granted 500,000 pounds in funding by the British National Lottery, which would have enabled them to expand and open a network of support centers across the UK. Obviously, this made Linehan very angry, and in response, he organised a concern-trolling campaign that got the funding suspended and Mermaids' financial future placed into significant doubt.

Enter Harry Brewis, a Twitch streamer and YouTuber. Following a promise he'd made in a previous video about speedrunning culture, he announced that he'd be livestreaming a 101 percent (not a typo) completion run of Donkey Kong 64 for charity, with all donations going to Mermaids, to hopefully make up for Linehan's wrecking.

The stream began on January 18. Before he had even picked up a controller, he'd raised $1,000, which was some pretty on-the-nose foreshadowing for what was about to happen. Over the next 57 hours, Brewis was joined by a whole host of YouTube personalities, including Jim Sterling, Lindsay Ellis, Dan Olson, Natalie Wynn, and Casey Explosion, as well as some no-names like John Romero (of Doom fame), Chelsea Manning, two of the hosts of Chapo Trap House, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and voice actor Grant Kirkhope (who's played the big ape himself).

When the stream concluded, Brewis and his donors had raised over $340,000 (264,000 pounds) for Mermaids. The kicker? The National Lottery then announced that they'd looked into the accusations leveled by Linehan and found no wrongdoing, meaning that Mermaids was also getting the 500,000 pounds they'd originally been promised.

#ThanksGraham

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