But what's really weird is that what he did isn't actually weird. The entire pharmaceutical industry runs on this kind of money-gouging malarkey. Every single pharmaceutical CEO in the world does exactly what Shkreli did -- the difference is they don't go on MSNBC to brag about it.

Surely once he realized his mistake, he scurried back into his Millionaire Cave to do more surreptitious evil, right? Wrong.

Why We Still Know About Him

The Shkrells has spent every single day since he hiked that price finding new ways to get his goofy-ass face in front of you in the most punchable contexts conceivable. He agreed to an interview with Vice that not only butchered a bunch of basic facts (he wasn't arrested for price gouging, and he didn't start funding the punk label after the Daraprim scandal) but seemed designed to depict him as a villain. He spends the rest of his time hanging out on Twitter picking fights with anyone who makes fun of him Periscoping images of himself almost playing guitar and pretending to rip up checks for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Here he is doing the more douchey of those two things.

Occasionally the phone will ring and he'll answer on speakerphone. I've listened to a few of these conversations, and I can only see two possibilities: Either they're more obviously staged than Donald Trump's Twitter support or we live in a world where people call up Shkreli just to introduce themselves, tell him he's their hero, and ask him to make election predictions.

You can also find him making weird, unfounded accusations ...

Those wondering whether that caught on with the conspiracy crowds will be glad to know that it totally did.

... so he can argue with people on Twitter some more. If you go to his account and click on his mentions, you'll see that he spends his days finding everyone who is making fun of him, picking fights with them, and then blocking them.

If I were conspiratorially minded, I'd think that his entire public persona was set up by the pharmaceutical industry to make sure that we all remember this Daraprim scandal as the actions of a lone lunatic rather than using it to pry the broken pharmaceutical industry wide open and get a glimpse at the festering, pus-filled core of this throbbing abscess of an industry. But I'm not conspiratorially minded, so I just think Shkreli is kind of an insecure doofus who needs all the attention he can get, and none of us can help giving it to him.

Or maybe I'm just mad that he picked a fight with me on Twitter and then blocked me.

Mat Staver is Davis' lawyer and the founder of the Liberty Counsel, an anti-LGBT activist organization described as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, and as a pack of foamy-mouthed wingnuts by me on the popular comedy website Cracked.com. And every single wacko grab for attention you heard about Davis in the news came directly from them.

Remember when she met with the pope and he gave her his popey seal of approval? Never happened. But what a lot of people don't realize is that not only was it Mat Staver and the Liberty Counsel that spread that rumor in the first place, but they doubled down later and said the pope was lying about not having met her. Which is a weird accusation to throw at a guy whose approval you're pretending to have. The Liberty Counsel is also the people who spread that picture of a support rally for Davis in Peru that was somehow held years before Davis was ever arrested. Apparently a bunch of Peruvians heard about a lady named Kim Davis and held a rally in support of anything that might happen to her in the future, because there is fucking nothing of interest happening in Peru. Either that or Staver is completely full of shit and spending his days trying to turn his client into the Rosa Parks of being awful to other people for no reason.

Back in 2015 he wrote an article called "Gay Rights Have Made Us Dumber," in which he wrote: "If for no other reasons than manners and aesthetics, we ought to think about shoving the next generation back into Narnia."

RomoloTavani/iStock/Getty Images
From Prince Caspian to Samwise Gamgee, British fantasy literature is the most heterosexual place around.

Technically Narnia is in the back of a wardrobe, not a closet, but more importantly, come on, dude -- he doesn't really fucking believe that. Not just because Yiannopoulos is a flamboyant and proud gay man but because it's nonsense. Nobody believes that. The purpose of a statement like that is to latch on to the irrational anger people feel toward gay pride parades ("Why isn't there a straight pride parade?") and give it a shallow justification: That pride parades are dumb and make you dumb. Obviously that's totally bonkers (this guy has graduate degrees in nuclear science and engineering from MIT and wears high heels to Disneyland), but nobody looks too closely at something that makes their mad feel justified. And that's what makes it excellent trolling. On another note, Yiannopoulos has also said it's a provable fact that Jews control Hollywood. I'm not linking to any of his articles to offer proof because I don't want to give him the traffic; you'll just have to take my word for it.

If you're so inclined, you can go peruse his history and watch his strategy develop. In 2014 he wrote a piece called "Why Men Cheat With Me But Not On Me" that opens with this line: "I've never been cheated on. Obviously." He then went on to explain that he cheats, like, all the time. Which is the kind of comment you write for the bad guy in a romantic comedy so the audience doesn't mind when Hugh Grant steals his fiancee. The guy has always wanted to be hateable, but now he has his hate audience and his mentally ill internet harasser audience. Because that's where the real money is?

So it doesn't matter that he doesn't really believe the stuff he says, anymore than it matters that Chris Pratt isn't really a snarky space-pirate. They're both just playing fantasy roles. I don't see a difference, aside from the fact that Chris Pratt is less likely to ruin somebody's career or get them killed.

On Feb. 26, 2012, George Zimmerman fatally shot 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Florida, and hey there, welcome to my comedy article. The shooting became the biggest story in the world and then Zimmerman was acquitted a year and a half later, an announcement that led directly to the creation of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Any reasonable person in Zimmerman's position would probably be soured on the idea of fame for life. It's damn near impossible to spin his actions as heroic -- even the most sympathetic interpretation of the evening ends with "scared guy kills kid half his age and three-quarters his size." And here he is, shortly after his acquittal, complaining that he has $2.5 million in debt and is suffering from PTSD. You'd think he'd want to slink out of the spotlight and try to get on with something like a normal life as quickly as possible, right?

Why We Still Know About Him

That article about his debt and PTSD? That interview didn't come right after the trial -- it came months later, in a television interview. Turns out Zimmerman has spent every second since his acquittal trying to keep us talking about him. Apparently forever.

Six months after his trial, he started selling paintings commemorating his, uh, opinions and shit -- including one blood-red one of his prosecuting attorney.

HuffingtonPost.com
You were expecting subtlety?

Not long after that he auctioned off the gun used to kill Martin. In his description, he called the weapon an "American firearm icon," which is weird because I thought gun-rights activists fantasized about overthrowing tyrannical governments more than shooting kids in a panic. Again -- even his defense clarifies that killing Martin was a tragedy. What makes his gun "iconic"? Bill O'Reilly thinks Zimmerman's an asshole. Bill O'Reilly.

And he's still doing this stuff. This year he approached some people in a bar to brag about who he was, even pulling out his photo ID to prove that, yes indeed, he's that guy you think he is (though on the 911 phone call he made after being punched in the face he somewhat hilariously refused to give his name).

It's really starting to seem like we're cultivating an unhealthy attitude toward fame. Maybe we're encouraging people to be more conscious of their fame and brand and public persona than is healthy. Maybe we've become a culture that is dangerously obsessed with fame, and we all need to work together to fix it. Follow me on Twitter.

JF Sargent will be shaving his head to raise money for researching childhood cancers on Sept. 3. Make a donation to his head-shave fund here. You can also follow him on Twitter or Facebook.

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