The following is AlterNet's own selections and rankings of two dozen from America's 50 Most Loathsome Americans by Ian Murphy of the Buffalo Beast.

24. Sean Hannity

Charges: Left the seminary upon realizing he could abuse, manipulate, and molest more people as a conservative broadcaster. The sneering, self-righteous poster boy for every right-wing nontroversy (see Benghazi and Fast & Furious), Hannity’s something of a Piltdown Newsman. One can easily imagine him a 19th century Boston cop, bashing brown folks and loving it. But in this age of media saturation, even bullies like Hannity must prostrate themselves and grovel occasionally at the feet of reality. After hyping Tucker Carlson’s black-cent “bombshell,” and then stubbornly realizing it was nothing, he had Fox’s resident melanin-haver Juan Williams join the panel to flog him. That way, Hannity cleverly avoided looking foolish.

Smoking Gun: Look at his jaw; he always seems like he’s about to bite someone.

23. Dinesh D’Souza

Charges: An intellectual imposter whose career’s swung casually between vicious conservative think-tank lackey and moronic Christian apologist. He reached a fraudulent low last year with the release of2016: Obama’s America which, through the prism of Potemkin journalism, imagined the fake horrors awaiting America at the end of Obama’s second term–like unstoppable Sharia Law. According to D’Souza’s armchair psychoanalysis and “super serious” scholarship, this impending doom springs from Obama’s need to fulfill the anticolonialist dreams of his father’s ghost with the help of John Edwards and an Ouija board. Or some such.

Smoking Gun: “In a sense, through the earth itself, he communes with his father and receives his father’s spirit.”

22. Sam Harris

Charges: As the former’s confused reason for Fox News dogma, and the latter comedy for cackling, Sam Harris has official overtaken Ricky Gervais as the world’s funniest atheist (they’re tied for most annoying). He recently added Muslim profiling and NRA talking points to a sophist’s portfolio already bulging with hawkish appreciation for war and torture. Populated with more strawmen than a Kansas corn field, Harris’s post-Sandy Hook paean to firearms justified the death of 20 children because, well, Sam Harris is scared of sharp objects, and he’s too dimwitted to imagine a nonlethal knife-deterrent.

Smoking Gun: “Fantasists and zealots can be found on both sides of the debate over guns in America.”

21. Frank VanderSloot

Charges: Overly litigious gay-bashing billionaire Mormon CEO of Melaleuca, Inc., a cultish pyramid-selling “Wellness Company” that promises its “partners” “total financial freedom” for “families trying to get out of debt”–likely incurred from purchasing overpriced Latter-day douche and snake-oil supplements in bulk to pawn off on other pious dupes. The natural grifter to co-chair Romney’s national finance committee, he dumped $1 million into Mitt’s Restore Our Future PAC, and even makes casino creep Sheldon Adelson seem like a nice guy.

Smoking Gun: He ostensibly believes that the Garden of Eden was located in Jackson County, Missouri, and that Native Americans are actually Jews.

20. Penn Jillette

Charges: Humiliating himself as Donald Trump’s dancing business-monkey. Featured on a not-so-secret list of sexist creepers within the skeptic/atheist community. He’s an intolerably smug know-it-all who actually knows very little. A devout Randroid and Glenn Beck fan, he’s to the rationalist movement what John Wayne Gacy was to clowns. His thankfully defunct, eponymously titled show “Bullshit,” operated under the tired formula of dirty hippy debates Cato Institute whore, and we learn that second-hand smoke is as safe as Gerber’s. Magic! The Anti-Lorax, Jillette’s an environment-hating buffoon who denied anthropogenic global warming until as late as 2008–because he was too scared of the “political climate.” At least Teller has the decency to never speak.

Smoking Gun: “Voting for our government to use guns to give money to help poor and suffering people is immoral self-righteous bullying laziness.”

19. Ghost of Breitbart

Charges: The P.T. Barnum of modern conservatism, he was a traveling hypocrisy circus, a one-man confidence game, who never missed an opportunity to employ the Alinskyite tactics he pretended to deride. Most obviously, smearing your political enemies with your own failings…like calling everyone on the left an Alinskyite. Spent the final months of his life pitching a video–with all the coked-up vigor of the late Billy Mays–that was going to shake up the world. Released posthumously, the Obama-hugs-black-professor video riled few outside of the Klan, and that’s the real tragedy of his death: Andy never did taste the failure. Just sidewalk.

Smoking Gun: “I have videos, this election we’re going to vet him…from his college days to show you why racial division and class warfare are central to what hope and change was sold in 2008.”

18. Alex Jones

Charges: A shower and shave away from doomsaying hobo, Jones makes a decent living off of his borderline schizophrenia. He “KNOWS” that every mass-shooting is staged by a global cabal who wants to steal your guns, global warming is a New World Order hoax, Beyonce flashed an Illuminati symbol which caused the Super Bowl blackout, and every other super-secret, unfalsifiable plot perpetrated by a shifting and shadowy “THEY”–who engineer society based upon the wishes of interdimensional elves with whom “THEY” confer using Satanic hallucinogens. Jones is the very “false flag” propagandist he claims to despise by diluting real concerns, such as drone strikes on American soil, with an endless stream of loonitarian logorrhea that makes David Icke sound like Neil DeGrasse Tyson.

Smoking Gun: Ancient cave paintings depict the Illuminati Anti-Christ as a quick-tempered, red-faced psycho with a bad hair cut…WAKE UP, SHEEPLE!

17. David Barton

Charges: Armed with only a BA in religious studies from Oral Roberts University and the integrity of a serial rapist, pseudo-historian David Barton has successfully convinced millions of benighted Americans that the Founding Fathers debunked the theory of evolution a half-century before it was ever proposed, that the Constitution is a “verbatim” copy of Scripture, Jesus opposed a minimum wage, and that the Bible warns against net neutrality. He’s recently taken to defending the Second Amendment with an apocryphal story of armed, 19th century school children protecting their teacher which Barton apparently–not a joke–ripped off from a Louis L’Amour novel.

Smoking Gun: “… life begins before conception…”?

16. Dana Loesch

Charges: The ideological love-troll of Phyllis Schlafly and Grover Norquist, Loesch wants to reduce government to a size where it can drown in your vagina. Whether comparing intrusive, state-mandated transvaginal ultrasounds to consensual intercourse, defending Todd “Legitimate Rape” Akin, or fabricating a conspiracy over her husband’s temporarily suspended Twitter account, Dana’s a cheap, hyper-partisan squid, squirting a cloud of imagined liberal sins which she thinks nullifies the original criticism because she’s a total fucking moron. And when that invariably fails, she’ll just lie about what she said, or call you a sexist/pedo. Quite possibly still on the CNN payroll only to make Piers Morgan seem slightly more palatable.

Smoking Gun: “Seems to me like Akin was trying to fit medical explanation into a soundbite. Not the best statement, but some are stretching it majorly.”

15. Dick Morris

Charges: Jamming gaydar everywhere with a love of pastels and a lispy slobber-mouth that looks to crave more than toes. As a close Clinton adviser, Morris is as responsible as anyone for transforming Democrats into a moderate wing of the Republican Party, and thereby shifting the GOP toward extremism. During the election, however, it was Morris’s poll-stroking Romney delusions that confirmed he’s a man living in total denial.

Smoking Gun: “We’re gonna win in a landslide.”

14. Marco Rubio

Charges: Bobby Jindal redux whose impending melanin-lite response to the State of the Union will be a handsome, ineffective pander to a demographic most Republicans would most like to mow their lawns, for Pete’s sake. His RNC speech focused on an upward mobility his party has all but made impossible. Every time I see him I hear Phil Collins singing in my head, “Ru-Ru-Ru-Rubio! Whoa-o!” And now you will, too.

Smoking Gun: “There is only one savior, and it is not me. #Jesus”

13. Tucker Carlson

Charges: Trust fund douchebag whose perseverance in the face of consistent “journalistic” failure would be admirable were it not derived from a wholly undeserved sense of entitlement. Fought his impending and absolute irrelevance by rerunning a video clip (with the help of Drudge and Hannity) he first reported on in ’07 while at MSNBC which reveals that Barack Obama–hold on to your motherfucking October surprised genitals!–is a black guy. One of the few American pundits who believes that incredulous squinting qualifies as commentary.

12. Mark Cuban

Charges: Training-jowl billionaire whose first major business venture was a chain letter, and one of his latest is exploiting rubes on reality TV. He’s an alleged inside trader, and cowardly 9/11 truther, who credits his success to Ayn Rand. The ipecac of Ãœbermensch, his anti-worker appetite unsated in the boardroom, he’s now sunk to stealing work from struggling commercial actors because, unlike the rest of us, he can’t get enough of Mark Cuban’s self-satisfied face.

11. Matt Drudge

Charges: The Internet’s answer to William Randolph Hearst, his only credibility comes from one sperm-related scoop 15 years ago, and a surname that makes him sound like an old-timey muckraker. He’s the shamelessly hungry middle segment in the human centipede between GOP operatives and vapid talking heads, constantly swallowing and shitting a stream of propaganda that would make Goebbels cringe.

Smoking Gun: Falsely claimed Obama ditched Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to meet with a parrot-toting pirate in an eye patch. True.

10. “Papa” John Schnatter

Charges: Infantile Romney-garch who threatened to raise the cost of his shitty pizzas by 15¢ and cut workers’ hours because Obamacare mandates that he provide meager health benefits to his underpaid employees.

Smoking Gun: His 2 million-pizza giveaway marketing strategy cost his company roughly 6 times what Obamacare does.

9. Dan Cathy

Charges: The Fred Phelps of chicken, the Chick-fil-A COO finally revealed what his family’s charitable donations have been screaming for years: “I’m probably gay, and I need the government to keep me from indulging in the gay marriage I so desperately desire!” They gave $5 million to the Family Research Council since ’03 alone. They’re hyper-religious dicks who’re closed on Sundays, and damn them for making decent chicken you can’t eat with a side of conscience.

Smoking Gun: “I think we are inviting God’s judgment on our nation when we shake our fist at Him and say, ‘We know better than you as to what constitutes a marriage’. I pray God’s mercy on our generation that has such a prideful, arrogant attitude to think that we have the audacity to define what marriage is about.”

8. Jennifer Rubin

Charges: WaPo’s Dershowitz in drag, she’d report you to the Anti Defamation League for so much as disrespecting a bagel, and imagines herself the blogging bulldozer to Palestinian legitimacy. Meant to satisfy conservative Post critics with the even-handed Washington Times Moonacy they crave, Rubin’s occupied literary territory mainly covered histrionic Arab-hating until branching out as Romney’s stenographer–even reposting campaign press releases to counter her own paper’s accurate reporting.

Smoking Gun: “Now wait a minute. Is this an act of anti-long hairism or anti-gay?”

7. Joe Arpaio

Charges: “America’s Sheriff” (in the way rat vomit is “America’s Snack Food”) has a long history of racism, prisoner abuse, and protecting pedophiles, but last year his low-rent Wyatt Earp routine turned overtly cartoonish. In a blatant effort to distract from an investigation into his illegally misspending nearly $100 million on immigrant roundups and spying programs, Arpaio launched the “Cold Case Posse”–meant to finally expose Obama’s Manchurian Presidency. The citizen “posse” determined the President’s birth certificate to be fraudulent, and then, as you remember, Obama was removed from office and Arpaio was given the Golden Key to Fantasy City for not totally wasting everyone’s time.

Smoking Gun: “At the very least, I can tell you this, based on all of the evidence presented and investigated, I cannot in good faith report to you that these documents are authentic.”

6. Lance Armstrong

Charges: Sociopathic, ten-speed Escobar who brazenly lied, ruined lives, and played on our collectively gullible patriotism and misplaced respect for blatantly selfish charity PR, so that he could reap millions, bang Sheryl Crow then drop her like a cancerous testicle, and feast on undeserved fame–only to finally come clean in a venue that granted Oprah 15 more terrifying minutes of relevance.

Smoking Gun: “I have the facts on my side.”

5. Rush Limbaugh

Charges: The hardest-blowing blowhard in a media landscape littered with windbags. And he knows it. Every second of it. Every lie. Every distortion. Every racial and sexual dogwhistle, it’s blown through a smirk connoting he knows he’s the biggest, fattest, carnival-barking swindler of our bilious age, capable of conning millions into believing he possesses any principles beyond self-aggrandizing greed.

Smoking Gun: Just turn on the radio.

4. Karl Rove

Charges: Hubris. A fledgling act of perception management, he cheered on Nixon when he was 9 years-old, and he’s become exponentially more depraved as the years went by. He weaseled out of Watergate investigations, turned Texas red, and crowned a vegetable president with dirty tricks. He sold an illegal war, stole an election, outed Valerie Plame and suffered no consequences save for power and money. Why wouldn’t he think his heavily funded Crossroads GPS–which he basically promised the Koch brothers would win them the election–could possibly fail in convincing Americans to elect a cardboard cutout who thinks he’ll become a god in the afterlife? Hubris. A hubris that unfolded on live TV during his epic election night Fox News meltdown. Incredulous. Shocked. He’d spent all the money. He’d done all the evil. What went wrong? Finally, milk was spilled, and Rove responded like a petulant toddler. And, lo, the schadenfreude was sweet.

Smoking Gun: “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” (2004)

3. Paul Ryan

Charges: Compulsively lying, arrested adolescent Muppet whose sheltered mind is still blown byAtlas Shrugged and Stairway to Heaven. The Uri Geller of economics, he managed to bend the will of MSM patsies like Ezra Klein into portraying him as a credible policy wonk, rather than what he truly is: a two-bit illusionist who wants to disappear Grandma’s Medicare and Social Security money and make it reappear in the pockets of the rich wankers he secretly wishes would rape him in a rock quarry.

Smoking Gun: Even Fox News said Ryan’s RNC performance “was an apparent attempt to set the world record for the greatest number of blatant lies and misrepresentations slipped into a single political speech.”

2. Donald Trump

Charges: A convincing argument against the 1st and 5th Amendments, this walking combover needs to just shut the fuck up and die already. The consummate huckster, and sufferer of verbal dysentery, his countless transgressions defy cataloguing. So I’ll spare you everything save for his moronic ploy to gain Obama’s passport and college records in exchange for a $5 million charity donation. Insult to racist injury, the video announcement was so low rent that he looked like an 8mm-shot Boehner/Oompa Loompa with a disgruntled squirrel on his head.

Smoking Gun: So awful he makes Mark Cuban seem awesome.

1. Wayne LaPierre

Charges: As the NRA’s well-paid CEO of death (and thinly veiled fear of brown people), it’s his role to obscure the very basic fact that more guns equals more gun violence–by any cognitively dissonant means necessary. In the ’90s, he called federal agents jack-booted Nazis in a fundraising letter, yet in his preposterous Sandy Hook speech he implored Congress to post armed guards at every school in the nation. In pure Alex Jones fashion, he once accused President Clinton of needing a certain level of gun violence to justify the assault weapons ban–which the NRA was keen to shoot full of holes. Asinine rhetoric about gun-free zones advertising massacre, violent video games, TV and movies aside, it’s the annual multi-million dollar lobbying efforts painting Smith & Wesson as benevolent job creators which cows even alleged democrats like Harry Reid. And with two recent PR blunders–a commercial slamming Obama’s “hypocrisy” for having armed Secret Service agents protect his daughters, and a shoot-’em-up app marketed to 4 year-olds!–LaPierre came off more tone-deaf than the early audition stage of “American Idol.”

Smoking Gun: “There exists in this country, sadly, a callous, corrupt and corrupting shadow industry that sells and stows violence against its own people through vicious.