Bullies

I was not bullied much as a kid, which is surprising given that I was funny-looking, nerdy, and bad at sports. I would have thought I’d be a prime target, but no, I can only think of two incidents.

When I was in middle school, there was a gang of older girls who liked to intercept me as I was walking home from school, and surround me and mockingly tease me — ruffling my hair, telling me I was cute, asking about all my girlfriends, giggling as they made fun of me. It wasn’t your classical kind of bullying, but it hurt just the same, and I would linger by a corner of the school until they’d moved on, or change my route to avoid them. Even today I still feel the sting when anyone compliments me, so don’t. I only mention it for completeness’ sake.

The other incident was in third grade, and better fits the typical mold. There was a huge kid in my class, I’ll call him Huey because he had that kind of physique and was a bit on the dim side, and one day he grabbed me as I was walking home, threw me down, and sat on me and started punching me.

The thing is, Huey wasn’t the bully here — we later got along just fine, in part because I didn’t talk to him or about him. No, the real bully was the principal of the school, Pete Baffaro (his real name, boy did I despise him) who charged over to the grassy lot where I was visibly outclassed, grabbed both of us and hauled us into his office, where he pulled out a wide leather strap and proceed to brutally beat us both to the point I was uncomfortable sitting down for days afterwards.

I learned an important lesson that day. The real bullies weren’t my peers, but the officials who lorded over us and felt they could abuse us with impunity. Ever since, I’ve been deeply mistrustful of the kind of bullying assholes who get on school boards or other elected positions, or who are hired by bigger bullies into positions of power, who just want to control others.

This reminiscence was triggered by an article by AR Moxon, writing about the bullies who want to be elected governor of Missouri. He’s discussing the story of the Republican political candidates who put on a show of using flamethrowers on a pile of boxes, to demonstrate what they’d do to them there woke books if they get elected.

This is nothing new these days, really. Republican office-holders and aspiring office-holders have been burning and shooting all sorts of effigies for years now, indicating the types of things and people they would like to see eliminated in one way or another.

A lot of people are alarmed by this, because they understand that burning and shooting things meant to signify certain people is always the precursor to burning and shooting the signified people.

However, I’m told the difference between burning books meant to signify certain types of people and burning cardboard meant to signify books meant to signify people is a very important distinction.

I agree, actually.

It tells us where the permission levels are right now for our national gang of genocidal bullies, by which I mean the Republican Party.

I look at that photo and I see a bunch of Pete Baffaros, seeing an excuse to batter children in the name of protecting them. Don’t elect them, Missouri. There is no kindness in any of them.

The word of the day must be “mismanagement”

I’m not going to mourn the demise of this organization, though: Project Veritas is dead. Dead, dead, dead.

Project Veritas, the conservative organization founded by James O’Keefe, suspended all operations on Wednesday after another round of layoffs, Mediaite has learned.

According to a letter titled “Reduction in Force” that was sent to Project Veritas staffers by HR director Jennifer Kiyak on Wednesday, the organization is putting all operations on pause amidst severe financial woes.

The rat-faced scumbag who built the organization lie by lie was already out, and is pretending he had nothing to do with the collapse. It was the other guy. Except, of course, that O’Keefe was the one who established the principles of pseudo-journalism and fraud that formed the foundation of Project Veritas.

O’Keefe, a right-wing activist who gained fame and notoriety for his sting operations against liberal groups, launched Project Veritas in 2010. He left the organization earlier this year amid allegations of improper spending of funds on personal luxuries. He was replaced by Giles as CEO, who has overseen the rapid decline of the once well-funded group that has in recent months struggled with layoffs, the resignations of board members, and fundraising struggles.

Earlier this month, Mediaite reported on an internal meeting during which Giles said the organization was “bankrupt.”

Huh. Go anti-woke, go broke, I guess.

Fraud, liar, Rufo

I will never understand how someone could emerge from the dismal bowels of the Discovery Institute and be taken seriously, and not laughed off as a clown. But that’s the Chris Rufo story. He just moved off to an even more ludicrous organization, the Republican party of Florida.

A journalist and activist, Rufo is largely responsible for the rise of “critical race theory” as a major concern for the GOP. He has played a crucial role in Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s attempt to transform Florida’s universities, spearheading the takeover and transformation of the New College of Florida, a small liberal arts school, as proof of concept for a new right-wing model for higher education.

Rufo has managed all of this before his 40th birthday. And he wants to go bigger: In recent essays, Rufo has argued for conservatives to treat authoritarian Hungary and Richard Nixon as models for a “counterrevolution” against the left.

Great. And here I thought creationism was as low as they could get. But then, this is a familiar story, or conspiracy theory.

Rufo claims that the American system as we know it has been overthrown, subtly and quietly replaced by “a new ideological regime that is inspired by … critical theories and administered through the capture of the bureaucracy.” Rufo’s “counterrevolution” is aimed at reversing this process; taking America back, starting with Florida’s universities.

That’s what John Birchers claimed in the 1960s! The American system then had been taken over by Commies…and now it’s all about the hippies and far-left radicals undermining the American way of life. It’s a great recipe for capturing the minds of paranoid idiots.

Except…Rufo has to make shit up to make that argument at all. And he admits it!

But many of his assertions, like the claim of secret regime change in America, are far less defensible. When pressed in an interview to defend some of his most extreme positions, Rufo ultimately claimed to be writing in “a kind of artful and kind of narrative manner” that does not always admit of literal interpretation. The retreat was necessary given the glaring lack of real-world policy evidence for what he had written and said.

The seemingly credible evidence Rufo presents of radical influence — the mainstreaming of once-radical concepts like “structural racism,” for example — thus ends up undermining his case. When radical language goes mainstream without accompanying radical shifts in policy, that’s not actually evidence of a radical takeover. If anything, it looks like a win for the liberal mainstream, which seemingly has coopted radical ideas and redirected them toward more moderate ends.

Radicals haven’t taken over mainstream America; they’ve been taken over by it.

Now that’s an interesting and defensible thesis: that maybe the ideals of those old-time radicals are popular and persuasive, but they’ve been effectively translated into milder, more pragmatic forms. That I can believe. I can also believe that isn’t necessarily a bad thing, while also seeing that in many ways it neuters the radical agenda.

But the notion that American arms manufacturers have been taken over by radicals is ridiculous. Lockheed Martin builds weapons to maintain the American war machine. It is not owned or controlled in any way by sincere believers in the Third Worldist anti-imperialism of the 1960s radicals; it is using the now-popular terms those radicals once embraced to burnish its own image.

Rufo is getting the direction of influence backward. Radicals are not taking over Lockheed Martin; Lockheed Martin is co-opting radicalism.

That’s how a liberal system works, not by overthrowing everything everywhere all at once, but by pushing progressively for slightly better systems, one step at a time. We need the revolutionaries shouting at the margins to push everyone in the right direction, but face it, it’s the bureaucrats who will implement it. And it’s always been that way!

Historically, liberalism has proven quite capable of assimilating leftist critiques into its own politics. In the 19th and 20th centuries, liberal governments faced significant challenges from socialists who argued that capitalism and private property led to inequality and mass suffering. In response, liberals embraced the welfare state and social democracy: progressive income taxation, redistribution, antitrust regulations, and social services.

Reformist liberals worked to address the concerns raised by socialists within the system. Their goal was to offer the immiserated proletariat alternative hope for a better life within the confines of the liberal democratic capitalist order — simultaneously improving their lives and staving off revolution. The New Deal, which was explicitly pitched as a means of defanging radical passions, is an especially clear American example of this pattern at work.

I mentioned the John Birchers — they hated the New Deal and Roosevelt. Even the slightest tinge of “socialism” would set them off. It’s the same with Rufo and his repellent ilk — they hate things with any hint of progressivism, it doesn’t matter if it empirically improves the lives of citizens, they’re agin’ it.

I do find it odd, though, that everyone writing about him ignores his personal history of anti-science, loony creationism. I also wonder if he ever really believed that nonsense. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was just an opportunistic front.

Oh, right, I was reminded

This time of year, what’s at the forefront of my memory is my wife’s birthday, and my kids’ birthdays, which are mostly around this time of year. The thing that most people bring up around now is the ugly memory of 11 September 2001. I shy away from it, because while it was definitely a tragedy with significant loss of life, it was also an excuse, a justification, a starting point for excesses of evil on this country’s part. Also, a trigger for kitsch.

These days it’s perhaps more often utilized in memory of a great tragedy that happened 22 years ago this Monday, back at the dawn of the 21st century, the attacks on 9/11, when our own infrastructure was turned against us in an act of modern horror. So around this time of year, when we hear Never Forget, it’s most likely the attacks of that day being referenced. It’s on posters, and t-shirts, to help you remember. There’s a lawn decoration, I see, in the shape of the Twin Towers, which you can buy at Walmart, in case you think your neighbors might be in danger of forgetting to Never Forget. You can put it on your lawn, and maybe you’ll all remember who your enemies outside your borders are, and if you actually sometimes like to talk as if New York City is an unlivable hellscape full of your enemies inside your borders, maybe you’ll be so busy Never Forget-ing that you’ll forget to remember that you do that, at least until it is time for Halloween lawn decorations.

Oh god. $79.95. And the ugly upper-middle class house is a perfect background for it.

OK, AR Moxon mentions all the things we should never forget.

I’ll Never Forget the way the liars who had the steering wheel on that day bragged that they would create their own reality, and then proved it. I’ll Never Forget how proud they were of making us a country that tortures. I’ll Never Forget how lie led to lie led to lie, but never to consequences.

And I’ll Never Forget how the liars who came after—even less scrupulous, even more flagrant—noticed there would be no crime that an authoritarian-facing Presidential power couldn’t survive, no outrage that would not be normalized, no meat too raw for voters who craved bigotry, and pressed that advantage far past our breaking point, so that today we have an openly criminal party speaking and acting against any elections they do not win, and arguing in public and even in court that it isn’t illegal if a president does it, provided the president is an authoritarian.

I think we’d do well to Never Forget that the failure to prevent those attacks did not represent insufficiently aggressive national security, or insufficiently guarded borders, or insufficient domestic policing, or insufficient cruelty in our foreign policy, but rather insufficient attention paid to available information—an intelligence failure, in other words: a failure of awareness, of imagination, of competence. So it strikes me that those who still today insist on ignoring available information risk similarly catastrophic failures of our national intelligence.

Those are the things I already remember when the pretense of martyrdom rolls around every year.

At last, a concrete example of “woke”! Poetry.

You may have noticed that Tommy Tuberville was holding up military appointments. We now learn what kind of thing he thinks justifies his dilatoriness.

Tuberville attempted to defend his monthslong blockade by fighting the culture war on “wokeness.”

“Right now we are so woke in the military, we are losing recruits right and left,” he said. “Secretary [Carlos] Del Toro of the Navy he needs to get to building ships; he needs to get to recruiting; and he needs to get wokeness out of our Navy. We’ve got people doing poems on aircraft carriers over the loudspeaker. It is absolutely insane the direction that we’re headed in our military.”

OH MY GOD. Sailors might hear poetry. Real men don’t read or listen to poetry, or pay any attention to song lyrics. It is not surprising at all that a moron like Tuberville lacks all music or prosody in his brain. Poor man.

Is there hope of justice?

Maybe. This outcome of the January 6 insurrection trials gives me hope.

Former Proud Boys leader Henry “Enrique” Tarrio, described by a judge as “the ultimate leader” who “was motivated by revolutionary zeal” in organizing members of his far-right group to spark the breach of the U.S. Capitol, was sentenced Tuesday to 22 years in prison, the longest sentence yet among the hundreds convicted of disrupting the peaceful transfer of presidential power on Jan. 6, 2021.

Let the punishment match the crime, and I think that’s a good punitive sentence that will discourage others from repeating this escapade. Even better: Tarrio was not one of the stupid goons who smashed windows and pounded on cops and barged into offices — he was a high level officer who stood back, wasn’t even in Washington DC, but incited the stupid goons and fired up the insurrection.

Tarrio, 39, was convicted of seditious conspiracy and obstructing the congressional proceeding meant to confirm the 2020 presidential election as part of a riot that U.S. District Judge Timothy J. Kelly said broke America’s long democratic tradition of peaceful transfers of power. Tarrio was the last of five Proud Boys to be sentenced after all were convicted in May following a 15-week trial.

Tarrio, of Miami, was convicted even though he wasn’t in Washington on Jan. 6. He had been arrested two days earlier for burning a “Black Lives Matter” flag torn down from a D.C. church during an earlier protest in the city following President Donald Trump’s defeat. He was banned from the city as a result.

Who else is now pretending innocence because they didn’t actually swing a stick? Who else was just telling goons to smash things? Maybe that person is going to face a sentence as severe as Tarrio’s. Lock ’em up for a decade or two.

But also, this got me wondering. I don’t know any Proud Boys, have never even met one, and if I did, I’m likely to just turn on my heel and walk away. Do you know any? It’s weird how this tiny, obnoxious fringe group is getting so much attention when what it deserves is revulsion, and how it has been a tiny bit successful in puncturing the stability of the country.

Similarly, who knows a real live Groyper? These are groups with insane, hateful ideologies that have somehow risen high in the popular (or, at least, media) consciousness, and have some strange aversive influence. I mean, seriously, if one of them showed up at a party at my house, they’d get the bum’s rush, and if they wouldn’t leave, I’d be calling the cops. I don’t understand how these people walk in public without getting their shoes spit on constantly.

I learned some Latin this morning

Mark Meadows, the creationist ninny who also happened to be Trump’s chief of staff and self-serving MAGA nut, rushed to testify in an Atlanta court on Monday. He was basically trying to get himself off the hook — I expect a lot of the indicted are thinking about how to get out from under a prison sentence — and his defense was the good ol’ “I was just following orders” excuse. The cute thing about that is that he just passed the buck to the ex-president.

It’s all the more curious, then, that Meadows decided to take the witness stand on Monday and assert that he was merely doing his job as Trump’s chief of staff when he partook in what Atlanta prosecutors call a pressure campaign to flip the vote there. Because in doing so, he’s essentially pointing the finger at his boss.

“He now cannot ever say, ‘I wasn’t doing this for the president, I was acting on my own,’” said Peter Odom, a former prosecutor at the Fulton County DA’s office.

Indeed, Meadows’ entire defense rests upon the idea that he was just doing his job, that his efforts to connect Trump with people who would help to overturn the election was at the direction of the former president himself. It’s precisely that point which Fulton County DA Fani Willis is trying to prove: that Trump was at the center of this entire criminal conspiracy.

Anyway, more important than yet another day of legal maneuvering is that I learned a Latin phrase!

“There’s an ancient legal doctrine: Respondeat superior. It’s Latin for ‘Let the master answer,’” which means that a boss is ultimately responsible if he “directs the agent to do something,” Carlson said.

That’s going to be so useful in the coming months.

Revenge is a dish best served flaming hot with lots of collateral damage

It was a strange detour in the war in Ukraine — the Wagner group, led by Yevgeny Prigozhin, abruptly left the field and started marching towards Moscow. Then Prigozhin equally abruptly gave up and retired to Belarus. I certainly had no idea what was going on, or what politicking was behind the maneuvers. It was clear that Prigozhin had made Putin sweat, briefly, and given Putin’s reputation for dealing brutally with betrayal, it was surprising that his opponent was walking away without a dose of poison or falling out a window.

Well, the price of crossing Putin has been paid. Prigozhin apparently has died, along with the crew and other passengers, in a catastrophic airplane crash.

In one video geolocated by NBC News near the village of Kuzhenkino in Tver Oblast, Russia, what looks like a plane can be seen spiraling down through clouds, trailing smoke behind it. The video, filmed from the ground and posted on social media, shows the apparent jet hurtling toward the ground before crashing and erupting into flames, sending a dark plume of smoke spiraling into the sky.

Another video filmed from a car near the same area shows an eyewitness driving beside a field in which the fiery wreckage of a plane can be seen. Another, graphic and close-up, shows someone inspecting the flaming wreckage in a field and swearing as they come across what appears to be two bodies.

You are clearly paranoid if you think Putin could have anything to do with such a ruthless, violent ‘accident.’