Hank Munzer is one of those far-right nuts, a braggart and bully, and one of those people who was in Washington DC on January 6th, and who is proud of it, despite being arrested and facing a prison sentence. He’s also unfortunate because one of his fellow residents of Dillon, Montana has written an essay about how screwed up small-town conservatives have become, and uses Munzer as a specific, named example. That’s a brave act — I guarantee you that this essay is a hot topic at the Dillon cafe and in telephone gossip. I know, because his description of his county sounds a lot like mine.

A generation ago, one national politician described our state as “hyper rural.” You know the feeling? My county, larger than Connecticut, boasts about 9,000 residents and few traffic lights. Most Americans can’t imagine or understand or appreciate such a mode of life. Many pass through but few would choose to stay. In pockets like mine, it’s an unimaginable distance to D.C. or New York—other countries.

Stevens County, Minnesota is a bit smaller geographically, and we have 10,000 residents (optimistically), and two, count’em, two traffic lights. Similarly, both Morris and Dillon were named after late 19th century railroad executives. But we also have a university in town. I guess that makes us immensely more cosmopolitan than Beaverhead County, Montana, but we’re still in the same ballpark of rural, conservative counties, and the descriptions sound familiar.

Hank Munzer’s building also has analogs here.

The paint job on Hank’s business building proves his lie as it is far more than an eyesore; as a calculated act of visual violence, it repels many of us and, according to one local realtor, dissuades occasional prospects who considered moving here. One friend told me she no longer drives on this main street; another said she chants “a–hole, a–hole, a–hole” every time she rides by. The city council does nothing because of Fred’s ostensible First Amendment protections.

My stomach used to cramp as I passed but in more recent seasons, I’ve grown numb, pretending to ignore this bizarre paint job. Most townspeople do their best to ignore it. I’ve never seen a building, graffitied or otherwise, like this one anywhere.

The essayist needs to get out more. I’ve seen similar in lots of places. Here in Morris, there’s a house on 7th Avenue with huge crudely painted signs saying “ALL LIVES MATTER,” with a thin blue line police flag and various other unsightly splatters on it — coincidentally, I also mutter “a–hole, a–hole, a–hole” when I drive by. In Glenwood, several miles away, there was a construction detour that forced us to swing through a residential zone with a house covered with gigantic Trump posters and signs — it was a major eyesore that had me saying even ruder things every time we had to drive by it.

I wish I could say it’s just one fringe lunatic in a small town in Montana, but they’re everywhere. And they’ve become bold and outspoken and swagger when they trumpet their idiotic conspiracy theories, and pretend they’re not on a downward spiral.

In his spot-on analysis of my state, “Fifty-Six Counties,” novelist Russell Rowland defines a fierce love of “the land or their families or their country” characteristic, I believe, of rural Americans: “They love until it makes them blind, until they feel the need to barricade themselves against anything that threatens that love.”

That circling-the-wagons mentality against ostensible outside threats, a species or xenophobia and denial, results in destructive conduct: “So we drink. We kill ourselves. We throw our sinking self-image out onto those around us, sometimes in violent, ugly ways, and we decide that our problems are everyone else’s fault, and that if they would go away, or act more like we do, or learn to think more like we think, then we would feel better.”

In such soil grows the Hankss of rural communities. After all, “they” are out to get us, right? And rural problems come from elsewhere, according to this self-delusion.

This toxic combination of ignorance, victimhood, naiveté, and auto-hypnosis, now commonplace, would remain minuscule but for alt-right media platforms.

That’s the thing: they’ve found self-reinforcing online communities where every stupid thing they say and believe gets echoed and praised by other people who also believe the same stupid thing, and they lose all sense of perspective and swell up with righteousness and think petty obsessions make them great and meaningful. So here’s where Hank Munzer stands now.

He was arrested about a week after the Capital riot and charged with one felony count and four misdemeanors, two of those disorderly or disruptive conduct. Among other things he was accused of recording videos inside the Capitol. Six days later he posted those on Facebook. That fact alone evidences his online dependency. Did he know or care about legality? He thinks he did nothing wrong and only exercised free speech.

He was arraigned then released on bail—he grins in his orange prison suit—and then he got to work on his business’ building in Dillon.

Hank was supposed to go to trial in August 2022 but now there’s been another half-year postponement. He’s wanted a change of venue but will be tried in Washington D.C. He prefers to represent himself rather than use a lawyer. That fact suggests the level of his self-righteous zealotry or his narcissistic personality disorder. Or both.

Meanwhile, he enjoys local notoreity. He even ran for city council and garnered dozens of votes. Whose sick joke is that? Exactly whom in rural America is he speaking for? One flavor of rural America consists of a range of deep resentments; above all, resentment of the federal government. Nothing new here, given the long history of agricultural subsidies and dependencies.

Same here, except that I’d add that many of those resentments are fostered by the corporate farms that have eaten up the small landowners. It’s just good policy to give the peons a far-away enemy to hate, lest they notice that greed is destroying their local community.

I agree, though, that small town problems have been getting enflamed by the pernicious poison of talk radio, Fox “News,” and Facebook.

It’s all just hanging out there, exposed, flapping rudely in the wind, and we’re supposed to pretend that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas isn’t selling out the country. The story is simple and transparent.

Thomas’s mother lived on some property owned by Thomas. Harlan Crow paid Thomas $133,363 for that property, and then allowed his mother to continue to live there rent-free afterwards, and in fact renovated the house, put on a new roof, a nice fence, etc.

Crow was the best landlord of all time!

Of course, what it all was was a pretext to put a whole lot of money in a judge’s pocket and curry favor with him. Thomas knew this; he rather obviously avoided reporting the whole money shuffle to the government, and tried to hide the source of this sudden largesse.

“He needed to report his interest in the sale,” said Virginia Canter, a former government ethics lawyer now at the watchdog group CREW. “Given the role Crow has played in subsidizing the lifestyle of Thomas and his wife, you have to wonder if this was an effort to put cash in their pockets.”

Oh, really? You think? I’m not wondering at all. Hint to ethics lawyers everywhere: the time for understatement is over. This is time to suspend him from the bench while impeachment proceedings are begun. I’d go so far as to suggest it’s time for handcuffs, except we all know that white collar crime by high-ranking federal officials is going to be treated with kid gloves, instead.

See also Robert Reich’s take on this situation.

Seriously, you had to know it wasn’t going to stop with banning drag shows.

Let’s close the libraries in Missouri. They’re just full of seditious blasphemy.

Republicans in the Missouri House of Representatives have voted to defund their state’s libraries after the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sued the state for banning numerous LGBTQ+ books as “explicit sexual” materials.

The April 4 vote removed $4.5 million of state budget funding for libraries as well as “costs for diversity initiatives, childcare, and pre-kindergarten programs,” WCPT 820 Radio reported. The removal now requires an additional state house vote and state senate approval before heading to the governor’s desk to become law.

In Texas, they’re starting small. Give ’em time.

A small Texas county is weighing whether to shut down its public library system after a federal judge ruled the commissioners violated the constitution by banning a dozen mostly children’s books and ordered that they be put back in circulation.

The Llano County commissioners have scheduled for Thursday a special meeting in which the first item on the agenda is whether to “continue or cease operations” at the library.

You might wonder what horrible books they tried to ban.

The books that Llano County officials removed from the library shelves include Isabel Wilkerson’s “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents”; “They Called Themselves the K.K.K.: The Birth of an American Terrorist Group” by Susan Campbell Bartoletti; the graphic novel “Spinning” by Tillie Walden; and three books from Dawn McMillan’s “I Need a New Butt!” series.

Last year, an assistant principal at a Mississippi elementary school was fired after he read “I Need a New Butt!” to a second-grade class. The reason? Because the book used words like “butt” and “fart” and included cartoon images of a child’s butt.

Also removed from the library were Maurice Sendak’s “In the Night Kitchen”; Robie H. Harris’ “It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex, and Sexual Health”; and four other children’s picture books with “silly themes and rhymes,” like “Larry the Farting Leprechaun,” “Gary the Goose and His Gas on the Loose”; “Freddie the Farting Snowman” and “Harvey the Heart Has Too Many Farts,” according to the complaint.

I guess we’ve moved beyond hiding the books that talk about sex and race to silencing anything that mentions farts. Don’t straight white people do that, too?

Man, these stories keep popping up, and they’re not even interesting for the irony anymore. Yeah, another crusader ‘protecting’ children was found to have a stash of child porn.

Michael Dolce, a 53-year-old lawyer known for representing child sexual abuse survivors, was recently arrested by FBI agents at his West Palm Beach, Florida home. Dolce, who founded a group called Protect Our Kids First Inc., was allegedly laying in his bed and downloading sexually explicit images of children when agents broke down his front door.

According to an FBI affidavit, after Dolce’s March 15 arrest, agents found 1,997 images and five videos of child pornography on his computer. The images were of male and female children ages five to 12, including several of a prepubescent girl in a subfolder titled “Sweet Pedo Stars.” Dolce could receive a minimum of 20 years in prison if found guilty of possessing child pornography.

The police are brutal, but sometimes they have good timing.

Except…OK, this Michael Dolce is a sick scumbag, he deserves to lose his job (he already has), and should be mocked and howled at for his hypocrisy, and should never be taken seriously ever again. There ought to be some penalties for his behavior, but twenty years in prison? In our prison system? Is that just? Especially when the article points out what he’s going to face.

If Dolce is found guilty of possessing child pornography, he’ll likely face a “living hell” behind bars, CBS News reported. Inmates with sexual interests in children often occupy the lowest rung of the prisoner hierarchy, with other inmates sometimes defecating in their cells, using them as sex slaves, or targeting them for violence and murder as a way to gain prestige. Even when such offenders are placed into protective custody, they remain widely despised by other inmates, the news outlet reported.

Child pornography is a deplorable crime that rightly deserves to be punished, but you know what else is a deplorable crime? A state-run rape factory that allows inmates to torture each other. I also have to wonder how the police had such good timing — there are serious issues of privacy here (uh-oh, is the FBI going to break down my door and uncover my vast stash of spider images?).

It’s unclear why the FBI was monitoring Dulce and whether he had any anti-LGBTQ+ views. However, he is one of the countless cisgender men who have been arrested for child pornography while right-wingers continually accuse LGBTQ+ people, drag performers, and their allies of being “pedophiles” and “groomers.”

What is up with that? I’m cis, but never had the slightest interest in child porn — it’s repulsive, and if anyone were to send me any, I’d be forwarding their messages to the police.

This headline — “Crisis: Socialist Woke Capitalism Bailout Ban Slammed” — sounds like the kind of confusing word salad you’d get from Fox News or James Lindsay or Chris Rufo or any of a thousand right-wing nutcases, so I have to a agree with the conclusion that it’s probably evil, yeah.

I don’t agree with the accelerationist scumbag composing the articles, though.

Republicans are even more stupid and short-sighted than I thought. In Tennessee, the Republicans totally dominate the legislature, they have all the power, and they couldn’t resist the temptation to use that power to brutally squash even the vestiges of influence the Democrats have.

The Republican-led Tennessee House voted Thursday to expel two Democratic lawmakers who halted proceedings last week to join protesters demanding gun-control legislation after a mass killing.

In a historic act of partisan retaliation, the chamber voted 72-25 to oust Rep. Justin Jones (D), a 27-year-old community organizer elected in November to represent part of Nashville, and 69-26 to expel Rep. Justin Pearson (D) of Memphis. Republicans did not have enough votes to remove Rep. Gloria Johnson (D), a former teacher from Knoxville who lost a student to gun violence.

They were protesting the inaction of the legislature in response to the Covenant School murders, in which three nine-year old children and three adults were killed. The Republicans are so determined to do nothing that they finally did something, by throwing out the few activists they had.

Just to make their injustice even more cartoonishly garish, of course they evicted the two black troublemakers and left the white woman alone. Tennessee, can you be any more blatant?

At least the charges were revealing.

Republicans in the House filed the resolutions Monday to oust Jones, Johnson and Pearson, saying the three lawmakers “did knowingly and intentionally bring disorder and dishonor” to the House.

The only dishonor here is the action of cowardly Republicans who not only expelled the people who criticized them, but then proceeded to ignore the problem of gun violence in their state. Apparently, the most honorable people in the legislature were Jones, Pearson, and Johnson, and the Republicans moved decisively to silence them.

I do wonder what happens next. The Tennessee Three will be a focus of a growing activism in the state, but let’s get real: the racists who elected a swarm of fascists to the legislature are going to be happy with their actions, and we’re also going to see a growing conservative resistance.

They’re probably building a Death Star already.

Yesterday, I wrote about how a liberal judge, Janet Protasiewicz, was elected to the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Her opponent was spittin’ mad, because she had been “political,” campaigning on her support for pro-choice positions, as if he wasn’t, because campaigning on a rabid anti-choice position isn’t political, somehow. Some Wisconsin Republicans are already scheming to impeach her, because she is somehow bad for holding the opinions she has.

Now consider the corruption of US Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas.

For more than two decades, Thomas has accepted luxury trips virtually every year from the Dallas businessman [Harlan Crow] without disclosing them, documents and interviews show. A public servant who has a salary of $285,000, he has vacationed on Crow’s superyacht around the globe. He flies on Crow’s Bombardier Global 5000 jet. He has gone with Crow to the Bohemian Grove, the exclusive California all-male retreat, and to Crow’s sprawling ranch in East Texas. And Thomas typically spends about a week every summer at Crow’s private resort in the Adirondacks.

The extent and frequency of Crow’s apparent gifts to Thomas have no known precedent in the modern history of the U.S. Supreme Court.

These trips appeared nowhere on Thomas’ financial disclosures. His failure to report the flights appears to violate a law passed after Watergate that requires justices, judges, members of Congress and federal officials to disclose most gifts, two ethics law experts said. He also should have disclosed his trips on the yacht, these experts said.

He’s rotten all the way through. It’s not just that he accepted absurdly expensive gifts from a right-wing billionaire, but that he knew it was unethical — he kept them secret.

I, too, am a public servant, although one that gets a salary less than a quarter of Thomas’s, and lacking all those additional perks. Every year I get sent an annoying form that I have to fill out, asking for all the details about any income above my salary, and wanting to know about any profitable associations that might bias my teaching or research. It’s mainly aimed at professors who, for instance, might have lucrative ties to pharmaceutical companies. At least I can say it’s easy for me to fill out, lacking additional revenues of that sort, but I do fill it out honestly and accurately.

If any of you readers feel like dropping by to whisk me off in your private plane for a vacation in Indonesia, thank you very much, but I will be listing it on my disclosure form.

Clarence Thomas wouldn’t.

“It’s incomprehensible to me that someone would do this,” said Nancy Gertner, a retired federal judge appointed by President Bill Clinton. When she was on the bench, Gertner said, she was so cautious about appearances that she wouldn’t mention her title when making dinner reservations: “It was a question of not wanting to use the office for anything other than what it was intended.”

Virginia Canter, a former government ethics lawyer who served in administrations of both parties, said Thomas “seems to have completely disregarded his higher ethical obligations.”

“When a justice’s lifestyle is being subsidized by the rich and famous, it absolutely corrodes public trust,” said Canter, now at the watchdog group CREW. “Quite frankly, it makes my heart sink.”

Even those vermin in Congress have tighter restrictions on gifts than Supreme Court judges.

There are few restrictions on what gifts justices can accept. That’s in contrast to the other branches of government. Members of Congress are generally prohibited from taking gifts worth $50 or more and would need pre-approval from an ethics committee to take many of the trips Thomas has accepted from Crow.

When your ethical considerations are looser than those of a Matt Gaetz, and you can’t even abide by them, then we can safely say that you’re corrupt to the core. Don’t impeach Janet Protasiewicz, not when you’ve got the thievery and corruption of Clarence Thomas stinking up the joint.

Several things that make me happy occurred.

• Trump was arrested. That’s nice.
• A liberal won the Chicago mayoral race.
  

  Brandon Johnson, a county commissioner and former public school teacher, was projected to win Tuesday’s mayoral runoff after promising to increase investment in social programs to address public safety fears in the nation’s third-largest city.

• The Wisconsin supreme court was flipped to a majority liberal

  Liberals claimed control of Wisconsin’s high court in an election Tuesday, giving them a one-vote majority on a body that in the coming years will likely consider the state’s abortion ban, its gerrymandered legislative districts and its voting rules for the 2024 presidential election.
  Milwaukee County Judge Janet Protasiewicz’s victory over former state Supreme Court justice Daniel Kelly will end 15 years of conservative control of the Wisconsin Supreme Court. She could face ethical questions when the court takes up politically charged cases because she campaigned heavily on abortion rights and repeatedly called the state’s election maps “rigged.”

  This is the one I cared about most, because it’s the state next door, and I’ve got a grandchild living there. Wisconsin has been on a long slow ugly slide to the dark side, and this is a welcome and meaningful reversal. Also — a Democrat campaigning on abortion rights won? Please, Democratic party, realize that this is a winning issue for you.

I think that one thing that has been dragging Democrats down for decades is the timidity of conservative Democrats who want to be Republican Lite and refuse to embrace what the party stands for — progressive values, equality, and labor (they still suck on that last one).