Jacob Wohl keeps kicking his own ass

It’s a marvel. He keeps putting himself in the spotlight to do something incredibly stupid.

He got some fool college kid to help him make the claim that Pete Buttigieg assaulted him…but the kid backed down and confessed to making the story up, so Wohl and Burkman just did a press conference in their driveway in which the piece de resistance was a video of the kid drinking a caramel frappucino. He’s got a Starbucks caramel frappuccino. Most forced coercion events… do not involve caramel frappuccino. No one has argued that this was a case of “forced coercion”.

They announced that there were going to be “hundreds” of protesters showing up at their press conference (that’s all these guys do, I think, is call “press conferences” for attention), and as evidence, they showed that there was an Eventbrite event organized by Leftist agitators.

Examining the event revealed that the organizer was…Jacob Wohl.

I’m sure the only reason journalists show up for their press conferences at all any more is just to see Wohl and Burkman faceplant.

Urge to join a union rising…rising…rising

I love watching corporate idiots roasting over an open fire. Delta Airlines tried doing a little gentle union-busting with some posters, and it didn’t go at all well.

Two posters made by Delta as part of an effort to dissuade thousands of its workers from joining a union drew a torrent of criticism after they were posted on social media Thursday.

The posters included messages targeting the price of the dues that company workers would be paying if the union formed.

“Union dues cost around $700 a year,” one noted. “A new video game system with the latest hits sounds like fun. Put your money towards that instead of paying dues to the union.”

The other, with a picture of a football, was framed similarly.

“What does $700 mean to you?” it said. “Nothing’s more enjoyable than a night out watching football with your buddies. All those union dues you pay every year could buy a few rounds.”

Who needs job security, safe working conditions, and better wages when you could just play video games and drink beer? Those posters reveal how much contempt management has for their workers.

Here’s my favorite response:

The meme that points out that you can build a guillotine for $1200 is my second favorite.

They grow up no matter what you do

This is a good piece on how kids get sucked into the alt-right vortex, although I think there was maybe a bit much of an attempt to blame the kid’s trauma on an overzealous idiot of a school administrator. People join the alt-right without ever being unfairly accused of sexual harassment.

The parents’ approach was just right, in my opinion: dealing with it patiently, giving their side openly, letting the kid wrestle with it himself with only gentle guidance. I remember when my son asked for a book by Thomas Sowell for Christmas — I was anguished, heart-broken, wondering where we went wrong, looking through the yellow pages for deprogrammers, anything to break the chains of libertarian conservative propaganda. But we got him the damn book anyway, and we’d still love him even if he’d asked for Ayn Rand. Fortunately, he seems to have turned out OK now.

Tell me a story, Bernie: Sanders in Sioux City

In my years of science communication, sometimes contentious, there was one thing everyone agreed on: tell a story. Data dumps don’t work. Use a narrative hook, get the audience engaged, lead them through the whys and hows and leave them with some resolution, a conclusion, and maybe something to leave them asking for more. Every successful communicator knows this through and through.

(You can also go too far this way, though: many TED talks are terrible because they’re all narrative fluff and not enough plausible, substantive content.)

So. Yesterday my wife and I drive off to Sioux City, Iowa to a Bernie Sanders rally. We got in with a crowd of enthusiastic supporters, we got good seats up front, we got handed our Bernie signs. We listened to the band, we listened to the warm-up speakers (they were all fine), and then the main act, Bernie Sanders, appeared to wild applause.

He was good. I agreed with his position on every danged thing. But…

There was no story here. None at all. We got shotgunned with blipverts. It was a positive, receptive crowd, so it worked: chains of short soundbites evoked lots of applause, and it was clear that this was a well-honed stump speech that said all the right things to Bernie supporters.

“Medicare for all!” <cheers> “Support LGBTQ rights!” <cheers> “…Women’s right to choose!” <cheers> “Civil rights!” <cheers> You get the idea. Good stuff, I’m tempted to cheer and wave my sign, too, but I’m also feeling some dismay. Where’s the hook? Where’s the story? Where’s the focus? What’s the point? If I go home after this and meet some Biden supporter, how do I explain why Medicare for all matters, what’s the case for it as good policy, how do I justify it over some alternative? What are the alternatives? What are their weaknesses?

Worse, what if I’m arguing with a Warren supporter? How do I differentiate the two? He did make the case that a lot of the radical ideas he brought up decades ago, and a few years ago in the last presidential election, are now mostly mainstream in the Democratic field (with exceptions, obviously). What might make the difference is if Sanders had an emotional case that engaged his listeners with an intellectual punch that followed through. That rally was for people who already supported him, which was fine and valuable and part of the campaign, but where’s the part that reaches out and compels non-Bernie backers to pay attention? That’s needed to grow his support.

You might wonder what it will take to rally the Trumpkins to his cause. Nothing. Screw ’em. They’re a lost cause. There were two people who had the gall to show up in Trump hats, and they were politely escorted out, which is an appropriate response, I think. They were only going to disrupt the event and we might as well recognize that they’re unreachable, and talking to racists isn’t a viable strategy.

But talking to moderate conservatives or conservative Democrats is still on the table, as well as drawing together progressives. Bernie has to work on the persuasion game a bit more. And that means introducing a question or problem, building some empathy for people suffering under the current state of affairs, offering a solution, making a case for how it will work, giving us a compelling explanation that we can take home and share with friends and family.

Soundbites are fine, and needed to hammer blurbs home to a dumbass media. But they need to be imbedded in a constructive framework.

He needs to give us a story.

They all do.

Madness in Sioux City!

This morning, I’m driving off to Sioux City, Iowa for a Bernie Sanders rally, because my wife really wants to see him, and it’s unlikely he’ll be visiting Morris. It’s a 4 hour drive, which isn’t as bad as it sounds, since we’re used to having to drive 3 hours to get to just about anywhere. It’s still going to rip the heart out of my day, just to listen to an old man rant at the system. I could do that home, alone, with a mirror!

I’d be OK with President Sanders. I’d prefer a President Warren, but I’d be content with anyone taking a progressive step forward. Right now my second worse outcome is President Biden, and that’s the establishment Democrats want to foist off on me.

My worst outcome is that Biden is the nominee, and Sanders decides to run as an independent, and we get President Raunchy Oompa-loompa again, and that is my one major reservation about Sanders.

Nothing like a little fearmongering to drag the citizenry into war

Life Magazine indulged in a little propaganda in 1916 to persuade the citizenry that we ought to be involved in World War I. If we weren’t, why, the Germans would invade from the east and the Japanese from the west, and we good Americans would be confined to a …reservation in the desert, a prospect offered without irony.

Curiously, Canada is labeled as a land of barbarians. Canada joined the war effort in 1914, though, before the US did. I’m not sure what they’re implying.

Meineapolis/St Karl are nice touches, as is Nagaseattle.

A series of unfortunate life-choices

I remember Katie McHugh mainly as a flash-in-the-pan obnoxious anti-semitic Islamaphobe — someone who got a job in the racist hothouses of Breitbart and the Daily Caller, made a little noise with some extremely hateful tweets, like a kind of mini-Katie Hopkins, and then got fired as the alt-right strained to appear a little less thuggish (they failed). Now Rosie Gray has a thorough article on her history, and it’s a sad, dismal story all around. McHugh regrets her role in the alt-right, although I’m not entirely convinced that it’s a genuine repentance — it’s more like she regrets how she has fucked up her own life by embracing a series of bad actors.

Her journey to remorseful failure begins in college. She attended a small liberal arts college where she stood out alone as a far-right firebrand, which was sufficient to win the attention of the far-right media. I’ve seen that happen at my university. Yes, you can stand out by acting the colossal regressive on a campus full of progressive, optimistic, intelligent students, but while it may appeal to the ego in the short run, it’s going to lead to catastrophe eventually. We had a student here who made a reputation for himself writing ugly crap for the alternative newspaper (not as ugly as McHugh’s stuff, though), which led to him making connections with James O’Keefe, which led to him getting arrested in a break-in in Louisiana. It’s not a great career trajectory.

McHugh’s story is similar. She leapt from writing for the college newspaper to working with Breitbart, the Daily Caller, the usual upstart conservative rags, and making connections with major racist white nationalist figures. The pipeline from young conservative to Trumpian conservative is apparent in her history, and she also exposes the real nastiness in their beliefs that these organizations try to hide.

The alt-right was at the time all about smoothing over its public image, becoming approachable, more mainstream. “They didn’t have swastikas covering their foreheads,” as McHugh put it. The very term “alt-right” represented this effort to rebrand white nationalism. Everything in public was euphemism. The names of the main organizations were bland: National Policy Institute, American Renaissance. People could blend in, and they did. They were “polished, sophisticated,” she said. “There’s a very high culture aspect to it.” The class markers were important to someone like McHugh, who had come from the sticks. And the emphasis on genetics and IQ was appealing as well. “They see it almost as a moral value,” she said. “They think that people with high IQ confers them with some kind of super-ability and makes them leaders, natural leaders.”

The emphasis on intelligence confers the whole enterprise with a pseudo-intellectual veneer, and it also provides white supremacists with a way to elide accusations of white supremacy. According to their argument, they can’t be white supremacists because they say that Jews and people of East Asian descent have a higher average IQ. This both whitewashes their bigotry and feeds into the alt-right’s victim mentality, especially as it relates to Jews. The work of the anti-Semitic writer Kevin MacDonald is a cornerstone of the alt-right movement. His Culture of Critique series argues that Jews, using their higher intelligence, employed Judaism as a “group evolutionary strategy” to perpetuate themselves and win out over other groups. MacDonald blames Jews for the very existence of anti-Semitism, arguing that anti-Semitism is a justified response to Jews’ plot to run the world.

If they’re so smart, though, how is it that looking at the details of their groups exposes great pulsing veins of absurdity? This is almost funny.

Their differences went deeper — and stranger — than that, and allowed McHugh to see inside a truly bizarre subculture. McHugh was a Catholic, while DeAnna was a member of the Wolves of Vinland, a group based near Lynchburg that was focused around a neopagan theology based on self-improvement and feats of strength, as well as coded white nationalism. The idea was to cast off the bounds of modern Judeo-Christian society and find a way back to pre-Christian northern European culture. McHugh sometimes accompanied DeAnna on weekend trips down to the Wolves’ headquarters for what they called a “moot” — a ceremony in which the assembled Wolves would smear ash on their bodies around a fire and give what McHugh described as “dramatic speeches” about self-sufficiency and relying on the other group members. They would then sit around the fire and drink beers.

One part of McHugh’s disaffection with the movement was over such silliness. She couldn’t accept it, so she reverted to…Catholicism. More absurdity, different flavor.

McHugh recognizes now how hard she screwed herself over. She’s working as a waitress in a small town somewhere unnamed, and struggling to keep up with her medical bills (she’s diabetic). She has regrets and advice, and not much else.

At age 28, she has made herself unemployable in the career field she chose — even on its fringes. She perpetually struggles to support herself financially. It’s easy to see how someone in McHugh’s position might regret the path she took that got her here. Would she regret it if she still had friends, still had a writing job?

McHugh has a message for the people on a similar path, though, one that can be considered regardless of whether you believe she’s actually changed.

“People like me should be given a chance to recognize how bad this is and that the alt-right is not a replacement for any kind of liberal democracy whatsoever, any kind of system, they have no chance, and they’re just harmful,” McHugh said. “There is forgiveness, there is redemption. You have to own up to what you did and then forcefully reject this and explain to people, and tell your story, and say, ‘Get out while you can.’”

Well, we can hope some college students somewhere read about her and recognize that hate is loud and gets you noticed, but it doesn’t make you a better person.