The contradictions have become obvious. The people who howl most about “identity politics” are the ones most dedicated to propping up the privileges of white male identity. The ones screaming about “free speech” get all the press and are determined to silence those awful SJWs. And the ones who sneer at thin-skinned lefties are the most delicate little flowers.
Charles Pierce comments on the recent abrupt resignation of New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, a liberal Democratic politician — one of our guys! — whose career “went into the acid bath because, at one level or another, they failed to see women as actual human beings”. The article resonates with me because this is a universal problem everywhere, not just in politics. I run into it in science, in atheism, everywhere. It’s a problem with the human condition.
The search for the person on a white horse is an open invitation to counterfeit engagement and artificial activism. The impact of celebrity on our politics has been devastating enough; see the current tenant at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for details.
See also the list of Intellectual Dark Web
phonies. Every time an organization looks for the guy on the white horse to lead them, they are going to experience a colossal pratfall because there is no end of grifters with a bucket of whitewash and a broke-down mule ready to announce their candidacy.
Schneiderman is one of those terrible people with a history of assaulting women, and it’s good that he’s out (for now; expect a comeback attempt soon. The standard waiting time seems to be a few months.) But the rot goes deeper. Who are all these people who knew, but did nothing?
His swift resignation was more than justified and his disappearance from the ongoing drama of this presidency, while unfortunate, is wholly appropriate. He should’ve been in jail years ago.
Instead, for the purposes of this story, we should focus on one small slice of the account.
After the former girlfriend ended the relationship, she told several friends about the abuse. A number of them advised her to keep the story to herself, arguing that Schneiderman was too valuable a politician for the Democrats to lose. She described this response as heartbreaking. And when Schneiderman heard that she had turned against him, she said, he warned her that politics was a tough and personal business, and that she’d better be careful. She told Selvaratnam that she had taken this as a threat.
Who in the hell counsels a friend to hush up a violent assault on these grounds? My politics are as important to me as anyone’s are but if, say, Sherrod Brown came and burglarized your house, I wouldn’t tell you to let him keep your jewelry because we need him to save Social Security. (Note to Senator Brown: I do not believe you are a cat burglar.) This is turning your politics into a graven image, a golden calf of the soul. Believe it or not, there are some things that politics ought not to touch. Physical abuse of any kind is high on that list.
The metaphor may be apt, but it’s also kind of incongruous that so many atheists are hauling around golden calves of the soul. The argument that “So-and-so is an asshole, but he’s our asshole, and his book/podcast/videos are soooo good” is tiresome. They aren’t worth it.
If it were the Onion, it might be funny, but this is the New York Times promoting a group calling themselves the Intellectual Dark Web
. They aren’t particularly intellectual, they’re not part of some “web” of something or other, but they are rather dark. Can we rename them the Dark Dorks?
The list of members consists mainly of people who are demonstrable assholes. They include:
Etc., etc., etc. You know, if you really wanted to compile a list of the worst people in America, the shallow populists who poison the discourse with conservative toxins and Libertarian lies, that wouldn’t be a bad start. These are not particularly smart or interesting people — they are good at inflaming other assholes and acquiring a following, but that’s about it. And now they’ve got a great big long article in the New York Times, with grimdark portrait shoots of them standing about in the shrubbery at night.
And just what is the dark intellectual foundation they’re trying to promote?
Here are some things that you will hear when you sit down to dinner with the vanguard of the Intellectual Dark Web: There are fundamental biological differences between men and women.
Yes? So? No one argues against that. What we argue against is the idea that you can find consistent, biological differences in their minds, or that one gender is the lesser to the other.
Free speech is under siege.
Jesus fucking christ. You’ve got the NY Times spewing your bullshit everywhere, where is your loss of free speech? The whole basis of your sleazy legitimacy is that you’re a bunch of people with large followings!
Identity politics is a toxic ideology that is tearing American society apart.
Say the status quo warriors who want everyone else to shut up about their bigotry, while howling non-stop about their precious identity.
And we’re in a dangerous place if these ideas are considered “dark.”
Uh, these are the people who named themselves the dark web. Not anyone else. Typical. They’re complaining about being victimized by their own term!
Quick, let’s start the Shiny Happy Web! All it takes is declaring yourself special, and people will think you’re a movement. Let’s pass on the dismal dishonest ideas, though, OK?
The New Yorker has a depressing roundup of various Hitler books. The United States seems to be getting a deserved roasting for acting as a role model.
The Nazis were not wrong to cite American precedents. Enslavement of African-Americans was written into the U.S. Constitution. Thomas Jefferson spoke of the need to “eliminate” or “extirpate” Native Americans. In 1856, an Oregonian settler wrote, “Extermination, however unchristianlike it may appear, seems to be the only resort left for the protection of life and property.” General Philip Sheridan spoke of “annihilation, obliteration, and complete destruction.” To be sure, others promoted more peaceful—albeit still repressive—policies. The historian Edward B. Westermann, in “Hitler’s Ostkrieg and the Indian Wars” (Oklahoma), concludes that, because federal policy never officially mandated the “physical annihilation of the Native populations on racial grounds or characteristics,” this was not a genocide on the order of the Shoah. The fact remains that between 1500 and 1900 the Native population of U.S. territories dropped from many millions to around two hundred thousand.
America’s knack for maintaining an air of robust innocence in the wake of mass death struck Hitler as an example to be emulated.
We’re still really good at that. As the hearings for a new CIA director begin, we’re seeing more grand denials of responsibility for horrors.
Clay Johnson is a man who gained a powerful reputation during the Howard Dean campaign as a smart guy who knew how to use the emerging internet technology as a tool for politics. He has since gone on to be an important tech guy in Democratic and progressive politics, rising ever upward.
He also has a powerful reputation as an abuser of women. But that doesn’t matter. It never seems to matter.
Let’s begin with his apology.
Johnson, in interviews with HuffPost, described his history in the workplace as “awful” and said it filled him with shame, hurt and regret, although he disputed the details of most of his accusers’ stories.
“I don’t know the answer to that,” he said when asked if he had sexually assaulted two women on the Dean campaign. “What I can tell you is, I had two women complain to management on the Dean campaign about sexual harassment, and I was given a warning.” Later, he said his memory of his encounter with Schacht didn’t include anything he would describe as “assault.”
“My entire career was littered with treating people very poorly,” he continued. “Whether that was the Sunlight Foundation, the Dean campaign, or anywhere else I worked. I did not behave appropriately. I was awful to people, to nearly every single person, and I really wish I hadn’t been.”
What an odd “apology”. There’s no word of apology to the people he hurt, but more of an admission that he was generally awful…but not as awful as his accusers say he was.
That’s kind of a mantra with him. Sure, he was rude and crude, but never as bad as the women he victimized say. Oh, yeah, there was one woman who has a grudge against him, but it’s just stale old personal drama.
…he emailed Miller in June 2008 to warn her that he and Schacht had a history from the Dean campaign. “She hates me,” he wrote, in an email he shared with HuffPost. “Absolutely despises me. Happy to talk to you about it in person, but it’s mainly gossip, innuendo, stale and old. It is weird, I’m happy to talk about it with you. But the short story is: It was a presidential campaign, it was Vermont. She was like 22, I was 26 and we were both shamefully less professional in the workplace. You can put the rest of that story together. I promise there’s not a long slough of disgruntled female campaign staffers in my closets. But there is one, and it is her.”
That woman, Schacht, is someone he attempted to rape. The full, explicit details are in the article. I’ll pass on repeating it here, since, after all, it’s just “gossip, innuendo”. And it didn’t matter at all. Two women accused him of assault in the Dean campaign, but that didn’t check his career in the slightest.
During Johnson’s first job in politics, on Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign, Schacht and a fellow campaign worker separately accused Johnson of sexual assault. Word of both women’s complaints reached several of Dean’s top deputies. But Johnson kept his job, and his work on the campaign became his ticket to a high-profile career.
He went on to co-found a pathbreaking political consulting firm. Powerful groups and people sought his thoughts on the future of tech in politics; his Twitter banner shows him cracking a joke to a roomful of government officials including President Barack Obama. Despite Schacht’s warning about his behavior, the Sunlight Foundation chose him to head its flagship technology division. He left amid a staff insurrection over his lewd and menacing behavior. And still, he rose higher.
I guess it’s just a fact of life in politics, even progressive politics.
“We just pass creeps from campaign to campaign,” said Meg Reilly, vice president of the Campaign Workers Guild, a new union seeking to organize political workers across the country. “The excuse becomes, ‘We’ll deal with this once the candidate gets elected.’ People tell themselves that if they’re working for this candidate who’s really fantastic, who opposes sexism and racism, then everyone on the campaign is immune from committing the same sins.” Once the election ends, little prevents abusive employees from starting a second act in government, political advocacy or nonprofits.
Responses to his increasingly egregious behavior were ineffective. Johnson himself dismissed them.
Johnson couldn’t recall anyone asking him questions about his behavior. But there had been one repercussion, he said: Rogan, in the presence of his co-deputy campaign manager, Tom McMahon, gave Johnson a warning. “They were like, ‘This complaint has come in, so like, cool it,’” Johnson said. “I would say it made me more defensive. I’m not sure I would say it altered my behavior.”
Then there’s this weird defensive behavior from his employers, even the ones who kicked him to the curb.
At the end of 2007, Blue State Digital forced Johnson out. “Clay was asked to leave the company because his partners didn’t want to work with him anymore, not because of any allegations of inappropriate behavior,” the firm said in a statement. “Clay would not be hired today, we’re glad we fired him over a decade ago and we regret he was ever associated with the company.” The firm wouldn’t provide further details.
Wait, wait, wait. They don’t want to work with him, they wouldn’t hire him again, they regret ever hiring him…but they won’t give details? They say it wasn’t because of inappropriate behavior? This is insane. This is how abusers can keep going from prestigious job to prestigious job. This is how a pattern of bad behavior perpetuates itself.
Other companies give a few details.
Many of Sunlight’s staff members would come to have issues with Johnson as well. Johnson routinely made obscene comments toward his co-workers, according to multiple former Sunlight employees. Nisha Thompson, one former employee, described him as “leery” and “a bully.” Once, she ran into him at a bar outside of work. As soon as she said hello, she claims, Johnson replied, “I’m going to fuck you in the ass.” He sought her out at work the next day to say he’d been blackout drunk, Thompson said.
Johnson’s most frequent target was a young digital designer who reported directly to him. Her desk was next to Johnson’s, and other members of the labs team said she was the butt of all his lewdest comments. In summer 2010, he said something so inappropriate that the team, in dramatic fashion, dragged her desk away from his and surrounded her with their own desks. No one could recall the exact comment. But both the designer and a former Sunlight employee, Hafeezah Abdullah, said the incident involved Johnson spraying the designer in the face with a can of compressed air used for dusting keyboards. The designer and at least one other team member told HuffPost they complained to the head of operations, who was Sunlight’s de facto HR rep.
I’m trying to imagine a workplace so dysfunctional that people rearrange the furniture to block a sociopath’s access to a colleague; where one of the workers gets blackout drunk (and admits it), and makes obscene suggestions to a coworker. I can’t. I guess I’ve been fortunate, or possibly, oblivious. It sounds to me, though, that Clay Johnson has been disruptive everywhere he works, leaving a trail of chaos through every organization he’s been associated with, and nothing he’s done has substantially harmed his career. Every setback is an opportunity for him to move upwards.
The rape story was appalling. It’s this little incident that tells you something about his destructive personality.
All this time, “his party trick was bringing women down a notch,” said Erie Meyer, the tech worker. At Personal Democracy Forum in 2013, Johnson humiliated her by saying to a group of CEOs she was meeting for the first time, “This is Erie Meyer. She’s Gray Brooks’ fiancée and she has herpes.” She was neither engaged nor did she have a sexually transmitted infection, but “this was Clay’s way of letting people know that I was a plus-one — I was not a person of note.” Meyer sobbed in a stairwell and skipped the rest of the conference.
A year later, Johnson became a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.
That’s why I started with his “apology”. I can believe he knows he has been awful to people. I don’t believe he cares, except when it might interfere with his career — it’s total selfishness.
If you’ve never cared about other human beings all of your life, if you’ve treated your peers as garbage, why should I believe you’ve suddenly discovered empathy now?
Isn’t that what every politician wants? Maybe not if you’re a coal executive convicted for conspiracy to violate mandatory federal mine safety and health standards, conspiracy to impede federal mine safety officials, making false statements to the Securities and Exchange Commission, and securities fraud, or if you are a mannequin of a man carved out of marshmallows with a monotone.
What in the world did I just watch pic.twitter.com/4eudpGAxp0
— Liam Donovan (@LPDonovan) May 3, 2018
He’s running for the senate representing West Virginia, against Manchin (a conservative Democrat who is no prize himself), and for some reason he thinks his opponent is Mitch McConnell, the senator from Kentucky, who he’d have to work with if his charisma did somehow get him elected.
I’m sorry, West Virginia. Your politicians all suck.
That’s one way to flush a university’s reputation down the sewer — let faculty appointments be sold to the highest bidder, and sell out secretly to ideologues. George Mason University is just the latest subsidiary of Koch Industries,
The gifts, in support of faculty positions in economics, “granted donors some participation in faculty selection and evaluation,” Cabrera said, noting that one such agreement is still active (the rest have expired).
All 10 of the now-public agreements relate to the university’s Mercatus Center for free market research, a locus of Koch-funded activity. Three of the agreements involve Koch. The two most recent, from 2007 and 2009, stipulate the creation of a five-member selection committee to select a professor, with two of those committee members chosen by donors. The other Koch agreement, from 1990, also afforded Koch a role in naming a professor to fund.
George Mason also allowed Koch a role in evaluating professors’ performance via advisory boards. And while the agreements assert that final say in faculty appointments will be based on normal university procedures, the 2009 agreement says that funds will be returned to the donor if the provost and the selection committee can’t agree on a candidate. … The university has consistently said that the foundation is a private entity and that compromising the confidential nature of donations through that avenue by releasing such documents could chill giving. Koch was a joint, $10 million donor on the law school deal.
I would just like to point out that I am currently chairing two search committees at my university, yet the Koch’s haven’t come calling to bias our decisions. I guess that means none of our candidates are ideologically compatible with the Kochs, so they lack motivation to slide me ten million dollars under the table. There’s just not much room for bullshit propagandizing in biology, unlike economics departments or worse, garbage think-tanks like the “Mercatus Center for free market research”.
Henry Farrell does a fine job of summarizing the problems with letting anyone buy out the independence of a university.
The ordinary protection against conflict of interest, and against donors using the university’s reputation as an ideological/financial cutout or flag of convenience is to build institutional firewalls, which allow donors to provide large money with broad conditions attached (such as: this money should be used to hire an endowed professor carrying out research and teaching on Topic X) but without specific controls on who that professor is. This is at best imperfect – but it at least somewhat curbs the voracity of development officers and individual academic “entrepreneurs.”
It would appear that any such firewalls were comprehensively breached at George Mason University (which is a public university, with consequent public obligations). The ferocity of the university administration’s efforts to keep the arrangements secret suggest the reputational damage that the university now faces. It’s also worth observing that many GMU faculty have suspected something like this for a long time, but weren’t able to get straight answers from the administration until its hand was forced by this lawsuit.
Finally, it’s notable that the person representing the interests of an as-yet unnamed big donor to the law school is Leonard Leo, who is the Federalist Society officer largely responsible for the ideological vetting of judges for the Trump administration. That doesn’t say great things either.
Just to be fair, though, it wouldn’t say great things if George Soros were buying up faculty appointments, either. This isn’t about which heinous ideology is corrupting universities, but a complaint about any corruption of academic freedom.
At the very least, though, I now expect the top brass at GMU to all be sacked, and faculty hired under the Koch affirmative action plan for wingnut economists to be dismissed. Anything less, and GMU should face major accreditation problems and a shameful loss of reputation — they’re just another Liberty University, a fake school with wealthy donors.
Gosh, this has been a busy week of late nights and paperwork and search committees and trying to catch up with my backlog as the semester winds down to a close. And then I realized…I forgot something. Something something something I’d been planning to attend on Monday. D’oh!
I completely missed Dinesh D’Souza’s visit to our campus. I’d noted it, and there are great big posters everywhere of his gormless goony face, but still — on the appointed day and hour, I had so little interest in the event that I didn’t even remember it enough to tell myself I was too busy to waste an hour on it.
I wondered how it went, but when I asked around, no one else had attended either, or remembered that it was going to happen. We just didn’t care. I’m sure the UMM College Republicans were disappointed, too. Where was antifa? Where were the shrill mobs of feminists and progressives and radical leftist students and old hippies?
So I thought I’d look in on the UMM College Republican web page. Surely they’d have a report on the talk by their hero, brought in to antagonize a liberal campus. They’ve got nothin’. Well, not exactly nothing: they mention their victimhood at length (someone let the air out of one of their tires; probably a black op. One of their members found a used condom thrown at their door…which sounds like an icky college student prank, but you never know where the tentacles of George Soros will strike), and talk about the party they threw for the graduating president of the club, who was given a “Most Hated Person at UMM” award. I felt bad for them. I don’t even know who they are. If it would be validating, I might be willing to muster a vague feeling of pity, but sorry, not hating.
They had photos of the party. They are very sad.
So their big event of the semester with a nationally known speaker was kind of a pathetic bust. They’ve got like four people at their graduation party. I guess I am feeling that vague pity after all.
If I knew who they were, maybe I’d raise a fist and say “Comrade! Workers of the world, unite!” as I passed them in the hall, just so they’d feel like their life goals had meaning.
I guess this is the forlorn, empty fate of conservatives, eventually. I don’t think Trump has helped their brand.
Oh. I checked the facebook page for the event. Even sadder.
I don’t know if that’s a good thing. Capone was a murder and thief, an amoral gangster — and the law was unable to bring him down for the truly evil things he did, but could jail him for the lesser crime of tax evasion. It was a useful tactic for ending a criminal regime, but two things are bothersome: that we were inadequate to the task of stopping a murderer, and isn’t it revealing that the more easily prosecutable crime in a capitalist was society was a crime against property?
It just seems like we’re constantly pussy-footing around the gross corruption of the Trump regime, and have dispatched people like Mueller to investigate and find some little hook, a violation of campaign finance law, perhaps, or lesser offense that, because of the ways our laws work, are easier to nail him on. That seems like a bad precedent to me. The man is openly incompetent and dangerous, and we pin our hopes for getting him out of office on a badly filed form, or a personal peccadillo, and we can’t remove him for being terrible at his job? Something is wrong here.
Case in point: Scott Pruitt.
It is ironic and pathetic and dangerous how the media, the Democratic party leadership and too many liberals are now focusing everyone’s attention on Scott Pruitt’s expenses and petty scandals to discredit him. When we look at who Scott Pruitt really is, and what he’s really done, we can see that going after him this way is like catching a naked mass murderer right in the act and then charging him with indecent exposure. It is hugely dangerous because it mis-directs people away from the immense real danger represented by Pruitt.
It’s the same thing! The man is ragingly bad at what ought to be his job.
Pruitt is a Hard Core Christian Fascist Playing a Key Role at the Core of the Trump/Pence regime.
For years Pruitt has been one of the most prominent right-wing attack dogs against the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) when (during previous administrations before Trump/Pence) it was still in the main carrying out its stated mission of protecting the environment using science and scientific principles to monitor and assess the health of the environment.
He has been an open unapologetic lobbyist for energy firms for many years.
But more than this, Pruitt is a Christian fascist. He sits on the board of directors of the Southern Seminary, one of the largest seminaries in the world and the largest of the denomination’s (Southern Baptists) six seminaries. He is one of the main sponsors of the weekly cabinet-level biblical study group along with: Vice President Mike Pence, HUD Secretary Ben Carson, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, Energy Secretary Rick Perry, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, CIA Director (and now Secretary of State designate) Mike Pompeo and Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue.
This study group is run by Ralph Drollinger an infamous far-right extremist pastor who was disavowed by his own church for his bigoted ideology. His group also has similar study groups in the U.S. House and Senate and in 43 State assemblies. In a September 2015 interview, Drollinger described his mission as creating a “factory” to mass-produce politicians like Michele Bachmann, who is on the Capitol Ministries board. “She thinks Biblically,” Drollinger said. “She doesn’t need a whole lot of time to figure out how to vote because she sees the world through a scriptural lens. We need more men and women like her in office.” Drollinger has praised the new (Trump/Pence) administration for its power to “change the course of America in ways that are biblical.”
Yet none of that is indictable. We can have a radical religious bigot placed outside of his qualifications in a high position with the specific purpose of destroying the office under his charge, and nothing can be done. But hey, maybe he filed an inappropriate expense report! Maybe he spent too much on office furniture!
It’s too much to hope that failing to meet the obligations and trust expected of a political servant might be grounds for dismissal. That’s all I ask — not that they go to jail (although they should) or be hung from a lamppost or be water-boarded at Gitmo by our pro-torture government, but that they be dismissed from the jobs they cannot do. And that maybe our vetting process for high office involve less about ideology and more about basic competence.
Senator Tammy Duckworth had a baby, and Orrin Hatch stuck his foot (his own foot, not the baby’s) into his mouth. I’m not surprised that the Salt Lake Tribune took notice.
Sen. Orrin Hatch said this week he was fine allowing babies on the Senate floor, but then he asked a follow-up question of his own.
What, he mused, would happen “if there are 10 babies on the floor of the Senate?”
It seems to me that that would mean either a) there were a lot more women senators, or b) a lot more senatorial men were taking their paternal duties seriously. Both sound like good outcomes.
Leave it to a Minnesotan to make the nicest comment, though.
“We could only wish we had 10 babies on the floor,” Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., told The AP. “That would be a delight.”
I had to choke back a comment about how there were far more than 10 Republicans already on the floor.
