War For Eternity: Inside Bannon’s Far-Right Circle of Global Power Brokers

From the European Conservative:

It has been nearly three years since Steve Bannon was pushed (or jumped) out of the Trump Administration. Since then, he has become something of a genre. In 2018, the documentary filmmaker Errol Morris (The Thin Blue Line, The Fog of War) released American Dharma, a film-length journey through Bannon’s mind. In 2019, filmmaker Alison Klayman released The Brink, a fly-on-the-wall look at Bannon’s attempt to cobble together a coalition of right-wing populists around the world to spearhead a global nationalist movement. And earlier this year, Harper Collins published Benjamin R. Teitelbaum’s War for Eternity: Inside Bannon’s Far-Right Circle of Global Power Brokers.

Unlike other ‘Bannon-watchers’—many of who seem unable to resist casting him as a Rasputin-like figure, while being simultaneously repulsed and fascinated by his insistence on speaking in symbolic and often apocalyptic terms—Teitelbaum approaches his subject from an unlikely angle. An assistant professor of ethnomusicology and international affairs at the University of Colorado Boulder, Teitelbaum has spent years developing relationships with those on the far right. His 2017 book, Lions of the North: Sounds of the New Nordic Radical Nationalism, focused on the right-wing fringe in the Nordic countries. In War for Eternity, he suggests that some of Steve Bannon’s views might be a lot weirder than most people realize. Specifically, Teitelbaum believes Bannon is a student of ‘Traditionalism.’…

Perhaps what is most refreshing about Teitelbaum’s work is that he is willing to enlighten where others are ready to condemn. “Studies of right-wing extremism are uncommon in the extent to which they thrive on conforming to readers’ stereotypes and expectations,” Teitelbaum told me. “The prevalent discourse among scholars and commentators to not normalize or platform the people we study, though motivated by legitimate concerns, also leaves little room for inquiry and education. I would like for all my work—including this book—to work against that instinct.”

In the case of War for Eternity, he says: “I offer a study that not only exposes thoroughly radical and disruptive visions for the future being pursued by figures with significant (if intangible) influence—[but] I hope that I have also shown the peculiarity of their lives and thinking, and provided an example of the ways that our old categories for thinking about politics—right, left, fascist, etc.—may not serve us well when trying to understand the actual ideas now infusing our governments. If concern and alarm as well as increased inquiry and reflection are the products of my book, I will have done my job.” By those metrics, Teitelbaum has certainly succeeded.

Here are some highlights from this 2020 book by Benjmain R. Teitelbaum:

* LATE IN THE EVENING ON NOVEMBER 8, 2016, A FEW hours’ drive away from the spot of Trump’s final rally in Grand Rapids, a young man named John B. Morgan walked into the bar of the Gandy Dancer restaurant perched on the banks of the Huron River in Ann Arbor, Michigan. John had been the founding editor in chief of a Traditionalist publishing house called Arktos. Now he worked for another
publisher, Counter-Currents, which was more plainly white nationalist than Traditionalist. It wasn’t a perfect fit for John, but nothing was.
John lived in Budapest, and India before that. But Ann Arbor still felt like home, and he was in the midst of a pilgrimage. This election was something special. Trump had no chance of winning, he thought.
And John couldn’t really call himself a fan per se. But the fact was that someone who was less than
completely hostile to his ideals of white identity politics was in contention for the U.S. presidency. John
wanted to vote in person to commemorate that unbelievable state of affairs. This was a once-in-a
lifetime event.
He was meeting an old friend at the bar to watch the results that night. They were drinking beer, paying little attention to the TV screens showing CNN’s coverage of the vote. The hour arrived at and passed seven. They noticed when the states of Indiana and Kentucky were called for Trump. That was expected, but still, it was nice, John thought, to confirm that Trump had won something. Back to what their conversation: old jobs, old places, old people, old . . . shit!
Wolf Blitzer was saying on CNN that Trump was competitive. Of course he’s winning the southern states, and he’s leading in Florida. Hillary is struggling to wrap up Virginia. But the real battle is taking place around the Great Lakes, in America’s industrial region—the Rust Belt. He’s got a chance there.
Here.
Another round of beers. Blitzer was back on TV before long, interrupting their conversation. Trump is a favorite, even likely at this point. Was John drunk?
His friend had to work the next day, so they parted ways and John hustled back to the apartment where he was staying. He poured himself a Dark Horse beer and turned CNN back on. Trump was going to win. States including Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—his part of the country—were pivotal. He was thrilled, proud—full of solidarity with the working people of Michigan whom he’d lived among for so many years. He was jumpy, almost. For about thirty seconds.
Then a different sentiment washed over John. He took another deep draw of Dark Horse. “Now we actually have to do something.”
We? The alt-right, or whatever people are calling them. Those on the edges—the extremes rejected by mainstream conservatives—who dare to make politics an explicit fight for the fates of white people. If they had a role in electing Donald Trump, then they could also have a role in helping him govern. But they had a considerable resource on the inside. John thought to himself, There is this Bannon guy, I’ve been reading about him. He’s one of us! Maybe he’ll be sitting there in the White House, telling Trump Traditionalist ideas.
On that night in front of the television, John felt something he had never felt following U.S. politics: optimism. It was almost frightening, he later told me, and profoundly un-Traditionalist.

* Meanwhile, our night is drawing to a close. Darren Beattie and I are chatting. Prior to his days in the Trump administration, he was a philosophy professor, and we are talking about obscure authors we knew about.
“Do you know Michael Millerman? A Heidegger scholar, into Aleksandr Dugin,” Darren asked. I replied. “Yeah, yeah. I’ve read his stuff. Another guy I know from my research, his name is Jason Jorjani, he’s—”
A clatter. Did Steve just drop his silverware? That’s what it sounded like, but my eyes were turned away at that moment.
“How . . .” Steve is suddenly in our exchange, staring at me with a new intensity. “How do you know who Jason Jorjani is?”
“I know him from my past research,” I say, taken aback. “I know a lot of those guys.”
Bannon says nothing and turns back to peek at his cell phones. How does he know who Jason Jorjani i —an obscure intellectual moving in the darker corners of the far-right and associated with Arktos?

* Jason Reza Jorjani is the son of an American mother of Scandinavian and Irish ancestry and an Iranianexile father, and he grew up wealthy in New York. Most people who meet Jason comment on how young he looks for his thirty-eight years. His eyes are bright; his hair is full and youthful. His face is evidence of a gentle life.
But Jason had a vision, and he was willing to sacrifice for it. You could call it an Iranian nationalist vision, but that wouldn’t capture its fervor or eccentricity. He dreamed of a unified Aryan world where societies with Indo-European spiritual roots would mobilize as one to assume leadership in a new global order. This would include Buddhists in Japan; Hindus in India in the East; Europe and its satellites in North America; and Iranians—the fount of Zoroastrianism and its Shia Islamic incarnation —at the center. These are the great peoples, the superior civilizations best positioned to handle the challenges facing humanity and the world. The unification begins, Jason believes, with a cultural and political revolution in Iran aimed at returning the nation to its own roots and throwing off its allegiances toward Islamic counterparts in the Sunni world, followed by integration with its true spiritual brethren, the other Aryan states, including the U.S.
Jason talks big. At times it sounds fanciful and unserious, especially considering his background and
lack of direct contacts with government. He was a humanities professor at the New Jersey Institute of
Technology and a philosopher (he earned his doctorate in philosophy in 2013). He’s a writer, in other
words, not an official policy maker. However, his was a Traditionalist, Evolian vision, one that seeks to
base state formation and geopolitics on historical essences and spiritual roots, with not always veiled
allusions to racial determinism (Jason has discussed using eugenics programs to rid Iran’s population
of its Mongol genetic traces), not to mention a specific celebration of Indo-European spirituality and thehierarchical exaltation of “Aryans.” And this approach had a chance to be implemented in the brave
new world that emerged following the rise of Trump and the arrival of a Traditionalist in the White
House. At least Jason thought it had a chance. That is why he attempted a daring campaign that would bring him into partnership with parapsychological terrorists and international money launderers,
transform organized white nationalism, and eventually present a public relations hurdle for the Trump
administration.
On the phone, Jason began to tell me the story. He explained that in February 2016, well before the
presidential election in the United States, he had published a book arguing for the West to embrace the spiritual archetypes of its pre-Christian Greek heritage: Prometheus and Atlas—the same book that
Jason later asked me to give to Steve Bannon. In it, Jason claimed that reviving ancient spiritualities
would allow the West to not only escape dry rational modernism but even unleash repressed ways of
thinking and knowing—most specifically ESP and psychokinesis. He published the book through an
outlet he had just recently come to know: Arktos. Arktos was not only a controversial outlet but anunstable one. Its then editor in chief John Morgan warned him during the production phase of the bookthat interpersonal conflicts at Arktos were flaring and that his own ouster appeared imminent. Still,
Arktos was open to his commentary on psychic and telekinetic powers, and it turned out that this was aplus for both author and publisher. Prometheus and Atlas garnered an award from the American
Parapsychological Association.
However, you write a book on topics like these, and freaks of all kinds come out of the woodwork. By
mid-spring 2016, Jason was receiving emails hard and fast from people making outrageous claims
about their psychic abilities, professing to have unlocked secrets of the universe and to be
representatives of hidden orders. Some even threatened to attack Jason through parapsychological
means.

* A few months after his lunch with [Michael] Bagley, Jason would again be sitting in Persepolis restaurant. This
time, however, he was meeting with white nationalist Richard Spencer.
Jason had just returned from a trip to London, where he spoke before an Iranian nationalist crowd and
met the Londoner for the first time. The Londoner received a full report about his and Bagley’s
meeting, and he wanted to help develop the idea that the two had hatched, that of building a new
organization. It should be a “think tank,” the Londoner insisted, one that combined the best resources
in the radical right these days. Arktos could cover the deeper intellectual stuff, but Red Ice—another
Sweden-based outfit headed by a man named Henrik Palmgren and specializing in slick radio and video
shows—could serve as a media outlet. And perhaps an American organization could be involved, too,
like Richard Spencer’s National Policy Institute, which had been hosting large white nationalist seminars
and conferences for years. They could call the umbrella organization the AltRight Corporation. And, the
Londoner added, he could make sure it was well funded.
That was the conversation that brought Jason back to Persepolis. He was here to solidify the American
wing of this new project. Spencer had been catapulted into the public eye as the face of the alt-right
movement, amid claims by journalists, pundits, and Hillary Clinton herself that the alt-right was deeply
involved in Donald Trump’s then floundering campaign for the U.S. presidency. Spencer wasn’t sure
that those allegations were true. Steve Bannon had publically referred to his media company Breitbart
as a platform for the alt-right, but it was unclear what he meant by that (the term alt-right was still
new and its meaning a matter of debate). Still, during the campaign, Trump had been slow to reject
the endorsement he received from former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, though he eventually issued
a condemnation. Small stuff, but even the slightest hint of receptiveness from a major presidential
candidate was cause for elation among the likes of Spencer. It was something they had only dreamed
of—namely, momentum, and the potential that the most maligned and rejected political cause in the
post–World War II West might have made an inch of progress toward the goal of relevance, maybe
even influence. Further, it was a position they achieved not by camouflage or clandestine infiltration of
the mainstream, but as themselves—as unapologetic white nationalists. The radical right saw this as
an age of possibilities, a time for innovation and ambition.
Perhaps that is why Richard was so eager to say yes to Jason—yes to a new three-way partnership
among Red Ice, Arktos, and his own organization, the National Policy Institute. Their partnership would
mark the unification of the major transatlantic cultural and intellectual platforms associated with white
nationalism today. The AltRight Corporation was going to be a reality.
The lunch at Persepolis was just the after-party. Jason and Richard had reached their agreement the
day before and had then headed to a private club for a night of booze and celebration. During the wee
hours of the morning the two posed for a picture. Against a wall behind them stood a statue of Herme
—the Greek god of trickery. Jason had included Hermes in the picture on purpose.

* The [Alt Right Corporation] organization was supposed to be run equally by all the leaders—a Knights of the Round Table model. However, Richard was the outward face of the organization, whether they liked it or not. He had become famous as an icon of the new white nationalism. Both he and his ideology were constructions of the media, Jason believed. But Spencer’s persona was a liability. In late January, he was punched in the face during a filmed interview outside on the street, and the video of the attack was spread virally by liberal America. Richard, meanwhile, had taken to carrying weapons, even to work. A mythos seemed to be forming around him. This presented a major branding problem, because thanks in part to Richard’s antics, their name was starting to mean something other than what Jason wanted.
Alt-right. The term was originally coined not by Spencer as the media kept saying, but by a renegade philosopher and professor named Paul Gottfried who published books with Arktos. Its rise to public attention during the 2016 presidential election came in part when Steve Bannon was quoted describing Breitbart News as a “platform for the alt-right.” The term was further solidified about a week after Bannon took over Trump’s campaign, when Hillary Clinton devoted a speech in Reno, Nevada, to exposing the alt-right as a white nationalist cause that—via Bannon and Breitbart News—had “effectively taken over the Republican Party.” Alt-rightists themselves were thrilled by the attention, although they also knew that the characterizations were somewhat inaccurate. Alt-right was being used internally as a catchall for a wide range of actors and ideologies, some of them ideologically irreconcilable. What they shared was a strong opposition to immigration, hostility toward the established conservatism in the Republican Party (hence the alt, or alternative right), and—the main innovation meriting a new moniker—a methodological focus on internet activism. All that, plus a relative lack of squeamishness about sharing space with white nationalists. Political extremes are dens of sectarianism, but this new term was uniting a broad coalition.
Now Richard had taken it over, and this made Hillary Clinton retroactively correct in her characterizations— alt-right was becoming synonymous with old-fashioned white nationalism. Daniel Friberg was basically in that camp; the Traditionalism that Arktos published seemed like a side interest of his. Jason was now swept up in it, too. Shortly after Trump’s election, Richard held a gathering for white nationalists in Washington—a victory rally, basically—and toward its conclusion held a press conference. Jason was invited to the stage and he obliged, saying nothing and appearing less than comfortable with this degree of visibility, sitting between famous American white nationalist ideologues like Kevin MacDonald and Jared Taylor before a sea of international cameras and journalists.
Jason wished the term alt-right had retained its more open definition—he bet Bannon did, too—if only because association with the movement was becoming riskier to him professionally. Already in late 2016, his faculty colleagues at the New Jersey Institute of Technology were beginning to take notice of his emerging public profile. But Jason was willing to sacrifice: the alt-right was offering him a megaphone.

* Steve saw his role in the White House as one of holding the president to his earlier campaign promises, and putting an end to gratuitous war-making had been a pillar of their pitch to voters. It was part of Trump’s pledge to American workers that his administration would start prioritizing them, making decisions based on whether or not their interests were being served. Spending their money and lives in wars that didn’t directly involve them and their welfare was antithetical to that cause, the reasoning went.
America first.

* THEY MET in McIntire Park in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Saturday, August 12, 2017, a little before eleven A.M . Daniel Friberg, Richard Spencer, and Henrik Palmgren—three of the four leaders from the AltRight Corporation—joined hundreds of other protesters assembling for the Unite the Right rally, its official purpose being to contest the removal of a local public statue of Civil War Confederate general Robert E. Lee. But as its name indicates, this rally was also intended to bring together actors who identified with the alt-right.
The most colorful attendees were masses of militant white nationalists, swastika-toting neo-Nazis, and Ku Klux Klan members. There were plenty of Confederate flags, too, of course. Marchers even seemed to have studied, rehearsed, and performed renditions of the Civil War Confederate war cry, the Rebel yell.

* Richard, Daniel, and their nearest associates at first defied the order, but chaos ensued as protesters and authorities scattered in multiple directions. After some initial confrontations with police, Richard Spencer ran to his getaway car and left the scene. On his way out, he happened to see his informal predecessor walking the streets—the last man to emerge in American popular culture as an outspoken white nationalist, former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, who jumped to safety in their car.

* ILL-FATED, TRAGIC, CATASTROPHIC —these were the words being used by the white nationalist intelligentsia during the immediate aftermath of Charlottesville. The menacing tiki-torch gathering, the militarized garb, the Nazi sloganeering, and of course the violence would wipe out any potential that the alt-right movement had to rebrand white nationalism and anti-liberal activism. Far from a display of ingenuity and innovation, the people marching in Charlottesville surely looked all too familiar to onlookers. Even participants voiced their reservations. Richard Spencer denounced the event organizer’s response to the death of Heather D. Heyer online. And in the wake of an op-ed I wrote in the Wall Street Journal highlighting Daniel Friberg’s uncharacteristic willingness to march alongside visible Nazis and Klansmen, he clarified to the Scandinavian media that he was unsettled by the presence of those actors and would have prohibited their participation had he been an organizer.

* Bannon was thrilled with Trump’s response. Despite the fact that he had been isolated in the administration for months, the New York Times reported that he consulted with Trump about the response to Charlottesville. Indeed, all public communications from the White House following the rally aligned with Bannon’s reported long-standing advice to the president, as the Times reported it, “not to criticize far-right activists too severely for fear of antagonizing a small but energetic part of his base.” The president’s behavior at the press conference marked a breathtaking stand in Bannon’s eyes—a stand for the importance of history, a stand on behalf of who he believed were righteous people on the streets made invisible by the Nazis next to them, and a courageous refusal to bow to media pressure.
Being in step with the president at this particular moment turned out to be a liability, however. When the president received blowback for his remarks, critics blamed the incident on Bannon’s influence, meaning that his dismissal could palliate to the ongoing outcry. They could attribute Trump’s racism to the presence in the White House of a man who had presided over a news organization—Breitbart—that produced consistently positive coverage of European identitarian groups and seemed obsessed with crime committed by African Americans; a man who had allegedly developed ways to stir racial animus as vice president of Cambridge Analytica; who had celebrated the online world of the alt-right; and who had a tendency to be drawn to racialist culture and literature, from the Nazi war-era films of Leni Riefenstahl to the writings of Jean Raspail, Charles Murray, and of course, Julius Evola.
Three days after Trump’s second press conference, Steve Bannon resigned, under pressure.
On the same day that Trump gave the press conference, August 15, Jason Jorjani left both the AltRight Corporation and Arktos. Ask him why and he’ll tell you that he left in part because his original vision for a more dynamic and encompassing alt-right movement seemed dead. He was especially sobered by user comments on his own AltRight site. “Iranians is brown poo-poo people,” rang one. The alt-right was a narrow white nationalist initiative after all, just as its most vocal critics alleged. There wasn’t room for his cause there. The “Charlottesville disaster,” as he referred to it, solidified those impressions in spectacular fashion.

* In order to understand the motive behind an action, look at its effects, Jason thought. This premature centralization of the alt-right without proper capital investment—this attempt to bring together the likes of Richard Spencer, Daniel Friberg, and Henrik Palmgren—destroyed the AltRight Corporation. It also destroyed his career.
I thought back to my early suspicions when he first told me about the Londoner, that the figure sounded too sensational to be true, and that he might have been a law enforcement plant and spy. A conspiracy, perhaps, targeting the alt-right and Jason.

* About a month after the Unite the Right rally, on September 19, 2017, the New York Times published an article featuring Jason. He had met a young Swedish man named Erik Hellberg earlier that spring at a gathering called the London Forum. And later, in June, the two reconnected for a drink at an Irish pub close to the Empire State Building. What Jason didn’t know was that “Erik Hellberg” was really Patrik Hermansson, an anti-racist activist who had infiltrated rightist circles in Europe and the United States. He was wearing a hidden camera during their conversation at the pub, and quotes from that conversation—to his horror—were now appearing in one of the largest newspapers in the world.
“It’s going to end with the expulsion of the majority of the migrants, including citizens who are of Muslim descent. That’s how it’s going to end. It’s going to end with concentration camps, expulsions, and war, that’s how it’s going to end. At a cost of a few hundred million people,” Jason had told the undercover activist. He had been characteristically articulate in form and grand in content. But in print this didn’t sound good either: “We will have a Europe, in 2050, where the bank notes have Adolf Hitler, Napoleon Bonaparte, Alexander the Great. And Hitler will be seen like that: like Napoleon, like Alexander, not like some weird monster who is unique in his own category—no, he is just going to be seen as a great European leader. You know like we say in English, you don’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.”
Jason contended that he was describing a “nightmarish prediction of a future that would follow from Western policy makers’ failure to address the Muslim migrant crisis” rather than his own ideals.

* Jason wasn’t just out of the AltRight Corporation, which would soon be dormant. His university in New Jersey would eventually fire him, too.

* Steve: “But why does a guy who is that sophisticated get hooked up with Richard Spencer?” Something about Jason’s story as I presented it made him sound suspect. “Richard Spencer is a goofball, and you can’t get in business with goofballs like that.”

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The Rocket That Fell to Earth: Roger Clemens and the Rage for Baseball Immortality

Jeff Pearlman writes in his 2009 book:

* To those who had come to know [John] McNamara during his time in Boston, the shifting of blame was hardly a surprise. Though popular with a handful of Red Sox veterans, the 54-year-old skipper was a guarded, crotchety man who trusted few people outside his tight ring of coaches and friends. Upon being hired by the Red Sox, McNamara McNamara owned a lifetime major league record of 751-805 and had been fired three times. He saw himself as one of the geniuses of the game, and anyone who dared question his moves or motives was, in his eyes, a buffoon. “Everybody thinks he can do your job,” he snarled. “Everybody.” So when the press asked about Clemens’ departure from game six, what was he supposed to say? That he was wrong? No way. Not McNamara’s style. He would blame his ace before taking any personal responsibility. Clemens was livid. “Did McNamara tell you that he’s a drunk?” he later asked television announcer Tim McCarver in an unsubstantiated off-the-air rant. “Did he tell you that he had the clubhouse guys fix him a drink in the fifth inning? That he was completely clueless?” Upon reporting to spring training, Clemens’ mood hardly improved. Because he had slightly more than two years of major league service, Clemens was required to pitch one more season before becoming eligible for arbitration. Hence, while Yankees first baseman Don Mattingly, the MVP runner-up, was being awarded a $1.975 million salary via arbitration, Clemens was forced to accept Boston’s offer of $500,000—a mere $160,000 raise from 1986. “We decided to renew Roger’s contract at a figure we think is fair,” Lou Gorman, Boston’s general manager, said at the time. “This is fair.”

What frustrated Clemens wasn’t necessarily the paltry contract offer but that the Red Sox had lied to him. During the off-season, Clemens, his agents and Gorman had agreed to a one-year, $1 million contract that left all sides smiling. Yet when Peter Ueberroth, baseball’s commissioner, learned of the agreement, he called Gorman in a tizzy. “Lou, I’m reading that you’re going to pay Roger Clemens $1 million,” said Ueberroth. “Please tell me it’s not true.” “That’s right,” said Gorman. “I shook hands and made a deal with the man.” A lengthy pause. “Well, Lou, I’m ordering you not to give him $1 million,” said Ueberroth. “You can’t pay him more than $500,000. Not a penny more.” “But Pete,” asked a stunned Gorman, “what am I supposed to do here?” Over the previous two years, baseball’s ruling class had colluded to drive down wildly escalating salaries.

* As Jordan would later write of Clemens in a piece for The New York Times Magazine:

“A French dilettante once said, “I am such an egotist that if I were to write about a chair I’d find some way to write about myself.” Clemens’s egotism is more childlike and innocent. He doesn’t realize that he sees himself as the center of his small universe, at the center of every story he tells… Everyone is a bit player in Clemens’s universe, even his beloved mother, Bess, who reared him and his five siblings mostly without a father. She left her first husband when Clemens was a baby, and her second husband died when Clemens was 9. Bess has been fighting emphysema for years. “She has her good days and bad,” Clemens says. “I only hope she can hang on to see me go into the Hall of Fame.” Clemens assumes everyone’s pleasure revolves around him…. He says he hates to miss a start because that might deprive his fans, especially young boys, from the pleasure of seeing “the Rocket Man punch out 20.” The Rocket Man is his nickname. He sometimes autographs his book “Rocket Man” or “Roger ‘The Rocket’ Clemens” and then adds a list of his awards.”

When the Clemens family purchased a Porsche, Roger insisted on a CY-MVP vanity license plate. When Clemens ate out at a restaurant, he would look around, hoping someone would recognize him. (Then, when he was recognized, he would audibly complain about the lack of privacy.)

* As the hundreds of major league ballplayers who turned to performance-enhancing drugs throughout the 1990s did their absolute best to keep the media at arm’s length, Piazza took the opposite approach. According to several sources, when the subject of performance enhancing was broached with reporters he especially trusted, Piazza fessed up. “Sure, I use,” he told one. “But in limited doses, and not all that often.” (Piazza has denied using performance-enhancing drugs, but there has always been speculation.) Whether or not it was Piazza’s intent, the tactic was brilliant: By letting the media know, off the record, Piazza made the information that much harder to report. Writers saw his bulging muscles, his acne-covered back. They certainly heard the under-the-breath comments from other major league players, some who considered Piazza’s success to be 100 percent chemically delivered. “He’s a guy who did it, and everybody knows it,” says Reggie Jefferson, the longtime major league first baseman. “It’s amazing how all these names, like Roger Clemens, are brought up, yet Mike Piazza goes untouched.” “There was nothing more obvious than Mike on steroids,” says another major league veteran who played against Piazza for years. “Everyone talked about it, everyone knew it. Guys on my team, guys on the Mets. A lot of us came up playing against Mike, so we knew what he looked like back in the day. Frankly, he sucked on the field. Just sucked. After his body changed, he was entirely different. ‘Power from nowhere,’ we called it.” When asked, on a scale of 1 to 10, to grade the odds that Piazza had used performance enhancers, the player doesn’t pause. “A 12,” he says. “Maybe even a 13.”

* Perhaps his strangest away-from-the-family pursuit came in the form of Charlize Theron, the bombshell South African actress with the 36B-24-36 body and the form-fitting red-carpet outfits. Clemens had long fancied the starlet, who during the 2002 season came to New York to promote a new film. While eating dinner at Serafina—one of Manhattan’s snazziest bistros—an apparently intoxicated Clemens looked up and spotted his Hollywood crush. He approached the actress, introduced himself and asked whether she’d like to join him for a drink. When Theron—who, as a baseball ignoramus, likely had no idea who the pitcher was—declined, Clemens trailed her through the restaurant until a bouncer stepped in his way. “Take one more step,” he growled, “and there’ll be some real trouble here.” With that, Clemens stopped, looked up as Theron exited through the front door and yelped, “But Charlize, I’d do you right…”

* In the insular world of professional baseball, there exists a code of honor that, in any other sector of society, would make no sense whatsoever. On the diamonds and inside the clubhouses, loyalty means standing up for your teammates, no matter the circumstance. Boston outfielder Wil Cordero is arrested for beating his wife in 1997? He’s welcomed back with hugs and open arms. Mets pitcher David Cone allegedly exposes himself to female fans in the Shea Stadium bullpen in 1989? Most Mets laugh it off as wacky hijinks.

* The once-bashful kid now lived for the attention. He didn’t merely want it—he needed it. “You’re talking about the ultimate narcissist,” says Pat Jordan, the writer and former minor league pitcher. “Actors are fearful—their narcissism is a product of their fear. But an athlete’s narcissism doesn’t spring from fear, it springs from arrested development. A person like Roger Clemens has never cultivated anything but himself. Everything is about the arm, about maintaining the arm. The longer it goes on, the easier it is to become a Roger Clemens. You constantly call attention upon yourself, because you’re all you know. I used to be like that when I played, and I wasn’t one one-thousandth of the pitcher Roger was. It took me a long time to get out of the idea that if it rains on my parade, I’m the only one get

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Yelp Enables One Click Smearing

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The Arsonist: A Mind on Fire

Chloe Hooper writes in this 2020 Australian true-crime book:

* The arsonist had had no need to set kindling amongst the blue gums. Each tree had made its own pyre. Every summer they dropped their bark and branches and leaves, and each year without fire the piles grew higher, and they released toxins to ward off new growth that would compromise their fuel beds. No plant on the planet craves fire like the eucalypt: to live it needs to burn. ‘Gasoline trees’, the Americans call the globulus . Flames release gases that act like propellant, sending fireballs rolling across treetops. The shedding ribbon bark unfurls streamers of fire that travel kilometres on the wind.

* It is estimated that only one per cent of bushfire arsonists are ever caught.

* But in many minds, staying to defend your house is the Australian test of grit: it’s proof that you deserve to be living in the bush in the first place.

* fire-setters were more often than not male; they were commonly unemployed, or had a complicated work history; they were likely to have disadvantaged social backgrounds, often with a family history of pathology, addiction and physical abuse; and many exhibited poor social or interpersonal skills.

* The Arson Squad was aware that there were more deliberately lit fires near the urban–rural fringe – places where high youth unemployment, child abuse and neglect, intergenerational welfare dependency and poor public transport met the margins of the bush, the eucalypts. And that pretty much described most of the towns in the Latrobe Valley.

* Although statistically it’s uncommon for firefighters to deliberately set fires, it is common for arsonists to be firefighters. Volunteering to battle local blazes offers camaraderie and status. It’s a bonding, adrenaline-filled service, for which politicians and the media turn some of those in the ranks into heroes. And, of course, if there are no fires when the season starts, someone feeling powerless and forgotten might start to itch for the thrill.

* Before long she was also butting heads with Detective Shoesmith about the child pornography charges. In crime parlance, they looked to her like a ‘burger with the lot’, similar, for example, to an armed burglar also being accused of double parking and firearm possession. She felt the Arson Squad had charged Brendan too hastily and caused immeasurable reputational damage. Paedophiles and arsonists were the pariahs of modern Australian life – to be both rendered someone the ultimate outcast.

The barrister knew all the clichés about fire-setters also being sexual perverts. Sex and fire was an old, old fusion. Sigmund Freud had not been required reading in any law school course on fire-setting – and Legal Aid did not go in much for psychoanalysis – but in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Freud synthesised the idea by writing that fire-lighting was a regressive attempt to master the threats and uncertainties of the natural world: ‘In man’s struggle to gain power over the tyranny of nature, his acquisition of power over fire was most important. It is as if primitive man had had the impulse when he came in contact with fire, to gratify an infantile pleasure in respect of it and put it out with a stream of urine . . . Analytic findings testify to the close connection between the ideas of ambition, fire and urethral eroticism.’

A few years later, Freud provided his further thoughts: ‘The warmth radiated by fire evokes the same kind of glow as accompanies the state of sexual excitation, and the form and motion of the flame suggest the phallus in action.’

Eighty years on, fire-lighting was still widely considered to deliver an erotic thrill. Back at the Morwell police station, some local detectives who had been inside a lot of fire-setters’ houses reckoned they’d found uncommon amounts of sexual paraphernalia. And some of McCrickard’s colleagues, criminal barristers who went on to defend Sokaluk, privately also believed in the connection. One had defended a man who would lie down by his car, nearby his blaze, and masturbate; another defended two intellectually disabled men who would head into the bush, light fires and jerk each other off; and yet another defended a man whose calling card was setting fire to women’s shoes.

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Sins of My Father: Growing Up with America’s Most Dangerous White Supremacist

William Pierce’s son Kelvin writes in his 2020 biography:

* He would fly into sudden violent, volcanic rages, to the point that he even killed the only two living things he truly loved, our sweet Siamese cats. The only time he was truly happy was when he could lock himself in his study with his books and Nazi paraphernalia, to write about the race wars to come that he hoped to organize and orchestrate. When he wasn’t writing or addressing fund-raising rallies for his neo-Nazi organization, the National Alliance, he liked to experiment with chemicals and explosives in the basement of our home or in the woods behind it. He had me help him produce nitroglycerine and showed me how to make bombs. To my mother’s terror, he hid weapons and other dangerous stuff in the crawl space of our house until a few days before the FBI came sniffing around. Sometimes he used me as a guinea-pig, once knocking me flat on my rear from a powerful electric shock. While I was frightened I was happy, too, because I was spending time with him…

* I would have done anything for a word of praise, a hug, or a kiss from him, but in the end, I always failed him. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t become the little Aryan he wanted and so he abandoned his attempt to mold me. As for my brother, Erik, he didn’t even try with him. The only time I saw him display any affection toward either of us was after his death, when I found among his belongings a photograph of us as babies, sitting on his lap. He was smiling. It wasn’t until I left for college and met the outside world that I realized what a monster he was. When he left my mother, he wrote her a letter saying he was going because he loved his political party more. He went on to marry four other women, mostly mail-order brides. He died at his secluded compound on a West Virginia mountaintop before he had the chance to wed a sixth woman that he had squirreled away out of sight of his fifth wife. He spent his last days restructuring the National Alliance to make sure it survived him and gave no thought to us at all – his Nazi acolytes didn’t even know our names or that we existed, although they did try to recruit me a few days after his death, like some sort of prized trophy to hang on the wall.

* I had spent most of my life hating Dad, and he surely hated me. He hadn’t spoken to me in seven years and never acknowledged the adoption of my two baby girls from Eastern Europe six years earlier. I had sent him pictures and letters about them, but he never bothered to reply. I strongly suspected that he didn’t approve of them because they weren’t white enough for his tastes. When I finally stopped blubbing, I realized why I was so upset. I had wanted him to love me and be proud of me, and for us to be able to talk and enjoy each other and have a normal relationship.

* After I got myself together I called my twin brother, Erik, and told him the news. “He evidently died from cancer but I don’t know much more than that,” I said. Erik said he didn’t really care — Dad was a complete jerk and he didn’t give a damn about any memorial service. I suggested that it might give us closure to attend and we’d be able to see Uncle Sandy, too, but he was adamant. “That bastard didn’t give a damn about me or my kids, and there is no damn way I’m going to his service,” Erik said. “He was a horrible father and nothing will change that!”

* “Well, your father had cancer,” said Charles. “It was adenocarcinoma, a cancer of the adrenal glands. Several months ago he began losing weight and had lost quite a bit before his secretary finally insisted he go see a doctor. He resisted because he didn’t trust the doctors, but eventually made an appointment. He said he didn’t feel particularly sick but had lost about 30 pounds and wasn’t sure why.” After a series of tests, Dad was diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer. He was admitted to the hospital and started treatments. After about two weeks, he was told that the treatments were helping and his progress was so promising that he could go home and continue on an outpatient basis. But he quickly got worse and within a few weeks was back in the hospital. This time they told him the prognosis was dire and that he needed to stay in the hospital. “That’s when I went to see him,” Charles said. “He phoned and said he didn’t trust the doctors. I spoke to them and decided that he did, indeed, have Stage 4 cancer. After discussing his options with me he decided to go home and discontinue further treatment.” Once home, Dad declined rapidly, to the point where he couldn’t get out of bed any more. Soon, he refused to eat or drink anything at all. “I suspected he knew the end was near and did not want to prolong it any longer than necessary,” said Charles. “Without taking in any fluids he became very weak and for his last few days he was so weak that he couldn’t speak. He passed a few days later. Your father was a very strong man and he went out on his own terms.”

* Charles put his hand on my shoulder. “Your father and I spoke several times before his death and he told me near the end that one of his only regrets in life was in regards to you and your brother. He said he sincerely regretted not having a better relationship with you two,” Charles said.

* I remember as a kid Dad devouring history books, particularly tomes on European history, culture and morals, and he knew that a movement built around a single person would not survive once that person died. The clearest example of that was his former boss George Lincoln Rockwell and his American Nazi Party, which tore itself to shreds within three years of his assassination in 1967. Dad witnessed it all, yet when it came to his own demise 35 years later he totally ignored the principle that he had believed in for so long. When he learned that he was dying, he gave no thought to Mom, my brother or me, or our future, which makes me angry to this day. Instead, he set about trying to organize the Alliance’s affairs to ensure a smooth transfer of power. He had refused further treatment at the hospital and returned home to meet with each staff member to discuss their work and outline a plan for when he would no longer be there. Six days after his death, the Alliance’s 17-strong professional staff announced they had chosen Erich to be their new leader, in accordance with his wishes.

* At the time of his death, Dad presided over a racist empire that produced revenue of about $1 million a year, which I suppose should be considered quite a success for a man who lived almost entirely off my mother’s earnings for 20 years. He ruled his empire from his roost on a 346-acre hilltop compound near Hillsboro, W. Va. He is said to have purchased the land with money donated by “The Order,” a gang of mostly Alliance members and supporters who stole $4 million by robbing armored cars, and shot dead Alan Berg, a liberal Jewish talk-show host, on the streets of Denver. The Order was led by Robert Mathews, a young West Coast Alliance member who Dad had been grooming for great things. Mathews died, aged 31, in an explosion at a house on Whidbey Island, Wash., in 1984 after a three-day standoff with the FBI. Dad liked to portray the Alliance as a group dedicated to the welfare and salvation of the white race, and not the lucrative hate business that it became. He had various streams of income, apart from membership fees and donations from deluded donors. There was a high-brow glossy magazine called National Vanguard, which was meant to rouse intellectuals and professionals to join his cause. In addition, he had a crude monthly publication, the members-only National Alliance Bulletin, filled with venom and calls for action against the Jews and others whom he believed were undermining the white race and secretly controlling the government. He also operated National Vanguard Books, a mail-order firm offering racist and anti-Semitic literature, along with tapes of his weekly half-hour radio show, “American Dissident Voices,” which broadcast over shortwave stations that could be heard in New England, Florida, California and several states in the South. Later, it could also reach some places in Europe.

Then, there were the sales of his book “The Turner Diaries,” which inspired Timothy McVeigh to bomb the Alfred P. Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995. The Turner Diaries, and his subsequent offering, “Hunter,” were designed to appeal to poor, grievance-nursing whites and became the how-to manual for The Order and subsequent rightwing spin-offs. Both books featured protagonists who work to halt what Dad called the “degeneration” of the white race and allowed him to ‘kill’ all the people he hated —in no particular order, Jews and rabbis, blacks and interracial couples, Communists, intellectuals and academics, gays, reporters and feminists, of course, Hollywood actors, talk show hosts, state governors, congressmen, a cardinal and a couple of bishops. They all died in gory attacks: there were exploding skulls, flying brain tissue, slit throats, knifings, shotgun blasts, hangings and bombings. Dad wrote other books, non-fiction treatises, but it was his crude fiction that earned him the big bucks and the infamy he so richly deserved. I don’t know how many copies have been sold, but in 2000, Britain’s The Guardian newspaper put the number at more than 500,000 just for The Turner Diaries.

* Dad was born in September, 1933, to an alcoholic father and a domineering mother who had trouble showing affection. When he was a young boy, his mother would pay him a small fee to find the bottles of booze his father had hidden around the house. His father died when Dad was still a youngster. Drunk, he was struck by a car…

* He spent the last two years of high school in a military-style boarding school after his mother embarked on a disastrous love affair that left her heart-broken. Dad never really experienced the warmth and emotional support that comes from having a loving home. He would entertain himself for hours, reading reams of science fiction, and play around with model rockets and chemistry sets, for which he had an extraordinary aptitude.

* While Dad earned his Ph.D at Colorado in the summer of 1962 and Mom earned her B.A. in mathematics, I continued to rock on my horse. At bedtime, I would rock with my pillow. I was about two years old when Dad started to change. From being a fun, care-free man he slowly turned into a monster. Mom says it was like a psychological switch had been thrown.

* According to Dad, he had been “an ideological virgin” until he was 30…. He said he’d hadn’t thought much about non-whites and had very little experience of them as he was growing up. “If anything, I was inclined toward the liberal position on the race question.” He recalled during a dormitory bull session as an undergraduate how he had supported the right of a person to marry or cohabit with anyone who would have him, black of white.

* He was bored with his life. He feared he was destined to work every day at something that had no real meaning and, at the same time, was fast-formulating the belief that Jews were having a massive and negative influence on America. He was convinced that they were the masterminds behind the Civil Rights Movement, and were plotting to mix blacks with whites as part of a plan to dilute the white race and create a society of half-breeds because they feared the idea of a strong white race.

* Rockwell’s views about Jews and how they were encouraging whites and non-whites to mix particularly resonated with Dad and he decided then and there that he had to help save his people from this Jewish scheme. It was more important to him than anything else — even us. He had finally found the meaning of life that he had been searching for. Rockwell’s views solidified the conclusions Dad had reached through all his hours of reading and his hatred of Jews mushroomed until he came to believe that Hitler’s final solution, the mass extermination of the Jews, was the only answer. He used to fantasize about slaughtering Jews and anyone else who supported them and their secret mission to destroy us all. It was an all-consuming malignancy that took root in his psyche and he would spend every hour from that moment until his death waging war on the Jewish people, and the blacks and left-wing students that he believed the Jews were manipulating.

* His inner rage at events in the outside world would explode into our home in the form of regular beatings that left us bruised and scarred, and in a lot of pain — he’d use a wire coat hanger, an electric razor cord, a belt, or a 2-by-4, or whatever was closest to hand. As he became more violent, I became more detached, hiding inside my head in an imaginary world where I felt safe. Sometimes, I’d reach out into the uncomfortable outer universe, looking for a sign that I was loved and lovable, but I’d always be reminded of my unworthiness and would retreat again.

* Rockwell told Dad that he had tried appealing to what he called “the winners” — the teachers and professors, doctors, lawyers and engineers, to the writers and artists, businessmen and craftsmen, and to his fellow military officers, to everyone that he considered to be “careful, responsible men and women with steady employment and stable families.” While he found that many agreed with him in principle, “almost none had the moral courage to stand up and be counted among the righteous.” In short, while they shook his hand after his speeches, Rockwell said, they would scurry away in fright when he talked about taking America back from the Jews.

* I knew beyond all doubt that there was something seriously wrong with me. I was simply bad to the core, and nothing could save me, which is why my Dad never loved me.

* One summer’s day, while Dad was out of town, I was playing down by the stream behind our house. I’d found a book of matches from somewhere and decided to entertain myself by setting individual leaves on fire and then blowing them out. It was grand fun and I did it several times until suddenly a couple of adjacent leaves caught fire and I could no longer blow them out. In a few moments the fire spread to the point that it was out of control. I got up and ran back to my house and shortly after one of our neighbors noticed the blaze and called the fire department. There was quite a large blaze raging behind the house by the time the fire truck arrived. I just stood there, watching all the commotion, in rapt fascination.

* Rockwell called publicity the “lifeblood of any political movement.” He knew that without it, no one would know that he and his Nazis existed. His publicity stunts included sending Stormtroopers dressed in ape costumes to the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., carrying placards demanding “Free our Brothers” and “We Equals Want Civil rights.”

* He pulled a similar stunt at a gay rights’ convention, pretending to be a delivery man and rushing on stage with a box labeled as an emergency shipment of 24 quarts of Vaseline.

* Mom told me later that she considered leaving him many times but he threatened to go to the dean at Mary Washington and say that she was heavily involved with his work with Rockwell, although that was a lie.

* To my delight as a kid, Dad actually did sleep with a gun under his pillow. I used to creep into his room to play with it when he was away.

* Our neighbors saw the stories and soon Erik and I were being harassed and beaten up by local kids. We became known as the “Neighborhood Nazis” and people told their children not to mix with us. Some of the papers also printed our address.

* Dad took over the operation [of the National Youth Alliance]. It was to consume the rest of his life, stealing all that he had left to give and leaving not a shred for his wife and kids. Even when he died, the only reference to us was a line in his will acknowledging that he had had two sons.

* I remember being puzzled by the two men in Dad’s office because they didn’t seem to be all that intelligent. Over the years, I would see similar people at Dad’s gatherings. It was as if he were surrounded by weirdos, mostly young men who had nothing better to do than hang out with other small-minded thugs, making themselves feel better by putting down other people.

* Dad married five times in all, but there was only one woman he truly cared about and to whom he was loyal to the end: his mother, Marguerite Pierce. She wasn’t terribly affectionate in return, which perhaps is one reason why he was never able to show love to Erik and myself. My mother was terrified of her but, to her credit, Grandma did urge Dad to think again when he told her he was dumping us for his new, all-consuming love — National Socialism.

* Alcohol played a prominent and tragic role throughout Grandma’s life. For some reason, she seemed strangely attracted to heavy drinkers — her father and stepfather were both alcoholics, and so was her first husband and her last…

* Grandma never liked Mom. When Mom and Dad were courting, she advised him to bed my mother if he must, but, for God’s sake, don’t marry her. For once, Dad didn’t listen to her. She was hard on Mom all the years I knew her. She would sweep in and immediately start criticizing Mom’s housekeeping, her personal appearance, her weight, and how the house wasn’t up to her standards of cleanliness, always upsetting Mom…

* Dad should be writing a book telling the story of “Jewish conniving from beginning to end — or present,” she said. “Tell it in an interesting, readable style. Don’t be too intellectual for the general public, but, principally, DON’T ADOPT THE STYLE OF ROCKWELL by haranguing and trying to arouse the ignorant….”

* She became interested in creative writing while in Texas and spent two years as a student at the University of Texas in Austin. In 1964, she moved to Odessa, 30 miles west of Midland, and founded a monthly social magazine called “Odessan.” I was in high school and had gone to visit her but she had nothing planned for me to do when I got there, so I ended up helping her as she chronicled the social life of influential people in and around Odessa. She would go around and visit small businesses, attend social affairs and take pictures, documenting the happenings around town and selling advertising for the magazine as a way to fund it. She edited and published the magazine for 14 years. She also managed to write two novels and a number of short stories, but she was never able to get them published.

* Dad sharing stories with me and laughing like that was the closest I ever felt to him and, in all honesty, it is the only memory I have up to that point when he interacted with me in this way. I really admired him but was also very afraid of him. He still never touched me unless it was to hurt me and never said how he felt about me, except to explain to me why he was going to hit me. The only other thing he would talk about were the racist facts of life.

* I remember another neat experience with Dad when he decided to teach me how to make a bomb.

* I think in his own way Dad wanted to have a relationship with me but just didn’t know how.

* In the summer of 1971, he had embarked on an extraordinary series of articles that delivered detailed diagrams and instructions on how to make weapons that could kill and maim, explaining patiently in a professorial tone how to use each one efficiently. The articles, under the title “Revolutionary Notes” and “Patriot’s Notebook,” appeared in “Attack!” his publication aimed at high school and college students. He wrote that they were part of a new phase in the development of the Alliance that would involve “intensive organizing using the most radical and aggressive methods we can devise.”

* Dad had been stockpiling explosives in the crawl space of our house, in readiness for the race war he hoped would start soon. Mom knew about the cache and wanted it gone. She begged him time and again to get rid of it but, as usual, he ignored her. Then something happened, I don’t know what, but suddenly Dad gathered up all the explosives and dumped them in the Potomac River. Less than a week later, while he was at work, the doorbell rang. It was the FBI with a search warrant. Luckily for Dad, there was nothing to be found.

* Dad carried a terrible rage inside him and it didn’t take much to light his fuse. He would cuss like crazy when things went wrong, which was often. The smallest thing set him off, even having to replace a light bulb would spark a blue cuss-storm. But when he was discussing his beliefs, he never raised his voice. He was thoughtful with his choice of words, articulate and persuasive. When he explained things to me I was certain that he was right because he always seemed to make perfect sense.

* His favorite tipple was Black Label beer and he would buy it in quart-sized bottles. I guess his habit was becoming pretty expensive because I remember him trying his hand at brewing his own beer at home. He had saved at least 100 empty Black Label bottles and filled them with his homemade hooch. That didn’t last long, though, because one night he came home terribly drunk and threw up all over their bed. Not surprisingly, Mom was furious and perhaps he felt some shame, because after that night, he never had another drink, at least as far as we could tell.

* Dad’s political principles waxed and waned, depending on his needs at the time… When it suited his pocket, he portrayed himself as a revolutionary who would lead the White Race to the promised land and wouldn’t hesitate to use violence to wipe his enemies from the earth.

* Dad was flexible when it came to the media, too. Like an early Donald Trump, he reviled every journalist who ever drew breath, but courted their coverage at every turn. He would eagerly take calls from print reporters, play his part in documentaries and sit for interviews — especially if there were TV cameras present. It was as if he needed the attention, like some kind of validation of his value and his views. At the same time, he’d claim that the media was controlled by Jews bent on destroying the White Race and its culture, and fulminated mightily on the matter every chance he got.

* If there is one person who could readily believe Dad’s “seeker of truth” fantasy, it was Robert S. Griffin, a tenured professor of education at the University of Vermont. He wrote a hugely controversial book on Dad, which I have cited several times in this book, and quoted verbatim large tracts of my father’s venomous views. He was rebuked by the Southern Poverty Law Center for his “tedious regurgitation” of Dad’s words, and for being nothing more than a “fawning admirer” who let my father to get away with asserting that the Alliance was not a hate group, but simply “dedicated to the welfare and progress of our people.” I found the book almost impossible to finish, although it was amusing in parts to hear Dad spin his version of events and try to justify his behavior and beliefs. However, I cannot allow Griffin get away with his portrayal of my father as some benign, absent-minded professor with a fascinating insight into how the world really is…

Griffin contacted Dad in 1997, saying he wanted to write a book exploring where “culture and society” were headed and the role my father and his views played in it. Dad let Griffin stay with him at the compound for six weeks in the summer of 1998 while Griffin asked him softball questions for 30 hours and taped his answers for posterity. The result was a book titled “The Fame of a Dead Man’s Deeds,” taken from a line in an old Norse poem, which Griffin self-published in May, 2001. It was all a matter of ego for my father, but Griffin thought Dad saw him as a fellow academic who understood his views. For a while, Griffin claimed to be “simply a conduit” for Dad’s views and dismissed the idea that he was a racist himself. He said he was only an objective observer painting a portrait of my father and called his approach “cultural anthropology,” but as time has passed, his racist colors came shining through. Or, as Griffin calls it, his “ethnic pride.” Griffin has a website on which he promotes his articles, books and random thoughts. On watching white supremacists and neo-Nazis march in Charlottesville, Va., in August 2017 to chants of “the Jews will not replace us” and the old Nazi slogan of “Blood and Soil,” Griffin said his first reaction was “elation and gratitude” at how white people had organized, “standing up for their heritage and race, standing up for people like me, standing up for me.” It didn’t seem to matter to him that the marchers wore khaki uniforms and carried flaming torches and Nazi flags. He lauded their leadership, and their “remarkable dedication and courage,” and for putting themselves in “physical peril” where “they could have been shot,” he said…

But even in his adulation of Dad, he spotted “a menacing quality” about him. “There seems to be a pressure inside him, something brewing just beneath the surface, an anger perhaps,” Griffin wrote. “There is a hardness, a coldness, a potential for violence that I feel in him, and it makes me uneasy and uncomfortable.” His discomfort clearly didn’t last long. Two months before Dad died, Griffin spoke glowingly of his attributes. “He’s the most fascinating human being I’ve ever been around — ever,” he said. “Whatever you think of him, I found him to be a man of integrity and courage and dedication. And in his eyes he is doing the most important thing he can think of with his life. Those have become standards that I’ve applied to my own life.” (4) The SPLC called on the University of Vermont to condemn his writings and investigate his classroom activities. The university declined to do so. It said it had an obligation to protect “our faculty’s right to academic freedom and freedom of speech.” Griffin sees himself in a favorable light. Anyone who says he is a neo-Nazi is merely “name calling.” He describes himself as “curious and perceptive and thoughtful…an honorable person, persevering and courageous.” His tenured position at the university, he wrote on his website, “gives me more protection from attack than anybody I can think of.”

* My first real interaction with a black person came in 4th grade. I was sitting in my seat in Mrs. Carden’s class when she told us to go to the back of the room to retrieve our mid-morning snacks and then stepped out for a minute. I had just gotten my snack when I felt a staggering blow to my right jaw. I saw stars and my knees buckled. Clarence, a much bigger and older black boy in my class, threw the punch. I was terrified. I just stood there crying, my jaw throbbing, trying to process what had happened. Clarence was a trouble-maker and had been held back a couple of times but I’d never had a run-in with him and had done nothing to incite him…

It turned out that Clarence lived in “the ghetto” and I started seeing him a lot as I explored our neighborhood. I was scared to death of him and was always on the lookout for him, wherever I went. But sometimes that wasn’t enough. I would run into him while I was alone and far from home, then he would chase me and beat me up. He seemed to delight in terrorizing me. I started to hate blacks, just like Dad, but I kept my mouth shut.

* Another data point in my view on blacks was added when my bike was stolen after I ran home one day to get a snack during my paper route. Mom said she thought she knew where it was. We got into the car and she drove straight to “the ghetto.” She drove around slowly for a few minutes and then I saw a small black kid riding my bike on the sidewalk… Afterwards, I was amazed at how Mom just knew where my bike would be and how easy it was to get it back. Maybe Dad was right? Perhaps blacks were to be feared because of how they behaved?

* Dad was always coming up with new rules. One day he decided we couldn’t have Christmas anymore because he wasn’t going to have us worshipping some Jew. Mom pitched a fit.

* He also banned sports. Mom knew we were both terribly shy and sheltered and decided it would be good for us to be involved in a team sport, to expose us to other kids our age outside of our school activities.

* Dad was still beating me in seventh grade. I hated him for it and regularly fantasized about his death. By now, I knew many people loathed and despised him because of his beliefs and activities and I often prayed that someone would murder him, but no-one ever obliged me.

* Lying was my only way of dealing with him, despite the fact that it never worked.

* For a long time, Mom had been a reluctant participant in Dad’s work. She did all of his accounting and all of his typing. He wrote a lot and it was all hand-written. Whenever he needed anything typed, he would bring it home and ask her to do it for him, and she did it straight away, despite being exhausted from her full-time teaching job and being completely responsible for keeping the house clean and handling all family affairs.

* She put on the last bandage, then said quietly, “Never again!” Mom confronted Dad and said simply that he had beaten us for the last time. He said if he ever laid a finger on either of us again, she would leave and he would never see us again.

* Dad somehow derived strength from beating us up. He was like all the bullies at school, I realized. And, just like a bully, when Mom finally stood up to him, it sapped him of his strength, much as I had found out for myself at school… It was as if he no longer felt responsible for making us into what he was not, the perfect Aryan male. We were no longer his hunk of clay for molding, and he was no longer the creator.

* Dad was down in the dumps. It seemed no matter what he wrote or how he wrote it, he couldn’t stir the masses to revolt, he moaned over lunch with Revilo P. Oliver. It was 1974 and they were sitting in a restaurant in Washington, D.C. Oliver was a controversial classics professor at the University of Illinois, a leading white supremacist, and a founder of the John Birch Society, until he was expelled for his racist views.

* After listening to Dad complain, Oliver asked if he had ever tried writing fiction. Dad admitted that it had never occurred to him. Oliver opined that Dad would never be able to get his message across to the masses because most of the people he was trying to reach occupied “the lower rungs of society” and simply did not read non-fiction. But they might well read light, action-packed fiction, he said, and promised to send Dad an example of what he was talking about. (1) A little later, Dad received by mail a book called “The John Franklin Letters,” which Oliver is believed to have penned under a pseudonym years before. It was published in 1959 by the Birch Society and detailed the bloody deeds of one John Franklin, who forms an underground military group called the Rangers dedicated to killing bureaucrats, whom he called “Buros.” (Oliver shot himself in 1994, at age 86, suffering from leukemia and emphysema).

Skimming through Oliver’s book, Dad realized how easy it would be for him to write something similar.

* The two books were products of my father’s feverish mind, his sick, secret fantasies laid bare upon the page, but he didn’t have the courage to use his real name, instead writing under the pseudonym Andrew McDonald. He dreamed that his writings would spark a race war and he often fantasized about walking the streets at night, quietly, efficiently dispatching mixed-race couples, Jews, gays, and anyone else who didn’t fit his Aryan mold, mentally mapping out the route he would take each night.

* Strangely, I never picked up Dad’s loathing of Jews. They didn’t spark fear inside me, though I’m not sure why, given Dad’s all-consuming hatred of them. Perhaps it was because I’d had no personal interaction with Jewish people up to this point. While I was certainly brimming with hate, I chose to focus it on blacks, gays, and any type of authority figure who tried to exercise control over me.

* [FBI] Agents had watched Dad for years, but in February 1985 they got approval for a pen register that allowed them to log, but not record, all calls made from and received by a specific phone number — my father’s. With the trove of numbers they collected, agents fanned out to look into the lives of scores of people who had been in contact with the Alliance. Some couldn’t be traced but others were watched and questioned, their vehicle descriptions and license plate numbers noted, and their records scoured for any trace of criminal or suspicious activity. Enquiries expanded to Seattle, Birmingham, Charlotte, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Little Rock, Philadelphia, San Diego and San Francisco and Tulsa and scores of other cities and, at one point, agents from several field offices attended a meeting in Denver to set their investigative targets, priorities and goals.

* Dad was scouring magazines, looking for a new mountain mate. He could not live without a woman for long. She didn’t need to love him, and he certainly didn’t need to love her. His requirements were simple: sexual services, cook, clean and do whatever he needed to keep his writing flowing and the Alliance operation moving forward.

* He cited as an example one of Gliebe’s more memorable merchandise purchases — $50,000-plus on boots made in China with swastikas imprinted on their soles. Gliebe called them “a great investment.” (3). He also commissioned a calendar that was supposed to highlight Aryan female beauty but actually featured strippers from a club he patronized. Alliance members were further scandalized upon learning that he had married a former stripper. Another of my father’s favorites was Kevin Strom, the sound-engineer who recorded Dad’s white separatist broadcasts. Strom supervised the building of the compound’s sound and video studios and the installation of its phone and alarm system, which was buried underground to keep it safe from government attack. Dad trusted Strom and Strom liked Dad — his own father had hanged himself when Strom was in his 20s…

* Things started to unravel for Strom when he was arrested in 2007. Police had found images of child porn on his computer, with hundreds of photos of naked girls in “sexually suggestive positions.” He was charged with possessing child pornography. Two other charges of enticing a minor to perform sex acts and intimidating a witness were dismissed at trial.

* Now I know that we are more a product of our environment than the product of our genes.

From the Southern Poverty Law Center February 6, 2014:

Recent revelations from the current NA chairman, Erich Gliebe, and his former wife paint a more deviant portrait of William Pierce as a sex-starved, manipulative sociopath. Pierce, they say, ran naked around his compound, was obsessed with pornography (an industry he routinely blamed Jews for creating) and used his membership list as a dating service, trolling for twenty-something females foolish enough to apply for a “staff position” at the NA headquarters in rural West Virginia.

In a 3,800 word essay published online and on Facebook, Gliebe’s ex-wife, Erika, alleged Pierce once tricked a young woman into a sexual relationship with him on the false promise of having a family with her. The woman eventually learned Pierce had a vasectomy more than 30 years prior.

To a handful of insiders in the racist movement, this is old news. Erich Gliebe is known to have privately made most of the disclosures found in his ex-wife’s essay for years. And many of the charges seem to have been previously substantiated.

One of the women allegedly lured into a sexual relationship with Pierce, Suzanne Flynn, outlined Pierce’s betrayal in a post on the Instauration Yahoo Group message forum in February 2003. “I had been involved with Bill [William Pierce] for almost a year before I started worrying about why I wasn’t getting pregnant, whereupon he revealed that he had had a vasectomy over 30 years ago, right after his twin sons were born,” Flynn wrote.

Pierce, at the time of his relationship with Flynn, was still married to his fifth wife, Sevdi, who lived with him in a trailer on the NA property. Flynn was ostensibly hired as Pierce’s “assistant.” The two of them took up residence in a small cabin down the road from the NA compound. “He brought me to live with him in our own house in West Virginia while his last wife was leaving him,” Flynn wrote.

In the same post, Flynn threatened to release pornographic images and videos of her and William Pierce if Erich Gliebe did not return her vehicle and other property she left at the NA compound. “If [Gliebe] would return my car and my stuff to me, then I would happily not publish anything detrimental to the NA, i.e. nude interactive pictures, videos, etc., on my website, “http://www.nsrus.com,” Flynn wrote.

Erich Gliebe has also made disturbing disclosures about Pierce’s sexual appetites over the years. In a recorded conversation with Kevin Strom in April 2005, Gliebe claimed Pierce used to walk naked around the NA property and after his death, Gliebe said he discovered Pierce’s computers were “loaded with porn.”

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The Man Who Ran Washington: The Life and Times of James A. Baker III

James Baker had a life that worked. Success leaves clues. Baker valued family, relationships, community, religion, preparation, organization, and care. He played by the rules.

Here are some choice selections from this new book:

* Voting against Trump should have been an easy call for Baker. Trump, after all, was “a guy who’s his own worst enemy,” as Baker reminded us. “He can’t keep his mouth shut.” But Baker also was not quite ready to walk away from the party to which he had devoted so many years. He knew what it felt like when political power shifted and he knew that it was much better to be on the winning side. He had fought against the Reagan Revolution inside the Republican Party on behalf of Gerald Ford and George Bush, then became the revolution’s most capable executor as Reagan’s White House chief of staff. As Bush’s secretary of state, he had watched the unraveling of the Soviet Union and its empire in Eastern Europe, another revolution that Baker did not start but figured out how to channel. The lesson he had taken from these events was simple and it was clear: When the tectonic plates of history move, move with them.

When it came to Trump and the nationalist-populist backlash that he represented, however, Baker just could not decide. It was only days before the election, and he went back and forth. At the end of our long conversation, after touching on Middle East peacemaking and the inner machinations of the Bush White House and the bipartisan prayer group he used to attend on Capitol Hill, we circled back to the subject at hand.

Could Jim Baker, the very definition of the establishment, really vote for Donald Trump?

* DELEGATE HUNTER, campaign manager, White House chief of staff, treasury secretary, and secretary of state, James Addison Baker III played a leading role in some of the most critical junctures in modern American history. For a quarter century, every Republican president relied on Baker to manage his campaign, his White House, his world. Baker brought them to power or helped them stay there, then steered them through the momentous events that followed. He was Washington’s indispensable man.

Any chronicle of the modern presidency would find Baker at the heart of virtually every chapter, for his was an unmatched case study in the acquisition, exercise, and preservation of power in late-twentieth-century America and into the first decade of the twenty-first. He was the campaign operative who secured the Republican nomination for Gerald Ford against a relentless challenge from the right by Ronald Reagan in 1976, then four years later managed George Bush’s first presidential campaign, which proved successful enough to earn Bush the vice presidency and Baker a spot by the new president’s side. He set up and ran Reagan’s White House as chief of staff for four years, securing many of the achievements that shaped the legacy of the fortieth president. In Reagan’s second term, with nothing more than an undergraduate course in economics, he took over as secretary of the treasury and rewrote the American tax code from top to bottom in collaboration with leading Democrats. He returned to the campaign trail in 1988 to win the presidency for Bush in a harshly negative election that foreshadowed some of the political nastiness of races to come, then switched back into statesman mode as America’s top diplomat, from which perch he effectively managed the most tumultuous period in international politics since World War II.

Over the following few years, as Washington presided over the end of the Cold War, Baker shaped a new American approach to a reordered world. Through it all, he was the archetype of a style of American politics and governance that today seems lost, an approach focused on compromise over confrontation, deal-making over disagreement and pragmatism over purity. He negotiated with Democrats at home and Soviets abroad, assembled the coalition that won the Gulf War and brokered the reunification of Germany in the heart of Europe. He was the “gold standard” among White House chiefs of staff, as virtually everyone put it, and went on to become the most consequential secretary of state since Henry Kissinger. In short, he was the un-Trump.

* “WASHINGTON LOVES the ones who grease its gears. But history only remembers the ones who shift them,” the late Washington Post writer Marjorie Williams wrote of Baker. The man she profiled in the Post’s Style section upon his ascension to secretary of state in January 1989 was confident in his stature in the imperial capital at its twilight-of-the-Cold-War apogee, yet insecure enough to wake up each morning ready for battle to prove it. He represented the city’s ideal of itself, a relentless but nonetheless patrician competitor willing to drink a Scotch with his rivals after hours, an Ivy League country-clubber equally at home in tennis whites or toting a shotgun to a duck blind in predawn Texas. This Baker was a master of Washington at the end of almost a decade at its heights; he was smooth and smart and disciplined, “a man in whom drive is more important than destination,” as Williams wrote, but also a gentleman for whom recklessness was as inconceivable as incivility. Baker was a “player,” the capital’s ultimate accolade, and no matter what the game, he figured out a way to come out on top. As Haley Barbour, who worked in the Reagan White House with Baker and went on to become chairman of the Republican National Committee and governor of Mississippi, observed to us, “In the two-party system, purity is the enemy of victory, and Jim Baker was a winner.”

* He excelled not just in the Washington arts of self-promotion, palace intrigue, and blame-shifting (although he was world-class at all of them), but also in putting them into service for the real art of the deal, whether it was saving Social Security with congressional Democrats or persuading Soviet leaders to allow two Germanys to become one again or jaw-boning Arab sheikhs into contributing so much money for the liberation of Kuwait that the Gulf War against Iraq became the first American conflict to nearly turn a profit.

He divided problems into three categories, according to David Gergen, a former adviser from his White House days: easy; hard but doable; and impossible. The first category he left to others, the last he wrote off, and the middle is where he focused his energies. As inconceivable as it seems amid our state of endless partisan warfare, getting things done was in fact the currency of the realm in the Washington of Baker’s era and this is what drove him with a ruthless focus and confidence that infuriated others who were ideologically purer and far less effective. Washington has and always will be a town that struggles between outcomes and principles; it is a place where compromise is both necessary and invariably suspect. Did Baker actually stand for anything other than his own advancement? Was it just power for power’s sake? What would he be willing to give up to cut a deal? His critics were not the only ones to wonder. But what was remarkable about Baker was the extent to which his deals stuck.

At the end of his run, when the Berlin Wall had fallen and the Soviet Union was no more, when colleagues from the Reagan White House were out of the power game entirely or writing bitter memoirs about the Iran-contra scandal, Baker had somehow escaped the humbling comedown that is usually a part of the Washington narrative. Instead, Baker’s reputation only grew in the years of gridlock and dysfunction that followed, and he has more recently become a figure of surprisingly bipartisan nostalgia for a different time and a different sort of leadership. “He was the most important unelected official since World War II,” the former national security adviser Tom Donilon, a Democrat, told us.

* “Baker somehow understood the billiards of politics, understood the ricochets,” said Hedrick Smith, who followed him in the 1980s for The New York Times. “He understood how balls careened off each other.” Baker knew when not to exercise power, too, whether it was letting his outmaneuvered White House rival Ed Meese save face with a symbolic but meaningless title or avoiding the temptation to gloat to the Soviets about their geopolitical humiliation.

* Baker did not come to American politics animated by a desire to save the world or even much of a worldview at all, and most of what the law had taught him before he entered public life was about the perils of risk-taking. He was profoundly careful—“Mr. Caution,” his close adviser, Margaret Tutwiler, dubbed him. “A shrink would have a field day with Jim Baker,” Tutwiler observed. “The man is so realistic, without emotion, that even though he’s an emotional, sensitive guy, sometimes it’s so clinical. But he lives in the real, real world. He does not delude himself over fairy tales.” Dispassionate and ever to the point, Baker brought discipline and endless handwritten lists to the challenge of running the world. He was “somebody who likes making order out of chaos,” as his son Will Winston put it. He defined himself as the opposite of an ideologue. “I didn’t have any overarching paradigm for politics,” Baker told us as he reflected on his career years later. “My view was you try to get things done.”

It was in the doing, then, that Baker excelled, in his genius ability to read what others required in a situation and find a way to give some version of that to them while still walking away from the table with whatever prize he sought. Baker was a compulsive winner, but he also had a way of making rivals feel like they had not entirely been defeated. “The Velvet Hammer,” his cousin Preston Moore called him, and Baker was much more pleased when Time used that phrase to headline another cover story about him, this time referring to him not as The Handler but as “a gentleman who hates to lose.” Anyone who had ever tangled with him knew that was true. Baker was that way because of who he was and where he came from, and it was his strange luck, and the country’s, that he happened to be ready to leave his hometown and legal career behind at just the moment when the entire Republican elite had been decimated by Richard Nixon’s Watergate disaster.

And here the story was rich, complex, and surprising in ways we did not expect. The man who would dominate Washington turned out to be an accidental political savant. He did not spend his childhood obsessing over electoral votes or memorizing congressional district boundaries. His Texas clan had viewed politics as a dirty business ever since the Civil War, when the family patriarch, a slave-holding Alabama émigré, had been booted out of a Texas judgeship after the Confederacy’s defeat. “This is not a man who sat back and read Machiavelli or read the great books about influence and power,” noted David Gergen. “It just came naturally to him.”

* Baker had simply never developed the touch of a candidate. “He was the worst retail politician I’ve ever seen,” Jim Barlow, who covered the campaign for the Houston Chronicle, reflected years later. “It’s not that he was a snob. He didn’t feel right in forcing himself on people.” Baker was so uncomfortable with small talk that when the two of them were alone on long flights around the state in a tiny campaign airplane, Barlow taught him gin rummy to avoid awkward silences.

* Baker had missed the moment. He was right that Texas was changing—1978 would be the year that Texas really began transforming from a solid Democratic state into a solid Republican one.

* The discussion was to be held at 10:45 a.m. on a Sunday in 1979. The subject: If George Bush ran for president, what were his chances?

In keeping with his father’s preparation mantra, Baker had a six-page paper drawn up by aides to guide the conversation, a brutally honest assessment of the prospective candidate’s strengths and weaknesses. His plan was to distribute it among the Bush advisers who would attend the meeting, then collect copies back after it was over to prevent leaks.

* Baker was nothing if not organized. Tapped by his friend to put together a national campaign, he set about the task with typically painstaking preparation—assembling a staff, drafting a budget, developing a fundraising plan, crafting a message.

* If handling the family were not awkward enough, there was also the matter of the candidate’s longtime personal assistant, Jennifer Fitzgerald, who was quickly making enemies on the campaign staff. Fitzgerald, an attractive young divorcée, first met Bush while working at the Republican National Committee a few years earlier. Neither spoke of it publicly but it was clear a personal relationship of some closeness developed. Bush even called Fitzgerald regularly one summer at the beach house in North Carolina she was sharing, according to a housemate later contacted by the reporter Susan Page. He brought her to China as his personal secretary and then to the CIA. Many who worked for him over the years wondered about their relationship. Bush, a flirt with a habit of bottom-squeezing attractive women he encountered, repeatedly sought out Fitzgerald despite the questions it raised and any pain it caused Barbara. Colleagues often interpreted Fitzgerald’s airs as a sign that she was the boss’s secret girlfriend. Whether they actually had an affair was never clear; one person in Bush’s inner circle told Page that they had a romantic relationship for a dozen years. Both denied it to Bush’s biographer, Jon Meacham. Baker always professed not to know—but did not rule it out.

* Managing a candidate with a shaky command of facts and a disconcerting penchant for confusing movie tales with real life, Reagan’s team feared putting him onstage without a script for an hour or more, unsure if he would be nimble enough to parry a sitting president far better schooled in the nuances of policy. Nancy Reagan, among others, totally opposed debates. But as the fall wore on, Baker pressed Reagan to take on the president and the California advisers increasingly came to the conclusion that they had to accept at least one or two forums, if only because polls suggested that Reagan still needed to close the deal with the public. “We can’t run out the clock when we don’t have the football,” said Drew Lewis, who ran Reagan’s campaign in Pennsylvania.

* Michael Deaver later credited Baker with convincing Reagan to debate Anderson. Either way, Baker thought the visual would work to Reagan’s benefit—Carter would look afraid by not showing up. And he counted on Reagan’s winning personality to shine against Anderson’s dour persona. On the night of the debate in Baltimore on September 21, Baker gave Reagan a card just before he went onstage with one word of advice: “Chuckle.” As it turned out, Anderson proved a good sparring partner for Reagan to warm up against. “It sort of wiped Anderson out,” Baker said. “He was, after all, a Republican, and he was a terrible debater and he was a colorless guy.”

* Reagan’s team wanted a date as late as possible, figuring that the closer to the election, the better. Baker went so far as to propose that the debate be held on the night before the election. Carter rejected that, assuming that Reagan would make a blunder and wanting more time for any gaffe to sink in with the public. They settled on October 28 at the Cleveland Convention Center—still late enough in the campaign that it played in Reagan’s favor. “We were outfoxed by Jim Baker in agreeing to it so close to the election,” Stuart Eizenstat, a top Carter adviser, later concluded. More importantly, in Eizenstat’s view, Baker’s ability to convince Reagan to debate in the first place proved decisive. “His confidence in his candidate may have assured his election,” he said. Carter also came to believe that Baker had gotten the better of him. “He out-traded the people who were representing me at the time,” he said years later.

* Trump is many things, one of which has been an extraordinary X-ray into the soul of others as they react to him and the challenges he poses to the American political system. In Baker’s case, Trump had revealed the limits of the mythology that had grown up around the man. Democrats might embrace Baker’s pragmatic approach to the world. Democrats might embrace Baker’s pragmatic approach to the world. But in the end, he was a Republican and that, he told us, was how he wanted to be remembered. His struggle reflected the larger one by the party he had helped build. Once anathema to its leaders, Trump effectively captured the party, forcing it to toe the line, with dissidents crushed or exiled. Much more than in Baker’s time, Washington had become a place of tribes, with a permanent war of us against them.

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Trump Leaves Hospital

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* There’s an endearing quality about Trump.

He doesn’t give a damn. He just says f*** it, I’m going for a joyride.

Meanwhile, everyone in the media’s head is exploding in flames.

The absurdity, bizarreness, and sheer hilariousness of the whole thing is surreal.

I, for one, am so grateful that I have an opportunity to be alive in this era. The entertainment value cannot be overstated.

* Did the left just now take losing their minds to a new dimension?

The doctor’s and other personnel at a military hospital of this stature, would never cover for a dishonest political trick even if the president requested it. And given the MSM’s deep dislike of Trump, they would never cover for him.either.

To think that this is some kind of hoax is beyond absurd.

* The media, of course, is already spinning this video as “Trump selfishly endangers health of Secret Service drivers.” For normal humans, however, it’s a great piece of theater, as well as (hopefully) a sign that the President is on the mend.

* Trump recorded that video at around 7pm Saturday 10/3. That was roughly Day 2 of the Wuhan Death Cooties which is essentially a version of the flu. The last time I had the flu, on Day 2 I was lying in bed, sweating like a pig, struggling to get a breath, not moving other than to take care of the necessary bodily functions.

The idea of getting out of bed on Day 2, putting on a suit and tie and recording a video regardless of the necessity of doing so would have been completely unthinkable.

And now the doctors are saying he might be discharged tomorrow, Day 4 of the Cooties.

Trump demonstrated once again what a stud he is.

* This morning I was watching the Sunday Morning show on CBS and Ted Koppel was interviewing a guy who was bemoaning the influence of “right wing” commentators like Ben Shapiro, who are now getting many more Facebook hits that “reputable” news providers like the NY Times. My son, who is not particularly Trumpian, happened to be in the room and he said something like, “I would have a lot more sympathy if the MSM hadn’t thrown away its own credibility and neutrality.” And to prove his point, he clicked over to the CNN web page and sure enough the lede was some sort of hysterical anti-Trump headline.

* After spending months denying the dangers of COVID-19, Trump is expressing an emotion aides have rarely seen: fear. On Friday, Trump grew visibly anxious as his fever spiked to 103 fahrenheit and he was administered oxygen at the White House, according to three Republicans close to the White House. Two sources told me Trump experienced heart palpitations on Friday night—possible side effects of the experimental antibody treatment he received. Trump has wondered aloud if he could defeat the disease. “Am I going out like Stan Chera?” Trump has asked aides, referring to his friend, New York real-estate developer Stan Chera, who died of COVID in April.

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Football for a Buck: The Crazy Rise and Crazier Demise of the USFL

Jeff Pearlman writes in this 2018 book:

* During camp the Invaders stayed at a Red Lion Inn, and one night one of the leaders of the team’s regular Bible-study group was caught having anal sex with a prostitute against the railing outside his room. “We were a beautiful mess,” said Plummer. “We’d be on that church bus, mooning people out the back windows. We had guys like Ray and Cedrick who were actually listed as player-coaches. What they’d do is, if they got too drunk the night before practice, they wouldn’t practice the next day and say, ‘Hell, I’m just a coach today.’ That was a saying for ‘I’m hung over, man.’”

* Throughout his storied coaching career, [George] Allen was infamous for seeking out every possible advantage—legality and morality nonfactors. In his days leading the Redskins, he became a PhD-level practitioner of football espionage. Among other things, Allen wiretapped visiting locker rooms. He installed tinted one-way glass in the facility so he could look in on opposing coaches unobserved. He ordered his defensive and offensive linemen to lather the front of their uniforms with Vaseline, thereby making them impossible to grip. He messed with the temperature controls of the visiting locker rooms—on a hot day, the furnaces blasted; on icy afternoons, the heat magically failed to operate. All USFL teams were required to submit player contracts to the league. The Blitz had two sets of contracts for most of their veteran standouts—the ones with lower figures that were presented to league offices to appease the USFL’s financial concerns, and the real contracts, with eye-popping bonuses. “George Allen did what he felt he had to do,” said George Heddleston, future general manager of the Pittsburgh Maulers. “And no one would dare stop him.”

* “It was strange, because I’ve run into softer walls than Herschel . . . the guy was all muscle,” said Danny Rich, an Express linebacker. “There was one play I remember most. The Generals handed the ball to Herschel, and I reached in and grabbed his crotch and twisted it as hard as I could. And he puts this kind of kung fu grip on my wrist. I’m grabbing his wiener, he’s grabbing my wrist. I’m now trying to yank my hand away, and he stands up and just points at me. Doesn’t say a word. He was a baaaad man. They needed to use him.”

* The USFL was exceeding its rival league’s expectations, and the increasingly concerned NFL knew it. The new rules—in particular the two-point conversion—were well received, and the bright uniforms and fresh nicknames felt invigorating and lively. If the 1980s was the era of blissful, colorful, dynamic excess, the USFL was the football league of blissful, colorful, dynamic excess. Unlike the NFL, the USFL refused to penalize for excessive celebrations. If a player wanted to moonwalk in the end zone, he would be allowed—no, encouraged—to do so. Balls were spiked over the goalposts. Pretend grenades were tossed into a circle of pantomiming linemen. Funkadelic handshakes, head bobs, butt shakes—all embraced by a league in love with televised highlights. “At the time the NFL was the no-fun league,” said Charley Steiner, the Generals’ broadcaster. “The USFL saw that and flipped it on its head. I’d get calls on occasion from the league office—‘Why don’t you come on over?’ And we would sit around in Chet’s office. And one day they’d say, ‘What do you think about two-point conversion?’ and ‘What do you think about a replay and a red flag?’ It was always the same—‘Sure, why the hell not?’ It was so cool. We were just shooting the shit. ‘What do you think about wide receivers not wearing numbers in the 80s, but single digits?’—and that’s the way these things evolved. Everything was on the table.”

* Early on during training camp, [John] Corker—nicknamed Sack Man—gathered the team in a circle and guided the Panthers in prayer. “He started praying like a Baptist black preacher,” said Dave Tipton, a defensive tackle, “and I thought, Wow, Corker must walk with the Lord.” Not quite. Blessed with the world’s largest penis, Corker never shied away from showing it off to fellow Panthers. “The biggest johnson in the USFL,” said Matt Braswell, the team’s center. “We had women reporters come into the locker room, and Corker would position himself so he was in full view of any females. He had this vat of Nivea skin cream, and he would just make sure to completely rub it and moisturize it.” Corker operated on a clock that required only two to three hours of sleep per night, and was powered by the dual fuels of alcohol and cocaine.

* “After games ended a couple of us would do a sweep of the room to make sure no one forgot anything,” said D. J. Mackovets, the team’s media relations director. “So there’s this one time I’m walking out of the locker room with Jack and I hear this player yell, ‘Oh, no! Here comes coach!’ Well, there were a group of players beneath the stands with a hooker, and she was giving all of them blow jobs before they got on the bus.”

* Trump knew little about football but everything about headlines and eyeballs. During the 1984 season, for example, he dressed the Brig-a-Dears, New Jersey’s cheerleading squad, in the USFL’s skimpiest outfits, making them look, in one member’s words, “like hookers. The outfits fitted poorly in the back and exposed too much.” By most accounts, the uniforms were tasteless and prone to vaginal/breast exposure—and Trump loved it. “He was an attention whore,” said Jerry Argovitz, owner of the Gamblers. “No spotlight was too bright.”

* In the end, the USFL was like a really fun, good-looking college girlfriend. You dig her at the time, don’t cry when it’s over, and forever look back fondly. —Tom Vasich, Los Angeles Express season-ticket holder

* All told, the NFL featured 158 ex-USFL players in 1986, and their arrivals brought forth unprecedented levels of both excitement and awkwardness… The USFL produced 60 Pro Bowlers and two Super Bowl MVPs, as well as four Hall of Famers (Young, White, Kelly, and Gary Zimmerman, the Express offensive lineman). Dozens of NFL head and assistant coaches got their starts in the USFL, and Steve Spurrier went from guiding the Tampa Bay Bandits to becoming one of the great coaches in college-football history. The Buffalo Bills reached four straight Super Bowls in the 1990s behind the personnel genius of general manager Bill Polian (Chicago Blitz), the coaching of Marv Levy (Chicago Blitz), the quarterbacking of Kelly (Houston Gamblers), the blocking of center Kent Hull (New Jersey Generals), and the tackling of linebacker Ray Bentley (Michigan Panthers and Oakland Invaders). Halfback Emmitt Smith of the three-time-champion Dallas Cowboys regularly found himself finding daylight behind left guard Nate Newton (Tampa Bay Bandits). Though Doug Flutie’s NFL career was somewhat spotty, he is a three-time Grey Cup champion and widely regarded as one of the finest players in Canadian Football League history.

* The NFL adopted both the two-point conversion and the coach’s challenge from the USFL, and when the league expanded into Jacksonville and Tennessee (first Memphis, then Nashville), USFL veterans took enormous pride.

* What often gets lost in the aftermath of success stories, however, is the $1 smothering of dreams. For every Jim Kelly and Herschel Walker, there are hundreds of professional football players and coaches (and administrators and cheerleaders and popcorn vendors) whose careers ended the moment the USFL ceased to exist. What ever became of Nat Hudson and Ronnie Estay? How about Todd Dillon and Johnnie Dirden? Ken Bungarda, anyone? Sylvester Moy? Sel Drain? “It was a sickening feeling,” said Marcus Bonner, a Gunslingers halfback. “Like someone was punching you in the stomach and stealing your joy.” “I have a team photo that I’ve looked at every day for thirty years,” said Bruce Miller, a Breakers defensive back who never reached the NFL. “It still hurts. There were so many of us who moved their families, who enrolled their kids in school—and then it died. I’ve never seen more grown men cry.”

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Trump Tests Positive

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* What’s the angle to play here? If Trump sails through with few or no ill effects it shows the public that the virus isn’t really all that bad and/or that Trump is in better shape than Biden and/or that hydroxychloroquine works, just like he’s always said.

And how the hell is Biden going to survive an exposure to the virus? I would imagine that eventually every major politician is going to get COVID, just because meeting with lots and lots of people is part of the job description.

OTOH, if the virus takes Trump I’m not sure that having Mike Pence at the top of the ticket would be a bad thing…

* Weird that the market is dropping. Did the marker think Trump was going to be peacefully re-elected?

* Remember when Dan Savage went around licking doorknobs to infect Gary Bauer with the flu?

This has the Left’s fingerprints all over this.

* Chances are good that Trump will beat Covid. He will get the best treatment available. Plus, he is very healthy. He has unbelievable stamina. But if he dies MAGA will go nuts. For sure they will believe their god-emperor was murdered.

* How is Boris Johnson doing?

Last December he was said to be a political genius who’d finally solved Brexit. I don’t hear that kind of talk about him anymore.

* Masks do both. Especially if you are wearing a real N95 mask and not a rag over your face. They may not be 100% effective in stopping all incoming (or outgoing) droplets but they reduce the viral load.

The way a mask works is not like a spaghetti sieve. Rather on a microscopic level it looks like a forest of trees and the droplets are like skiers going down a ski slope. If it is a dense forest, most of the skiers are going to go splat on one of the trees before they make it to the bottom of the slope. Air can flow in between the spaces of the trees.

How seriously you become infected depends in part on how big of a whiff of virus you got in the first place. This is why some otherwise young and healthy doctors died in the early stages of the pandemic, before it was widely understood what was going on – they received massive doses of the virus from people in a highly infectious phase and it overwhelmed their immune system.

Once the virus is inside of you it becomes a race between the virus reproducing exponentially and your immune system kicking in. Getting a big dose gives the virus a head start in the race – instead of 1, 2, 4, 8 it becomes 1024, 2048, 4096, 8192 – you get to big numbers much faster. Masks reduce the # of particles that you inhale – not 100% but up to 95% and this makes a big difference in how sick you get. A small # of virus particles may even be caught by your innate immune system (mucus membranes, etc.) and you don’t get infected at all.

* Trump’s BP is given as 121/79.

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