Author Archives: ricncaric

Besides the basic info on my twitter profile, I let folks know my view that “Dems Need to Be More Aggressive.” I still think that the Biden administration and the DNC need to be more partisan in promoting their programs and fighting right-wing disinformation. For example, the Biden administration and DNC have been pushing the theme of “not a single Republican voted for” key Biden administration bills from the American Recovery Act in 2021 to the recent Inflation Reduction Act. But that’s very generic and consequently unsatisfactory. The Biden people need to name names of Republicans who vote against popular bills.

There was no lack of Biden administration aggression yesterday though.

Early yesterday evening, Trump filed a lawsuit seeking several things:

1. A Special Master to review documents for executive privilege and attorney client privilege;
2. A detailed inventory of items seized during the search.
3. Return of any information taken from Trump’s property that went beyond the scope of the search warrant.

As with anything linked to Trump and the law, he’s advancing audacious legal claims in search of sympathetic right-wing judges while also trying to politicize his dispute with the Department of Justice and the FBI.

That’s what Trump did with the Mueller investigation and it worked for him.

What Trump and the Republicans are finding out though is that the Democrats have caught up with the politicizing game and both the Jan. 6 Committee and Department of Justice have been engaged in selective leaking of “shocking new evidence.”

And this time, the hammer came down quickly.

Trump filed his suit in the early evening and it was still pretty early in the evening that the New York Times published a report (with Maggie Haberman as lead author) that the FBI had discovered 300 classified documents among the materials that Trump had originally taken from the White House to Mar-a-Lago.

In total, the government has recovered more than 300 documents with classified markings from Mr. Trump since he left office, the people said: that first batch of documents returned in January, another set provided by Mr. Trump’s aides to the Justice Department in June and the material seized by the F.B.I. in the search this month.

Here’s Eric Swalwell (D-CA) learning about the New York Times report report while being interviewed on MSNBC.

The reporting of Haberman, et al, was based on information from “multiple people briefed on the matter.” I’m not sure whether the information on Trump holding classified documents was a leak or not and I’m not sure who would have been the informants if there was a leak.

And I’m not sure it matters either.

The main fact is that filed a publicity seeking law suit yesterday afternoon but his lawsuit was swamped a couple hours later by a major story about him stealing classified documents that was based on information from people connected to the investigation.

And there’s been no defense from Trump, his legal team, or Fox News.

The only noticeable thing I’ve seen today is Lindsey Graham bleating that “Trump is too old to go to jail.”

Don’t Mess with the DOJ!

Last night, a twitter figure who goes by “Jon Bois” (and has 250,000+ followers) tweeted about how he and many of his friends had lied about have college degrees, fooled employers into hiring them, and now had good lives. I couldn’t tell whether “Jon_Bois” was male, female, trans, or non-binary and couldn’t discern the party politics involved in his tweet either. But I thought the tweet was significant as an embodiment of the “ethic of scamming” that’s emerging among white guys and has special appeal among younger white conservatives.

I should have screen shotted the “John Bois” tweet so I could copy it into this blog. But I forgot and the tweet was deleted by the time I started working on my blog again this morning. Yet another reason why I don’t have 250,000 followers. In another tweet, Jon Bois himself explains the deletion.

@jon_bois, Aug 13, i’m gonna delete a tweet i don’t feel good about. i suggested lying about having a degree on your resume. among other things, being a white guy, pulling something like that is firmly in “easy for me to say” territory. it was dumb of me. thanks to those of you who checked me on it

Still, I think that an ethic of white guy scamming is emerging as a thing in the United States and want to discuss. During my 1990-2020 teaching career at Morehead State in KY, I began to notice in the late 1990’s that college achievement was becoming more and more “uncool” among white males and that the archetype of a smart, athletic, leadership-oriented guy who both worked and partied hard was disappearing among my students. The male leadership types were replaced by women who were confident, hard-working, set the tone for student discussion in my classes, and got the best grades as result. The top ten government students were identified every year and it seemed that 7-8 out of the top ten were women every year beginning in the late 90’s. When I started teaching honors students, it was the same with about 8 out of 10 honors students being women.

My perception was that guys had been outpaced by ambitious women since high school, were no longer willing to compete, and had decided that the whole idea of excelling academically was bullshit. The problems of the Great Recession, soaring student loan debt, and the introduction of critical perspectives on male violence, white supremacy, and LGBT issues as well as right-wing politics have all since contributed to white male antagonism toward college education.

But the root has always been the revulsion at having to compete with women.

With Trump having been defeated and Joe Biden in the Oval Office, the antagonism toward college has started to morph into an ethic of white male scamming through life as an alternative to gaining the qualifications traditionally associated with a college education. Last December, at a meeting sponsored by his Turning Point USA organization, conservative activist Charlie Kirk downplayed the value of college in making connections helpful for a career: “As you age you realize you really only had one or two friends in co9llege–most of these people are not important.” Of course, this is a very mistaken. Government and corporate employers all over the country require college degrees and ramped up their requirements for educational attainment as a result of the Great Recession. But Kirk implicitly poses the counter-argument that conservative politics can serve as an alternative economy in which white men can thrive without college degrees. There’s some truth to this in the sense that conservative media stalwarts like Kirk himself, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Joe Rogan all failed to finish undergraduate degrees and went on to success in conservative media. But white men are a large demographic and there’s reason to question whether conservative politics is big enough to support conservative white men. That’s also a problem for other conservative alternatives such as welding, plumbing, and electrical work. All those fields have relatively high wages and shortages of applicants but there are far from being enough openings to absorb the masses of alienated white conservative men. What’s the average white guy to support himself if he doesn’t want college?

Tucker Carson has the answer–FAKE IT. “like drop out of college . . .Get married . . . Have more children than you can afford. Take a job you’re not qualified for, Like Go Balls Out! You know just go Balls Out.” Where the underlying suggestion from Charlie Kirk was to work in the conservative grift, Carlson is about scamming as a way of life. As I listened to the interview, the implication was for men to drop out of college and then lie about their credentials when they were applying for jobs. Carlson makes it all seem like “shits and giggles” but the main way for men to rush into “achievement,” “responsibility,” and “commitment” without acquiring credentials is to fake the credentials. The idea of marrying young and quickly (“if you’re compatible with someone, and you can smell that, you can make it work.”) also has an air of faking it–as if compatibility can just be assumed rather than established through dating or (God forbid!) a relationship.

Not unlike Jordan Peterson, Carlson sees young men as having a problem with responsibility: “young people . . . , particularly boys, like run from responsibility.” and proposes dropping out of college, early marriage, and big families as a solution. But where Peterson’s solution is to start small (“make your bed”), Carlson wants young men to think big in the sense of going all out for 50’s heterosexual marriage. That’s even though he doesn’t expect young men to have had much if anything in terms of prior relationships or qualifications for the middle-class/professional jobs that would make it possible for men to support the families he wants them to have. That’s where scamming comes in. As difficult as heterosexuality is for young men, the ethic of scamming makes it possible to dream.

Having started writing once again on the blackface bands of the 1840’s, I am now re-starting the writing journal part of “Early Blackface Writing, etc.” Life happened in the form of the holidays, my wife’s retirement, a family brush with Covid, a couple of academic papers, and the process of getting a book contract. But I restarted this part of the book manuscript on Monday and have been pushing at it hard.

The first of the blackface bands was the Virginia Minstrels which I discussed back in February when I addressed some of the phallic dimensions of this classic picture from 1843. One of the convenient aspects of doing research on the popular culture of the 1840’s is that the image has not changed even if my interpretation is constantly challenged. White performers liberating the white penis by attributing a fertile universality to the black penises of their blackface selves is still a difficult concept for me to even articulate let alone grasp in its full context.

But I’ve also moved forward and have indeed worked my way through more than three pages of writing this week in relation to “Ol’ Dan Tucker,” the most prominent song of the Virginia Minstrels. Here’s several verses found in the online Lester Levy Songsheet Collection at the John Hopkins University Libraries.

What I find troubling and interesting about 1840’s minstrelsy is the celebration of black men suffering and dying. In this version of “Ol Dan Tucker,” Tucker “swallowed a hogshead molasses down/the molasses worked de hogshead bust/And he went up in a thunder gust.” An 1847 version has Tucker riding ” a steam engine/One night he laid across a track/An de locomotive cum an’ brake his back.” There were other verses on the humiliation of Ol’ Dan Tucker but these stanzas on Tucker’s spectacular death strike me have a revolting happiness and joy about them.

Which makes them hell to write about.

Researching blackface is stressful and I felt so polluted during my first six weeks on the topic in 2010 that I wanted to take a shower every time I emerged from the archives.

Sometimes I think I did.

But researching blackface is not as painful as writing about it. I had brain surgery as an infant, grew up in an abusive family, and have been in therapy most of my adult life. When I first started therapy, it was because of the eye pain symptoms, I experienced almost any time I tried to read during my first year of grad school. But dreams of my father torturing me soon followed and lasted for close to 20 years before abating in the later 1990’s while my daughters were little. What writing about minstrelsy does is put me back into a state of intense vulnerability where my normal sense of my body and the environment is disturbed and discomfited enough that I have to stop writing and usually take short naps to recompose myself so I can get back to work.

My situation is certainly not the same as Harry Potter’s in the Prisoner of Azkhaban. I’m not being attacked by a dangerous, magical creature like the dementors and I haven’t fainted like Harry Potter did when the dementor attacked him on the Hogwart’s Express. But Harry began to hear his mother’s screams as his lessons on repelling dementors advanced with Professor Lupin and that is what I’ve started to hear as I take little breaks from my writing on blackface–a screaming from no place of which I know and directed to no one I’m aware of.

Just screaming .

Perhaps that screaming will continue to occur. Perhaps it won’t. Perhaps the episodes where I hear screaming will take shape and direction. Then again, maybe they won’t. And perhaps there’s a connection to the pain and anxiety I experienced growing up, the dreams of being tortured by my father, or the various panic attack and depressive episodes I’ve gone through. That’s likely the case but those connections might remain opaque and indiscernible as well.

But I do know that my writing on blackface minstrelsy does have a vital connection to my mental history as a whole.

Robert E. Crimo III has been charged with 7 counts of murder in relation to his July 4 assault on the Fourth of July parade in his home town of Highland Park, IL about 30 miles northwest of Chicago.

Hours after gunfire interrupted the Highland Park, Illinois, July Fourth parade, killing seven people and wounding dozens more, police apprehended the man they believe was responsible. Robert “Bobby” E. Crimo III, 21, faces seven charges of first-degree murder in connection with the shooting, which authorities said he allegedly carried out by climbing onto the rooftop of a nearby business and opening fire minutes after the parade started, sending paradegoers and participants running for safety.

Except for right-wing propagandists like Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham, the political discourse on how to stop the deluge of mass murders begins with gun access. People like Crimo III, Buffalo shooter Payton Gendron, and Uvalde murderer Salvador Ramos both signaled that their intent to commit mass murder and readily obtained high powered weapons to carry out their crimes. Like Gendron and Ramos, Crimo III had AR-15 assault rifles in his possession. and, in Crimo’s case it was his father who backed his application for a gun license.

While I do not want to de-emphasize gun access, more meaningful attention needs to be given to the sub-cultures of mass murder that are developing in the United States. The Buffalo and Highland Park shooters both declared their intention to commit mass murder in advance, participated in online communities that encouraged large-scale shootings, and thought of themselves in terms of mass murder histories. There is some distinction between the graphic violence/nihilism internet sites frequented by Bobby Crimo III (Highland Park) and Payton Gendron’s (Buffalo) white supremacist community but Crimo III and Gendron were both on Discord, announced themselves to their fellow participants, and referenced themselves to histories of mass violence that are now extended enough that they can be credibly called traditions.

Odette Yousef of NPR interviews “experts in violence and technology” who believe that “a number of “online milieus have been tied to an increasing number of mass shootings over time.” According to Alex Newhouse of the Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism, “a lot of these communities are designed to spin out mass shooters over time, over and over and over.” The mass shooter aesthetic of the online nihilism/violence communities focuses on gore and violence, draws on the history of shootings going back to the Columbine school shooting and Lee Harvey Oswald and “is all designed to be, one, shared; two, completely incomprehensible to anyone … looking onto it; and three, to be a way of breaking down a person’s natural reluctance to commit violence… It is designed to break a person’s brain.” Much like porn and Fox News pull people into an abyss where they are no longer able to engage in life outside those sub-cultures, online nihilism/violence communities can lead young white boys and men to “spiral deeper and deeper into really, really fringe, really violent spaces, there is some point on that spiral where you can’t just go back to being normal now.” “Awake” by Crimo III provides an arch example of what the terrorist analysts are talking about.

Like a sleepwalker, I am unable to stop and think. My actions will be valiant and my thought is unnecessary. I know what I have to do, I know what’s in it, not only for me but for everyone else. There is no past or future, just the now. It is more abstract than I can ever imagine. I can feel the atmosphere pushing me in. It’s unstoppable, like a wave pulling me under, I can’t breathe without it. I need to leave now, I need to just do it. It is my destiny, everything has led up to this. “Nothing can stop me, not even myself. Is there such thing as free will, or has this been planned out, like a cosmic recipe?

There’s a great deal of ambiguity that can be seen with Crimo III here. In online nihilist/violence communities, being impelled to move down a path where you finally “just do it” can be seen as a representation of the path in which which users fall toward a committing large-scale murder. In other words, Crimo III would be adapting an identity as a mass murderer hurtling toward his destiny–“Nothing can stop me, not even myself.“ Crimo III also could be expressing a specific intent to commit a murderous act when he says “I need to just do it” and he indeed took weeks to plan the massacre in Highland Park before leaving the Chicago area in his mother’s car to check out the possibility of shooting people celebrating the 4th in the city of Madison, Wisconsin the home of the University of Wisconsin. But terrorist analysts would also stress that Crimo III could have been taking an aesthetic stance as a mass murderer without either adopting a mass murderer identity or forming a plan to kill large numbers of people at the earliest opportunity as would eventually happen. In this sense, Crimo III’s October 2021 statement contains several possibilities.

Despite the mounds of interesting and original analysis, the NPR article expresses considerable uncertainty about the best approach for medical people, therapists, and law enforcement.

Experts worry that gaps in understanding the conditions that contribute to this kind of mass shooting, as well as legal limitations, could hinder efforts to prevent future, similar attacks. It’s not hard to to figure out where different violent spaces are,” said Conley. “What’s hard is what do you do once you find one, if the red flag still falls within free speech territory. Because currently we have no intervention abilities, we only have law enforcement.

But the experts err in underestimating the nature and scale of the problem. Given the frequency of large-scale shootings, the development of an online culture of mass murder, AND the easy availability of guns, large-scale shootings are now more about “domestic terror” than “gun violence” and it’s reasonable to think of Bobby Crimo III and Payton Gendron as terrorists than people engaged in gun violence without any specific purpose. Buffalo shooter Payton Gendron was specifically seeking to terrorize America’s black population by attacking a store in the black section of Buffalo. Crimo III attacked his own community but is also a terrorist who sought to and succeeded in creating a climate of fear for any kind of community celebration in the U.S. Where the Buffalo shooter identified himself with the “otherness” of white supremacy and conspiracy theories, Crimo III seemed to place himself outside the whole web of self-other relationships identified with “society” and launched his attack from what he viewed as the position of a pure outsider.  

There is considerable dispute over whether the U.S. government should deploy its considerable counter-terrorism apparatus against domestic terrorists like Gendron and Crimo III.  The argument against considering mass shootings like those in Buffalo and Highland Park is that the federal, state, and local enforcement apparatus is so steeped in bigotry that any enhanced law enforcement would result in increased discrimination against Black, Hispanic and Muslim men. But I still believe that the U.S. needs to categorize these mass murders as “domestic terrorism” rather than “gun violence.” The mass shootings in Buffalo, El Paso, and Christchurch, NZ   were attacks on minority communities in the name of the white replacement theory being promoted by extreme right-wing conservatives like Tucker Carlson. Perhaps more importantly, the United States needs to come to grips with the domestic terrorism problem before guys like Bobby Crimo III level up their terrorism to attacking conventions, downing planes, blowing up trains, or taking down bridges during rush hour. I’m not an expert on terrorism or terror technology but I would be surprised if discussion on larger-scale terrorism hasn’t already started on 4Chan, Discord, and other dark web outlets.

I think the Crimo III case can provide an outline of what could be done in the way of intervention though.

1. Mass Murderer Identity: There should be a kind of red flag policy that allows state and federal authorities to detain those who enunciate mass murderer identities, threaten to kill large numbers of people, or outline schemes for attacking schools, night clubs, holiday parades, concert crowds and the like. Identifying “potential” mass murderers in this way would require some sort of law enforcement surveillance of dark web sites (something already being done by researchers) and confiscate weapons, put people on “no fly lists,” and other measures.
2. Mass Murder Communities. Identifying someone as having already adopted a mass murderer outlook and identity, the authorities should be authorized to obtain warrants to investigate the online communities designed “to spin out mass shooters over time, over and over and over.” It’s not just the individual who is a danger, it’s also the online communities that encourage him and others to fall deeper and deeper into nihilism and violence. Those involved in online violence communities should be subject to the same weapons confiscation, no fly lists, and the like. In this sense, part of the point of identifying and investigating “potential” mass murderers is to gain access to their communities and break down the encryption barriers to that access that are currently in play.
3. Online communities and THE community. There is a simple idea that committing crimes or being a criminal puts a person in a self-other relationship with the community with the “self” being the law-abiding members of the community and the “others” identified as being outside and opposed to the community. But it’s also possible to view a society like the United States as composed of self-other relationships of various sorts. In the case of mass murder communities, being subject to the criminal justice system has the ironic effect of drawing them back into society by treating them as suspects and possible criminals. According to online violence researchers, one of the effects of the mass murder communities is to draw participants away from all their other social contacts and interests. In this context, subjecting members of such communities subject to law enforcement processes would serve as a way to re-connect them to society by identifying them as criminals and potential criminals.