Issue 4 is now available.
Paul wrote a great section exploring Trump’s ties to Russia. We also look at Trump’s war with the media (and with objective reality), offer a template for writing to your Senators, and suggest other ways you can make a difference.
Those of you who subscribe to the paper edition, you should get your copy in the next day or two.
Stay sane out there.
Still writing & researching Crane Girl, still scrambling to get Federalist Capers issue 4 ready by the beginning of March. Working on a new, nonfiction book project. Lots of other things going on. Nothing too intelligent to say at the moment.
In the meantime, here’s Chris Wallace of Fox News about a week ago, calmly explaining why it’s one thing for Trump to criticize the media, but it’s very different to call them the “enemy of the people.” Check it out.
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I’ve seen a lot of news lately about Republican senators and representatives having town hall meetings, where a ton of liberal activists show up, and interrupt, and chant, and jeer, and boo, and shout a lot of questions, and seemingly don’t listen very carefully to the answers, and generally shut down the broader discussion.
Not all cases are like this. Many times there’s a tense but reasonably civil back-and-forth dialogue. Right now, though, I’m talking about the jeering-and-interrupting kind.
Because virtually every reaction I’ve heard from the left — from Democratic leaders all the way down to liberal dudes and ladies on social media — has been strongly approving. They love this tactic, it seems. I I don’t think I’ve heard a single person on the left condemn it.
Speaking as a liberal activist myself: What the hell?
Of course people on both sides of the political spectrum can and should go to town halls, whether they agree with the representative or not. Of course they should speak up, ask pointed questions, call out lies, demand accountability. Of course there should be a debate, or at least an attempt at one.
But in many cases, that’s not what’s happening. What’s happening is that somebody comes out to talk to constituents and gets yelled at for a while, and the actual conversation gets lost in the noise.
How is this helpful, exactly?
If you want to yell, by all means, yell. That’s what protests are for. Use your outside voices — outside. Or if you want to protest inside the town hall, do it in a non-disruptive way — wear shirts with slogans on them, hold up signs, whatever. You can make yourself heard, and you should. There are a thousand ways to do it. First Amendment’s still in effect, as near as I can tell.
But trying to shout down the other side just makes you look stupid.
If a kindergartner tried to win an argument by shouting down another kid, you’d tell them that that’s not how we do things. So why are adults getting a free pass?
A lot of Republicans have stopped having town halls altogether, and people get upset. “Why aren’t you going out to face your constituents?” Well, y’know, probably ’cause they don’t want to get yelled at for an hour? It’s their job to face criticism. It’s not their job to stand in front of a microphone and listen to screaming.
The only real defense I’ve heard for this tactic is that when Obama was president, Tea Party activists did it to liberal politicians.
Guys. If our standard for wisdom is “stuff Tea Party activists have done,” we’re in sad shape.
I think what frustrates me most about these yell-ins is how blatantly partisan they are. People seem to love it when it’s their side doing the yelling, but once it’s the other side, suddenly the shouters are disrupting the democratic process. In other words, it’s not about logic, it’s about which team you’re on. Your team does it, great. Other team does it, it’s terrible.
That kind of my-team-your-team mentality has been going on for the length and breadth of recorded history, but Trump has elevated it to levels I’ve never seen before, at least not from a U.S. president. He doesn’t care about thinking correctly, or even getting the facts right. He just wants to win, no matter the damage that his “winning” may inflict on America’s institutions, democratic processes, or people.
I reject that mentality. I hope you do, too. I don’t just want my team to “win” — I want us to be right, and to do the right thing.
Because to me, that’s largely what winning is.
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Level 0 (neophyte): Gather data, analyze swiftly, make a decision. No paralysis.
Level 1 (practitioner): Gather data. Can’t decide between possible actions. Spend too long analyzing, end up doing nothing. Paralysis occurs.
Level 2 (master): Due to awareness of “analysis paralysis” problem, can’t decide whether to be decisive or do a big analysis. Second-order paralysis. Meta-failure achieved.
Guess who just got promoted to master!
Just kidding. I got promoted a long time ago.
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I see blogs that post whatever random photos they’ve found from all over the Internet, with the disclaimer that everything they post is “assumed to be in the public domain.”
That’s like a bar owner saying that all drinks they serve are “assumed to be non-alcoholic.”
I mean, selling booze without a license isn’t the worst crime in the world. But don’t be like, “What? How did this beer get in your Samuel Adams bottle?”
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I recently passed 100,000 words on the first draft of Crane Girl.
Stephen Miller is a senior adviser to President Trump. Lately, he’s been making the rounds on news shows, offering the official White House viewpoint on all sorts of issues.
I don’t think I can say much more about him without violating my “minimal profanity” rule, so I’ll just offer this excerpt from George Stephanopoulos’ February 12 interview.
I’ve taken the liberty of highlighting every sentence that contains the word “evidence,” since that’s really what the whole conversation is about.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Let me move on, though, to the question of voter fraud as well. President Trump again this week suggested in a meeting with senators that thousands of illegal voters were bused from Massachusetts to New Hampshire and that’s what caused his defeat in the state of New Hampshire, also the defeat of Senator Kelly Ayotte.
That has provoked a response from a member of the Federal Election Commission, Ellen Weintraub, who says, “I call upon the president to immediately share New Hampshire voter fraud evidence so that his allegations may be investigated promptly.”
Do you have that evidence?
MILLER: I have actually haven’t worked before on a campaign in New Hampshire. I can tell you that this issue of busing voters into New Hampshire is widely known by anyone who’s worked in New Hampshire politics. It’s very real. It’s very serious. This morning, on this show, is not the venue for me to lay out all the evidence.
But I can tell you this, voter fraud is a serious problem in this country. You have millions of people who are registered in two states or who are dead who are registered to vote. And you have 14 percent of non-citizens, according to academic research, at a minimum, are registered to vote, which is an astonishing statistic.
STEPHANOPOULOS: You can’t make a — hold on a second. You just claimed again that there was illegal voting in New Hampshire, people bused in from the state of Massachusetts.
Do you have any evidence to back that up?
MILLER: I’m saying anybody — George, go to New Hampshire. Talk to anybody who has worked in politics there for a long time. Everybody is aware of the problem in New Hampshire with respect to —
STEPHANOPOULOS: I’m asking you as the White House senior — hold on a second. I’m asking use as the White House senior policy adviser. The president made a statement, saying he was the victim of voter fraud, people are being bused from —
MILLER: And the president — the president — the president was.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Do you have any evidence?
MILLER: — issue — if this is an issue that interests you, then we can talk about it more in the future. And we now have our government is beginning to get stood up. But we have a Department of Justice and we have more officials.
An issue of voter fraud is something we’re going to be looking at very seriously and very hard.
But the reality is, is that we know for a fact, you have massive numbers of non-citizens registered to vote in this country. Nobody disputes that. And many, many highly qualified people, like Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state, have looked deeply into this issue and have confirmed it to be true and have put together evidence [citation needed].
And I suggest you invite Kris Kobach onto your show and he can walk you through some of the evidence of voter fraud —
STEPHANOPOULOS: You have — you have —
MILLER: — in greater detail.
STEPHANOPOULOS: — just for the record, you have provided absolutely no evidence. The president’s made a statement.
MILLER: The White House has provided enormous evidence [citation needed] with respect to voter fraud, with respect to people being registered in more than one state, dead people voting, non-citizens being registered to vote. George, it is a fact and you will not deny it, that there are massive numbers of non-citizens in this country, who are registered to vote. That is a scandal.
We should stop the presses. And as a country, we should be aghast about the fact that you have people who have no right to vote in this country, registered to vote, canceling out the franchise of lawful citizens of this country.
That’s the story we should be talking about. And I’m prepared to go on any show, anywhere, anytime, and repeat it and say the President of the United States is correct 100 percent.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, you just repeated, though, you just made those declarations. But, for the record, you have provided zero evidence that the president was the victim of massive voter fraud in New Hampshire. You provided zero evidence —
MILLER: Anyone who’s worked —
STEPHANOPOULOS: — hold on.
MILLER: — politics is familiar —
STEPHANOPOULOS: You have provided zero evidence that the president’s claim that he would have won the general — the popular vote if 3 million to 5 million illegal immigrants hadn’t voted, zero evidence for either one of those claims.
MILLER: Well, it’s —
STEPHANOPOULOS: Thanks a lot for joining us this morning.
MILLER: — that non-citizen voting issues, pervasive and widespread, and we are going to protect our country from voter fraud. We’re going to protect our borders from terrorism. And we’re going to protect innocent men, women and children from violent criminal illegal immigrants that need to be removed from this country.
And our country will create jobs, safety, prosperity and security, particularly for disenfranchised working people of every background, faith and ethnicity in this country.
STEPHANOPOULOS: You can start by providing evidence to back up your claims. Thanks for joining us this morning.
It’s honestly just surreal.
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A short story, for your reading pleasure.
This is the first new fiction I’ve written in a long while, aside from Crane Girl. I got the idea for this on Saturday while I was vacuuming, and after that, it pretty much wrote itself.
Enjoy!
In the ancient days, on a world very much like Earth, there lived a king so great that he conquered the whole planet and put every nation under his scarlet banner. This king seized and drank the Gilded Ambrosia, and thereby gained immortal life.
Millions of subjects vied eagerly for the king’s favor, trying to impress him with luxuries, with secret books, with dark-eyed concubines, with curious riddles and blades of adamant. But as his age grew from decades to centuries, and then to millennia, the king grew ever more difficult to impress. If an acrobat was skillful, the king had seen another one ages ago who was yet more brilliant. If a bomb could level a city, his armory held capsules of fire that would demolish ten cities each. No army could be stronger, no counselor could be wiser, than those he had seen already in his long, long life.
But there was one man, a sorcerer, who had used his art to make himself immortal, as the king was. And this man was no sycophant. He didn’t care about status in the court, or silver, or fame. The sorcerer was truly loyal to his king, on account of some kindness in the distant past, and he wanted no more than to please his monarch by giving him something truly impressive.
He knew that the king had every luxury, that a hundred servants scrambled at his every whim, so he pondered long and deep on what could genuinely impress his king after all these years.
At last, he had it.
With his own vast wealth, the sorcerer hired scores of apprentices, hundreds of jewel-smiths, armies of builders and craftsmen. He scoured the libraries of the world for every scrap of esoteric knowledge. His workers worked, and he began his own Great Work, an incantation so dreadful and intricate that he had thirty boys and thirty girls chanting mantras day and night just to keep the cosmic forces from ripping his temple apart. The spell itself was yet more terrible and took eleven months to cast, and twelve years to sculpt, and thirteen centuries to polish.
But the sorcerer finished his task in the end.
He gained an audience with the king, and in a burst of radiance he teleported them both from the royal palace to a location the sorcerer had prepared, on the other side of the world.
The king didn’t lift an eyebrow.
The sorcerer unveiled the new palace he had built for the king. It had a thousand turrets, ten thousand chambers, emerald ramparts, sapphire gates, and a ruby portcullis. It was geometrically perfect. There was none like it anywhere.
The king gave a tired sigh.
The sorcerer (on foot) led his monarch (in a palanquin) through the palace, showing off vaulted ceilings adorned with billions of tiles, none wider than a hair’s breadth, each hand-painted separately by a master artist. The kitchens had such clever and elaborate machinery that any order could be made and delivered to anywhere in the building within seconds. The bells and the pipe organs could produce any melody, and they could be heard for leagues in all directions.
The king yawned.
But the sorcerer wasn’t concerned, because all these features of the palace were mere trifles compared to what was coming next.
For the sorcerer brought the king (who was still in his palanquin, borne by eight servants) to the last room, and there the sorcerer showed him a machine that stretched half a mile underground. He prostrated himself on the lapis lazuli floor and said:
“May it please His Majesty, this machine is the great jewel of the palace, beside which all other trappings are as nothing. For this machine will transform His Royal Highness, turning him into no less than the Lord God Omnipotent, Commander of Galaxies, Wielder of the Infinite Flame, Master of the River of Time. All this will transpire instantly, as the machine reacts to the merest touch of my lord’s royal fingers, if His Majesty will but press this lever.”
The king didn’t answer.
And now the sorcerer really was worried, because he could tell by the faint downward curl of the king’s lip that he was sorely displeased, perhaps even offended. Any other man would have feared for his life, but the sorcerer’s only concern was that he had failed to impress the king.
He could not understand what had gone wrong. It was impossible that the king had ever received a gift like this before, and still more impossible that he would object to having unlimited power. But try as he might, he could not think of a reason for the king to be upset with his offering.
At last, the sorcerer dared to whisper, “I am certain I have not merited my lord’s approval. I beg that my lord would reveal to his obedient servant the reason for his displeasure. For, if by some chance my lord did not choose to give his attention to what I said before, if he will but press this lever –”
The king spat in disgust.
“What,” he said, “you expect me to press it myself?”
Just a reminder, if you liked that story, you can find a lot more of my fiction (and other work) at BuckleyCreations.com.
Current word count on the first draft of Crane Girl is 97,645 and growing daily. Final word count is tough to estimate, but somewhere in the neighborhood of 130K wouldn’t surprise me. I might actually get this monstrosity finished someday.
Part of the fun of this particular novel is the ridiculously over-the-top amount of research I’ve had to do. (Okay, “had to” might be a bit much. But it’s all useful.) Here is an incomplete list of stuff that I’ve read specifically for Crane Girl purposes. I took notes on most of these.
Nonfiction
Fiction
Religious texts, myths, legends, epics, and fairy tales
Long poems
Miscellaneous
I also read the first dozen chapters of Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno (couldn’t go on, it’s really just awful); the final two chapters of Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur; chapters XIII – XX of the fourth-century Gospel of Nicodemus (containing the first-ever coherent account of the Harrowing of Hell); half of a book about the Tarot; a good chunk of the Mayan Popol Vuh; as much Jung and Campbell as I could stomach (spoiler: it was less than a whole book); large portions of the Persian epic Shahnameh; and a chapter of Wells’ The Time Machine (I had read the entire book years ago).
Also, significant reading about: St. John of the Cross, the Arabian Nights, Robin Hood, various species of wild dog (especially wolves, jackals, and foxes), symbolism, Latin, theology, angels and demons, various religions, various world mythologies, various passages in the Bible, Aesop’s fables, the Reynard/Isengrim cycle, and roughly nine million other topics.
You can hate my book if you like, but don’t tell me I didn’t do my homework. 🙂
Have a good weekend!
Brian D. Buckley 