Thursday, April 20, 2023

"Just How People Get Into Politics"

 

Marcel Proust's fictional character Palamède de Guermantes, Baron de Charlus, in a drawing by Jean Cocteau, ca. 1921-23, via. 

Warning, this is incredibly distasteful, so much so that I think a lot of journalists are telling themselves it's not newsworthy so they can stop themselves from thinking about it, but if you do think about it, it starts to seem important, as a sign of what the Republican Party is now and where it's going, hopefully toward total collapse.

The story goes back to last January, when the House Republicans were struggling to elect a speaker over the hostage-taking tactics of their most radical faction, not including Georgia representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who had made some kind of private deal, presumably over committee seats, with Leader Kevin McCarthy, and was supporting him.

Upon which a voice arose from outside of Congress, that of Ali Alexander, organizer of the Stop the Steal movement following the 2020 election and January 6 defendant, in a remarkably vituperative attack on Greene,

You are a harlot and a liar. You supported Q. You talked about Jewish people and now you denounce people who talk about Jewish power? Now you want to act like you're not into conspiracies? Girl, go get your teeth fixed. Mine are crooked cause I'm not a multimillionaire. Why are yours crooked?

culminating in a fairly specific threat:

In the coming days, I'm going to reveal that Marjorie Taylor Greene, in my summation and the summation of lawyers, committed a crime. That crime is going to be handed to the state of Georgia, and the state of Georgia will decide whether they adjudicate that crime or not.... Everyone will know about your drunken nights because the consultant you have drunk with you will have to choose whether they fear me or whether they fear you. And they fear me, Marge. They fear me a lot more than they fear you. You don't know this saying because you're too new. When you were on Q boards and masturbating to transvestites in Seattle, I was fighting and bleeding for this country, Marge. I came here before you, I will be here after you. Hoe, go home!

And that, mysteriously, was it—McCarthy was duly elected Speaker, Marge got her seats on the Homeland Security and Oversight committees, and Alexander went quiet, possibly less feared than he thought he was. 

He never did tell us what her crime was, and some people may have figured he was just making it up altogether—I didn't, I'm confident he really does know something, if only based on the specific language he used in this rant. Then, at the end of March, we entered act 2 of the drama, Marge Strikes Back, in the person of her 38-year-old unpaid summer intern, the alt-right anti-Semite ex-gay British commentator Milo Yiannopoulos:

As Karoli Kuns at Crooks & Liars tells the story, Yiannopoulos was personally pissed off with Alexander and his Nazi associate Nick Fuentes for getting Kanye West to throw him out of his post in West's imaginary presidential campaign (it wasn't a real campaign, Karoli explains, but the grift pickings were choice), and retaliated by putting out a story about Alexander (whose real last name is Akbar) debauching a 15-year-old with pseudonym "Nicholas" (not, I think, to be confused with Fuentes):

According to Milo, Nicholas, now a 21-year old heterosexual influencer in the America First movement, says that Akbar asked him for dick pics when he was 15, and he sent them, reasoning that it was "transactional" and "just how people get into politics." Akbar also offered to buy alcohol for the boy, and offered to send him gifts without his parents discovering them in exchange for one demand: "jack-off material". Akbar called Nicholas his "puppy" and asked when they could meet for sex. He offered access and introductions in exchange, which never happened.

But it seems clear that Greene is involved as well, and she's shown up to demand an FBI investigation of Alexander, even as Yiannopoulos adds more instances of Alexander's "grooming" behavior with more boys and Alexander himself finally issued a sort of confession-apology (he confesses only to "inappropriate messages" and "flirting" with "corny pick up lines").

So I hope we get to Marge's crime in act 3—some say it's more likely January 6 than sex

—but in the meantime this is where we are, and it may at first look like just another of those "every accusation is a confession" stories about the party (QAnon or Republican) that accuses everybody of being a "groomer" and turns out to be full of "groomers" itself. Nevertheless I found my mind wandering along different lines: wondering it there's something systematic or structural about it to explain why 15-year-old "Nicholas" got the impression that sending a penis picture to a Republican organizer is "how people get into politics". Did he know something we don't know?

Or is it how everything is done? Raw Story yesterday morning recycled a Daily Mail story about Kent Stermon, a 50-year-old Florida GOP donor and DeSantis ally—DeSantis put him on the board of governors that runs the state university system—who bribed a teenage girl with a Taylor Swift ticket to text him a photo of her breasts, asked to see them again when she came to pick up the ticket, and then shot himself dead last December, after the girl's father turned down a "five-figure" hush money payment and called the police on him.

It echoes, in my mind, the story of Florida congressman Mark Foley, a prominent opponent of child pornography who introduced the Child Modeling Protection Act of 2002 and then turned out to be conducting penis discussions with teenaged male congressional pages by email—this was back in the days before smartphones, so no pix. He escaped criminal charges, some say, through the intervention of Speaker Dennis Hastert, who was as you'll remember burdened by some "groomer" baggage of his own, from his youthful days as a high school wrestling coach, which landed him in prison. Which is inevitably going to remind you of Representative "Gym" Jordan of Ohio, right?

And then there's Milo himself, who got in trouble years ago (2017), before he got religion, for complaining about anti-"groomer" prejudice and the way "we get hung up on this child abuse stuff":

He is interrupted by one of the presenters, who said: “This sounds like priest molestation to me.”

Mr Yiannopoulos replies: “And do you know what? I’m, grateful to Father Michael, I wouldn’t give nearly as good head if it wasn’t for him.”

I think Republicans have a pervert problem—by which I don't mean there is a certain percentage of LGBTQ+ Republicans, as you'd expect in any population of a certain size, but that they have a subcommunity of party elites that is addicted to transgressiveness itself, to doing things they themselves understand as wickedness, to being evil because they think it's evil, because that's what gets them off. Especially the sexual abuse of children, male or female, but not only that, and that at the top of it is the figure of Roger Stone, with his weird sartorial dandyhood and his troupe of young bodyguards like some latter-day Baron de Charlus, a power in the party for over 50 years, since he was himself a teen protégé of the infamous Roy Cohn; his own personal kink was suggested in the personal ads of the mid-1990s:

Daily Mail. January 2019.

(You can see he's actually completely uninterested in the female member of the hypothetical couple, only the male member, heh-heh, and the insatiable Mrs. Stone—he wasn't looking for some suburban wife-swapping, what got him off was arranging and watching his own cuckolding by some dude even handsomer than himself.)

Then there are his own protégés, who include

  • Milo Yiannopoulos (author of the 2020 hagiography, The Trial of Roger Stone, blurbed among others by former bowtie model Tucker Carlson and Pizzagate scandalmonger Jack Posobiec)
  • Ali Alexander
  • Proud Boy leader Enrique Tarrio and all the Bois
  • Congressman Matt Gaetz, memorable for rooming with a teenage "adopted son" called Nestor as well as his former friendship and Sugar Babies activities with Republican politician Joel Ginsberg
  • ex-congressman Madison Cawthorn, last seen on video bare-assed and humping a male friend's face—when Cawthorn complained about all the senior Capitol Hill leaders who kept inviting him to their "cocaine-fueled orgies" and people accused hm of making it up, Stone came to Cawthorn's defense, confirming it was true, and
  • I don't know who-all else

And then there are the independent figures like Stephen Bannon trying and failing to raise up a kind of Knights Templar abbey/"gladiator school" in an 800-year-old Italian monastery and Erik Prince running a mercenary-training institution in Wyoming and Mrs. Greene the gym proprietor swinging with her clients, including a self-denominated "Tantric sex guru", before getting elected to Congress (I thought the rumor that she was shtupping Kevin McCarthy was meant as a joke, but maybe it's true and that was the last straw for her husband), all these frats and all this nastiness... 

They believe they are evil, I was theorizing, and take pleasure in it, and they all know each other. If not a conspiracy, a kind of built-in conspiratoriality, where everybody's got a secret to protect.

And the question I really want to pose, moving back to one of our more usual topics, is whether that could be a factor in their politics, the performative cruelty of the policy proposals, the bullying contempt for the neighbors, the giddy destructiveness, the reckless name-calling (which keeps bouncing back on them, more than ever in this "groomer" panic). Are these particular Republicans trying to be evil? Because it gets them off? Is that the whole exciting point?

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