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August 22, 2018
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Aug 21, 2018 TD originals
The #Resistance Has a New Grift, and Liberals Are the Perfect Mark
9-month-old Gavin McGill sports a "resist" onesie while attending a protest
on Capitol Hill with his family. (Jacquelyn Martin / AP)
The rapid transubstantiation of security-state apparatchiks into hashtag de
Gaulles is one of the miracles of our age. One moment youre presiding over
Americas domestic security apparatus, digging into the scandal of Hillary
Clinton aides trying to ignore Sydney Blumenthals emails and entrapping
stupid young men in made-up terrorism plots; the next, youre tweeting the
kind of nature photos that are typically paired with a quote from Reinhold
Niebuhr.
The president of the United States strings together a series of
English-adjacent phrases calling you a big jerk and a loser. A Macmillan
imprint offers you seven figures to reiterate in print what youve already
said in a zillion interviews and even in testimony before Congress. Not that
anyone is going to read the thing; your book is a book in the sense that
Warhols Brillo boxes are Brillo boxes: the perfect aesthetic earnestness of
its imitation is the greatest artifice of all. You will speak about Honor
and Duty on cable news, despite all available evidence you nudged Donald
Trump into the presidency.
James Comey, welcome to the resistance.
Comey, to be fair, came by it honestly. His prissy, self-serving moralism
seems as genuine as it is hypocritical, and that makes him a perfect foil
for the louche, amoral Trump. His handling of the Clinton email affair was
pure bureaucratic ass-covering, and his post-hoc move to explicit
anti-Trumpism has the zealous air of a true convert. His tales of an
unbalanced Trump cajoling him to swear an oath to some kind of gold-plated,
Epcot version of the Führerprinzip align perfectly with the mythology of the
online resistance, whose most assiduous writers favor 100-tweet threads
drawing from History Channel accounts of the rise of fascism and the
authoritarian tendency. His book may be a scam, but at least the suckers who
bought it can stop a door or steady a wobbly table with it long after the
thrill of displaying its cover at an airport gate or subway seat fades.
Scammier by far are the crowdfunded legal defense funds of subsequent
martyrs of the Freedom-Fries French Forces, Andrew McCabe and Peter Strzok.
Unable to wait for the advance check to clear or just too lazy to come up
with a two-sentence pitch that any fifth-rate agent with a pulse and a Gmail
address could immediately convert into a book deal, these former
G-menMcCabe was Comeys deputy; Strzok a senior special agent who worked on
the so-called Russia investigation until he got bunged off the case for a
few intemperate texts to his office girlfriendflew straight to the gig
economys newest pyramid scheme and set up GoFundMe pages. Crowdsourcing is
like Amway without the draining pretense of pretending that there is
anything to sell. Money just flows in and up. McCabe quickly raised
$500,000. As of this writing, Strzok is just shy of the same himself.
These funds are ostensibly to defray the current and future costs of legal
representation, but the whole thing has the air of a grift. The Resistance,
at least in its extremely online incarnation, is not populated by the most
stable or reflective people. After all, it made stars of conspiracists like
Louise Mensch; former Sarah Palin partisans like Amy Siskind; self-styled
game theorist Eric Garland; and the Krassenstein brothers. Brian and Ed
Krassenstein are listed on Strzoks GoFundMe as having raised the most money
through sharingthat is to say, by promoting it to their credulous
followers.
Theres a precedent for this phenomenon. During the last presidential
election, a GOP headquarters in Orange County, N.C., was firebombed. A group
of out-of-state Democrats led an online effort to fundraise for a new
headquarters, casting it in terms of common humanity or Americanness that
supersedes the grotty partisanship of electioneering. Online liberals raised
over $10,000 in less than an hour. The GOP showed its deep appreciation by
trying to strip the voting rights of the states overwhelmingly Democratic
African-American population, packing the state Supreme Court and stripping
what little power belonged to the Democratic governor.
If the circumstances were different, the underlying moral silliness was much
the same: throwing money into the wind to prove some kind of ethical point
for less than nothing in return. The GOP will take the money and stand on
everyones neck if it wins; the new ex-FBI heroes will take the money and
either join a white-shoe law firm or hit the lecture circuit for the rest of
their lives.
We have already begun to move on. Among other harsh critics of the president
to emerge from the fluorescent hallways of our three-letter agencies is John
Brennan, a stone-cold supporter of unregulated killing and torture abroad,
who does not like the cut of Trumps jib. He did the rounds, saying Trump is
unfit for office, whatever that can mean for an office thats held such
paragons of dignity as Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon and James Buchanan, to
name a few among a grab bag of fools, slaveholders, Indian killers,
nonentities and straight crooks.
Brennan is a man who lied to Congress and the public by claiming that
Americas drones have never, ever killed a civilian. Only bad guys, you can
be sure! But that will be forgotten because Donald Trump stripped him of his
security clearance, which will make it incrementally harder for Brennan to
convert his retirement into a sinecure fooling various northern Virginia
defense contractors into paying him for copy-and-pasting the CIA World
Factbook into a PowerPoint.
On Thursday, Brennans brass was polished by William H. McRaven, a retired
Navy admiral who oversaw Operation Neptune Spear, the nebulous operation to
kill Osama bin Laden that has spawned thousands of bar-stool tall tales by
guys who claim they were the trigger man. He did the I am Spartacus
routine and praised Brennan as a man of unparalleled integrity, whose
honesty and character have never been in question. Brennan, again, is a
documented liar and prevaricator who used those very sacrosanct codicils of
classification and security clearance to mislead the entire nation about
Americas conduct of war. Surely he meant well.
The liberals who fall for this sort of thing, who abandon all skepticism of
the military and intelligence entities in America as soon as the wrong party
gets into the White House, are only partly to blame. They are victims,
really, of our deranged national culture of politics as consumer choice,
party as lifestyle and preference. They now find themselves atomized,
without any route for collective action beyond chipping 10 bucks into the
crowdfunding bucket; they can evaluate politics only superficially, and so
anyone who says bad things about bad guy number one is good enough.
Trumpfor all his obvious intellectual deficiencyis a far sharper judge of
character. He is a con man, and he can spot a con. He has judged these men
with an almost admirable precision. He knows how badly they want to be on
TV.
Jacob Bacharach
Jacob Bacharach is the author of the novels
