Left: A Japanese-American woman holds her sleeping daughter as they prepare to leave their home for an internment camp in 1942. Right: Japanese-Americans interned at the Santa Anita Assembly Center at the Santa Anita racetrack near Los Angeles in 1942. (Library of Congress/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images/Foreign Policy illustration)
Apparently unlawful detention of tens of thousands of Americans into concentration camps is starting to worry the GOP even in Texas.
[Rep. Pete] Sessions, who represents areas of central and west Texas in the state’s 17th Congressional District, suggested during an appearance on “CNN News Central” on Monday that voters were deterred from participating in the special election due to icy conditions.
Canada, for its part, has cancelled a contract with ICE. It shows Trump is not above the thaw. There’s a simple way to stop giant empty warehouses being converted into his concentration camps.
Canadian company says Virginia warehouse sale to ICE won’t proceed.
The Freedom Forum published a tepid First Amendment analysis of armed protest after Border Patrol agents killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. It’s barely competent, an example of what’s wrong.
It correctly identifies time, place, and manner restrictions, content neutrality requirements, narrow tailoring doctrine. It asks a constitutional question:
When can the government restrict someone’s right to protest because they’re lawfully armed?
It’s also useless. The question isn’t what the law says. It’s who the law protects. The answer to when has historically been that the government restrictions are based on who: race.
The Pattern
Case
Legal Status
Circumstances
NRA Response
Black Panthers (1967)
LEGAL open carry
Monitoring police, protesting at California Capitol
Helped draft the Mulford Act ban, supported passage to deny gun rights
Philando Castile (2016)
LEGAL Licensed, permit holder
Informed officer he was armed, reached for wallet, shot dead
Silence. Then blamed him, based only on a police claim they found marijuana. Refused to defend gun rights
Kyle Rittenhouse (2020)
ILLEGAL—Couldn’t legally acquire rifle
Killed 2 people at BLM protest
Awarded him $50k and AR-15 assault rifle to execute more protestors, promoting “warrior for gun rights”
Amir Locke (2022)
LEGAL Licensed, concealed carry permit
Asleep on couch, woken by no-knock raid, grabbed gun, shot dead in 3 seconds
No support, “not commenting”
Alex Pretti (2026)
LEGAL Licensed, VA nurse, no criminal record
Filming immigration enforcement, disarmed, publicly executed, shot in back while face-down
Attacked gun rights leaders
The Only Illegal One
Every person on that list except Rittenhouse was exercising legal gun rights. The Panthers were carrying legally under California law. Castile was licensed. Locke had a concealed carry permit. Pretti was a permitted VA nurse in the ICU serving the military with no record.
Rittenhouse didn’t stumble into a felony. He got his sister’s boyfriend Dominick Black to break gun laws for him. Kenosha police already knew Black from “numerous interactions” yet Wisconsin courts rapidly reduced his two felonies to a small fine under a no contest plea. Then Black was arrested multiple times again for fleeing police, and for armed robbery—with a rifle. Gun crime pays, if you are a young white boy named Black in Wisconsin.
Rittenhouse couldn’t legally acquire the rifle. He did anyway and then crossed state lines for the sole purpose of pointing a hunting rifle at innocent people. He panicked, while hunting humans, and killed two. ICE agents with handguns panicked and executed two.
It was this that the NRA looked at and decided to flagrantly mock the courts and their felony charges by dispensing huge gifts to Rittenhouse: $50,000 and a trophy AR-15.
The only person using a gun to deny other Americans their constitutional rights, is the one the NRA gives rewards. The only person breaking gun laws is the one that the NRA has openly and repeatedly celebrated.
Armed Protesters in State Capitols
I’ve read so many articles about American gun-toting protesters entering state capitol buildings, that I’ve lost track of the number:
However, only very rarely have I seen anyone reference that the NRA’s firm position on this issue was to ban guns. Guess why.
The Mulford Act
In 1967, the Black Panther Party was legally monitoring police in Oakland—armed patrols using California’s open carry laws to document police brutality. On May 2, several armed Panthers entered the California State Capitol to protest a proposed gun control bill. Republican Assemblyman Don Mulford drafted the Mulford Act to ban public carry of loaded firearms. The NRA helped write it and supported its passage:
The display so frightened politicians—including California governor Ronald Reagan—that it helped to pass the Mulford Act, a state bill prohibiting the open carry of loaded firearms, along with an addendum prohibiting loaded firearms in the state Capitol. The 1967 bill took California down the path to having some of the strictest gun laws in America and helped jumpstart a surge of national gun control restrictions.
Reagan’s Lies
History rhymes even when it doesn’t repeat.
Not so long ago we had a President named Ronald Reagan who was known for being a horribly racist exaggerator. Here’s the Snopes perspective on his justification for banning guns:
“The Black Panthers had invaded the legislative chambers in the Capitol with loaded shotguns and held these gentlemen under the muzzles of those guns for a couple of hours. Immediately after they left, Don Mulford introduced a bill to make it unlawful to bring a loaded gun into the Capitol Building. That’s the bill I signed. It was hardly restrictive gun control.”
This wasn’t true.
The Panthers were disarmed by capitol police soon after entering the building and, according to contemporaneous accounts including the Associated Press, were escorted out 30 minutes later. No one was held at gunpoint for hours.
Reagan’s crooked mythology required to justify the gun ban had to be inflated because the reality—Black men legally carrying, reading a statement, leaving peacefully—wasn’t scary enough to strip their rights. They needed the story to be an armed invasion.
As I’ve written elsewhere, the NRA we know today remains very much the same organization with these same values that it suddenly became in the 1970s.
Building the Base
The pattern the NRA follows extends beyond selective defense. It actively recruits children into the political identity. Business Insider reported on essay contests for kindergarteners asking how the constitutional right to bear arms affects them personally.
Leaving aside the oddness of asking the youngest of grade schoolers how the constitutional right to bear arms affects them personally, the contest raises alarms for gun-control advocates. Gun violence was the No. 1 cause of death for US children in 2021… “They’re selling a lie, and it’s a very dangerous lie,” Brown [the president of the gun-safety group Brady] added. “They are selling it to your kids, and they don’t care if it’s killing them.”
By the time they are capable of making a mature judgment, their health may be harmed irrevocably and their decisional capacity impaired by the product’s addictive qualities.
That analysis misstates it. By the time they are capable of making a mature judgment, these targeted kids—and those around them—are already dead.
I say this as someone who grew up in the heart of rural American gun culture. By 12 years old I had been shot and wounded, requiring hospitalization.
The number of children and teens killed by gunfire in the United States increased 50% between 2019 and 2021…
As a historian familiar with Nazi Germany, I have to point out their children were motivated towards mass violence by rapid dissemination of highly targeted authoritarian disinformation. The NRA runs the exact same playbook (not by coincidence)—capture children ideologically before they can evaluate the claims, normalize the violence that identity produces. An inverse effect also helps illuminate the cruelty. British soldiers in WWII reported a strategy of offering God and Chocolate to melt a Nazi child’s cold coal heart full of false fears and nightmares.
The 180-Degree Flip
The NRA has an origin story that is the exact opposite of its current incarnation.
In 1871, Union generals under President Grant founded the NRA to train Black freemen—emancipated slaves—to defend themselves against white supremacist militias like the KKK. The organization was “a roster of Union commanders” who had just defeated the Confederacy. Training emancipated Americans with marksmanship was seen as logical: help citizens protect the federal government from regression and rebellion.
Then came 1977.
The NRA developed a splinter extreme right-wing Institute for Legislative Action lobby group that suddenly seized complete control of the organization in what’s called the “Cincinnati Revolt.” The timing matters: the United Nations Security Council Resolution 418 of 1977 had unanimously adopted a mandatory global arms embargo against apartheid South Africa.
Southern Africa magazine, August 1977—the same year gun manufacturers seized control of the NRA to violate apartheid arms embargos.
Founded to arm American Blacks against white supremacist gang violence. Pivoted to pass a ban on gun rights for American Blacks. Captured entirely after international embargo of South Africa, in order to arm whites-only-rule. Now celebrates an illegal gun used to kill innocent people at a racial justice protest. Silent when police murder Black men with legal permits. Silent when ICE publicly executes Americans. Not drift. Inversion.
The Legal Architecture
The NRA isn’t the only institution built for one purpose and captured for the opposite.
Grant’s Enforcement Acts were designed to prosecute the Klan. The Supreme Court gutted them within a decade. United States v. Cruikshank (1876) established that the Fourteenth Amendment only restricts state action—the federal government cannot protect Black citizens from private white violence.
Southern states declined to prosecute Klan. The Klan’s members often were state actors—sheriffs, deputies, judges—who refused to prosecute themselves. The doctrine gave them an obvious loophole: put on a hood, become a “private” actor. The same men who wore a badge by day wore a sheet by night.
The Trump administration is using an anti-Ku Klux Klan law to prosecute Minnesota activists for demonstrating… charged with conspiracy to deprive rights—a federal felony under Section 241, a Reconstruction-era statute enacted to safeguard the rights of Black Americans to vote and engage in public life amid the KKK’s racial violence. Levy Armstrong and Allen are both prominent Black community organizers.
Black organizers protested violence by a federal official. The state is acting. No doctrinal barrier applies. Section 241—the fragment of Grant’s law that survived—activates instantly to target the very people it was meant to protect.
The law was carefully stripped of power by jurists who saw Reconstruction as the crime. It couldn’t protect Black Americans from private violence. Yet it retained full power to punish Black Americans if they dared to confront state violence.
Whatever is architected for safety will be weaponized into a tool of terror. Decades of saying gun registration would be the end of freedom, then forcing registration. Decades of open carry as a sacred right, then wearing a holstered gun in public becomes a crime punishable by immediate state firing squad execution.
What “Shall Not Be Infringed” Actually Means
The NRA is no longer a gun rights organization. They’re a white nationalist political organization that uses gun rights selectively. The Second Amendment applies to people they consider legitimate political actors, and doesn’t apply to people they don’t, based on race.
The Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus—not the NRA—defended Castile, Locke, and Pretti. Principled gun rights advocacy is possible. The NRA chooses not to practice it.
They promote illegal gun use for political purposes and work to ban guns when the wrong people carry them legally. That’s the NRA today, opposite of why it was created.
Mass violent detention like this one in 1976, Guguletu, near Cape Town, is why the UN passed arms embargoes. It’s what the NRA illegally armed after the 1977 “Cincinnati Revolt,” and what it stands for today. America pulling out of the UN and deploying ICE is apartheid all over again.
He celebrated Renee Good’s killing in Poughkeepsie. Now he’s calling himself the victim for trying to bring his hate speech to her city.
Three weeks ago, ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot Renee Good in the face, as she tried to drive away from him to avoid his escalating confrontation. She was unarmed, she wasn’t threatening. She had told Ross, seconds before, “That’s fine dude. I’m not mad at you.” She turned her steering wheel to the furthest right and away from Ross. As her car moved, away from him, he shot her in the head. And then he walked towards her.
Days later, Canadian comedian Ben Bankas took the stage in Poughkeepsie, New York:
Now for a moment of silence for Renee Good. Really hope that dog’s OK … and her pet.
The “pet” in this “joke” is Good’s widow.
Her last name was Good. That’s what I said after they shot her in the face.
Then:
“Dumb, retarded lesbian” who “should have been shot 10 minutes before.”
This is hate speech. This crosses the line. This is a standing offer. Why? Let’s have a look.
The Incentive of Comedy as Incitement
Canadian law, like most legal frameworks, conceptualizes incitement narrowly: explicit calls to future violence. “Go kill lesbians” Courts can process that.
But Bankas is not telling anyone to murder a group. He’s offering them reward expectations after they murder lesbians:
He will promote and celebrate on stage the murder
He will mock victims with slurs
He will dehumanize grieving families
He will profit from entertaining about murder
He will build his brand on it
That’s not just approval of past violence. That’s a reward structure for future violence. It’s an open advertisement: kill the right people, and comedy-formatted public celebration awaits.
Courts treat celebration as backward-looking commentary. But performed approval is forward-looking—it tells future actors what awaits them.
Mike Ward Precedent
The Supreme Court of Canada ruled 5-4 in 2021 that comedian Mike Ward’s mockery of Jérémy Gabriel—a disabled child singer—did not constitute discrimination under Quebec’s Charter. Ward made cruel jokes about Gabriel’s appearance and disability, including joking that he’d tried to drown the kid.
Comedians exhaled. This attempt at humor survived.
But Ward’s case was structurally different from the Bankas road show:
Mike Ward
Ben Bankas
Mocked a living person
Celebrated a fresh killing
Target was a celebrity
Target was a woman executed by state agents
No identity-based slurs
“Dumb, retarded lesbian”
No endorsement of violence
“Should have been shot 10 minutes before”
Comedy about someone’s existence
Comedy endorsing state execution
The Supreme Court found Ward’s jokes didn’t “incite the audience to treat Gabriel as subhuman.”
Bankas is doing exactly that, with the enhancement that treating someone as subhuman gets you a comedy special.
The St. Paul Roadshow
Bankas didn’t just celebrate Good’s killing. He planned to bring the celebration to her city.
Six sold-out shows were scheduled for Laugh Camp Comedy Club in downtown St. Paul—ten miles from where Good was shot, in the city where her widow and three children live, while ICE operations continue throughout the metro. The shows were set for the last weekend of January, three weeks after Good’s death.
The venue cancelled all six shows on January 29th. Owner Bill Collins cited “heightened threats, increasing media attention and civil disorder.” He told the Star Tribune:
Honestly, I don’t see any way we can safely present this show in the current climate. I’m not sure any amount of security or preplanning would mitigate the liability I’d face if something happened.
Bankas’s response to the cancellation? He posted a video saying he was the victim, upset he couldn’t perform for the “normal” and “good” people of Minnesota.
There it is again. The people who don’t want to hear a comedian celebrate execution of an innocent woman are abnormal. The audience that pays to cruelly mock and shame a widow’s grief are somehow the good guys.
Source: Mitchell and Webb sketch in which Nazi officers realize they are the bad guys.
The economic coercion is also instructive. Collins says Bankas’s management company, CAA is demanding full payment despite force majeure—arguing that credible threats of civil unrest don’t excuse performance. The message to venues: your liability, your problem, pay us anyway.
Bankas refused to cancel. He didn’t say he would be considerate of others. He announced he was ready to hire armed security, as if to physically threaten the people he already was trying to harm with speech. Armed security to deliver hate speech looks less like self-defense and more like force projection. It says: I say harmful things to provoke and escalate and I’m coming anyway, because my attacks will be protected while your defense won’t be.
The thing that stopped him, as ever in America, was a small business owner calculating liability.
This makes it far more than a comedian pushing boundaries. This is an incitement roadshow, stopped by a venue owner’s wise math and a conscience.
Historical Precedents: Streicher and RTLM, Phelps and Bruce
This, of course, isn’t new. We’ve seen this pattern before, and seen it prosecuted.
Julius Streicher never personally killed anyone. He wasn’t in Hitler’s inner circle. He didn’t hold a government position when he published Der Stürmer. What he did was create a weekly newspaper that celebrated violence against Jews, dehumanized them with slurs and caricatures, and built audiences who laughed at Jewish suffering.
At Nuremberg, prosecutors argued that Streicher’s role in inciting Germans to murder made him an accessory as culpable as those who carried out the killing. The tribunal found that he continued his propaganda when he was well aware that Jews were being killed.
He was executed for what Bankas does today. The judgment:
For his twenty-five years of speaking, writing, and preaching hatred of the Jews, Streicher was widely known as ‘Jew-Baiter Number One.’ In his speeches and articles, week after week, month after month, he infected the German mind with the virus of anti-Semitism and incited the German people to active persecution.
RTLM Radio in Rwanda provided the soundtrack to genocide. Broadcasters didn’t personally wield machetes, while they provided names and locations over the airwaves. People named on the radio were then killed.
In 2003, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda convicted RTLM’s directors of genocide and incitement to genocide. Judge Navanethem Pillay told Ferdinand Nahimana:
You were fully aware of the power of words, and you used the radio—the medium of communication with the widest public reach—to disseminate hatred and violence. Without a firearm, machete or any physical weapon, you caused the death of thousands of innocent civilians.
The ICTR explicitly connected its judgment to Streicher: these were the first convictions for incitement since Nuremberg.
The pattern is consistent: You don’t need to pull the trigger. You just need to build the permission structure to dramatically increase likelihood, and celebrate when it happens.
Fred Phelps and Westboro Baptist Church
The structural parallel is closer than people want to admit.
Fred Phelps celebrated specific deaths. He brought signs reading “Thank God for Dead Soldiers” and “God Hates Fags” directly to military funerals. He tagged the dead with identity slurs. He confronted grieving families with the message that their loved ones deserved death.
In Snyder v. Phelps (2011), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 8-1 that this was protected speech. Chief Justice Roberts wrote that Westboro’s signs addressed “matters of public concern” and were displayed “on public land next to a public street.”
Justice Alito, the lone dissenter, wrote what Bankas’s defenders don’t want to hear:
They could have picketed the United States Capitol, the White House, the Supreme Court, the Pentagon… But of course, a small group picketing at any of these locations would have probably gone unnoticed. The Westboro Baptist Church, however, has devised a strategy that remedies this problem.
Sound familiar? Bankas could say these things anywhere. He’s bringing them to St. Paul.
But here’s what matters: Canada is not the United States.
Canada looked at the American framework—where “God Hates Fags” at a child’s funeral is constitutionally protected—and said no. Section 319(2) exists precisely because Canada decided that some speech causes harm serious enough to limit. The American comparison doesn’t help Bankas. It explains why Canadian law exists.
And even Phelps has a structural distinction: he framed deaths as God’s punishment, not human achievement. “God killed your son” is theology. “She should have been shot 10 minutes before” is endorsement. Phelps claimed to channel divine judgment. Bankas is celebrating human action and implicitly calling for more.
Lenny Bruce
Someone will say it: “Are you really going to prosecute comedians? They did that to Lenny Bruce.”
Yes they did. And his 2003 posthumous pardon—the first in New York State history—is now treated as vindication for free speech.
But look at what Bruce was actually prosecuted for.
The New York court found his act “obscene, indecent, immoral and impure” because it “appealed to prurient interest” and was “patently offensive.” He used “more than 100 obscene words” and made “sexual references to Eleanor Roosevelt and St. Paul.”
Dirty words. Sexual content. That’s what got Lenny Bruce convicted.
He never celebrated a killing. He never tagged a murder victim with identity slurs. He never said anyone “should have been shot.” He never brought material mocking a fresh corpse to that person’s grieving community.
The Lenny Bruce comparison actually clarifies the distinction:
Lenny Bruce (1964)
Ben Bankas (2026)
Prosecuted for dirty words
Celebrating state execution
Sexual content
Identity-based slurs on fresh corpse
“Obscene, indecent, immoral”
“Should have been shot”
Shocked audiences with profanity
Rewards audiences for violence
Posthumously pardoned
Claims to be the victim
Bruce’s pardon stands for the principle that the state shouldn’t prosecute comedians for saying dirty words about sex.
It does not stand for the principle that comedians can build reward structures for violence against identifiable groups and bring those rewards directly to the communities where violence just occurred.
“Lenny Bruce” is not a magic spell that protects all comedy from all consequences. It’s a specific case about obscenity law and sexual content. Bankas isn’t being crude about sex. He’s celebrating death.
If Lenny Bruce had taken the stage in 1964 to celebrate the Birmingham church bombing and call the four dead girls slurs, we wouldn’t be invoking his name as a free speech hero today.
Canada Already Prosecutes Celebration of Atrocities
A Holocaust comparison is relevant.
In 2017, James Sears and LeRoy St. Germaine were charged under Section 319(2) for publishing material promoting Holocaust denial and hatred against women and Jews. Canada recognizes that celebrating historical atrocities against identifiable groups constitutes hate speech.
So: celebrating the Holocaust? Prosecutable.
Celebrating the fresh execution of a “dumb, retarded lesbian” by federal agents, while dehumanizing her widow as a “dog”? Comedy?
The incoherence is obvious.
The law recognizes that celebration of mass historical violence promotes hatred. It hasn’t recognized that celebration of individual violence against a member of a group—tagged with identity markers, performed for paying audiences—does the same work.
But it does the same work.
Section 319(2): The Elements
The Criminal Code prohibition on willful promotion of hatred requires:
Other than in private conversation (comedy club, filmed, posted online: yes)
That willfully promote hatred (here’s the question)
Against an identifiable group (lesbians, disabled people via slur: yes)
The question is whether celebrating a specific killing, while using identity-based slurs, constitutes “willfully promoting hatred” against the group.
The traditional answer has been no—it’s commentary on a specific incident, not a call to action against the group.
But that analysis misses the function. When you:
Celebrate a killing
Tag the victim with identity slurs (“lesbian,” “retarded”)
Generalize approval (“should have been shot”)
Perform this for paying audiences who laugh
…you’re not commenting on Renee Good. You’re building social permission for violence against people like Renee Good. The slurs do the work of connecting individual to group. The laughter does the work of normalizing.
The Pattern: Harm, Dismissal, Escalation
This isn’t Bankas’s first time. He’s been told repeatedly how and why his material causes harm. His response has been consistent: dismiss harm, reverse claims of victimhood, escalate.
The cancellations:
Kelowna
Calgary (Grey Eagle Casino—two complaints about residential school jokes)
Thunder Bay (cancelled within hours of announcement)
North Bay
Sault Ste. Marie (Chief Karen Bell: “To know that someone was attempting to make jokes about residential schools was very hurtful. We are the first people of this country who Canada made a great effort to eradicate.”)
London, Ontario (Aeolian Hall)
Dartmouth, Nova Scotia (Alderney Landing)
His response pattern:
When Aeolian Hall cancelled after a complaint, Bankas called himself the only one under “blatant attack.” When the Grey Eagle Casino cancelled after complaints about residential school material, he said they “should have done the show even though they were offended.” After Sault Ste. Marie cancelled, he declared himself: “on the front lines of freedom of speech.”
When people say his material harms, he frames their objection as the only real harm. When Indigenous leaders explain that joking about residential schools—where children were beaten, starved, sexually abused, and buried in unmarked graves—causes real harm to survivors and their descendants, he responds he knows other people who “love it” and shows are “selling out” as if the Holocaust would have been ok if Hitler had sold observation tickets (Historian protip: Berlin officials often traveled to Auschwitz to watch genocide through special observation ports in the gas chambers).
His publicist’s framing is revealing. Deborah Knight claimed the venue “felt that even though the show is meant for a mature, adult audience, Ben’s comedy was too politically incorrect” and she suggested critics were the “malicious actors who are possibly attempting to keep the creation of art/comedy (meant for consenting adults) away from the public in order to further their dreams of censorship.”
Translation: Your harm doesn’t count because people will buy tickets and probably want to harm you already or will after the show. Stopping their harm to you is the harm.
…right-wing, and his comedy is bigoted. One of his taglines is ‘I’m racist.’
After unmistakable widespread objections to his material about Indigenous people, trans people, and other groups causing harm, Bankas didn’t moderate. He escalated. He has been celebrating execution of an innocent American woman days after her death, slinging identity slurs, and campaigning to run that material in her backyard.
He didn’t accidentally cross a line. This is someone who’s been shown the line repeatedly and has made the act of unaccountably crossing it for profit his entire brand.
The Question for Canadian Law
Canada has hate speech laws beyond what the United States has. Those laws exist because Canada hasn’t been captured the way America has, admitting some speech causes harm serious enough to limit. The marketplace of ideas doesn’t self-correct in cases where the product is the prevention of prevention.
The question is whether laws apply only to explicit calls for violence, or whether they can reach the entertainment infrastructure that rewards hate-based incitement for more violence after the fact.
Ben Bankas is testing that question. He’s betting the answer is no, that “comedy” provides sufficient cover to communicate “I approve executing that dog, she was lesbian” instead of just saying “go execute”.
The current legal frameworks seem to fail to capture how incitement functions, given Ben Bankas as a test case for that failure. Julius Streicher also didn’t pull triggers. He made it funny when others did.
They just hired an Epstein Files guy, which tells you The Atlantic isn’t in the journalism business anymore.
It’s in the billionaire reassurance business.
Apparently they pulled David Brooks in as the best in the industry at telling intellectual elites that mounting catastrophes aren’t their problem. No, he spins tall tales about the liberals being at fault for refusing to empathize with the needs of fascism. It’s a teenage girl’s fault if she refused to “massage” Epstein and his clients. It’s Ukraine’s fault they refused to give away their land to Putin.
The Smug and Vacuous David Brooks Is Perfect for The Atlantic: The former New York Times columnist is a one-man cottage industry of lazy cultural stereotyping.
Apparently Brooks’ brand rose from Weekly Standard (neocon war propaganda) to New York Times (elite consensus maintenance) to The Atlantic (people who think they’re too smart for the Times). All of it has produced little more than intellectual cover for the consolidation of power, while pretending to be a critic.
Brooks’s entire game is the false alibi: look what the victim made the abuser do.
Liberals bring fascism upon themselves by being smug. Ukraine made their own invasion happen by not accommodating Putin. And when the Epstein files dropped? Brooks dismissed them as conspiracy bait for MAGA while being in those files himself. His defense when exposed was essentially: “Some of my best friends are billionaires I can’t keep track of which ones are known sex traffickers.”
That’s the architecture. Total elite impunity, fraudulently painted as reasonable centrism. How dare the children being sex trafficked accuse Epstein of exactly what Epstein was doing?! Brooks being a journalist while saying he can’t keep track of who around him does what crimes, is peak asshat hypocrite.
He punches down, way down.
He wants us to believe he can track anything, because that lets him blame downward. Yet anything that comes up to implicate billionaires? Suddenly this journalist can’t be expected to know the most obvious things. The thing about Epstein is that he operated with impunity as if above the law, not that he wasn’t known for sex trafficking children.
You can read Brooks and come away thinking the problem is teenage girls having confidence, not that institutions you trust are systematically captured by predators who face no accountability.
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995
