Reno at Night

It’s not exactly a secret that I’ve been a social activist, almost completely unpaid, my entire life. It started back in 1989, after I moved out to Pullman and became involved with the environmental movement. I fell under the tutelage of Leroy Lee, a Native American wannabe as close to being a Nez Perce Indian as one could be. Leroy was no Pretendian — but he was as ingratiated with both the Coeur D’alene and Nez Perce tribes. And he decided I was smart, which has always been a curse, and enlisted me in helping him with what turned into the Phantom Forest scandal. Leroy was a timber stand examiner, and worked in the woods measuring exactly how much actual timber was present on both private and mostly National Forest land. So he drug me along as he compiled damning evidence on the US Forest Service, showing that they had kept two sets of books regarding sustainability of that resource — one inflated, to justify increased cutting. And one actual — because in the end, the USFS had to sell that timber. I was a protege — not an architect. But I learned a lot from Leroy, who had intuited that I would go on to continue his work.

Leroy died young — 18 years ago, but I still remember him fondly.

And that launched my own benighted career — defending beautiful places that no one knew, and no one really cared about. Most people, when it comes to saving forests, sort the world into what they can see from the highway. And if there’s a “beauty strip” — a row of trees that blocks the view of clearcuts from the road, most will never question any of it. Even in this latest round of dealing with Donald Trump and ostensibly renewed calls for more logging on National Forests (most people don’t even understand that National Forests are NOT National Parks — they can and are logged) I’ve found that most people, even while professing care about ecological integrity, haven’t the foggiest what that means. Even professional environmental activists have fallen into line defending agencies I literally spent decades fighting.

But that’s the memetics for you. We’re in the middle of a war, as I’ve written here, between elites and counter-elites, and the elites long ago managed to figure out, regardless of whatever the noble cause was, to hack the institutional income stream from whatever the charitable, front-and-center projection du jour. I’m a huge fan of Mike Benz and Jennica Pounds, a woman that goes by DataRepublican on X. They have deconstructed the NGO-Industrial complex better than anyone. And along with the Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE) have been responsible for bringing the pain to the deep, ingrained corruption on the Left. None of this doesn’t mean that a mirroring corruption wasn’t already present on the Right. But I was one of the people that at least thought that, by being a Lefty, I was on the right side of these large issues.

Along the way, I started writing for the local newspaper, the Moscow-Pullman Daily News — a bi-weekly op-ed column under the tagline ‘Reality-Based Lefty’. I have, and still do believe that local news reporting is essential in smaller communities. I’ve seen various studies that show local newspapers profoundly damp down the corruption in governance . So as much as I believe anything coming out of the academy nowadays, I, once again, thought I was working on the right side.

I had written at least 23 years of columns until I quit in 2023. The column made me recognizable, and notable in the communities of Moscow and Pullman. My administrators at the university notably also hated the fact that I was writing, and found various and sundry ways to persecute me (bogus ethics violations, etc.) for writing it. Academic administrations are about power and control — and that matters in small, university communities. And though I’ve always been excellent in my job (raising money, publishing, blah, blah, blah) as university governance has declined, my ability to speak has also gone down. I’ve enjoyed some reprieves dependent on the university president, and WSU has had some good ones. But my colleagues and lower level factotums memetically have had an impossible time believing that a professor could or should speak with an independent voice.

As far as external audiences, I’ve had to deal with more than my fair share of potential directed violence. During the Cove-Mallard campaign, my phone was very likely tapped by the FBI. At various public hearings, I had other forces of the timber industry threaten me. And I went toe-to-toe with millworkers and loggers as well. I’ve written about some of this in my book, Wild to the Last: Environmental Conflict in the Clearwater, which was published in 1998 by WSU Press. At least at the time, I couldn’t have been so far out of the blessings of the university hierarchy.

What I found with folks that worked in the woods was that, while they had problems, and would threaten me, if I also matched their approach, and talked to them, they would back down and we would talk. There’s a certain pattern to the dance when someone threatens to kick your ass — they step forward, and yell. And you better step forward, chest-to-chest as well. Fear doesn’t wear well. But then they would inevitably step back, and you would talk. Mill owners and timber magnates were worse. But the industry just wasn’t, and isn’t about killing people for their political views. That’s not true for all natural resource industries — I’ve always told people I’d never mess with Basque sheep farmers (those guys are nuts). They’d kill you at the drop of a hat. Maybe it’s just the fact they’re the only humans alive still pretty much descended from Cro-Magnons. But while there was indeed tons of political skulduggery in the timber/USFS game, murder is just not in the cards. Or I’d be dead.

I took a hiatus after Clinton’s Roadless Initiative got passed. We had managed to move off the table most of the remaining public wild country on National Forest ground (no roads) off the table. I had kids to raise, and I wanted to make change in the university landscape. So I became the Chair of the Faculty Senate — kind of like the elected president of the faculty — and went to work on the issues of the day, which mostly revolved around DEI. This led to me participating in hiring Elson Floyd, a black man, who turned out to be a narcissistic psychopath. He spent WSU into penury, and we’re still struggling financially from this. He also made sure to wreck my career in administration as well. He simply couldn’t tolerate having another powerful person in his orbit. That’s a longer story in itself that will have to wait until retirement. I also got divorced, and ended up in a protracted struggle with the mother of my two sons, who was aided and abetted by a school system, which calling it corrupt would be mild. It was painful as hell, but it did yield profound insights into how our country has gotten the problems that it has. Short version — we didn’t get here overnight, and we’re not gonna get out of here overnight either.

And then came COVID. I was involved in the ramp-up to the lockdowns and masking, and I’ve written extensively about all of it, as well as my eventual discovery that it was all a farce — a diabolical one that still goes on today.

And along the way I wrote my column in the local newspaper. I was, at the first, earnestly attempting to communicate with the public about civic issues while hewing to the mainline science. This, though, went sideways during COVID, when it became obvious that the powers-that-be were deliberately lying for lots of reasons — the largest being what I named Elite Risk Minimization. Elite Risk Minimization is the psychopathic manipulation of public interventions, using the force of government, to minimize any perceived risk elites have to their well-being. It is absolutely anti-empathetic, and it utilizes other ensconced elites (like professors at universities) to propagate bullshit beliefs. The guiding principle became “if it saves one life” — as long as that life belongs to an elite. If you’re poor, your life can be wrecked — and many were. It’s a well-worn story how elites sat at home and had food delivered to them, while ostensibly the poors wandered about waiting on them, dropping food in bags outside their doors while ostensibly subjecting themselves to clouds of the virus. Fortunately for the poors, the lethality of COVID turned out not to be true — though it is still BELIEVED to be true. Especially in small university communities like Moscow, ID.

And around the world, folks found out that all that science, and all that elite opinion, had largely been arbitrary, or manufactured by the folks paying the bill. Which, more often than not, turned out to be the taxpayer.

So I wrote about this. Initially, I wrote about the need to follow government mandates. But then the data came in, and I made some influential friends (hi, Jay, if you’re reading this!) and the whole fraud got grounded. So, I started out, initially kindly, and then more forcefully, telling elites in the two university towns that the rational case behind their affectations and hero worship of criminals like Tony Fauci was a crock of rotten fish.

And they responded. Boy, did they ever. I received all sorts of emails about “staying in my lane” and how I was killing people with my op-eds. I was screamed at in public, and ostracized. What was also unusual was that other citizen columnists for the paper, instead of covering their own viewpoints on issues, started writing libelous columns about me. The ethics of the op-ed game are pretty simple. You write your opinion, and then the public gets their shot. What was wild about all this was that it wasn’t just letter writers. It was other op-ed columnists. After three years of all of that, I decided it wasn’t worth the $25/column I was receiving. I figured the persistence of hate against me wasn’t worth it.

The residue from my column still haunts me. The latest incident happened just four days ago. A retired lab manager from a biology department at WSU, that I used to work on Democratic politics, while at the dog park where I run my border collies, picked up dog feces in a bag, came stomping and screaming at me about how irresponsible I was as a dog owner, and threw the feces at me. He then attempted to steal my dog. There were plenty of witnesses — I hang out with a bunch of, well, elderly ladies at the dog park, who are on my team. The perp didn’t leave until I called 911.

But even as he left, as I was running the calculation in my head on who exactly he was, he walked away with a smug grin. His point to be made, in a veritable community of elderly immiserators, was that there would never be a price I could pay to not be tormented by these people in public. Am I 100% sure it wasn’t just about the fact that my dog took a poop? Of course not. But if there’s been any theme in my life over the last four years, is that once you are declared an outcast in a Lefty community, you are fair game for whatever happens to you. And if that thing is evisceration, you may have a Greek chorus weeping for you on the sidelines. But no one will do a thing. You deserved it.

There’s a pattern here that’s worth noting, that I’ve seen over and over since Trump got elected — but was really in play during COVID as well. It plays into the whole Elite Overproduction thing I write about. If you piss off a logger in a logging community, they may threaten to kick your ass. But it’s a direct threat. You square off, size each other up, and then take your chances. The logger (or miner) isn’t counting on some institution to manipulate to change the circumstances. They know that they’re likely breaking the law to kick your ass, and they’ll end up having to explain this to the judge. But they’re functioning inside some rational understanding of an ordered society.

That is no longer true on the Left. When I’ve been assaulted — and it’s happened three times, full-on — the expectation of the person screaming at me/spitting on me/hurling a bag of dog shit at me is that, in their minds, they have functionally been deputized by society to punish me, and any institutional authority summoned would back them up. Ostracism is guaranteed. And because Trump is evil/a rapist/a criminal, they have decided that the rules of a civilized society no longer apply. At least to them — but in the case that I act (in all three cases of assault and battery, I had to passively absorb the abuse) I will be the one that the cops haul away.

This thought is not with rational merit. One of the problems with being a large, muscular human (I’m a big guy, though at 62, not as strong as I used to be) is that they also assume bias in the police, and after I literally break them, I will be the one to pay. Even if it’s obviously self-defense. When the person that was attempting to steal my dog was trying to clip a leash on her collar, I was very careful to not touch him, all the while yelling at him to stop. Witnesses, as I said, and another gentleman were on my side. But so certain he was of his righteousness — it was me, a local societal pariah — it never occurred to him that he would ever suffer any consequences. It’s fundamentally a pattern of psychopathic inversion — claiming self-victimhood as the tool to justify whatever cruelty they decide to mete out. Remember that the next time one of these psychopaths start talking about “the cruelty being the point” when talking about Donald Trump. They’re self-identifying and projecting one of the key behaviors they’re familiar with. And they get to be the judge.

This phenomenon is not just limited to me. There have been numerous other situations where various lefties acted out to disrupt events with no expectation of consequences. In March, a Republican Central Committee meeting in Coeur D’Alene, Idaho, was disrupted by Teresa Borrenpohl, an official at North Idaho College and a Democratic candidate who was forcibly removed from the meeting by private security after disrupting the meeting. She claimed ‘free speech’, though she did not follow the rules of the hearing. While I can understand her actions, at some level, the bottom line once she was thrown out of the meeting was to demand reparations for not being allowed to continue to disrupt the meeting. She was the authority, and she would not tolerate the fact that a group of people might object to her declaring her authority illegitimate. Further, she made it abundantly clear that this was not an act of civil disobedience, where an entity breaks the law, fully expecting to face consequences. There would be no consequences – at least not for her, she informed the press, other than the Kootenai County Republicans paying her tribute. She controlled the morality of the event.

I was heavily attacked as well on Facebook after the event by many people by bringing up similar points. Many of the people on the FB thread know me personally and deeply. It was clear — any questioning of her moral authority would result in permanent ostracism. Some of the people on that thread were individuals who had also participated, or supported our own Civil Disobedience efforts. Clearly, at least in their minds, the rules have changed. As Lefties, they now embody the law, the judge, and the jury. As well as the executioner.

It is worth pausing for a minute and considering what is happening in communities, or rather tribes on the Left. And here’s the thing — Trump Derangement Syndrome is just a symptom. There has been an overall psychosocial v-Meme devolution on the Left. There is still some hanging onto higher-level narratives from Legalistic and Authoritarian v-Memes. But overall, the corpus has adopted a psychopathic perspective based on the psychological condition known as ‘splitting’ — where there’s a descent into black-and-white thinking, where only the current observer, as long as that observer is correctly tribally aligned, gets to decide on the veracity of any given situation. Tribal Taboos have been established (e.g. there will be no firing of any black official, regardless of their self-evident level of corruption) and they will not be broken. And if they are broken, it’s like an entire unraveling of worldview that takes place, instead of any attempt to relate a change of condition with society, or any functional integration of their worldview with what’s actually happening in current affairs. They are literally operating in a fantasy world of their own creation.

But it is reinforced through large-scale LARPing as social-justice warriors, or some other icks. No grounding necessary. The problem is that scales of their fantasies keep growing. As well as the concomitant gaslighting of the general public.

Core characteristics of much of this involve what I call ‘narcissistic shielding’ — where an ostensibly innocent, group-declared victim is moved into a position between the out-group and the psychopathic champion of the in-group. “Don’t approach, or I’ll be forced to shoot the baby panda!” to paraphrase Elon Musk. Agency goes to zero with the Lefties. But the result of that is that it’s all the suspect outsider’s fault. All my attackers were their own narcissistic shields — champions of virtue. And while they threatened physical violence to me, had I responded, they were absolutely sure that the institutions would have been on their side. One of the screamers in my three incidents was a women in a motorized wheelchair who took it on herself to accost me for saying wearing masks were B.S. She accused me of wanting to kill her family.

All the confused outsider sees is the results of psychopathic projection from the Lefty insider. And this projection is both constant, and relentless. Consider the current Russiagate situation. Trump was pathologized, largely by a cabal under ex-President Obama and Hillary Clinton, to be a Russian asset, controlled by Putin. This is now being revealed as a combination plot that refuses to die. But the Left still persists in projecting this ostensible lack of agency on Donald Trump, due to their judgment of (of course) his lack of moral character, as well as mental incontinence, through sophisticated advocates like Heather Cox Richardson, even while there is nary a peep about the fact that Democrats were propping up mental invalid Joe Biden for basically his entire term.

Some of this stems from mental deterioration from the aging of the Left’s core group, which seems to mostly consist of AWFULs (Affluent White Female Urban Liberals) and men and women over the age of 65. I suspect some of this has to do with degenerate cognitive decline — as people age, unless they really work at it, they march back the cognitive development v-Meme ladder, becoming more and more tribal and authority-driven. Much of this seems also like schismogenesis — the creation of a self-image through negative reverse polarization. They must be the opposite of everything they hate about Trump, or else their own, fragile ego boundaries, decaying in the face of their own death, are shattered. It’s a reverse role of the stereotype of Uncle Bob showing up as the arch-conservative at Thanksgiving dinner. But it’s still emblematically characterized with a focus on Trump himself. The various policies, that are simply disastrous for society (like open borders, or masking small children) are conveniently shunted to the side. As they decay, they lose more and more sense for precise time, which then helps them construct Collapse Narratives, based around dubious moral principles, as well as policies only rejecting what is occurring, as opposed to creating alternate solutions that would even have measurable outcomes. The only thing uniting their worldviews is the desire for collapse.

From a neurogenic relational perspective, the Lefties are also moving back down the relational/agency development scale. If you’re not an Externally Defined expert/Tribal Elder, you can’t be listened to at all. And if you go against the drumbeat of dread, then you’re immediately scapegoated. Contrast that to my confrontations with the loggers. It started out Externally Defined (I was an environmentalist, they were timber workers) but over the course of our relationship, their view of me evolved. I became a person — with an independently generated relationship that was fundamentally data-driven. We had talked, and exchanged perspectives, which were likely never completely resolved. But I was still, at the end, a human. Contrast with the current crop on the Left. I know at the end of any conversation with a Lefty True-Believer I’m merely to be added to the list of people to be, at best, re-educated. Or put up against the wall. I gotta get my mind right.

An incredible example of this popped up in my FB feed. I encourage you to read the piece for yourself. A relatively famous Native American writer is condemning her fellow writers for not coming to her Struggle Session workshop, and directly faults one of the people that did come for leaving early. She freely admits that the framework was a Struggle Session. But simply cannot acknowledge that maybe the reason for why the various feminist authors did not show up was that they were just human. And busy. Her response is emblematic of collapsed egocentricism — which is itself a prime symptom of Axis II/Cluster B personality disorders.

And here’s the thing, folks. She did this publicly, in a regional magazine, to people who are her ALLIES. If these people ever manage to gain power again, you can imagine what they’ll do to apostates like me. We continually believe we cannot have a Chinese Cultural Revolution here. But I’m here to tell you that we can. These people are laying the groundwork for it. There are steps — devolution of relational development, followed by rigid appropriation of various orthodoxies, mixed in with no absolution possible.

I’ve had in-laws like this — and they were psychopaths. They are hiding behind the screen of a culture that has, what we believe, an intrinsic, if not invisible thesis of forgiveness. It is a core Christian philosophy. But what I’ve learned in my own life is that there are various rituals for you to confess your sins. However, at the end, you are not granted absolution for your ways, nor elevated for your transcendence. You have merely acceded to a guilty judgment against you. And now you must be punished. Preferably by execution. I’ve got stories.

Civilizationally, we’re in a tight spot. It is true that a lot of these people are literally aging out of the population. But they are exceptionally weak-minded. It’s also true that Lefties are also not reproducing at the rate that conservatives are, which, for all the problems the conservative movement has, it is fundamentally a Christian movement, which does have paths for redemption. Time will tell. But it is also time to start punishing with the judicial system those that break the law. They are not breaking the law with the expectation of societal elevation, as in the past with large civil disobedience campaigns. They are breaking laws expecting that their moral hegemony will dominate.

If you aren’t afraid, you aren’t paying attention. The clip below can happen here.