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| Thomas Massie Because no one should have to look at Stephen Miller |
One of Curmie’s Facebook friends posted this link from the Issa FB page, describing Rep. Thomas Massie’s questioning of the despicable Stephen Miller. It describes Massie’s demand to know what happened to $1.4 billion, supposedly spent on building a 230-mile stretch of border wall that (wait for it) doesn’t actually exist. There’s a link to a video describing a huge conspiracy: everyone from companies contracted to provide the special concrete used for the wall to supervisors who signed for shipments that never happened or the confirmed the completion of construction that was never even started is implicated. So is Miller himself, at least for incompetence if not for grift. And when Massie pressed Miller, the response was 143 seconds of silence. 143 seconds! A record!
Except.
There was something little hinky (to use Curmie’s mom’s term) about that story. For one thing, it was already three or four days old when Curmie saw it. Curmie won’t claim to be absolutely au courant with everything happening in the world, but it did seem odd that he hadn’t seen anything about a story this big within the first day or two. He suspected something was amiss, so he fired up the Google machine to see what other sources had said. Trouble was, they hadn’t. Not CNN. Not NBC, or PBS, or NPR, or ABC. Not the Washington Post or The Guardian, or even the North Platte Weekly Pennysaver. No one, other than a couple of places that essentially cited the story Curmie had already seen. Not looking good in the authenticity department.
There’s also a link in that takes you to a site at with a URL that includes the sequence “jervisfamily.com.” Now, that’s a reliable news outlet! Note: this blog isn’t a news source, either. It’s an opinion/analysis site, but at least it links to news sites, and doesn’t pretend to objectivity.
Somewhere along the line, Curmie also came across a “video” of those alleged events. Curiously, we never hear Congressman Massie or Mr. Miller, only a narrator. (The version Curmie first encountered has a female narrator but he can’t seem to re-trace his steps to find it now; here’s a variation on the theme with a male narrator.) More significantly, we never see Miller when he’s not talking. Maybe Curmie is relying too much on his theatre background here, but it would seem to him that if what you’re touting is silence, maybe we ought to see that moment, huh?
But wait! That’s not all! (Please insert he usual apologies for the late-night infomercial reference here, Gentle Reader.) This story has a few cousins out there. There’s the one about an $890 million wire transfer through the Caymans; this one was shot down by Scopes two days later. One presumes they’ll do the same with a bunch of others when they have the time. Oh, and you thought that 143 seconds of silence were significant? Well, in other Things That Never Happened, Representative Jared Moskowitz got Miller to shut up for 167 seconds about $2.7 billion in missing disaster relief money, and Representative Jasmine Crockett achieved 271 seconds (!) of silence in questioning about 9.8 million missing people.
It’s a freaking auction out there, Gentle Reader! And it’s not just the silences that keep getting bigger. Now there’s a $6.2 billion wire transfer, ferreted out by Representative Ted Lieu.
There were links to those other hallucinatory stories, of
course. Curmie chooses that adjective
intentionally, as it has come to be the standard term for “Shit AI Made Up,”
and the chances that at least a good deal of this crap is AI-generated approach
ontological certitude.
At first glance, these bogus stories (and there are plenty others, featuring different Congresscritters and different minions of the Trump Regime) seem plausible. Stephen Miller is probably the closest this country has seen to Evil Incarnate in a very long time. (He’s scarier than Dear Leader, who is obviously mentally incompetent.) That he would be involved in something illegal as well as morally indefensible isn’t much of a stretch. Moscowitz, Crockett, and Lieu are among the most aggressive Democratic Congresscritters; Massie is as close to an independent thinker as the GOP can muster. So we can understand why even an intelligent person like Curmie’s friend could be fooled at first.
But the key words are “at first.” Even a cursory analysis reveals the flaws in these “stories.” But confirmation bias is a real and powerful force. We’re tempted to believe anything negative about Miller (or Hegseth or Vance or Patel…) because they’re corrupt assholes. Thing is, though, we don’t need to make stuff up; the reality is bad enough. Moreover, this kind of crap hurts “our side” considerably more than it helps. It provides whataboutism ammunition for the MAGA world when we point out one of the manifold prevarications emanating from Trumpistan. More importantly, it’s dishonest, and we shouldn’t be trafficking in that shit. We just shouldn’t.
When, a dozen or so years ago, the Curmie Award went to the person deemed by Curmie’s readership to be the educator who most embarrasses the profession. (Curmie would supply a list of nominees and readers who vote for their… erm… favorites.) That award wasn’t created because Curmie, a professor, hates educators or education. Quite the contrary, in fact. He just doesn’t want to be associated with teachers or administrators who abuse students, punish them for being heroic, etc. Similarly, he wants nothing to do with liars who happen to agree with him on some political matters.
Issa—whoever he, she, or they may be—needs to disappear. So does Stephen Miller, but for different reasons.
Issa did, apparently, disappear. Or was disappeared, which would be a
different phenomenon. Unlike Issa,
Curmie doesn’t want to present as fact that which is even speculative, let
alone demonstrably false, so he’ll just suggest that there is a reasonable
likelihood that Zuck’s minions, rather than Issa, took down those posts. If so, we’re in a more complex ethical
landscape.
Obviously, there should be no censorship of opinions, even—or
perhaps especially—of those that run counter to Conventional Wisdom. Most of us think that guy Galileo may have
been onto something, for example. And we
can object to the obvious double standards employed by, say, Elon Musk in forbidding certain words and not others that are more problematic; nor can
we be certain that there isn’t a little selective enforcement afoot here. Still, even the question of allowing or
disallowing something that’s clearly objectively false may not be an easy call.
Even those posts can be divided into two categories, for example. Curmie has another FB friend, actually the spouse
of a friend, who posts “human interest” stories regularly. Some of them are plausible; others are puff
pieces that show some celebrity as a covert humanitarian, and are almost certainly,
well, hallucinatory. Other than
increasing the reader’s susceptibility to diabetes, however, these posts are
harmless. Curmie wishes they’d disappear,
but it’s clear that there was no ill will involved, just perhaps an insufficiency
of skepticism.
Issa’s posts were different. They were malicious, intended to defame individuals, and frankly it doesn’t matter whether the victim of these false allegations was a good person or an abhorrent jackass. Curmie remembers the one time he served on a jury: it was clear the defendant was what his grandmother would call a “wrong ‘un,” but was he guilty of this particular crime? As a host of previous posts indicate, Curmie is an avowed free speech advocate. But libel isn’t protected by the 1st Amendment, and that’s what Issa’s post were, even if the injured party was a public figure (and loathsome creature) like Stephen Miller. Perhaps the “community notes” approach might be preferable, but Curmie can’t object too much to the cancellation of Issa… if, indeed, that’s what even happened.
Curmie thanks Curmiphiles Kirsten, Eric, Cheryl, and Harold for their suggestions as to how to proceed, and hopes this was a reasonable solution.
