Recent precedent--
By a curious coincidence I have been reading The Crucible this week, for the first time - we didn't do it in any of my school English classes and I never got around to it on my own, until last week one evening walking home from the bus stop I passed a box on the sidewalk, aftermath of a yard sale, labeled FREE BOOKS. (NB: this would be a good trap for enemy agents to set if they were trying to capture spies who were also fans. Who can just walk past a cardboard box labeled "FREE BOOKS"--?)
How many magistrates and judges let him do his work unmolested, for fear that perhaps his eye would fall upon them?
There was no legal counter-argument against a charge of witchcraft.
--BBC-sponsored wikia article on Matthew Hopkins, self-appointed Witch-finder General of England
Anyway, I say "by a curious coincidence" because while it is of course relevant in this time when the McCarthy-venerators have been working fulltime to accomplish what their hero failed to complete, there is a character in the play, Abigail Williams, who in her pursuit of social power which includes revenge against those who slighted her, as well as the effort to escape punishment for her actual flouting of society (including dancing naked in the woods and half-assed attempts at casting love-potions) projects her own behaviors on her neighbors, accusing them of witchcraft and lewd behavior. To add verisimilitude to her accusations, she stabs herself in the stomach with needles after having framed a romantic rival with a "voodoo doll."
The Crucible and Miller's version of Abigail Williams are fiction, (if as loosely-inspired by historical persons and events as A Man For All Seasons.)
Francisco Nava is not. Just last fall he was a student at Princeton, belonging to a conservative club focused it seems entirely on how Everybody Else On Campus Is Getting More Sex Than We, writing pompous screeds for the Daily Princetonian on how having sex ruins women's lives 4EVA and condoms don't work to stop the spread of VD - typical conservative pundit-bullshit, regurgitated dutifully and smugly and no doubt getting him some derision from classmates who read his column or couldn't avoid listening to him pontificate in seminars - though I can only find a letter praising him, online.
Being mocked for a gullible meddling prude is not very glamorous, when it comes to persecution. It's hard (tho' rightwingers do it every day) to demand much sympathy in a world where people really are beaten up and killed for challenging governments or being different in socially-unacceptable ways. So Nava ('09) went and sent threatening emails to himself and a conservative professor, then roughed himself up a bit, and claimed he was attacked by other students for his published views.
Immediately this was siezed upon by other conservative college pundits, claiming that this was oh-so-typical of the Left's violence and "silencing" of those who dared speak the truth about sex in today's wanton climate blah blah blah, as well as by the liberal aristocrat-owned media.
Sound familiar?
And after it was revealed that under questioning from the police re inconsistencies in his story, Nava had admitted the fraud, we get the instant backpedaling from his fellow conservative clubmembers - the insistence that they had doubted him all along, that they hadn't publicized it - even though one of them wrote that editorial about how this showed how persecuted conservatives were! and others were still posting credulously at Hegemony organ First Things about it - and were not to blame or be associated with him any more at all. No hint of real remorse, or even the awareness that by signing the name of a real student at Princeton to his faked emails, he could have ruined that kid's name - that the "real victim" of this is not Nava for getting himself expelled and humiliated as a nasty but dumb hoaxer....
Sound familiar? That's how the rightbloggers and conservative magazine pundits have reacted - they weren't in the wrong for falling for Todd's story, because it fit their long-nurtured narrative of persecution and perpetual victimhood was just so typical of the violence of Those People (blacks, liberals, doesn't matter) and they are the ones who are to be pitied because Todd made them all look bad - it is truly nauseating.
But at least I didn't see anyone arguing that he wasn't responsible for his actions - unlike the defenders of a boastfully-self-styled liar, tossed out of one Republican campaign for dirty tricks already, who set up the hoax over a course of hours with blog entries (apparently sleep-typing in a fugue state) and only recanted when confronted with the hard evidence of her crimes, upon which she pleaded not guilty due to the influence of other witches madness.
(But our Western tradition of "chivalrism," in which women are not ever allowed to be accountable, not being mentally capable of adult choices, is strong on the left as well as the right. What, was she wafting about like Ophelia, raving childishly as she phonebanked for the McCain campaign that night, scattering Twitter-Tweets like blossoms as she drove through Pittsburgh's Little Italy? Scratching a carefully-drawn B on her own face in an unconscious daze like a comical version of Lucia di Lammermoor? Puh-lease! However this has been illuminating to me as to how various blatantly-improbable "miracle" hoaxes have gone viral, including things like the Fairies in the Garden pix as well as stigmatics like Anne Catherine Mrs. Jesus Mary-Sue Emmerich - when even in this skeptical modern age with google image search at a fingertip, even people from the opposing side are uncritically swallowing her stories from the "knife-carved mutilation" to the "black eye" to the "mental illness", it's clear that the best vehicle for a hoax in the West is a childlike white girl...)
But more importantly, the conservatives - even the so-called intellectual ones - have learned nothing from the past, not even their own.
Here's Nava's buddies while the hoax was in the process of debunking:
Is it possible that it’s a fabrication and an inside job? It is not impossible, but witnesses believe that Nava could not have inflicted the beating on himself. While the Groton incident is disturbing, the Princeton admissions office was satisfied with Nava’s explanation. As for the e-mail account, the Office of Information Technology may be able to uncover more information in the coming days.
On the other hand, there’s good reason to think that Nava is being honest and that he has suffered a terrible assault. His beatings were severe, and the panic he suffered on Saturday, after seeing a student in a ski cap similar to his assailants, is telling...
This is what they consider a measured skeptical response? A refusal to fan the flames? SRSLY?
And yet the rightbloggers couldn't believe that Todd could have scratched her own cheek and made a fake report! (Except for professional hatemonger and hoaxmonger Michelle Malkin, who was apparently jealous that she hadn't thought of it first, poor dear.) And even now they still think this a justified response, and themselves the real victims! Obviously they learned absolutely nothing from this incident (or another in which the College Republicans organizer and "victim" got in a drunken fistfight with some buddies and blamed it on TEH LEFT...at least he had a genuine black eye!)
Of course, in addition to the timing, Nava wasn't female, didn't claim his attackers were black (just black-clad) and didn't add any titillating bits about being lustfully pawed by a giant black man -- If only he'd tailored his narrative a little closer to the Republican id! Think how much more traction and sympathy he might have gotten!
Sarcasm, yes, but not a humorous situation at all: not only did Nava use another student's name on his poison-pen letters, but he shrieked, fainted, and pointed out a random classmate walking by as one of his assailants, calling for his arrest, on the basis of the other guy's wearing a knit cap. I am so much reminded both of old-tyme witch-hunting and the Pittsburgh hoax. And again, his associates and fellow-travellers believed this - though it turned out that he'd done something similar in high school, too (and learned nothing from the experience. But then, neither did they:
This is why the Right continues to be taken in by the likes of Todd, Drudge, and Fox - because they are incapable of self-awareness. One of the reasons I started to stop self-identifying as a proud conservative starting in college and calling myself instead "moderate," "centrist," "independent," or "apolitical" (tho' remaining a smug and self-righteously single-issue "prolife" voter) was the rampant hypocrisy of the leadership combined with the utter unconcern for the same in the rank-and-file - I would hear all the denunciations of "gridlock" and the demands for "bipartisanship" when the Republicans were out of power, and then the same people would be going "Neener neener we won, yay gridlock!" as soon as "We" were in power, and I would be going "but wait, wasn't our principle that compromise and cooperation were mandatory for a civil society? where did that all go?" which is how come I ended up not voting in 2000, accepting the "both sides just as bad" rhetoric because I could see the hypocrisy and lies on "our" side, but hadn't gone so far as to examine the base assumptions of my upbringing in re liberalism.
Frankly, my first thought when the hoax was confirmed was "Well, now they won't dare to bring Tawana Brawley up again, at least!" because really, how can they bring that (rather long-ago) case up with a straight face, when all anyone has to say is "Ashley Todd" (and also "Francisco Nava") right back? But they don't even get that, (let alone the relevance of the fact that Todd, unlike Brawley, was actually employed by the Republican party.) They are the stars of their perpetual psychodrama, the Good Guys always under attack, even when they aren't either.
I'm not sure what can shake such folks out of this mindset - for me it took just a few months of working in a public library, and realizing that not only was the world not simultaneously full of Ebol Godless Liberal Secularhumanists out to Destroy Christianity & Western Civ, and full of Real True Christians or potential converts all yearning to express the Godly Conservativism in their hearts, but that most people were completely oblivious to all the things that were sooooo important in our little Wanderer and National Review-ruled cliques. They didn't know our debates - internal or contra mundum - even existed, for the most part, and to the extent that they did they either didn't care or thought we were all cranks.
Which is yeah, embarrassing - but even at age 15-and-a-half I could tell the difference between that and persecution. (It helped that I was then being terrorized by gangs of school bullies who thought it was hilarious to stalk me, talk - loudly - about how much they wanted to rape me, surround and push me on the stairs and in the halls, and steal and rip up my books while my few "friends" pretended not to see nor hear: a patron or coworker saying in one's presence stuff like "Reagan's an asshole and the government shouldn't have the right to interfere in people's privacy and anyone who supports this is a McCarthyite!" doesn't quite level the balance there.)
This is, however, why they HAVE to believe that Obama has sekrit mind-bending power (whether or not he is the AntiChrist or just a foothill) - otherwise they'd have to accept that no, an awful lot of American people just don't want what they're selling. This would be even harder to manage, and more damaging to their pride, than the always-and-ongoing simultaneous beliefs that the vast majority of Americans are dumb dupes (which is why they kept voting for, and liking, Bill Clinton) and yet the vast majority of Americans are all really Real True Christians and Folks Like Us, so that the conservative kids can feel like they're all beloved and popular and part of the biggest bestest clique EVAR!
The argument that it was okay to break the Commandments in the service of the Church was something that used to get invoked a fair amount among conservative Catholic academics back in the '80s, in private, even if it was somewhat controversial, just like talking about killing abortionists/blowing up Planned Parenthood clinics. And "They're doing it to us/They did it first/They did it worst!" even sans proof of such claims was always the excuse, going back to the original Ratfuckers and Watergate - the root of it being "Well, they would do it to us first if we don't do it first to them" combined with "we HAVE to do it first because we're the Good Guys and they're the Bad Guys and so it's okay for us to do ANYTHING to stop them" - and no self-awareness of hypocrisy at all. Hence our 24-invoking torture defenders.
So it seems likely to me that Todd - for once Overzealous Staffer has a name and a face! - thought to herself "All's fair in love and war" and despite the ingratitude of the Ron Paul campaign over her cunning and initiative shown in lying about her allegiance to the rival candidates' staff to get their inside info, did not from that learn prudence in re the Republican Dirty Tricks Department, and thought to herself that - as so many rightbloggers have asserted - there MUST be equal badness going on being done by Democrats, and the Liberal Media (TM) just not reporting it, so she was going to provide an example that they couldn't ignore, this time - present herself wearing a Scarlet Letter just like the characters in her favorite book, and push it simultaneously to nonpartisan and trustworthy sources like Drudge. After all, it might have happened, it should be true, in the world of FOX and NRO and VDARE! So what if it wasn't really true? They make their own reality, remember!
((This is why they keep getting screwed over by their own incompetents, too. Apparently it didn't occur to the Michigan conservatives that a grandiose young fraud like Zatkoff might, you know, go on being grandiose and untrustworthy in his quest for power, so long as he kept on making the right ideological noises.)
Understand how the conservative mind works: so long as you can find somebody else even remotely connected to your opponents - even if that connection is only through a tenuous chain of enthymemes and assumptions visible only to you - who has done something bad, then whatever your side did doesn't count! and you are still the Good Guys, holding the moral High Ground, now and forever, world without end, amen. This is why there is no point in arguing with the trolls except to hone your dialectical skills on, and to serve as an object illustration of what we're responding to: it's all partisan for them, and their constant talk of principles is just that - talk, camouflage, like the sponges that certain small ocean-dwelling crabs attach to their shells to hide themselves.
But this lack of connection between the Virtual Reality that they generate inside their heads and amongst themselves - and remember, I used to be part of this, I remember what it was like - and the extramental cosmos they physically inhabit, also matches up with other aspects of Todd's little stunt. The police detective who was sent out to try to find the place she was mugged noticed that it was odd the way she didn't seem to have a clue where it happened and just had him drive around until she apparently picked an ATM at random - and yet, you know, that was a real streetcorner in a real neighborhood where a lot of real human beings white and brown of both sexes and all ages really do live - and some of them were actually there that night at that hour and none of them saw anything like this going on. It's difficult building spies' backstory and alibis, because that irreducible and inconvenient real world, stuff is - Pittsburgh is not just a cardboard stage set full of faceless unreal extras who can be posed to add verisimilitude to some ideologue's psychodrama, any more than Dallas is or Toronto or Oxford or Mumbai or Manchester, NH.
(Neither is Holland, BTW.)
But this lack of connection to the outer world, this living-exclusively-in-their-heads that afflicts the right wing - and not just Todd, manifestly - betrayed them all, because it meant that none of it passed the Plausibility test for a fic, it was neither possible nor probable by today's standards. Three hundred years ago, without recording cameras (the camera obscura was around and the concept of photography existed but chemistry and optics weren't up to it) and forensics being quite rudimentary (though, again, real policing did exist if spottily and rudimentarily, and worked better than torture or magic for catching and stopping crime, even in the 1600s), she and her superiors might well have gotten away with it. What might a Rev. Mather with his 'spectral evidence' have done with her testimony? But alas, she was born too late--
(--At least, I hope she was born too late, though the prospect of a VP with a Witchfinder-General on retainer makes me more doubtful than I like; but the fact that a brief video revelation that longtime Minnesota Represenative Bachmann is only one ketchup-bottle away from denouncing card-carrying Communists in Congress has left her position suddenly and abruptly unstable is hopeful, to unite both of Arthur Miller's themes--)
--And also, some of us have learned lessons from the past, and many hands have been working to bend that arc towards justice, ever so little by little--
One thing very suspicious about Todd's allegation, and also her pleas of madness upon discovery, was that there was a page of videos she had recorded for her employers the College Republicans on YouTube until very recently (unf. I was having network issues and didn't get to record them and I"m not sure if anyone has them archived elsehwere, but they were widely viewed and linked and reported from the start) in which she was perky and articulate and full of smug confidence - not at all a poor browbeaten Ophelia-type at all. Except for one, which was full of a hissing spite, directed at the subject of her ire, a campus maintenance guy who had insulted her by taking down some signs that she had stuck up on a door - signs that she had worked so hard on and that were so pretty, made from notebook paper - and cruelly thrown them away, creating a - her words - "hostile" environment.
Nothing from her as to whether or not they had permission to post signs there, and no sign that maybe the maintenance guy was just doing his job and NOT trying to hurt her feelings or persecute her, specifically, by taking them down - the combination of malice and pouting was juvenile, but also something I've seen, even had directed at me and when it's by older women in positions of power it's really scary. (No, seriously, I wasn't out to get you, ex-boss of 2003, I wasn't spying for your competition, and my little dragon paperweight was NOT a Satanic object!)
But the thing that struck me as she filmed the janitor taking out the trash - aside from her disproportionate offense and anger - was that he was a) black, b) about 6'4" tall...
I'm actually glad that it didn't apparently occur to the conservative punditry any more than it did to Todd to do any background research at all, not even the simplest check that might have revealed that this is not your father's Pittsburgh PD as I'm sure that instead of the deranged accusations that Todd was actually an Obama campaign volunteer valiantly sacrificing herself to punk the Republicans which we did get, we'd have heard deranged accusations from the Corner that Chief Harper - well, you can fill in the blanks yourself, I'm sure. I feel unclean writing the dialogue for Stormfront-Lite over there.
Now, the arrival of Sir William Phips to the government of New England was at a time when a governor would have occasion for all the skill in sorcery that was ever necessary to a Jewish counsellor; a time when scores of poor people had newly fallen under a prodigious possession of devils, which it was then generally thought had been by witchcraft induced. It is to be confessed and bewailed that many inhabitants of New England, and young people especially, had been led away with little sorceries, wherein they did "secretly those things that were not right against the Lord and their God." They would often cure hurts with spells and practice detestable conjurations with sieves and keys and pease and nails and horseshoes and other implements, to learn the things for which they had a forbidden and impious curiosity... Although this diabolical divinations are more ordinarly committed perhaps over the whole world than they are in the country of New England, yet, that being a country devoted unto the worship and service of the Lord Jesus Christ above the rest of the world, he signalized his vengence against these wickednesses with such extraordinary dispensations as have not been seen in other places.
The devils which had been so played withal, and, it may be, by some few criminals more explicitly engaged and employed, now broke in upon the country after as astonishing a manner as was ever heard of... The people that were infected and infested with such daemons, in a few days' time, arrived unto such a refined alteration upon their eyes that they could see their tormentors: they saw a devil of a little stature and of a tawny color, attended still with spectres that appeared in more humane circumstances.
These tormentors tendered unto the afflicted a book, requiring them to sign it at least, in token of their consenting to be listed in the service of the devil, which, they refusing to do, the spectres under the command of that blackness, as they called him, would apply themselves to torture them with prodigious molestations.
The afflicted wretches were horribly distorted and convulsed; they were pinched black and blue; pins would be run everywhere in their flesh; they would be scalded until they had blisters raised on them; and a thousand other things, before hundreds of witnesses, were done unto them, evidentally preternatural. For if it were preternatural to keep a rigid fast for nine -- yea, for fifteen -- days together; or if it were preternatural to have one's hands tied close together with a rope to be plainly seen, and then by unseen hands presently pulled up a great way from the earth before a crowd of people -- such preternatural things were endured by them.
But of all the preternatural things which befell these people, there were none more unaccountable than those wherein the prestigious daemons would ever now and then cover the most corporeal things in the world with a fascinating mist of invisibility... A person was haunted by a most abusive spectre which came to her, she said, with a sheet about her, though seen to none but herself...
Also, it is well known that these wicked spectres did proceed so far as to steal several quantities of money from divers people, part of which individual money was sometimes dropped out of the air... Yet more: the miserable have complained bitterly of burning rags run into their forceably distended mouths... Once more: the miserable exclaimed extremely of branding irons heating at the fire on the hearth to mark them...
Flashy people may burlesque these things, but when hundreds of the most sober people in a country where they have as much mother-wit certainly as the rest of mankind, know them to be true, nothing but the absurd and forward spirit of Sadducism can question them. I have not yet mentioned so much as one thing that will not be justified, if it be required, by the oaths of more considerate persons than any that can ridicule these odd phenomena.
--Rev. Cotton Mather, writing ten years after the Salem trials
Note in the above account of the things suffered by the self-described victims of witchcraft, all the elements of the Todd hoax are present: visible physical injuries and contortions, claims of sexual abuse, -- theft of money! -- a challenge to renounce one's belief and accept another spiritual leader! - and even the juxtaposition of the "flashy" ("chattering classes") and too-sophisticated modern minds who scoff at the notion that invisible devils could be responsible for this, contrasted with the plain ordinary people who believe it ("Joe Sixpack" of the seventeenth century), the only differences being that Ashley Todd claimed her tawny incubus was corporeal, when he supposedly robbed her, beat her black and blue, tossed her about like a ragdoll, touched her under her "cloths" and pricked her with pointed objects, demanding that she renounce her faith in St. John McCain and sign a pledge in blood to the Antichrist Obama - meaning that he should have showed up on a camera, not being a vampire...and that the "flashy people" who didn't believe were one-and-the-same with that majority of "sober" folks whose "mother-wit" rejected the tale this time round.
I guess even a Narrative can get threadbare, and lose the power of Story over imaginations, with too much use. I hope so, at least: then it was fear of witches, whose existence was 'proven' when they and their loved ones were forced to confess by the use of "stress positions", sleep deprivation and water torture - in Miller's time it was communists under every bed - in our day it's terrorists AND communists AND witches, now, too -- but eventually, even back then, people came to realize that they were in more danger from the witchfinders than from any accused agent of the devil, and rebelled.
One more interesting coincidence: the parallels to the Charles Stuart case occurred to a lot of us, but I didn't realize until other people pointed it out that it happened seventeen years earlier to the day. I don't believe in numerology or signs-and-wonders, and I don't expect that Todd was historically-aware enough to be deliberately playing with the date. But it is an interesting convergence.
Oh, and the cat-scratches I got last week breaking up a territorial dispute over furniture? Still crusted scabs. But they won't scar...
PS: Yes, I do consider the Restoration Era to be recent history.
PPS: William F. Buckley threw Tailgunner Joe under the bus after he became an embarrassment and a liability, too. Nothing new, nothing new.
How many magistrates and judges let him do his work unmolested, for fear that perhaps his eye would fall upon them?
There was no legal counter-argument against a charge of witchcraft.
--BBC-sponsored wikia article on Matthew Hopkins, self-appointed Witch-finder General of England
Anyway, I say "by a curious coincidence" because while it is of course relevant in this time when the McCarthy-venerators have been working fulltime to accomplish what their hero failed to complete, there is a character in the play, Abigail Williams, who in her pursuit of social power which includes revenge against those who slighted her, as well as the effort to escape punishment for her actual flouting of society (including dancing naked in the woods and half-assed attempts at casting love-potions) projects her own behaviors on her neighbors, accusing them of witchcraft and lewd behavior. To add verisimilitude to her accusations, she stabs herself in the stomach with needles after having framed a romantic rival with a "voodoo doll."
The Crucible and Miller's version of Abigail Williams are fiction, (if as loosely-inspired by historical persons and events as A Man For All Seasons.)
Francisco Nava is not. Just last fall he was a student at Princeton, belonging to a conservative club focused it seems entirely on how Everybody Else On Campus Is Getting More Sex Than We, writing pompous screeds for the Daily Princetonian on how having sex ruins women's lives 4EVA and condoms don't work to stop the spread of VD - typical conservative pundit-bullshit, regurgitated dutifully and smugly and no doubt getting him some derision from classmates who read his column or couldn't avoid listening to him pontificate in seminars - though I can only find a letter praising him, online.
Being mocked for a gullible meddling prude is not very glamorous, when it comes to persecution. It's hard (tho' rightwingers do it every day) to demand much sympathy in a world where people really are beaten up and killed for challenging governments or being different in socially-unacceptable ways. So Nava ('09) went and sent threatening emails to himself and a conservative professor, then roughed himself up a bit, and claimed he was attacked by other students for his published views.
Immediately this was siezed upon by other conservative college pundits, claiming that this was oh-so-typical of the Left's violence and "silencing" of those who dared speak the truth about sex in today's wanton climate blah blah blah, as well as by the liberal aristocrat-owned media.
Sound familiar?
And after it was revealed that under questioning from the police re inconsistencies in his story, Nava had admitted the fraud, we get the instant backpedaling from his fellow conservative clubmembers - the insistence that they had doubted him all along, that they hadn't publicized it - even though one of them wrote that editorial about how this showed how persecuted conservatives were! and others were still posting credulously at Hegemony organ First Things about it - and were not to blame or be associated with him any more at all. No hint of real remorse, or even the awareness that by signing the name of a real student at Princeton to his faked emails, he could have ruined that kid's name - that the "real victim" of this is not Nava for getting himself expelled and humiliated as a nasty but dumb hoaxer....
Sound familiar? That's how the rightbloggers and conservative magazine pundits have reacted - they weren't in the wrong for falling for Todd's story, because it fit their long-nurtured narrative of persecution and perpetual victimhood was just so typical of the violence of Those People (blacks, liberals, doesn't matter) and they are the ones who are to be pitied because Todd made them all look bad - it is truly nauseating.
But at least I didn't see anyone arguing that he wasn't responsible for his actions - unlike the defenders of a boastfully-self-styled liar, tossed out of one Republican campaign for dirty tricks already, who set up the hoax over a course of hours with blog entries (apparently sleep-typing in a fugue state) and only recanted when confronted with the hard evidence of her crimes, upon which she pleaded not guilty due to the influence of other witches madness.
(But our Western tradition of "chivalrism," in which women are not ever allowed to be accountable, not being mentally capable of adult choices, is strong on the left as well as the right. What, was she wafting about like Ophelia, raving childishly as she phonebanked for the McCain campaign that night, scattering Twitter-Tweets like blossoms as she drove through Pittsburgh's Little Italy? Scratching a carefully-drawn B on her own face in an unconscious daze like a comical version of Lucia di Lammermoor? Puh-lease! However this has been illuminating to me as to how various blatantly-improbable "miracle" hoaxes have gone viral, including things like the Fairies in the Garden pix as well as stigmatics like Anne Catherine Mrs. Jesus Mary-Sue Emmerich - when even in this skeptical modern age with google image search at a fingertip, even people from the opposing side are uncritically swallowing her stories from the "knife-carved mutilation" to the "black eye" to the "mental illness", it's clear that the best vehicle for a hoax in the West is a childlike white girl...)
But more importantly, the conservatives - even the so-called intellectual ones - have learned nothing from the past, not even their own.
Here's Nava's buddies while the hoax was in the process of debunking:
Is it possible that it’s a fabrication and an inside job? It is not impossible, but witnesses believe that Nava could not have inflicted the beating on himself. While the Groton incident is disturbing, the Princeton admissions office was satisfied with Nava’s explanation. As for the e-mail account, the Office of Information Technology may be able to uncover more information in the coming days.
On the other hand, there’s good reason to think that Nava is being honest and that he has suffered a terrible assault. His beatings were severe, and the panic he suffered on Saturday, after seeing a student in a ski cap similar to his assailants, is telling...
This is what they consider a measured skeptical response? A refusal to fan the flames? SRSLY?
And yet the rightbloggers couldn't believe that Todd could have scratched her own cheek and made a fake report! (Except for professional hatemonger and hoaxmonger Michelle Malkin, who was apparently jealous that she hadn't thought of it first, poor dear.) And even now they still think this a justified response, and themselves the real victims! Obviously they learned absolutely nothing from this incident (or another in which the College Republicans organizer and "victim" got in a drunken fistfight with some buddies and blamed it on TEH LEFT...at least he had a genuine black eye!)
Of course, in addition to the timing, Nava wasn't female, didn't claim his attackers were black (just black-clad) and didn't add any titillating bits about being lustfully pawed by a giant black man -- If only he'd tailored his narrative a little closer to the Republican id! Think how much more traction and sympathy he might have gotten!
Sarcasm, yes, but not a humorous situation at all: not only did Nava use another student's name on his poison-pen letters, but he shrieked, fainted, and pointed out a random classmate walking by as one of his assailants, calling for his arrest, on the basis of the other guy's wearing a knit cap. I am so much reminded both of old-tyme witch-hunting and the Pittsburgh hoax. And again, his associates and fellow-travellers believed this - though it turned out that he'd done something similar in high school, too (and learned nothing from the experience. But then, neither did they:
This is why the Right continues to be taken in by the likes of Todd, Drudge, and Fox - because they are incapable of self-awareness. One of the reasons I started to stop self-identifying as a proud conservative starting in college and calling myself instead "moderate," "centrist," "independent," or "apolitical" (tho' remaining a smug and self-righteously single-issue "prolife" voter) was the rampant hypocrisy of the leadership combined with the utter unconcern for the same in the rank-and-file - I would hear all the denunciations of "gridlock" and the demands for "bipartisanship" when the Republicans were out of power, and then the same people would be going "Neener neener we won, yay gridlock!" as soon as "We" were in power, and I would be going "but wait, wasn't our principle that compromise and cooperation were mandatory for a civil society? where did that all go?" which is how come I ended up not voting in 2000, accepting the "both sides just as bad" rhetoric because I could see the hypocrisy and lies on "our" side, but hadn't gone so far as to examine the base assumptions of my upbringing in re liberalism.
Frankly, my first thought when the hoax was confirmed was "Well, now they won't dare to bring Tawana Brawley up again, at least!" because really, how can they bring that (rather long-ago) case up with a straight face, when all anyone has to say is "Ashley Todd" (and also "Francisco Nava") right back? But they don't even get that, (let alone the relevance of the fact that Todd, unlike Brawley, was actually employed by the Republican party.) They are the stars of their perpetual psychodrama, the Good Guys always under attack, even when they aren't either.
I'm not sure what can shake such folks out of this mindset - for me it took just a few months of working in a public library, and realizing that not only was the world not simultaneously full of Ebol Godless Liberal Secularhumanists out to Destroy Christianity & Western Civ, and full of Real True Christians or potential converts all yearning to express the Godly Conservativism in their hearts, but that most people were completely oblivious to all the things that were sooooo important in our little Wanderer and National Review-ruled cliques. They didn't know our debates - internal or contra mundum - even existed, for the most part, and to the extent that they did they either didn't care or thought we were all cranks.
Which is yeah, embarrassing - but even at age 15-and-a-half I could tell the difference between that and persecution. (It helped that I was then being terrorized by gangs of school bullies who thought it was hilarious to stalk me, talk - loudly - about how much they wanted to rape me, surround and push me on the stairs and in the halls, and steal and rip up my books while my few "friends" pretended not to see nor hear: a patron or coworker saying in one's presence stuff like "Reagan's an asshole and the government shouldn't have the right to interfere in people's privacy and anyone who supports this is a McCarthyite!" doesn't quite level the balance there.)
This is, however, why they HAVE to believe that Obama has sekrit mind-bending power (whether or not he is the AntiChrist or just a foothill) - otherwise they'd have to accept that no, an awful lot of American people just don't want what they're selling. This would be even harder to manage, and more damaging to their pride, than the always-and-ongoing simultaneous beliefs that the vast majority of Americans are dumb dupes (which is why they kept voting for, and liking, Bill Clinton) and yet the vast majority of Americans are all really Real True Christians and Folks Like Us, so that the conservative kids can feel like they're all beloved and popular and part of the biggest bestest clique EVAR!
The argument that it was okay to break the Commandments in the service of the Church was something that used to get invoked a fair amount among conservative Catholic academics back in the '80s, in private, even if it was somewhat controversial, just like talking about killing abortionists/blowing up Planned Parenthood clinics. And "They're doing it to us/They did it first/They did it worst!" even sans proof of such claims was always the excuse, going back to the original Ratfuckers and Watergate - the root of it being "Well, they would do it to us first if we don't do it first to them" combined with "we HAVE to do it first because we're the Good Guys and they're the Bad Guys and so it's okay for us to do ANYTHING to stop them" - and no self-awareness of hypocrisy at all. Hence our 24-invoking torture defenders.
So it seems likely to me that Todd - for once Overzealous Staffer has a name and a face! - thought to herself "All's fair in love and war" and despite the ingratitude of the Ron Paul campaign over her cunning and initiative shown in lying about her allegiance to the rival candidates' staff to get their inside info, did not from that learn prudence in re the Republican Dirty Tricks Department, and thought to herself that - as so many rightbloggers have asserted - there MUST be equal badness going on being done by Democrats, and the Liberal Media (TM) just not reporting it, so she was going to provide an example that they couldn't ignore, this time - present herself wearing a Scarlet Letter just like the characters in her favorite book, and push it simultaneously to nonpartisan and trustworthy sources like Drudge. After all, it might have happened, it should be true, in the world of FOX and NRO and VDARE! So what if it wasn't really true? They make their own reality, remember!
((This is why they keep getting screwed over by their own incompetents, too. Apparently it didn't occur to the Michigan conservatives that a grandiose young fraud like Zatkoff might, you know, go on being grandiose and untrustworthy in his quest for power, so long as he kept on making the right ideological noises.)
Understand how the conservative mind works: so long as you can find somebody else even remotely connected to your opponents - even if that connection is only through a tenuous chain of enthymemes and assumptions visible only to you - who has done something bad, then whatever your side did doesn't count! and you are still the Good Guys, holding the moral High Ground, now and forever, world without end, amen. This is why there is no point in arguing with the trolls except to hone your dialectical skills on, and to serve as an object illustration of what we're responding to: it's all partisan for them, and their constant talk of principles is just that - talk, camouflage, like the sponges that certain small ocean-dwelling crabs attach to their shells to hide themselves.
But this lack of connection between the Virtual Reality that they generate inside their heads and amongst themselves - and remember, I used to be part of this, I remember what it was like - and the extramental cosmos they physically inhabit, also matches up with other aspects of Todd's little stunt. The police detective who was sent out to try to find the place she was mugged noticed that it was odd the way she didn't seem to have a clue where it happened and just had him drive around until she apparently picked an ATM at random - and yet, you know, that was a real streetcorner in a real neighborhood where a lot of real human beings white and brown of both sexes and all ages really do live - and some of them were actually there that night at that hour and none of them saw anything like this going on. It's difficult building spies' backstory and alibis, because that irreducible and inconvenient real world, stuff is - Pittsburgh is not just a cardboard stage set full of faceless unreal extras who can be posed to add verisimilitude to some ideologue's psychodrama, any more than Dallas is or Toronto or Oxford or Mumbai or Manchester, NH.
(Neither is Holland, BTW.)
But this lack of connection to the outer world, this living-exclusively-in-their-heads that afflicts the right wing - and not just Todd, manifestly - betrayed them all, because it meant that none of it passed the Plausibility test for a fic, it was neither possible nor probable by today's standards. Three hundred years ago, without recording cameras (the camera obscura was around and the concept of photography existed but chemistry and optics weren't up to it) and forensics being quite rudimentary (though, again, real policing did exist if spottily and rudimentarily, and worked better than torture or magic for catching and stopping crime, even in the 1600s), she and her superiors might well have gotten away with it. What might a Rev. Mather with his 'spectral evidence' have done with her testimony? But alas, she was born too late--
(--At least, I hope she was born too late, though the prospect of a VP with a Witchfinder-General on retainer makes me more doubtful than I like; but the fact that a brief video revelation that longtime Minnesota Represenative Bachmann is only one ketchup-bottle away from denouncing card-carrying Communists in Congress has left her position suddenly and abruptly unstable is hopeful, to unite both of Arthur Miller's themes--)
--And also, some of us have learned lessons from the past, and many hands have been working to bend that arc towards justice, ever so little by little--
One thing very suspicious about Todd's allegation, and also her pleas of madness upon discovery, was that there was a page of videos she had recorded for her employers the College Republicans on YouTube until very recently (unf. I was having network issues and didn't get to record them and I"m not sure if anyone has them archived elsehwere, but they were widely viewed and linked and reported from the start) in which she was perky and articulate and full of smug confidence - not at all a poor browbeaten Ophelia-type at all. Except for one, which was full of a hissing spite, directed at the subject of her ire, a campus maintenance guy who had insulted her by taking down some signs that she had stuck up on a door - signs that she had worked so hard on and that were so pretty, made from notebook paper - and cruelly thrown them away, creating a - her words - "hostile" environment.
Nothing from her as to whether or not they had permission to post signs there, and no sign that maybe the maintenance guy was just doing his job and NOT trying to hurt her feelings or persecute her, specifically, by taking them down - the combination of malice and pouting was juvenile, but also something I've seen, even had directed at me and when it's by older women in positions of power it's really scary. (No, seriously, I wasn't out to get you, ex-boss of 2003, I wasn't spying for your competition, and my little dragon paperweight was NOT a Satanic object!)
But the thing that struck me as she filmed the janitor taking out the trash - aside from her disproportionate offense and anger - was that he was a) black, b) about 6'4" tall...
I'm actually glad that it didn't apparently occur to the conservative punditry any more than it did to Todd to do any background research at all, not even the simplest check that might have revealed that this is not your father's Pittsburgh PD as I'm sure that instead of the deranged accusations that Todd was actually an Obama campaign volunteer valiantly sacrificing herself to punk the Republicans which we did get, we'd have heard deranged accusations from the Corner that Chief Harper - well, you can fill in the blanks yourself, I'm sure. I feel unclean writing the dialogue for Stormfront-Lite over there.
Now, the arrival of Sir William Phips to the government of New England was at a time when a governor would have occasion for all the skill in sorcery that was ever necessary to a Jewish counsellor; a time when scores of poor people had newly fallen under a prodigious possession of devils, which it was then generally thought had been by witchcraft induced. It is to be confessed and bewailed that many inhabitants of New England, and young people especially, had been led away with little sorceries, wherein they did "secretly those things that were not right against the Lord and their God." They would often cure hurts with spells and practice detestable conjurations with sieves and keys and pease and nails and horseshoes and other implements, to learn the things for which they had a forbidden and impious curiosity... Although this diabolical divinations are more ordinarly committed perhaps over the whole world than they are in the country of New England, yet, that being a country devoted unto the worship and service of the Lord Jesus Christ above the rest of the world, he signalized his vengence against these wickednesses with such extraordinary dispensations as have not been seen in other places.
The devils which had been so played withal, and, it may be, by some few criminals more explicitly engaged and employed, now broke in upon the country after as astonishing a manner as was ever heard of... The people that were infected and infested with such daemons, in a few days' time, arrived unto such a refined alteration upon their eyes that they could see their tormentors: they saw a devil of a little stature and of a tawny color, attended still with spectres that appeared in more humane circumstances.
These tormentors tendered unto the afflicted a book, requiring them to sign it at least, in token of their consenting to be listed in the service of the devil, which, they refusing to do, the spectres under the command of that blackness, as they called him, would apply themselves to torture them with prodigious molestations.
The afflicted wretches were horribly distorted and convulsed; they were pinched black and blue; pins would be run everywhere in their flesh; they would be scalded until they had blisters raised on them; and a thousand other things, before hundreds of witnesses, were done unto them, evidentally preternatural. For if it were preternatural to keep a rigid fast for nine -- yea, for fifteen -- days together; or if it were preternatural to have one's hands tied close together with a rope to be plainly seen, and then by unseen hands presently pulled up a great way from the earth before a crowd of people -- such preternatural things were endured by them.
But of all the preternatural things which befell these people, there were none more unaccountable than those wherein the prestigious daemons would ever now and then cover the most corporeal things in the world with a fascinating mist of invisibility... A person was haunted by a most abusive spectre which came to her, she said, with a sheet about her, though seen to none but herself...
Also, it is well known that these wicked spectres did proceed so far as to steal several quantities of money from divers people, part of which individual money was sometimes dropped out of the air... Yet more: the miserable have complained bitterly of burning rags run into their forceably distended mouths... Once more: the miserable exclaimed extremely of branding irons heating at the fire on the hearth to mark them...
Flashy people may burlesque these things, but when hundreds of the most sober people in a country where they have as much mother-wit certainly as the rest of mankind, know them to be true, nothing but the absurd and forward spirit of Sadducism can question them. I have not yet mentioned so much as one thing that will not be justified, if it be required, by the oaths of more considerate persons than any that can ridicule these odd phenomena.
--Rev. Cotton Mather, writing ten years after the Salem trials
Note in the above account of the things suffered by the self-described victims of witchcraft, all the elements of the Todd hoax are present: visible physical injuries and contortions, claims of sexual abuse, -- theft of money! -- a challenge to renounce one's belief and accept another spiritual leader! - and even the juxtaposition of the "flashy" ("chattering classes") and too-sophisticated modern minds who scoff at the notion that invisible devils could be responsible for this, contrasted with the plain ordinary people who believe it ("Joe Sixpack" of the seventeenth century), the only differences being that Ashley Todd claimed her tawny incubus was corporeal, when he supposedly robbed her, beat her black and blue, tossed her about like a ragdoll, touched her under her "cloths" and pricked her with pointed objects, demanding that she renounce her faith in St. John McCain and sign a pledge in blood to the Antichrist Obama - meaning that he should have showed up on a camera, not being a vampire...and that the "flashy people" who didn't believe were one-and-the-same with that majority of "sober" folks whose "mother-wit" rejected the tale this time round.
I guess even a Narrative can get threadbare, and lose the power of Story over imaginations, with too much use. I hope so, at least: then it was fear of witches, whose existence was 'proven' when they and their loved ones were forced to confess by the use of "stress positions", sleep deprivation and water torture - in Miller's time it was communists under every bed - in our day it's terrorists AND communists AND witches, now, too -- but eventually, even back then, people came to realize that they were in more danger from the witchfinders than from any accused agent of the devil, and rebelled.
One more interesting coincidence: the parallels to the Charles Stuart case occurred to a lot of us, but I didn't realize until other people pointed it out that it happened seventeen years earlier to the day. I don't believe in numerology or signs-and-wonders, and I don't expect that Todd was historically-aware enough to be deliberately playing with the date. But it is an interesting convergence.
Oh, and the cat-scratches I got last week breaking up a territorial dispute over furniture? Still crusted scabs. But they won't scar...
PS: Yes, I do consider the Restoration Era to be recent history.
PPS: William F. Buckley threw Tailgunner Joe under the bus after he became an embarrassment and a liability, too. Nothing new, nothing new.