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The Crucifixion of David Geithner, In Which Gawker Learns
the Meaning of "Don't Shit Where You Eat," and Conde Nast
Gets a Clue About What to Do With Reddit
[b]Embracing
Madness[/b]
by Charles Carreon
February 20, 2025
[b]Back in the Day[/b]
The germ of the idea to go to law school began in a
crummy apartment in Southern Oregon. A bunch of back to the
land hippies had staged a rebellion against the oppressive
Ashland Food Coop manager class, that had tried to gut the
community spirit of our food coop by removing the big round
wooden table by the wood stove, a table that was a hallowed
reminder of the former East-West macrobiotic café,
intricately carved with the twelve signs of the zodiac,
around which, the managers said, undesirables tended to
congregate. Ruffled up to righteous rage, the rebels had
stormed upstairs to the attic where the table had been
stored, returned it to its rightful position by the wood
stove, and left a note on it telling the “coordinators,” a
little gang of crypto Marxists who spoke an early version of
“woke,” to keep their hands off.
We rebels cemented our control over the Coop
newspaper, “More Than Food,” and within a few nights of the
table action, we came up with the brilliant notion to
rewrite the bylaws of the corporation that ran the coop.
Which is how I ended up in the crummy apartment with a bunch
of other guys trying to look like Che Guevara, trying to
rewrite these bylaws.
[b]Respect for the Founders[/b]
Wow, it was not easy. I was slightly better than
useless, because I had not the first idea how to go about
writing a rule, not being much of a rule follower, more like
a rule avoider, but that helped me see right away how hard
it was to make rules. Because rules are like fences – they
divide space in two. But a straight fence in this world is
rarely seen to go on for miles outside of Kansas. They have
to curve, angle off here and there to avoid obstacles, and
actually fence in what you want inside, and yet not have any
of that undesirable outside stuff in there.
I didn’t leave that apartment before I was thinking
about how smart those Founding Fathers must’ve been. Hell,
their Constitution had been around for nearly 200 years at
that point. The Bicentennial was coming up, and I thought,
“[i]Man, those dudes could really write rules. I guess
that’s what my brother learned to do when he went to law
school. Kinda interesting.”[/i] It didn’t go much farther
than that, but the basic insight that rules are tough to
write has only become better informed and more entrenched as
I actually got into the business of applying the innumerable
rules that the legislators and judges of this American
government have created.
[b]A Diverse Student Gets a Liberal Education[/b]
At UCLA Law School, we were proud of our liberal
heritage. We had a huge mural in the library that depicted
slaves throwing off their chains, farmworkers marching for
justice, women seeking fairness and recognition in their
workplaces, and other inspiring Americans fighting for
freedom and respect from a society that keeps the best of
everything for those who already have it. You could hardly
sit there studying without feeling like you were in the
midst of an ongoing generational struggle for justice that
had certainly not been won. Indeed, the more classes I took
as my three years passed, the more it seemed that the wheel
of social justice was no longer turning forward, but rather,
had lost purchase in the courts, was slipping, losing
traction, showing signs of reversing and turning the
opposite way.
I was one of those DEI people who got into UCLA
because I had a Spanish last name, travelled all over the
world studying spirituality, had three kids by my
mid-twenties, and was raising them out in a yurt without
plumbing or electricity while getting my English degree and
helping to establish a Buddhist community in Southern
Oregon. People with those type of qualifications were
considered “diverse” under the Bakke rule, that allowed some
weight to be given to that Mexican name.
[b]Dodged a Bullet[/b]
Obviously, had I gone into government by accepting
the job as an Assistant U.S. Attorney that I was once
offered, I would now be in grave danger of immediate
termination, or already out the door. Fortunately, I never
seriously considered the offer, having done thirteen months
and thirteen days as a state court Jackson County, Oregon
prosecutor, where I was also a bit of a DEI hire because I
was the only guy in the office who spoke Spanish, and I
replaced a guy who had been the previous only guy to speak
Spanish after he called me up and said they were looking to
hire a new prosecutor to replace him, and he understood I
spoke Spanish. Of course, I ended up doing a lot of
translation in the office, my favorite story of which I now
remember and will tell.
[b]Culture Clash in the DA’s Office[/b]
I was called out to the waiting area where a
stunningly handsome young Mexican and a beautiful Mexican
girl were waiting. I began the translation as requested by
Chris, the office manager. The parents of a young lady had
brought her to the DA’s office to press a charge of rape.
The young lady, about sixteen years of age, and fully a
woman, said that she had been taken by force by the young
man. He did not deny he had taken her from her home secretly
at night. It was clear from his face that they had been
intimate, although he didn’t say so. He wasn’t going to deny
anything. As I continued translating, it became clear that
the young lady, despite having been “taken by force,” was
very much in love with her taker. Chris and I stepped
outside, and I told her. “No crime here, Chris. She just
can’t say she agreed to elope, because her parents would
probably disown her if she did. But obviously, they just
need to get married.” So they left, happier, exonerated, and
I had solved a case by not charging the innocent. I worked
on other cases, too, with the Mexican community, some not so
happy. I could not induce either of two witnesses to a
barrio murder to testify. One claimed to not hear a gunshot
that he had to have heard. Another claimed he was so
plastered, even though sitting in the front of his pickup
truck, that he didn’t see who went in or out of the home of
the murdered man. They had all been scared into silence when
the first translator that the Medford cops brought to the
scene was Fernando Lozano, the local INS Agent, who was
known to deport all deportable persons he found. So talking
to him was not something most Mexicans were eager to do. If
I’d been the first translator to arrive, it might’ve been
different.
[b]A Little Side-Rant About Inflation, Immigration,
and Farm Workers[/b]
Now who were those Mexicans I was dealing with?
Mostly farmworkers, skilled people who accounted for a lot
of the pears, peaches, and apples we Americans love eating.
These days, they’re about the only ones who know how to run
an orchard. You go driving through the orchard areas of the
Medford Valley in the early morning in the winter, and
you’ll see them out there minding the smudgepots and
sprinklers that fight the freezes, pruning the trees so
they’ll flower abundantly in spring, and produce a big
harvest in the fall. Very few were involved with crime,
although the methamphetamine cartels obviously penetrated
Oregon like mold infests on old carpet, and you can’t argue
with the devastation that has caused. But we treated the
cartel mules lightly – time served and deportation – often
for crimes a white boy would do a couple years for.
Fundamentally, it’s quite simple. If you want to have
a low-wage, guest labor population, you are going to get
some criminals in the mix. If you decide that you can’t
stand the small percentage of dark skinned people who are
meth mules, and therefore we should deport all the dark
skinned people, I think you have misunderstood the problem,
and are ignoring better solutions. Like maybe taking the
Mexican population seriously, accepting their importance to
the economy, realizing that if they all go back to Mexico,
our fruit supply will diminish and become one more luxury
for only the rich. Maybe realizing that Medford needs some
Spanish speaking police, translators on staff, maybe even a
drug squad that isn’t composed entirely of white boys, so
you could actually do a little undercover work and find
those bad guys. But that’s called thinking, and that has
fallen out of fashion in politics.
[b]Trump Taught Politicians Not to Think[/b]
How did that happen? It used to be we expected our
politicians to be able to duel intellectually. They’d get
criticized for inconsistencies, called on for misstatements,
and challenged when they avoided an issue, at least by the
adversary. Because in the business of argument, truth is the
anvil, and hard questions are the hammer that pounds out the
dross and reveals the nature of the metal. If there is no
anvil, if truth doesn’t exist as a backstop, you can’t pound
the lies out, and discerning true from false becomes
impossible.
Until the advent of Trumpism, no politician could
defy the gravity pull of truth forever. They all made
concessions to truth, tried hard to craft convincing lies,
avoided contradicting themselves next week, in some new
venue. Now, truth has gone into hiding, because telling the
truth can be an immediate career death sentence for a
professional. It’s that time in the life of Washington DC
when everyone who wants to survive is looking for a new
outfit to blend in with the new regime, changing their
vocabulary, purging their old tweets of any taint of wokeism.
[b]The People-Destruction Industry[/b]
In China, they hire people to read your social media
posts to determine whether the government should censor or
imprison you. In American we crowdsource that through X.com,
which amplifies the long, continuous brain fart that
emanates from Trump Social, radiating its foul stench
through the Musk Horde of 140 Million boobs and bots, a
meaningful portion of whom set their fevered brains to work
studying the social media timelines of suspected wokeists.
When woke thoughts are found in those timelines, doxxing
follows swiftly, and soon another local librarian is facing
an angry schoolboard because she spoke a kind word about an
oppressed minority, or expressed doubt about whether the
United States should be funding a genocide in the Middle
East, or spoke up in favor of anyone who was already being
immolated in an online reputation-killing orgy.
[b]Mr. Archimedes[/b]
I once started writing a story about a guy I called
Mr. Archimedes, who could destroy anything on Earth by
focusing the sun’s rays using a huge array of tiny orbital
mirrors he caused to form from ice, kind of like Archimedes
did to the invading fleet at the Siege of Syracuse, when he
had the Greek soldiers line the beach with polished bronze
shields and direct the rays of the sun, one by one, on the
invading ships, causing them to blossom into flame. But
that’s science fiction, and Trump is not a fantasy writer.
He likes practical shit. I mean, he’d love to have Mr.
Archimedes on his team, but it sounds expensive, and he
built Truth Social with other people’s money, so that’s
cheap, and with Truth Social, he can direct the massed heat
of the hatred of millions of people at any individual he
desires to destroy.
In my story, Mr. Archimedes uses a homemade launch
device to seed the orbital layer of the earth with an
aerosol that grows into crystal mirrors with a photovoltaic
nano-receiver that allows Mr. Archimedes to control a
constellation of tiny mirrors with radio transmissions. See,
I’ve got this figured out. But how did Trump figure out how
to control the minds of millions of human beings, able to
and send them on search and destroy missions for anyone he
names?
[b]Trump, a Bad Tantric Guru[/b]
As a student of Tibetan Buddhist Tantra, I observed
and defined a mental disorder in an article proposing a new
DSM category -- Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome, or TIDS.
Not just a disease that strikes individuals, TIDS takes down
whole communities, flipping them into an occult vision of
reality wherein the guru is universally agreed to be
infallible:
[quote]No matter what he says or does they cannot be
shaken in their faith in him. They are blind to his faults.
They will rationalize away any contradictions, embrace any
madness in the name of his crazy wisdom. The reason is
simple- like any good left hand Tantric guru he is an object
of surrender and faith which gives them permission to
unleash their forbidden impulses with impunity….[/quote]
That’s from [i][url=https://matthewzgindin.medium.com/trump-the-tantric-politician-d624250cc218]”Trump
The Tantric Politician,”[/url][/i] by Matthew Gindin,
published on Medium back in November 2020. Describing Trump
as a left-handed tantric, as distinguished from right-handed
tantrics who may cosplay as white magicians, transforming
shadow qualities into pure manifestations. Gitlin explains
just how unsavory the left-handed path is:
[quote]Practitioners re-incorporated animal
sacrifice, created elaborate new rituals, practiced magical
spells for unethical purposes (like rape), used alcohol,
cannabis and hallucinogens in their practices, worshipped
violent and terrifying deities, broke moral and purity
norms, and practiced ritual sex (and not with feminist or
healing purposes in view). Their practice was sometimes
called svecchara, or [url=http://survivorbb.rapeutation.com/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=933]
the “way of the will”,[/url] i.e. freely doing whatever you
want.
[b]Tantric Trumpers – Libertines, not
Libertarians[/b]
In the West, we call such people [url=https://survivorbb.rapeutation.com/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=222]libertines[/url],
and we group them with figures like the Marquis de Sade,
whose ravings elevated brutal sexual abuse and murder to the
only real path to bliss and fulfillment for human beings.
Today, of course, Trumpists have likewise cast any sense of
conventional morality to the wind. If not eagerly seeking to
indulge in immorality, they condone and justify it among
their peers wherever it raises its nasty little gargoyle
head.
[b]Trump’s Embrace of the Forbidden is the Source of
His Power[/b]
Gindin defines tantra as religion that exploits the
power of excluded, forbidden, and stigmatized practices.
That would describe a master of political sorcery like
Trump, who frees his followers from all restraints on speech
and conduct. He teaches them by unabashed example, of
course. With their armies of trolls waging unhinged dialogs
on every social media platform, Trump has projected his own
venom deep into the public mind, as his followers get an
endless kick out of stimulating dismay, revulsion and fear
in the minds of the woke. If the woke do not exist, Trump
will invent them so his followers can enjoy giving offense
to this imagined crowd of hateable people. In the early days
of the Internet, it lost you friends if you were an
insensitive troll. Today, you act like an online barracuda,
and you go to sleep knowing you are loved by the Big Man at
Truth Social. Gitlin evokes some of the “excluded,
forbidden, and stigmatized practices” that Trump teaches his
minions to embrace:
[quote]Trump’s public discourse flagrantly insulted
and sexualized women in the most misogynist and
anti-feminist ways. Trump has preached a crazed,
hyper-violent rejection of Muslims of a type which has been
rightfully excluded from acceptable public discourse. He
dismissed the logic of military restraint, promising brutal
violence to perceived enemies. He rejects careful, complex
thought, instead promising the purity of the lizard brain
unleashed.[/quote]
[b]Trumpian Tantric Ecstasy Results from Release from
Inhibition[/b]
This release of all that inhibition is exhilarating
for people who don’t get a lot of thrills from just thinking
shit. When it’s not okay to call yourself a Nazi, you can’t
enjoy the pleasure of seeing people recoil in disgust. But
now Elon Musk can [i]sieg heil[/i] in front of the whole
world and enjoy the horror, because he’s just emulating
Trump, who tramples social norms underfoot. More
importantly, Trump has already silenced the media, from [i]Bezos’
Post that Dies in Darkness,[/i] to [i]ABC that Pays Real
Cash to the Criminal[/i], to [i]60 Minutes, that coughed up
the unedited tapes of Kamala’s interview[/i], by punishing
anyone who tries to check his rampages by turning his
cybertrolls on them, like an array of mirrors, focusing
Trump’s superhuman capacity for resentment, rage, and malice
like an angry red sun, frying his enemies like a kid burning
bugs on the pavement with a magnifying glass. With each
human destroyed, Trump grows stronger, his crowds more
vicious, the danger of total anarchy closer.
The thousands pardoned for J6 crimes have now been
confirmed in the rightness of their original criminal
conduct, and many are undoubtedly ready to try for higher
stakes next time, and are no doubt standing back and
standing by, hoping that future Trump events will also be
wild. Surely they’re hoping for an event that will be more
Kristallnacht than J6, a crushing of hated foes in the hour
of triumph, a satisfying settling of some nasty scores.
[b]The Demise of Non-Trumpist Republicans[/b]
Trump’s hate-amplifying machine reduced Kinzinger and
Cheney to a couple of lumps of slag, and the Republican
political machine sorted itself into a new configuration in
response to the lesson Trump had administered to those who
dared to defy his MAGA authority. Anyone with a brain or a
backbone retired. Men smooth between the legs and women with
makeup crowded in to fill the vacuum. Which remained
unfilled, because these new Republicans are all empty
containers for whatever Trump’s [i]rage du jour[/i] may be.
The only safe way to craft legislation these days is to let
Trump put it in an executive order, then maybe Congress can
follow at a safe distance. Of course, they’ll cut all the
social programs, pump up the military, borrow trillions to
cover a tax cut, thus increasing the interest rate the US
pays on bonds to an astronomical level, making it much
harder for us to carry our debt load, possibly bankrupting
the country for real, because obviously they’re not going to
ask Musk to pay more in taxes. The Republican Congress will,
in other words, do whatever Trump directs them to do,
because they are mush-brained tantric followers of a
malevolent guru who can do no wrong, and holds the power to
destroy them with death from above.
[b]The Abdication of Democrats[/b]
Democrats failed to show up to fight the real battle.
Cowed by Trump’s ability to command armies of hate-fueled
followers, led to their doom by the senescent Joe Biden and
last minute wonder Kamala Harris, having gotten milquetoast
service from their lawman, Merrick Garland, who could have
jailed the criminal ex-President on January 7th and had him
in prison within a couple of years. Now they face the
tsunami of Trump’s executive order onslaught with
philosophical resignation. They are back in their
comfortable place – helpless, so they cannot be blamed for
doing nothing.
[b]When Lies Work Better than Truth[/b]
Trump lied to get elected, but not in the usual way.
He did not care that Democrats and other un-converted people
knew he was lying. He taught lying as a new, beneficial
activity, that makes you more powerful. An industry grew up
to explain how he never meant what he said, and it always
meant something different. With such a flock of helpful
interpreters, Trump’s non sequiturs became fertile ground
for all manner of imaginations. People believed anything
they wanted to, borne aloft on the wings of an enthusiasm
untethered from any rational moorings.
The political class, so pragmatic that Congress has
capitulated on both sides of the aisle, cannot help us at
all in this situation. Like a virus that transmutes its host
into copies of itself, like a rapist breaking down any
resistance to attack, the Trump gene has infected our
representatives, turning Republicans into lackeys who see
all their hopes in Trumps’ approval, and Democrats into
ghosts who shrink away from the unfolding horror, unable
even to lay hands on the situation, as useless individually
as they are in their pathetic minority status.
[b]The Techno Nazi Blitzkrieg[/b]
Most other points of resistance have been overwhelmed
by a techno-Nazi blitzkrieg. The DOGE crowd blasted their
way into every locked chamber in the federal system, helping
themselves to financial and personal data, grabbing the keys
to the national safe and printing their names on all the
checks. Lawsuits raining down are being parried by a
Department of Justice that has thrown away its rudder and is
now directed exclusively by Trump’s edicts – the more
unconstitutional and absurd, the better. What Trump says
today is the law as soon as it is announced, and his
lackeys, Bondi as a puppet for top cop, and Brett Shumate as
the head of the Civil Division, who will repeat in court
whatever facts are fed to them by the Trump pipeline, true
or not, and make any argument of law in favor of upholding
Trump’s unfettered power, no matter how absurd. Because,
after all, there is a Supreme Court waiting to help Trump,
and it is yet to be seen whether they will throw away the
last restraints on this homegrown Hitler, or stand between
us and the end of our Democratic system of government.
[b]Sacrificial Victims in Abundance[/b]
The Trump junta is engaged in a rolling avalanche of
criminal acts, because the criminals run the country, and
are making the rules. Every day, Trump makes another law
against being a good person, and everyone he wounds and
destroys has to take it silently, or suffer enhanced public
punishment at the hands of his troll army. Those who are
being thrown out of the federal work force willy nilly are
being punished, not to make government more efficient, but
rather to feed and satisfy the nuclear level of hatred that
Trump pumps out every day to keep his flock enraged and
engaged. The armies of federal employees and nonprofit
workers who are being terminated, the immigrants and those
mistaken for immigrants who are seeing their families
shattered, and their relatives deported to places as grim as
Guantanamo, and all the others suffering from policies cruel
in their conception and execution, are all the offerings in
a ritual tantric sacrifice, a political black mass that has
only begun to consume victims.
[b]Self-Hate Causes Hatred of Others[/b]
Trump’s got a secret from himself. He hates no one
more than he hates himself. This is not a cliché, but a
reality. Self-hate is not incompatible with worldly success
such as he experiences. Rather, they often run together.
Looking at Trump as he roasts in the fire of his own private
hell, choosing to eat the bread of resentment and spew the
bile of hatred every day, it’s evident he is in torment. Of
course, like each of us, he is loathe to blame himself for
his pain. Like each of us, he doesn’t think it’s his pride
and vanity that make every word of criticism like acid
thrown in his face. I understand the sentiment. The bastards
are always on my ass. We all know it. The longer you stay in
the competitive, eat or be eaten, beat or be beaten mindset,
the bigger the slate of enemies to blame your problems on.
It doesn’t just rain shit by accident, you know? This crap
came from somewhere, and I’m going to return it!
Trump is unfortunate because mass media reinforced
all of his worst qualities. The mass media audience trained
him to be an over the top asshole on all occasions by
rewarding him for that performance. He doesn’t like that
person he’s been trained to be. To avoid ever seeing the
self-hate at the heart of his personality, Trump keeps the
video pointed at his triumphant self-image, the one everyone
is buying into and worshipping as the official new god of
Washington, maybe the whole world. Depends on how hard you
huff that delusion.
[b]Like Leader, Like Nation[/b]
The United States of America has put this extremely
confused man in control of the most powerful system of
authority ever assembled, and given him the actual power to
destroy the entire world. I posit that he is driven by
self-hate that manifests as an unending war on virtually
anyone whose destruction will distract him from his own
inner pain. Certainly Trump has good cause to hate himself,
but did America choose him as a leader because America hates
itself? Does it hate itself for cheating the middle class
out of any share in the game, making billionaires richer by
the hour while the ordinary person sees their resources
shrinking to nothing, their obligations mounting to the sky?
Does it hate itself for running a fraudulent political
system that never delivers promised benefits to the poor,
colored people, Native Americans, or other citizens who
don’t exist to the politicians? Did the people of this
nation simply give up on being treated fairly by Washington
DC, and turn to the seductions of blaming foreigners and
dark people for our problems? Did Trump voters decide that
the person most likely to reward them for their vote was the
person most in denial about reality, because reality is just
too much to take, and chose the guy who was smart enough to
lie?
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