67 Comments

So he's anti-war but plays war games

Uses racial slurs but likes cultural appropriation

He's a "Christian" but worships guns

Cognitive Dissonance is dead

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You have all of that exactly right.

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So much to think about. For starters, this kid is Rittenhouse redux: a bratty kid lionized by morons for actions that, pre-Trump, would have been seen as abhorrent. As for

MTG and Tucker taking him up, please remember that MTG is looking for publicity in all the wrong places (and getting it) and Tucker sometimes says things meant to play to his audience of MAGAts, as we learned from the Fox lawsuit. Perhaps overlooked is that the powers that be gave this kid a top secret clearance not for his foreign policy chops but for his i.t. abilities. Some msm are missing this.

What's going on now is equivalent to giving an electrician in a bank the combination. Adults, apply within.

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Best analogy yet, Margo!

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It is probably a sign of the times but I am totally frustrated that Teixeira was given any type security clearance. I was a plainclothes agent/investigator in Military Intelligence during the Vietnam War(1968-71). Most of my service was stateside conducting background in investigations on on military and civilian personnel who required a security clearance. We were highly trained and dedicated to thoroughly vetting every detail of the subject’s life which we performed without the benefit of computers.

About 35 years ago I was contacted by the U.S. Army and given my my original badge which was embedded in a very nice lucite paperweight. The explanation was that the the units I served in were disbanded and replaced by private civilian contractors. Years later I had contact with one of those civilian investigators and discovered that, in my opinion, their investigations seemed perfunctory and were not nearly as thorough as the ones conducted by professional military or FBI personnel. I suggest that Teixeira may have slipped through the cracks of modern, impersonal investigative practices and technology.

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Your take sounds right to me. Like so much of modern life, to quote Socrates, "Many systems have gone down the crapper. Time and use have proven corrosive." <misattribution intentional.>

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Thx for clarifying the source of that quote Margo. I always thought it came from one of Socrates’ pals George Carlin or Lenny Bruce.

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You are right that it could have been either one. (Person note re Lenny Bruce: When I was 20, a date took me to see his set at a basement joint in Chicago. The first thing I heard him say was,

"Ann Landers has the clap." Not being fully formed, intellectually, I insisted we leave. And we did.

When I grew up, I regretted it and became a fan. Also, thank sto Mr. T. for giving me a home when I decided to leave Twitter, due to Crazy.)

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Margo, can’t stop laughing over your Lenny Bruce story! I’m certain Lenny wouldn’t lie about Ms. Landers’ medical condition and hopefully she recovered after following the advice she would have given her readers and scheduled an appointment with the appropriate medical professional.

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Sir: You would have no way of knowing, but she was my mother. And, as I said, I was not yet fully formed, intellectually. (And I bet she raised you, too.)

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Anthony,

I have one of those badges also. Whatever happened to "Need to Know" - NTK? I guess this is what happens when leadership get replaced by 'management.' Snark intended.

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Thank you for your service Charlie.

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Listening to Steve Scalisie on potus this morning. He equivocated AOC with empty greene. Now you don’t have to Agree with AOC politically but she worked her way through university and is a decent person.

Empty greene harassed a school shooting survivor and is a vile person. She is a major force in Republican politics.

Equivocation by centrist is as unacceptable as it is disingenuous.

Any person giving any credence to empty green is as vile as she is.

Including Leslie Stahl.

Excuses for traitors is a Republican plank.

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They are definitely not one of the same!!

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Don't you mean "equated" and not "equivocated?"

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You right,

my point was that that equivocation is deception. But I misused an excellent word.

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I'll say it again. We need the media to draw the straight line between what this guy did in Massachusetts and Donald Trump. They both stole classified documents, stored them improperly, showed them off to their buddies. The Mass. guy at least was showing off to be seen as a big shot. Trump surely also wanted to be a big shot, but we can also guess how much he was being paid for a look, or more for a copy. Heck, we have already been told that he thought he could sell his loot back to the government just as Nixon did. (Apparently unaware that because of Nixon, the Presidential Records Act became law) And there is not just this criminal connection between the two. Trump is also the chief purveyor of radical rhetoric against people he defines as un-American - people of color, women, Jews, immigrants, LGBTQ+, Democrats - the same people the Mass. club hates. Where do you think they heard it?

Connect the dots. Make the connection. Make Trump part of this discussion. Put them on trial together. Heck, make them cellies in Leavenworth.

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Read my Substack column from last night: https://luciantruscott.substack.com/p/trump-is-under-investigation-for

I am on the case.

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Well done.

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I'm less interested in connecting Teixeira to Trump than in seeing the connections between him and the significant proportion of mass shooters who are young + male + white. The common denominator is "taking matters into their own hands." No, Teixeira didn't do his deed with a semi-automatic weapon (though it does seem that he's acquainted with firearms), and he didn't directly kill anybody, but did he think for one second what the consequences of his (alleged) stunt might be? I doubt it.

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That’s because an immature 21 year old, who liked to show off to his groupies, was given access to top secret documents.

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Which IMO is absolutely the crux of the problem, and the thing that has to be dealt with ASAP. There's no way to fix, or even identify, that level of immaturity in a 21YO (or in anyone, come to think of it), but it shouldn't be too hard to prevent low-level service members from having access, esp. unsupervised access, to sensitive documents.

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The kid is 21 now, right? 21! How old when he was recruited? He had no record the Pentagon could have vetted. It appears to me that what radicalized him was what he saw on the job. I wonder if the racism and antisemitism were familial, if they predated trump. Young Teixeira seems to me to be just another element, with a contemporary twist, of a dark cultural U.S. underbelly that stretches back to WWII. In way over his dumb head. "Jake Teixeira" indeed, mtg—so much more butch than Jack..I'm unconvinced she's not a bot.

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Correct, Di.

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It's being reported, by Reuters and others, that Teixeira's stepfather and stepfather's family were military, and his stepfather retired in 2019 from the same Air National Guard unit that Jack Teixeira was in. Racism, antisemitism, and misogyny certainly exist on military bases, and quite possibly in military families, but until more is revealed about his trajectory I'm not assuming that this is how he was "radicalized" -- or even that he was radicalized at all.

What I'm seeing is a possible connection to the "incels" and to the world of Gamergate: young men hanging out online, trying to impress each other, egging each other on to do things they probably wouldn't think up, or have the nerve to carry out, on their own. I know it's all the rage, esp. for "older" people (say those over 60 or so) to wax rhapsodic about how today's young people are going to save the world from climate change, gun violence, and the rest of it, but "today's young people" also include this guy, and Kyle Rittenhouse, and quite a few mass shooters.

Having come of political age in the mid-1960s, I saw firsthand the disconnect between the media coverage of my generation and the rampant misogyny and racism of the "counterculture" and the New Left -- not to mention the teens and 20-somethings, virtually all of them white but not all of them male, who were much in evidence at right-wing and support-the-war events. So I don't see this as a "dark cultural underbelly." It's more like a somewhat (but only somewhat) more extreme version of the 74 million USians who voted for Trump in 2020.

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Even if Lucian hadn't already assumed these guys are incels I would have. When I first went online, in early '90s nnnn-baud modem, pre-www days, I posted to the NYPC Club bulletin board as Annie. The response to my first included a "We know where you live etc etc" msg that cured me of using F names online and was my introduction to that crowd. Usenet was a terrific set of forrums on every imaginable topic. I used to enjoy swapping observations w/ David Firestone, then an nyt metro reporter. That crowd made Usenet unusable. They phoneline-hacked before the internet went wide. I don't know what they were doing for tech jollies before that, but their mindset connects back to Confidential, a general-interest conspiracy/scandal mag from shortly after WWII. Ditto the mindset of the trump-drunk (h/t Stuart Stevens).

In the '60s I didn't know counterculture and New Left foot soldiers or their adversaries (yawf anybody?). I crossed paths with some leaders, in fact was then a busy part of the media you say were disconnected, so in lieu of going off-topic will decline comment on that.

You can't draw conclusions one way or the other about connecting National Guard service with antisemitism, racism, and misogyny. I am one of those romantic old people who places hope in today's young people in all the departments you name. Again, the rodents you cite were always there. I'm not thrilled that they're better armed now. But be grateful they haven't figured out how to a make a pocket nuke. Yet. —di f

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I'm not clear on how to distinguish between incels and plain old male bonding. I even wonder sometimes if some guys use "incel" to distance themselves from the obviously dysfunctional other guys who share some of the same characteristics. Male bonding is definitely a thing, and it doesn't necessary have anything to do with lack of sexual opportunities or hostility to women. Perhaps more will come out about Teixeira's love life, or lack of same. Who knows?

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My understanding of the word incels is specific and without nuance: young men who can't get laid and consequently develop pathological misogyny and the other antisocial characteristics we're talking about. Male bonding certainly exists and can be as healthy or unhealthy as any other kind of bonding.

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I look at MTG and think she started out as male.

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Nah...just really unattractive inside and out.

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Well, I realize "she" would give trannies an undeserved bad name, but I agree with Judith that something about "her" is just not quite right.

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Can you prove "she" is not a chatGPT.project gone wrong, Judith?

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Can't prove a negative! But I am convinced she's not really human.

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SATURDAY MIDNIGHT The nyt moved a profile of Jack Teixeira just now. Nothing here about "Jake" and God (?, mtg). Otherwise, I'm not going to try to characterize it. See for yourself. 'In High School, Airman Charged With Leak Was Focused on the Military' https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/15/us/jack-teixeira-pentagon-leak.html

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Tucker and Marge are two of the most loathsome creatures hogging a disproportionate amount of our media space. One’s intelligent enough to know that he’s selling lies. I’m not that sure about the other. She’s basking in the wrong kind of spotlight and some day she may crash and crash hard. One can only hope.

As for this kid. I hope he gets himself a lifetime stay in the gray bar hotel.

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ML

One has to wonder how many people in her district have an IQ above room temperature?

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Probably not many. Don’t see that it’s an area of critical thinkers.

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MTG is about as bright as a small appliance bulb! Dumb as dirt. Oh...that insults dirt.

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The "sharing" of top-secret government information has been lionized by the left and right of the spectrum. When the Pentagon Papers came out the left was thrilled, they exposed the lies we were told about the Viet Nam war. In the end it never seems that this

file dumping does much harm. All countries spy on each other, that is no surprise. The info on the war in Ukraine might be the worst of this batch. What is concerning to me is that according to the Times, thousands of low-level kids have access to this information. The higher ups seem to have no idea who they are allowing to view Top Secret files.

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The higher up you go in the hierarchy, the older the people are and, usually, the less technologically proficient. The "higher-ups" probably don't even understand the technology they are supposedly supervising.

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I respectfully disagree. That may have been true 25 years ago but today’s senior military staff grew up with modern technology.

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You may well be correct about their familiarity with current technology. But still, I wouldn't be surprised if the younger people, like Texeira, are step ahead of the older ones at the top.

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Trust me, the older ones at the top “have people” who handle that stuff for them.

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Let’s HOPE so!

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The Washington Post had an article today regarding younger generations having less fear of being tracked and sharing online with strangers. Their lives are an open book, and they don't see the since in having secrets. This boy just wanted to show off to his online "friends". This is a problem.

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Pretty serious stuff here. So angry white males find places to vent their anger and hatred with Proud Boys and others. Their operation in Charlottesville defending the Robert Lee Statue and screaming about how "Jews will not replace us" speaks volumes. And on January 6 their apparent willingness to cause death or injury to elected leaders is disgusting. Add to this their ability to obtain AR15s and/or other firearms- it seems easy to predict an eventual bad and bloody outcome(s). The left is generally both non violent and unarmed. Maybe things will somehow magically improve.

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Maybe we will have a Dem president someday who will send full military force against these half-wit, half-assed militias, and wipe them off the face of the earth!

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Unlimited guns and restrictions. Angst. Racism. Incels. Spawned criminals. These radicalized (mostly) young men have been essentially deputized to do the bidding of the Republican right wing. They support these young men (Kyle Rittenhouse) and now pardon them (Miller). This is the right’s army.

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They hope. But we've been seeing in the January 6 trials what happens once they're subdued and tried.

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I believe that we need to deal with these ills that drumpf’s reopening of Pandora’s box have unleashed. But the greater concern is how we deal with these and not

lose sight of what is important to us and the world.

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The stupidity of these bozos,combined with the malice of Carlson and Greene, make for a very dangerous brew. The latter amplify the ignorance and legitimize it in the eyes of kids who lack a serious bone in their bodies, and who are amped up by the fantasies in game playing. So damn depressing.

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Treated like Osama Bin Laden? So this guy was shot to pieces in his hideout, along with family members, then mutilated, photographed, and his corpse dumped at sea? Okay.

Remembering all the ludicrous "Satanic Panic" scares about the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game back in the 80s and 90s, I have to wonder where the outraged morality police have been in these days of extremely gruesome video and computer games that seem omnipresent in so many young people's lives and can't be having a good effect, encouraging violent fantasies.

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The morality police are raging at Tik Tok.

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Hair raising , sickening and what s next? more crimes against humanity or doing the right thing.

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Junior Airman? More like Junior Birdman. Sadly, still needs to be viewed with deadly seriousness.

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I guess he joins Kyle, the Kenosha Killer, in the book of nutcase heroes.

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It's so fantastic it's almost unbelievable. Almost...

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Tucker is a nihilist, just like tfg. They believe in nothing. Their only concern is how to get more money and power. They, and others like them, are lying to and manipulating vast swaths of the American public. There are many, many Jack Teixeiras out there. I hope the FBI and DIA are up to the task of rooting them out.

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