I’d never heard of Alex Stein before June when I read reports he chased Rep. Dan Crenshaw around, calling him “Eyepatch McCain,” a reference to the injury Crenshaw suffered in Afghanistan, where he lost his right eye and the late Senator John McCain of Arizona.
Some outlets have referred to him as a comedian, but that’s a title plenty of unfunny people bestow upon themselves. A 2014 Insider story wrote of how he’d lost $70,000 on fantasy football. The story says :
His work in reality TV (behind and in front of the camera), as well as his work as a bail bondsman and car salesman allows him a comfortable lifestyle, to say the least.
What’s left out is that his father owns the bail bond business, and at least until this year, he lived in the upper half of a duplex owned by Daddy. The D Magazine story says he told Dad he was moving to New York, but since Stein now apparently works for The Blaze, it seems he hasn’t left the great state of Texas.
Having read as much as I can about Alex Stein and watching a bunch of his videos, I can say that Stein is not all that bright, but he understands the appetite many people have for a “Bum Fights” version of politics. It’s all sizzle and no steak. Still, it works. It landed Alex Stein a gig at The Blaze. He has nearly a quarter million YouTube subscribers, Twitter followers, and 184,000 Instagram subscribers. For someone who is 35 years old (I am estimating based on the Insider piece from 2014 that said he was 27) and has no discernable skills other than buffoonery, it’s a terrific gig.
That said, Alex Stein’s methods are part and parcel of a stench in the political discourse and the use of politics as a platform for notoriety and fame rather than exchanging ideas and having policy debates. Yes, the rough and tumble of partisan electoral politics often takes on an ugly tone and has since the nation’s founding. That will never go away, and it’s not all that big of a deal.
It’s within movements that the debates happen. It is where policy gets formed. It is where people are supposed to persuade others and get them to the point of agreement.
In what possible universe does a charlatan like Alex Stein bring any value to that? Going to Capitol Hill, filming and shouting, “There’s my favorite big booty Latina, AOC,” at Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez does nothing but make the social media star Congresswoman look like a sympathetic figure.
In the video with Crenshaw, Alex Stein immediately refers to him as “eyepatch McCain” before calling him a “globalist,” “a liar,” and “a traitor.” He also refers to him as “dude.”
In another instance of such behavior, a Twitter guy named Dave Reaboi, who also happens to be a Claremont Institute Fellow, tweeted a photo and comment from the National Conservatism Conference (NatCon).
Here’s the slumped-shouldered, “goblinesque” @jonathanchait at #NatCon3. Was fun to tell him what I thought of him before the panel with @libbyemmons @amber_athey @emilyjashinsky and @ChristinaPushaw kicked off. He looks exactly like you’d expect him to look, doesn’t he? pic.twitter.com/QObw6efljE
— David Reaboi, Late Republic Nonsense (@davereaboi) September 13, 2022
Now, in fairness to Reaboi, Chait is an easy target. He’s a dishonest hack with one particular skill: writing in bad faith. It’s his forte, and he does it well. I have no respect for his work, and more often than not, it doesn’t take much effort to peel back the layers to get to his dishonest efforts. Still, what good comes from Reaboi doing this? I get the impulse. That’s understandable. Still, mocking his appearance and throwing it up on social media for people to pile on? Where is the value in that, other than social media engagement? A few days later, Reaboi tweeted the following:
You can draw a straight (…) line from the fey, juvenile tastes and hobbies of previously well-regarded pundits of the Establishment Right to their weakness in the political arena. pic.twitter.com/RnsbEd8Clb
— David Reaboi, Late Republic Nonsense (@davereaboi) September 17, 2022
David French likes a television show, and somehow that reveals a sort of “weakness” in the political arena? Reaboi gives the game away in reply to his tweet:
I realize that it’s getting harder and harder to come up with David French reaction tweets that aren’t just FFS YOU FUCKING WEAK, EFFEMINATE SISSY.
— David Reaboi, Late Republic Nonsense (@davereaboi) September 17, 2022
There it is! That’s what Dave wanted to say all along. That David French is an “effeminate sissy.” It’s rather funny as the word “sissy” is something I used to hear on the playground in the late 70s and early 80s.
I am not sure Dave gets the irony of behaving like a juvenile while at the same time whining about French’s supposed “juvenile” tastes in particular areas of pop culture.
What makes me laugh somewhat is the idea that these people (the NatCons) believe they are not only the political superiors to mainstream, free market conservatives but their intellectual superiors as well. That isn’t to say some in the movement are not intelligent. Many of them are. That said, many more only pretend they have a level of intelligence that matches David French. If it was so easy to debate the man, why not do it instead of using schoolyard taunts? I mean, does calling French a “sissy” do anything to persuade others?
That’s another thing. The NatCons claim they’re a rising force in American politics. First, if you have to announce it, it’s likely not happening. Second, the politics of the NatCons is not new, though they behave like it is a shiny new toy in the political world. Anyone who has ever read about the late Senator Robert Taft of Ohio knows that. The politics of the NatCons closely aligns with Pat Buchanan. Nothing they’ve added is anything we haven’t heard before, except for their propensity to get deep into the culture wars. But it’s nothing new and they don’t have any new ideas. And the ideas they do have sound like they were cobbled together spending too much time at a bar following the NatCon conference.
Josh Hammer wrote a “primer” for the people who don’t know what it means to be a nationalist conservative. Here is what he wrote about immigration:
Yes, we should build a border wall, mandate universal E-Verify, and treat the cartels operating in northern Mexico as the enemy combatants they are, but we must also drastically reduce legal immigration from its current levels. A temporary full immigration moratorium would help to reconsolidate a deeply divided nation.
What the hell does that mean? How on earth does putting a hold on all immigration “reconsolidate a deeply divided nation?” It’s nonsensical.
Social media unleashed a monster. It brought the “comments section” to the forefront and gave license for people to behave like jerks. Hitting below the belt on social media is not frowned upon. On the contrary, it is rewarded, and it was only a matter of time before people began to realize, “Why not do it all the time?” Alex Stein is the real-life version of a Twitter troll. As for people like Dave Reaboi and his ilk, if they think being masculine means calling people “effeminate sissies” or mocking their pop culture choices then…I don’t know, find a different book about masculinity. One that wasn’t written by a high schooler.
A long time ago, Bill Buckley and Gore Vidal appeared on television in 1968 during the Republican and Democratic national conventions. Vidal, a blue-blood leftist was no doubt an intelligent man. He was not, however, a very good thinker. Bill Buckley was. When Buckley agreed to the debates, he thought it would encompass discussions about the Republican Party and the Democratic Party. Instead, Vidal, who was a genuinely loathsome person, used the time as much as he could to attack Buckley personally. He antagonized him at every turn, and Buckley only managed to make Vidal look the fool.
However, during one debate, Vidal hit a button that Buckley could not sit back and take. Vidal called him a “crypto Nazi” and Buckley responded, “Now listen, you queer. Stop calling me a crypto Nazi or I’ll sock you in your goddamn face, and you’ll stay plastered.” That was it. Vidal got him. If you ever see the exchange you can see the smug grin on Vidal’s face. He got him. That’s the kind of reaction Vidal wanted from Buckley from the start.
Now, to look at Buckley’s reaction, people like Alex Stein and Reaboi would think that was Buckley’s finest moment. But Buckley didn’t think so. Contrary to some accounts of people who say he did not regret it, he did. He said he became “equal of Vidal in intemperance…Obviously my response was the wrong one if it is always wrong to lose one’s temper, as I was disposed (‘the wrath of man worketh not the righteousness of God’) to believe that it was.” One can quibble with whether or not Buckley meant what he said. I would say he did, but you know how the saying goes: “It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to talk and remove all doubt.”
While Buckley proved the more intelligent and knowledgable person in those debates, all anyone remembers is one outburst. People like Alex Stein and Reaboi see acting the way Buckley did as a positive. They look at it like a badge of honor. The likelihood their influence (what little they have) lasts long is doubtful.
Being a jerk is easy. And there are plenty of those in the world.
…are we allowed to bring up further examples, or is this just “rarrgh, those Republicans, what a bunch of fucking fuckers, I mean, really” venting?Report
Stein got attention for trolling city council meetings as an overly-enthusiastic vaxxer or race activist. Not the most sophisticated humor, but at least it was clever. I saw bits of clips but never watched one start-to-finish. What he’s doing now makes it seem like he’s just lost.Report
This is Trumpism, which is a form of reactionary fascism.
It is really just a sulking grievance based ethnic tribalism.
As we’ve seen with DeSantis, Abbot, and the various pundits and media figures in their orbit, their only goal is to exert dominance and inflict pain and humiliation on the hated Outgroup.Report
Being a jerk was always a positive character trait in some circles. It just depended on who your jerkiness was directed against and whether you can come across as person of status and power doing this. People generally adopt the personality traits that look for them and there are a lot of people who manage to make negative character traits work for them. There are also people who can’t make positive character traits work for them because they come across as weak. Some people are very kind but come across as confident and fun while others have a deer stuck in headlights, please don’t hit me personality.Report
as someone who was bullied in school, I look at what’s going on in culture/politics now and feel like I’m back in seventh grade. Some people really never did grow out of it.
I will note I am much, much less likely to pay attention to someone’s criticism of a person if they start off with essentially “they’re ugly and their mama dresses them funny” instead of “there are flaws in their ideas, here are the flaws….” But I may be in the minority on that; perhaps rudeness sells to most people?
At any rate, I hate it, it brings up bad memories of a bad time in my life to see bullies seeming to get the upper hand.
(And yes, I suppose it always was thus; some of the very old campaign chants were pretty rude; there was one fundamentally based on the rumor that Grover Cleveland fathered an illegitimate child)Report
It makes me wonder, have issues gotten too complicated for easy communication? You could explain an 1822 law pretty clearly, but in 2022 you get 20 pages into a policy paper and just decide it’s easier to insult your opponent.Report
that might be part of it
part of it might be that education’s changed and LOADS of people no longer learn how to construct a cohesive argument. So insult becomes the default.Report
“have issues gotten too complicated for easy communication?”
no
people just want excuses to be mean
and they realized that if you could tie their being-mean to a Moral Issue then it was a perfect way to off-load the guilt of having been mean
and they don’t even have to feel like this is an intentional avoidance of guilt
because, after all, who’s gonna suggest that we shouldn’t go to the absolute limit in our efforts to uncover and purge the sins of society
are you gonna stand up in front a torch-waving mob that’s thoroughly convinced it’s doing the Lord’s work and say “maybe you guys should take it easy”?Report
Alex seems not to have fallen far from the tree based on the D magazine article. I think Chip and Lee have it right, being a jerk has always been a positive characteristic trait in human civilization. What matters is whether you are being a jerk to the in-group or the perceived out-group. How many people think something like this “All lawyers are A-holes….I need a lawyer, give me the biggest A-hole you can find.”
Humans have never been a particularly altruistic species overall. We are often tribal at varying levels of tribe and people confuse tribalism (“he/she looks out for his/her own”) with altruism.
Most people probably think Alex Stein and people like him are horrible boors. As one of the article notes, he was on a reality TV show where he proudly proclaimed he had no shame and was dispersed with quickly by the rest of the group. However, he has found a home among people who want hyper-partisan reactionary political “bum fights” as you note.Report
On a positive note, another difference with Buckley and Vidal is it’s absolutely inconceivable anyone will be writing about this person in 54 years time.Report
On the other hand, Rush Limbaugh’s show went national about 30 years ago and already he’s become a trivia question. But, his shadow still looms in all the imitators he spawned.Report
What I do find interesting about this article is that while it recognizes that many Trumpist Republicans are bullies, the writer can’t prevent himself for also making fun of the targets when they are associated with the other side like AOC and Jonathan Chait. Meanwhile, when Republicans like Crenshaw or Buckley are targeted by a mean spat it is bad because they are virtuous.Report
Yeah, Grillo’s comments on Chait say more about Grillo than they do about Chait in my opinion.Report
Grillo’s essays are often “Tell me you are a partisan Republican without stating you are a partisan Republican.” Plus he gets upset when people are critical of finance as an industry. Finance types always seem to have the thinnest of skins when it comes to critiques of their industry.Report
Is Grillo a regular here? It looks like he’s written five articles, and made one comment in their threads. Is that enough to be declaring what he usually does? I don’t think he comments here often on other’s articles – at least, I don’t recognize the name. Maybe he writes elsewhere and you’re familiar with his material, so maybe you know enough to know his sore points. It just seems weird.Report
Well, Chait is a hack, and AOC is a bully. It ties together. It’d be a hack move to pretend otherwise.Report
One part of is people failing to differentiate between the right to do something and whether is is good. This is pinging in my head today due to the alex jones farce . 1Am advocates, who i’m generally super critical of, have long fallen into this hole. Jones has a right to say an immense load of horrible shite so 1am advocates only talk about his rights. But most are loath to say jones is a human cesspool. Ken White is one of the few who does. Rights give you the ability to be an ahole. They don’t make being an ahole good or noble.Report
The people who are loathe to call Alex Jones an asshole exist in a permanent state of shock the bourgeois attitude about them and think of the bourgeois establishment as being middle-class and upper-middle class winemom Democrats (how cringe). One of the the bad and lasting sideeffects of the counter-culture movements in my view is that it sort of created a permanent desire to be “anti-establishment” in a good chunk of the population. There are good reasons to be anti-establishment but a lot of it appears to be “anti-establishment” for reasons pulled from the butt. We also seem to be in an era of Schrodinger’s establishment where everyone is both and is not the establishment at the same time.
Alex Lee Moyer who directed the recent Alex Jones documentary is a good example. She is a 38-year old woman who thinks people are just too deferential to authority these days. There is something about her attitude and pose which screams “I still want to be the disdainful, skateboarding, too cool for school punk in the back of class” even though she is a 38-year old woman. So she does pretzel logic to make Alex Jones be some kind of “anti-establishment” hero. Even though Alex Jones harasses the parents of murdered children.Report
When the establishment embraces equality and dignity of the former Outgroup, fascists have no alternative but to go to war with the establishment.
See schools, Boston Children’s Hospital, the DOJ or tech companies.Report
i really don’t think 1a stans – of which i am very much one – shy away from saying “that person is a real blah blah blah blah” (in alex jones’ case, the correct description is a string of compound obscenities) but rather tend to focus on the law.
so popehat, good example, has a lot of “no, you can’t ban hate speech or misinformation or any other factoid you just made up about the constitution, you bumbling idiots” because twitter is full of bumbling idiots on this front in particular who really want him to join the two minute hate and don’t want to think through their 20 seconds of tweeting because, well…it’s 20 seconds of tweeting.Report
You should listen to Ben Shapiro some time.Report
counterpoint: no, don’t. there’s so many better ways to waste the time we have on this planet than that twerp.Report
Apparently Greg thinks conservatives don’t call out the nuts on ostensibly their side. He should listen to Shapiro. If listening to one’s opponents isn’t a good use of time, then what do you call writing comments about them?Report
I’ve listened to Shapiro. Childish, poor thinker and mostly just self righteous sh*tposter. I see a very few C’s call out the fire hose of shit on the right. The people that do are RINO’s or ex R’s.Report
If you don’t want to know what the other side is thinking, fine, but you probably shouldn’t try to describe it.Report
Greg did say he’s listened to Shapiro.Report
Why do you think that would matter?Report
Hope springs eternal.Report
But then he misrepresented the right because he doesn’t know how Shapiro and others call out the people who deserve it. He can say he listens to the radio all the time but if he says that no stations play Queen, he’s demonstrating that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Seriously, it’s like We Will Rock You is on every time I flip the dial. They were never that good a band to begin with.Report
Name three.Report
given the number of right leaners around here who proudly and loudly avoid the centerists, much less the left, you might want to extend a bit more grace, especially when someone says they do in fact listen to your preferred source.Report
“One part of is people failing to differentiate between the right to do something and whether is is good.”
It’s like strapping on a big ol’ set of fake tiddies and going to work as a schoolteacher.Report
Yeah so. The fake titties, afaik, is a twitter sensation and Streisand Effect example. Might be stupid or childish or whatever. Not really alex jones “lets spend years calling for the harassment of the parents of murdered children” bad but YMMV.Report
And he just went unrepentant in Connecticut which is obviously a worse venue for him than Texas.Report
There are people arguing, nonironically, at length, that this person has every right to wear prosthetic tits as large as they like and anyone who suggests this might be a problem in a school setting is only doing it because they’re transphobic bigots.
“pfft, well, *I* haven’t heard of them”
I submit to you that there are more things happening in the world than Just What Greg In AK Sees In Front Of Him.Report
“It’s like strapping on a big ol’ set of fake tiddies and going to work as a schoolteacher.”
Huh? Why is it different for a school teacher to get breast implants than anyone else?Report
I believe he is referring to this week’s viral culture war incident. Warning, images are titillating.
https://thenationaldesk.com/news/americas-news-now/trans-teacher-whos-gone-viral-for-wearing-giant-fake-breasts-defended-by-school-canada-oakville-trafalgar-high-ontario-transgender-prosthetic-boobsReport
Heh, good one.Report
Got it. Had literally no idea about any of that.Report
Gavin Newsom, showing how to govern without being a jerk:
Newsom signs bill allowing California IDs for immigrants in the country illegally
In a statement Friday, Newsom touted the bill, along with other legislation that would allow street vendors to more easily obtain local health permits and provide immigrant students with improved access to in-state tuition at public colleges and universities and to ESL courses at community colleges.
In addition, he signed a bill that will provide low-income Californians, regardless of their immigration status, eligibility for legal assistance in civil matters affecting basic human needs.
“California is expanding opportunity for everyone, regardless of immigration status,” Newsom said in a written statement. “We’re a state of refuge — a majority-minority state, where 27% of us are immigrants.”
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-09-27/newsom-bill-california-ids-immigrants-in-us-illegallyReport
Nick Catoggio, the artist formerly known as Allahpundit at Hot Air, now writing for The Dispatch:
The cardinal virtue of modern conservative populism is spite. Whatever gambit a populist is pursuing, whatever agenda he or she might be advancing, the more it offends the enemy the more likely it is to be received by the right adoringly. Ron DeSantis’ Martha’s Vineyard stunt is an efficient example. It accomplished nothing meaningful yet observers on both sides agree that he helped his 2024 chances by pulling it off. He made the right people mad. That’s more important than thoughtful policy solutions.
…
A party that can’t decide what it wants on policy can at least converge on the belief that the libs are bad and that whatever irritates them must have value. So spite has become the glue that holds together an uneasy coalition of classical liberals, nationalists, country clubbers, hawks, and social cons.
…
That’s what Carlson’s conditioning program is about, I think. He’s trying to cultivate in his audience an instinct to question—or spite—liberal pieties wherever they arise, from grand-scale geopolitics like “Russia is bad” to more pedestrian but no less correct beliefs like “Biker gangs are bad.”
What is noteworthy here is what we’ve been discussing here- that the modern conservative movement isn’t defined by conventional “issues” or policy preferences that just anyone can adopt.
It is defined by identity, and a hostility to a hated Outgroup, who can never become members of the Ingroup. Spite and reflexive contrarianism are its tools to shape and mold their Ingroup thinking.Report