The Rancid Hypocritical Honeytrap

These days it is hard to wade across the morass of the virtual political world. There are radical activists, those who are trying to make a difference in the world for the better – whatever their flaws – and there are those who aggrandize themselves by trying to tear down such activists while posing as the pure "marginalized" left. One such poser is someone going by the internet name of @RancidTarzie. While also a blogger – The Rancid Honeytrap, hence the title of this post – with 90K+ tweets under his belt he primarily trolls the tweetersphere attacking what he sees as the inconsistencies of various leftist figures: from Noam Chomsky, to Amy Goodman, to David Graeber, to Glenn Greenwald. The latter perhaps being Tarzie's favorite target as it would be difficult on any given day not to find a tweet by Tarzie attacking Glenn. In fact, the tenacity with which Tarzie stalks Greenwald is perhaps indicative of a certain level of homophobia on Tarzie's part (more on this later).

While it is not my intention to fight fire with fire, I think it is important to understand why would any self-proclaimed leftist spend his waking time in such a manner. The main reason for this post is thus to expose Tarzie's own hypocrisy, which perhaps is due to ego-projection on his part – something which may help explain the vitriol he exudes as he goes after his targets. As I will try to show, he is either a phony – someone who poses as a leftist while doing the dirty work of the power structure – or a self-deluded and self-destructive nihilist. While I do not claim to have an answer – only he perhaps knows – either possibility is something that needs to be kept in mind when one sees the level of hatred that flows from this person's fingers. In the end, whatever his motives, it is clear that Tarzie has internalized the very hypermascunilist patriarchal mores that he pretends to be fighting against and thus he is ultimately a victim of the very system which he professes to abhor.

Whatever the reasons behind it, the important issue is that ultimately he acts as a splinter – or, as a source of faux friendly flak, as we shall see – within leftist political discourse and, if only for this reason, I believe he must be outed. And while, unlike his, it is not my intention to suppress criticism, I believe it is important to point out that not all criticism is meant as constructive. In fact, as I am trying to show, there are good reasons to believe that Tarzie's stance is geared toward destructive ends. Specifically, whether conscious or not, his criticism seems aimed at preventing the coalescing of a unified radical left based on convergence and commonality within difference rather than on a self-proclaimed, and ultimately illusory, ideological purity. This is not to say that we should refrain from criticizing sacred cows. I, for example, have my own reservations with Greenwald's partnership with Pierre Omidyar and, in this respect, I appreciate people like Chris Floyd keeping Glenn's feet to the fire. As another example, I personally criticized Democracy Now! (i.e. Amy Goodman) for participating in the censoring of John Pilger's film The War You Don’t See initiated by the Lannan Foundation (Chris Hedges's was included because of his unwillingness to stick his neck out for Pilger):

Pilger: The Strange Silencing of Liberal America http://t.co/AH2vTPXZUP @democracynow @ChrisLynnHedges @johnpilger @ProjectCensored
— PJ (@politicjock) November 20, 2013

Yet, in the case of Tarzie, what stands out is the relentless attack on anyone on the radical left who is actually getting something done, with whatever limitations, without offering any type of alternative vision in return. In fact, when confronted with this Tarzie's lame answer was: "Critics aren’t required to provide a vision." I guess he can't walk and chew gum either. Which goes to show that in his mind, criticism and movement building seem to be mutually exclusive.

And so, the main purpose of this essay is to show that Tarzie is a hypocrite who exhibits the very flaws he criticizes others for and who in the end, whether willingly or not, is doing the dirty work of the establishment in trying to discredit the radical left by injecting strife, division, cynicism and ultimately apathy. I will use one case in point, which is the way I came across him in the first place, the second part of a logorrheic two-part essay titled Passing Noam on My Way Out, Part 2: Chomsky vs. Aaron Swartz. The original essay can be found here. In the essay, Tarzie takes Chomsky to task for supposedly minimizing the ordeal suffered by Aaron Swartz. In addition, Tarzie argues that Chomsky is a defender of American exceptionalism because he believes that the United States people enjoy a certain degree of freedom. And so Tarzie's main argument is that Chomsky is unable to apply his own propaganda model to himself. This latter criticism sounded to me particularly bizarre and so I decided to post a comment in order to voice my disagreement:

While I understand your point, your analysis doesn’t really stand the test of reality on the ground. Just look at the recent sentencing of 500+ people to death in Egypt. That is something that would simply not be possible in the US, not at this level. So, Chomsky is correct, there is a quantitative and qualitative difference. By not acknowledging this difference, in the name of ideological purity, you are nullifying the efforts of millions of activists who in the past two centuries have spent their life toimprove people’s lives.

It was then that I was inundated with a barrage of insults interspersed with a flimsy rebuttal. (The entire exchange can be found here, at the very bottom; my handle is PJ). At the end of the brief exchange, apparently unhappy that I wasn't biting into his flame, he first threatened, and then proceeded to delete the entire exchange from the blog with the exception of my first comment. I was aghast. Here was a person who was taking Chomsky to task for not applying the propaganda model to himself (however incongruous that may be) while engaging in the very sort of top-down institutional censoring of radical criticism that Hermann and Chomsky had worked to uncover. In typical propagandistic fashion, he had made me literally disappear while leaving a small trace of the exchange as if to show that his comment section was open to criticism. It was clear that he had studied the propaganda model and was applying it to his blog in order manipulate the perception of unaware visitors and followers. Paraphrasing Chomsky, Tarzie keeps the level of dissent within narrow, pre-determined boundaries, in a manner strikingly similar to the practices of the establishment media. All this coming from someone who pretends to be part of the "extreme left" (per the title of his blog). (The very use of the term "extreme left," commonly used in a derogatory manner by the establishment to stigmatized those to the left of the neoliberal mainstream, should also give a warning of possible duplicitousness on his part). Fortunately, I was able to save the exchange before the cleansing happened, and  it now stands as a record of Tarzie's manipulatory tactics. The question that instinctively arises is: how often and in which ways does Tarzie manipulate the comments on his blog? While we may never know for sure, what is sure is that he does it and that, for this reason, he shouldn't be taken seriously. In fact, he is a perfect case of the pot calling the kettle black.

When I pointed out his hypocritical and authoritarian behavior on Twitter, he responded with the predictable barrage of insults. Again, amidst the insults, the lame excuse for deleting the thread was that my comments were "boring" and that we were supposedly "going in circles." I guess those are important reasons for deletion in Tarzieworld. Here is a sample:

@politicjock you're making for a much shittier reading experience than my comments are known for.
— The Rancid Honeytrap (@RancidTarzie) June 29, 2014

That is to say: comments are carefully manipulated in order to show how most people agree with him while giving the false impression that he is open to criticism. In regard to the insults, the first giveaway to Tarzie's authoritarian personality, I will spare you the experience which you are always free to partake in by looking at his feed. Suffices to say that he has been singled out by Greenwald as

@RancidTarzie 1) you're the most insulting person I know on Twitter - which is fine, but stop demanding perfect politeness from others
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) August 26, 2013

In this regard, as I mentioned in one of my comments on his blog, Tarzie's aggressiveness denotes a deep internalization of the logic of the hypermasculinist Hobbesian capitalistic logic of all against all. In typical totalitarian and narcissistic fashion, he sees any critic as a threat to his integrity that must be destroyed at all costs, as if his own survival depended on it. His behavior, in a way, is thus not so dissimilar to the torturing of Chelsea Manning by the Obama administration, or to that of Prosecutor Carmen Ortiz whose aggressive tactics, it could be argued, ultimately led to the death of Aaron Swartz. And while Tarzie obviously does not have the power to inflict such punishments on his critics, it is not unreasonable to believe that, given the chance, he would behave in similar ways, as he cleary exhibits personality traits that are very similar to those exhibited by those who serve the very system of power he proclaims to be fighting against. This type of hypermasculinist aggressiveness can perhaps also help explain Tarzie's latent homophobia toward Glenn Greenwald.

Further proof of Tarzie's authoritarian nature was offered by Tarzie himself this very morning. Having been caught red-handed censoring his blog and clearly not wanting people to judge for themselves, he has been repeatedly pleading with Scribd and Wordpress (the service which hosts the PDF of our exchange) to remove the document:

@Scribd This Scribd user has copied an entire post from my blog including comments. 1/2 http://t.co/iZWVClJnOI
— The Rancid Honeytrap (@RancidTarzie) July 1, 2014

@Scribd I would appreciate your removing it. The original post is here. http://t.co/br2Pi51uss 2/2
— The Rancid Honeytrap (@RancidTarzie) July 1, 2014

@wordpressdotcom @Scribd is letting users copy entire http://t.co/IgGklgCG7M blog posts without permission. Remedy? https://t.co/4gOCKyABul
— The Rancid Honeytrap (@RancidTarzie) July 1, 2014

As I have stated in the summary of the post in question, I believe that my posting constitutes fair use as it is meant to highlight a clear of case of political censorship. Yet, Tarzie's  internalized controlling patriarchal behavior shows that he is obviously struggling with the inability to control discourse and, not content with censoring me on his blog, he is now trying to use the rentier system of monopoly intellectual property rights in order to impose censorship beyond his sphere of control. If Tarzie was not such a low level servant of power  acting as a flaker while posing as a marginalized extreme leftist, I may actually be tempted to send the pdf to ExposeFacts.org. Jokes aside, the point still remains that Tarzie is, similarly to the NSA, clearly trying to cover his tracks after being exposed for the fraud that he is. Hopefully this post will help in setting the record straight.

Rebecca Solnit: A Necrophile for Empire

Writer and activist Rebecca Solnit has recently penned an essay criticizing those on the left who have chosen not to support the re-election of Obama on moral grounds. What else can one expect from someone who, just recently, praised the pornographic violence of The Hunger Games book trilogy – she found it "irresistible" – as some kind of radical anti-corporate message?

Faux liberals such as Solnit are so deeply embedded in the current corporate cultural system – from which, not surprisingly, she directly profits from – that they have lost touch with reality and, most importantly, with their own humanity. These are the morally corrupt American so-called liberals who choose to believe they are reading/watching an anti-corporate book/movie so that they can feel free to enjoy the ultimate necrophiliac pleasure of imagining/seeing children kill other children. Henry Giroux writes:

The film and its success are symptomatic of a society in which violence has become the new lingua franca. It portrays a society in which the privileged classes alleviate their boredom through satiating their lust for violent entertainment and, in this case, a brutalizing violence waged against children. While a generous reading might portray the film as a critique of class-based consumption and violence given its portrayal of a dystopian future society so willing to sacrifice its children, I think, in the end, the film more accurately should be read as depicting the terminal point of what I have called elsewhere the suicidal society (a suicide pact literally ends the narrative).

Given Hollywood's rush for ratings, the film gratuitously feeds enthralled audiences with voyeuristic images of children being killed for sport. In a very disturbing opening scene, the audience observes children killing each other within a visual framing that is as gratuitous as it is alarming. That such a film can be made for the purpose of attaining high ratings and big profits, while becoming overwhelming popular among young people and adults alike, says something profoundly disturbing about the cultural force of violence and the moral emptiness at work in American society. Of course, the meaning and relevance of "The Hunger Games" rest not simply with its production of violent imagery against children, but with the ways these images and the historical and contemporary meanings they carry are aligned and realigned with broader discourses, values and social relations. Within this network of alignments, risk and danger combine with myth and fantasy to stoke the seductions of sadomasochistic violence, echoing the fundamental values of the fascist state in which aesthetics dissolves into pathology and a carnival of cruelty.

Perhaps, this is the same type of hidden pleasure that Hillary Clinton and Obama (like Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al) must feel as they rain drones over the heads of helpless children in the Arab world under the guise of humanitarian intervention – aptly renamed humanitarian imperialism by Jean Bricmont.

Sadly, Solnit and other supporters of the Obama imperial status-quo are the very product of the American corporate culture of violence, the subject of Chris Hedges's Death of the Liberal Class and Empire of Illusion and of many enlightening commentaries by Henry Giroux.

Cornel West on Obama

First posted on Daily Kos on May 16, 2011.

In a interview with Chris Hedges published on May 16 on truthdig, moral philosopher and democratic intellectual Cornel West speaks openly about his feelings of disillusionment about Barak Obama. While feeling misled by the Obama phenomenon, West also says that he needs to take responsibility for "reading into it more than was there."

University Professor of African American Studies and Religion at Princeton University Cornell West is no stranger to the now president of the United States, having done 65 campaign events in support for Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign. But after Obama was elected, he began to realize that things in Washington were not going to be as different as many of Obama's supporters liked to believe:

I was thinking maybe he has at least some progressive populist instincts that could become more manifest after the cautious policies of being a senator and working with Lieberman as his mentor. But it became very clear when I looked at the neoliberal economic team. The first announcement of Summers and Geithner I went ballistic. I said, ‘Oh, my God, I have really been misled at a very deep level.’ And the same is true for Dennis Ross and the other neo-imperial elites. I said, ‘I have been thoroughly misled, all this populist language is just a facade. I was under the impression that he might bring in the voices of brother Joseph Stiglitz and brother Paul Krugman. I figured, OK, given the structure of constraints of the capitalist democratic procedure that’s probably the best he could do. But at least he would have some voices concerned about working people, dealing with issues of jobs and downsizing and banks, some semblance of democratic accountability for Wall Street oligarchs and corporate plutocrats who are just running amuck. I was completely wrong.

West continues:

It became very clear to me as the announcements were being made that this was going to be a newcomer, in many ways like Bill Clinton, who wanted to reassure the Establishment by bringing in persons they felt comfortable with and that we were really going to get someone who was using intermittent progressive populist language in order to justify a centrist, neoliberalist policy that we see in the opportunism of Bill Clinton. It was very much going to be a kind of black face of the DLC.

Speaking about his sense of betrayal, West feels that Obama has been swallowed by the oligarchic mentality which pervades Washington:

This was maybe America’s last chance to fight back against the greed of the Wall Street oligarchs and corporate plutocrats, to generate some serious discussion about public interest and common good that sustains any democratic experiment. We are squeezing out all of the democratic juices we have. The escalation of the class war against the poor and the working class is intense. More and more working people are beaten down. They are world-weary. They are into self-medication. They are turning on each other. They are scapegoating the most vulnerable rather than confronting the most powerful. It is a profoundly human response to panic and catastrophe. I thought Barack Obama could have provided some way out. But he lacks backbone.

Finally, while not excluding voting for Obama again as a last resort, West contends that perhaps the only hope for a better future rests in third party formations and grassroots movements as well as acts of civil disobedience:

We have got to attempt to tell the truth, and that truth is painful. It is a truth that is against the thick lies of the mainstream. In telling that truth we become so maladjusted to the prevailing injustice that the Democratic Party, more and more, is not just milquetoast and spineless, as it was before, but thoroughly complicitous with some of the worst things in the American empire. I don’t think in good conscience I could tell anybody to vote for Obama. If it turns out in the end that we have a crypto-fascist movement and the only thing standing between us and fascism is Barack Obama, then we have to put our foot on the brake. But we’ve got to think seriously of third-party candidates, third formations, third parties. Our last hope is to generate a democratic awakening among our fellow citizens. This means raising our voices, very loud and strong, bearing witness, individually and collectively. Tavis [Smiley] and I have talked about ways of civil disobedience, beginning with ways for both of us to get arrested, to galvanize attention to the plight of those in prisons, in the hoods, in poor white communities. We must never give up. We must never allow hope to be eliminated or suffocated.

In the end, Cornel West, has come to the conclusion that Barack Obama did not turn out to be the hope and change that most of his supporters around the world would have liked him to be. As noted earlier, West takes responsibility for projecting a lot of his hopes and aspirations onto a person who, after all, never pretended to be anything other than a centrist pro-corporate Democrat.

On the other hand, it is good that West and other intellectuals are waking up in light of the upcoming presidential election. Perhaps, this awakening on the left will force Obama and the Democrats to do something more than simply pay lip service to a base which has been mostly used and abused ever since Barack Obama has come into office.

The New Left and the Counterculture of the 1960s

And excerpt from Chris Hedges' Death of the Liberal Class:

Protest in the 1960s found its ideological roots in the disengagement championed earlier by Beats such as Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Borroughs. It was a movement that, while it incorporated a healthy dose of disrespect for authority, focused again on self-indulgent schemes for inner peace and fulfillment. The use of hallucinogenic drug, advocated by Timothy Leary in books such as the Politics of Extasy, and the rise of occultism that popularized Transcendental Meditation, theosophy, the Hare Krishna branch of Hinduism, and renewed interest in Zen Buddhism and study of I Ching, were trends that would have dismayed the Wobblies or the militants in the old Communist Party. The countercolture of the 1960s, like the commodity culture, lured adherents inward. It set up the self up as the primary center of concern. It, too, offered affirmative, therapeutic remedies to social problems that embraced vague, undefined, and utopian campaigns to remake society. There was no political vision. Herman Hesse's Siddhartha, with its narrator's search for enlightenment, became emblematic of the moral hollowness of the New Left.

These movements, and the counterculture celebrities that led them, such as the Yippie leader Abbie Hoffman, sought and catered to the stage set for them by the television camera. Protest and court trials became street theater. Dissent became another media spectacle. Anti-war protesters in Berkley switched from singing "Solidarity Forever" to "Yellow Submarine." The civil-rights movement, which was rooted in the moral and religious imperatives of justice and self-sacrifice, what Dwight Macdonald called nonhistorical values, was largely eclipsed by the self-centeredness of the New Left, especially after the assassination of Malcom X in 1967 and Martin Luther King Jr. a year later. And once the Vietnam War ended, once middle-class men no longer had to go to war, the movement disintegrated. The political and moral void within the counterculture of the Bohemians or the Beats, was always in tune with the commercial culture. It shared commercial culture's hedonism, love of spectacle, and preoccupation with the self.

The Inversion of the Liberal Class

This morning I was reading Chris Hedges' insightful essay The World Liberal Opportunists Made, where he squarely puts the responsibility of the destruction of the left onto the liberal class (the press, the church, universities, labor unions, the arts and the Democratic Party), which traded its historical principles for access to power and money. His critique of artists is particularly searing:

Artistic expression, along with most religious worship, is largely self-absorbed narcissism meant to entertain without offense.

Hedges explains how the current rise of demagogues on the right can be seen as the direct result of the failure of the liberal class to offer any credible alternative to the corporate state:

The collapse of liberal institutions means those outside the circles of power are trapped, with no recourse, and this is why many Americans are turning in desperation toward idiotic right-wing populists who at least understand the power of hatred as a mobilizing force.

Aside from the usual themes present in Hedges' critique, I would like to highlight a quote in his essay from political scientist Russell Jacoby, which, in his book The End of Utopia: Politics and Culture in the Age of Apathy, writes:

The left once dismissed the market as exploitative; it now honors the market as rational and humane. The left once disdained mass culture as exploitative; now it celebrates it as rebellious. The left once honored independent intellectuals as courageous; now it sneers at them as elitist. The left once rejected pluralism as superficial; now it worships it as profound. We are witnessing not simply a defeat of the left, but its conversion and perhaps inversion.

The inversion of the left is a very interesting concept which can be observed in the current smear campaign of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange coming from all sides, including the liberal class and the establishment media.

Another good example of this inversion was clear in the recent debate over Don't Ask, Don't Tell between Lt. Dan Choi and Queer Activist Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore which took place on Democracy Now last Friday. In the debate, Sycamore pointed out the absurdly hypocritical situation that the liberal class has put itself in on the Don't Ask, Don't Tell debate. By pretending to champion civil liberties, the liberal class has put itself in the awkward position of promoting the Empire and its deadly military machine. Dan Choi, without a hint of irony, proudly made his own the title of one Chris Hedges' recent books War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning in order to justify the U.S. military machine:

I know this is going to sound like fingernails on the chalkboard to some of your viewers, but war is a force that gives us meaning.

Sycamore, appropriately rebutted:

When Dan Choi says that war is a force that gives us meaning, I want to know what is the meaning of the US obliterating Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan? What is the meaning of soldiers pressing buttons in Nevada in order to destroy entire villages? You know, the meaning is that the US is involved in wars for corporate profit and oil resources.

And I’ve heard, you know, Dan Choi’s coming out story, and it’s a harrowing tale. And as queers, you know, most of us grow up in a world that wants us to die or disappear. And I think we see that with the coverage of the epidemic of teen suicides. So we shouldn’t be telling queer teens, "Oh, when you grow up, you can become part of the same system that’s destroying not only your life, but the lives of everyone in the world."

We need to be fighting for universal access to basic needs, things like housing and healthcare and the right to stay in this country or leave if you want to. We need to be fighting for comprehensive sex education, for AIDS healthcare, for senior care, for safe houses for queer youth to escape abusive families. And the problem with all this attention on the war machine, all this support for, you know, soldiers to serve openly in unjust wars, the problem is that the military is what’s taking away the ability to fund everything in this country that would actually benefit, you know, the people who need the most. You know, the war budget—if we could just, you know, take half the US war budget, we’d be able to have everything that we want in this country, whether it’s renewable energy, whether it’s, you know, housing for everyone, whether it’s healthcare, whether it’s food on the table. I mean, we need to get back to a struggle for basic needs.

The question is: how do we get back to a struggle for basic needs when the liberal class has abandoned its historical core principles and values?

At this point, it seems that the most pressing question we have in front of ourselves is what Lenin asked himself and the left slightly over a century ago: What Is To Be Done?

Essential Watching

Chris Hedges speaks at the the Veterans for Peace convention. Recorded on Saturday, August 28, 2010, in Portland, Maine.