Narcissists, Cowards, And Liars

Among my many guilty pleasures are watching Karen / sovereign citizen / 1st Amendment auditor videos on YouTube.

They, along with flat earthers / anti-vaxxers / anti-maskers, inhabit a Venn diagram that comes pretty damn close to being a circle.

When I was a kid back in the early 1960s, a sit-com featured a scene where a scientist character proposed putting helicopter blades on a house and lifting it off its foundation while giant turbo-jets turned the Earth beneath it so the house could settle down at any other spot on the globe.

Now, I don’t know if the character was meant to be taken seriously in the context of the show, or if the scene was spoofing wildly impractical ideas, but even as a grade school kid I realized this was an insanely stupid idea, not merely ridiculously inefficient merely in terms of modes of travel, but criminal selfish and dangerous, putting literally billions of people at risk for the convenience of one person.

That proposal -- comedic as it sounds -- is the driving factor behind the Karens et al cited above.

It’s the insane bunch of nonsense embraced by far too many people possessing an over-arching preening sense of self-importance, that what they want is automatically right and correct, that they are entitled to others’ immediate compliance, and that they need show no consideration for others in demanding they get what they want.

The reason I watch these videos is that these anusoids never get what they want, but a lot of them sure get what they deserve.

What they richly deserve.

It’s informative to compare the behavior of the anusoids with the behavior of genuine martyrs for justice, people like the brave folks who faced death and injury facing down jim crow during the civil rights movement.

Those heroes weren’t in the battle for self-aggrandizement.  They knew full well what they were facing and they were prepared to take their quite literal lumps in order to achieve liberty and justice for all.

Those heroes could articulate what they were doing and why it was important.

They could show in both words and deeds the positive steps they took, the sacrifices they made in order to achieve our goals of a more perfect union, with liberty and justice for all.

The anusoids don’t care.

For them it’s always about…them.

What they feel.

What they think.

But they never take the steps of self-evaluation that genuine heroes do.

You think Dr. King took on jim crow without first analyzing what he believed and why?

Unlike the anusoids parading about on YouTube, Dr. King could logically articulate what he strove for and why.

He couldn’t have done that without looking at his own motives, figuring out why he wanted to achieve these goals.

From out vantage point today his struggle and the struggle of millions of others alongside him seems self-evident, but then as now con artists and charlatans attached themselves to valid movements in the hope of promoting their own personal fortunes -- who cares what happens to the folks at ground level.

Dr. King was not that sort of person.

The record shows he had his own sins and shortcomings, and he was not the thoroughly angelic person many would wish, but he never let that aspect of his nature get in the way of his higher purpose, his greater objective.

Our modern anusoids are nothing but self-aggrandizement, not merely unwilling to learn but overtly hostile to any threat to enlighten them past their own jealously guarded preconceptions.

They are not heroes sacrificing themselves for the betterment of others, but bullies browbeating those who want to improve the world.

It’s astonishing (and amusing; that’s the guilty pleasure part for me) to watch these Karens and sovereign citizens and flat earthers and 1st Amendment auditors and COVID-deniers get their figurative teeth & asses handed to them time and time again and expect any different outcome the next time they try their stunts.

Case in point:
Sovereign citizens are selfish bullies operating under the assumption that if a flag in a government building has a gold fringe on it, that none of the business conducted therein nor any of the legal decisions rendered have any standing (no, I’m not making this up; that’s what they believe for…reasons…).

As a result, they don’t pay taxes or fines, they don’t have driver’s licenses or vehicle registration, they refuse to obey even common sense traffic laws if they don’t feel like it and are surprised and disappointed when their spurious legal arguments are rejected again and again and they face serious consequences.

Case in point:
So-called “first amendment auditors” who believe they can walk into any public place with a video camera and record whatever they want to record, even the private and confidential information of other people.

They love provoking confrontations with ordinary citizens in public places, and in badgering and bully those trying to work there, claiming they have a legal right to do so.

And they do except where per federal law there are signs saying no public recording, or security guards who are authorized to tell them no public recording, or managers and supervisors who have the legal authority and duty to tell them to either stop recording or leave the premises.

They typically refuse to either stop harassing people or photographing confidential information or to leave when told they’re trespassing and gleefully await the cops who typically give them ample polite warnings and requests to leave rather than waste time arresting these anusoids.

(Occasionally these dummies prove too dumb even for themselves.  One such auditor tried his luck on a military base, unaware that an entirely different set of laws apply there and a vastly different response awaited him.  I have to admit it was an amusing 15 minutes…)

If police stop you for suspicious behavior -- and lord knows, there are plenty of cops who overuse their authority to stretch the meaning of “suspicious” -- and you fail to provide identification when asked, they possess an enormous amount of leeway in deciding if they want to bump it all the way up to an arrest.

Spoiler:  
They can, and they’re almost never held to account for wrongful arrest.

You, however, will still spend some time in the grey bar hotel, and depending on how the courts and prosecutors are feeling, you might end up spending a lot more time than you think.

As my late friend John Dorman once observed:
”The thing about cops is not only do they have clubs and guns, but they’ve got radios so they can call more cops with clubs and guns.”

When sovereign citizens (so named in their mistaken belief that not only do their rights supersede all other rights of all other people and societies on Earth, but that all other people and societies are duty bound to obey them) are pulled over for failing to have tags on their vehicles and can’t produce a driver’s license as i.d. because they don’t have one, the police already have enough evidence to impound their vehicle on the spot.

When the sovereign citizens resist -- and failing to obey a lawful order constitutes resisting arrest (Dr. King knew this and was prepared to take it like a responsible adult) -- the situation inevitably escalates to the point where they’re arrested and charged.

And once in court, their sovereign citizen arguments never win.

Never.

I don’t know about you but if every time I peed on an electric fence I got a severe shock I’d stop peeing on the electric fence!

It doesn’t matter if I think I have a right to pee on the fence or not, if I think the fence should be electrified or not.

If every time I peed on it I got a shock, I’d find some new way of addressing my urinary requirements so as not to get a jolt.

Many heroes paid with their lives, their liberty, their sacred honor.

They didn’t demand others change,
they said they would not bow down to injustice.

Big difference.

What King and Gandhi and so many others did was to reawaken in their oppressors a sense of conscience, a sense of empathy.

You do not win empathy from people you attempt to dominate.

That hoary old bigot William F. Buckley infamously said:  
“A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.”

Note Buckley’s word choice:  “Stop”

Not “slow”
not “caution”
not “think”
but “Stop!”

Why?

Because the hoary old bigot William F. Buckley may have been deplorable, but unlike the deplorables of today he wasn’t stupid.

He knew the times, they were a-changin’ and that his options were to either change with them -- in other words, join the rest of humanity on a pilgrimage into the future -- or stop that change from happening so he and his kind (i.e., moneyed white Anglo-Saxon protestants, as they were called in his day) could stay on top and fuck you anybody not in their group who wanted a fair shake.

Buckley changed his tune only when it became overwhelmingly obvious that change was happening, like it or not.

When it mattered, when his voice could have made a difference that would have helped people, he championed segregation and denying non-whites civil rights.

In 2004, reporter Ron Suskind published the following quote from a Bush administration aide in the New York Times Magazine:

The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' [...] 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do'.

They’re not the words of heroes wiling to sacrifice themselves so others may be helped.

They’re the words of arrogant narcissistic bullies who wants everyone else to bend to their will, not genuinely concerned citizens who want what’s best for all.

Now, to be perfectly fair a lot of the people sharing videos of Karens and sovereign citizens and 1st Amendment auditors and anti-vaxxers are a little too rah-rah authoritarian.  

A few are more honest and balanced and share videos where it can be documented the police or other authorities went too far, pointing out the excesses and reporting on the outcomes of those cases.

Those YouTube channels sense the difference between people who are genuinely trying to document a situation that needs reporting -- such as Darnella Frazier, who recorded the arrest of George Floyd -- and anusoids who just want to annoy people.

In order to improve the world, we can’t let bullies throw temper tantrums when reality proves them wrong.

© Buzz Dixon