There are just a few things to get in order. One is the photographer. A glossy monthly magazine is doing a profile of me and they need to hook me up with a photographer who’ll take my picture. It’ll be a proper final curtain call to my journalism career. Take the picture and disappear.
I’ve spent most of my life in journalism. In the beginning it was an underground newspaper. Then I graduated to leftists platforms like The Washington Post and The Progressive. After a conversion to the right I freelanced for New York Press, The Wall Street Journal, Chronicles, Splice Today, The New Criterion. The New Criterion is a particular proud achievement. It’s the best journal in America, and when a book review I wrote landed there in 1998 a colleague of mine approached me at a party. “You’re in The New Criterion,” he said. “I can’t fuck with you anymore.”
No you can’t. The last several years of my life have been spent getting payback for the how the American Stasi journalists who carry out their orders blitzed me in 2018. NPR is afraid to have me on the air. The Washington Post wouldn’t fess up to their criminal behavior. Hollywood didn’t want to fuck with me. Only one reporter, David Enrich at The New York Times, had actually apologized.
When the photographer comes out I’ll look down the lens and remind these cowards that I beat them. They tried to kill me, they accused me of drugging girls, gang rape, and drinking a lot of beer (guilty of the last one), all in an attempt to keep Brett Kavanaugh, a Catholic school friend of mine, off of the Supreme Court. I’ll look down the lens the way Leonidas held his stare on Xerxes in 300: “The world will know that free men stood against a tyrant, that few stood against many, and before this battle was over, even a god-king can bleed.” The god-king bleeds because the god-king isn’t God.
One of my last articles will be on the forthcoming book The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control by Jacob Siegel. The Information State explores how with the election of Donald Trump in 2016, the security agencies, Silicon Valley technocrats, politicians and the media began to wage war not only on Trump but the people who voted for him. Trump as “a threat to American democracy” was the justification for the elite class to turn itself against the people.
Trump’s rise, Siegel writes, “meant that politics had become war, as it is in many parts of the world, and tens of millions of Americans were the enemy. With Russian active measures having supposedly penetrated the Internet, anything said online could be attributed to Moscow.”
He continues: “By conflating the anti-establishment politics of domestic populists with acts of war by foreign enemies, it justified turning tools of war against American citizens. It turned the public arenas where social and political life takes place into surveillance traps and targets for mass psychological operations. The crime was the routine violation of Americans’ rights by unelected officials who tried to secretly control what individuals could think and say.”
Many people went along with the censorship. The Hunter Biden laptop story was suppressed. Conservatives were tossed off social media. The nightmare isn’t over, and there are even conservatives who can’t get basic facts right. Most journalists don’t want to know the full truth about anything. It’s a lot to take. As the Arctic Monkeys put it, “curiosity is a heavy load.”
I’ve had some people ask me what would keep in journalism. I suppose a big salary to write about whatever I want twice a month. But the age of the well-paid celebrity journalist is over.
So let’s go surfing. I’ve recently attempted to surf after a lifetime as skateboarder. It’s not easy. But I’m Generation X, and we deal with trauma not through medication but through ill-advised, dangerous, adrenalized activity.
In his wonderful memoir Cold-Water Eden: One Man’s Pursuit of Ireland’s Legendary Waves, Irish pro surfer Richie Fitzgerald describes being a kid in western Ireland in the 1980s and trying to do what no one else had tried: surfing. Following the lead of his sister Frankie and with only a makeshift wetsuit cobbled together with spare parts and wool cloves, Fitzgerald was a disaster his first time out—except for the few seconds he got up on the board. “There was something about the feeling of sailing on a moving wedge of water that’s other-worldly. I just couldn’t shake it. I found my sister upstairs and said, ‘Hey Frankie, is it OK if I come surfing with you again next weekend?’ to which she replied, ‘I knew you’d enjoy it.’”
Richie Fitzgerald's story is full of scenes of struggle, fear, pushing oneself to the limits, beauty and triumph. Fitzgerald is an athlete, something that journalists are not anymore. My father, who worked at National Geographic for 40 years, would’ve loved Cold-Water Eden. My father took all of us to Ireland several times in the 1980s so we could see where we came from. I was there as a teenager when Richie was there surfing.
As a kid in Mullaghmore in County Sligo, Richie sometimes had visits on the beach from American evangelical Christian missionaries. They’d give him pamphlets about avoiding sin. Fitzgerald was more interested in girls and brushed them off. He also preferred the old local priest: “Father McNulty was the real deal with a direct line to God, and we knew it. He would absolve you of all your sin, and thank Christ for that.”