Ryan Routh seems to be yet another unhinged man with a gun over there:

Mr. Routh, a former construction worker from Greensboro, N. C., said he never fought in Ukraine himself — he was too old and had no military experience.

But like many foreign volunteers who showed up at Ukraine’s border in the war’s early months, he was eager to cast aside his former life for something far more exciting and make a name for himself.

“In my opinion everyone should be there supporting the Ukrainians,” he told me, his voice urgent, exasperated and a little suspicious over the phone.

When I talked to Mr. Routh in March of last year, he had compiled a list of hundreds of Afghans spread between Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan whom he wanted to fly, somehow, to Ukraine. Mr. Routh told one Afghan he was helping: “I am just a civilian.”

My conversation with Mr. Routh was brief. He was in Washington, D.C., he said, and had planned for a two-hour meeting with some congressmen about Ukraine. (It’s unclear if that meeting ever happened.)

By the time I got off the phone with Mr. Routh some minutes later, it was clear he was in way over his head.

He talked of buying off corrupt officials, forging passports and doing whatever it took to get his Afghan cadre to Ukraine, but he had no real way to accomplish his goals. At one point he mentioned arranging a U.S. military transport flight from Iraq to Poland with Afghan refugees willing to fight.

I shook my head. It sounded ridiculous, but the tone in Mr. Routh’s voice said otherwise. He was going to back Ukraine’s war effort, no matter what.

Like many of the volunteers I interviewed, he fell off the map again. Until Sunday.

60 years ago this fall, Richard Hofstadter published his classic essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” I assume this essay was inspired, if that’s the right word, by the first Kennedy assassination, and it’s striking how its opening paragraph sounds like it could have been written this morning, with the alteration of just one proper noun:

American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the Goldwater movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind. In using the expression “paranoid style” I am not speaking in a clinical sense, but borrowing a clinical term for other purposes. I have neither the competence nor the desire to classify any figures of the past or present as certifiable lunatics. In fact, the idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.

Or maybe it’s not even necessary to make that alteration: on some level — paging Rick Perlstein — Trumpism is the culmination of what Hofstadter called “the Goldwater movement,” although his characterization of that (this) movement as driven by the animosities and passions of “a small minority” has turned out to be overly optimistic.

The contemporary media environment has as it were normalized the paranoid style, to the point where something like a presidential assassination attempt is unsurprising to the point of banality. Donald Trump in particular is himself reaping what he has done so much to help sow, but he had and continues to have a whole lot of help in creating a paranoid, surreal, unreal nation, spiraling now toward who knows what, but probably nothing good.

The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. Like religious millennialists he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to set a date fort the apocalypse. . .

We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well.

A more succinct description of the Trumpist mentality remains difficult to compose.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media, written by Jason Koebler: I've been videochatting with Mixael Swan Laufer for about 30 minutes about an exciting discovery when he points out that to date, the best way he's been able to bring attention to his organization is "the old school method of me performing a bunch of federal felonies on stage in front of a bunch of people." I stop him and ask: "In this case, what are the felonies?" "Well, the list is pretty long," he said. Laufer is the chief spokesperson of Four Thieves Vinegar Collective, an anarchist collective that has spent the last few years teaching people how to make DIY versions of expensive pharmaceuticals at a tiny fraction of the cost. Four Thieves Vinegar Collective call what they do "right to repair for your body." Laufer has become well known for handing out DIY pills and medicines at hacking conferences, which include, for example, courses of the abortion drug misoprostol that can be manufactured for 89 cents (normal cost: $160) and which has become increasingly difficult to obtain in some states following the Supreme Court decision in Dobbs. In our call, Laufer had just explained that Four Thieves' had made some miscalculations as part of its latest project, to create instructions for replicating sofosbuvir (Sovaldi), a miracle drug that cures hepatitis C, which he planned to explain and reveal at the DEF CON hacking conference. Unlike many other drugs that treat viruses, Sovaldi does not suppress hepatitis C, a virus that kills roughly 250,000 people around the world each year. It cures it. [...] Crucially, unlike other medical freedom organizations, Four Thieves isn't suggesting people treat COVID with Ivermectin, isn't shilling random supplements, and doesn't have any sort of commercial arm at all. Instead, they are helping people to make their own, identical pirated versions of proven and tested pharmaceuticals by taking the precursor ingredients and performing the chemical reactions to make the medication themselves. "We don't invent anything, really," Laufer said. "We take things that are on the shelf and hijack them. We like to take something established, and be like 'This works, but you can't get it.' Well, here's a way to get it." A slide at his talk reads "Isn't this illegal? Yeah. Grow up." Four Thieves has developed a suite of open-source tools to help achieve its goal. The core tool, Chemhacktica, is a software platform that uses machine learning to map chemical pathways for synthesizing desired molecules. It suggests potential chemical reactions, identifies precursor materials, and checks their availability for purchase. The other is Microlab, an open-source controlled lab reactor built from affordable, off-the-shelf components costing between $300 and $500. It uses Chemhacktica's suggested pathways to create medications, and detailed instructions for building and operating the Microlab are provided. Additionally, the company developed a drag-and-drop recipe system called Apothecarium that generates executable files for the Microlab, offering step-by-step guidance on producing specific medications. Laufer told 404 Media: "I am of the firm belief that we are hitting a watershed where economics and morality are coming to a head, like, 'Look: intellectual property law is based off some ideas that came out of 1400s Venice. They're not applicable and they're being abused and people are dying every day because of it, and it's not OK.'" Further reading: Meet the Anarchists Making Their Own Medicine (Motherboard; 2018)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Part of the discourse this morning on Bluesky was about General William Tecumseh Sherman’s March to the Sea through Georgia during the Civil War. I missed most of it, but it provoked a very good thread on political war from Dr. Johnathan Flowers, Blade Wielding Bisexual (Lordean arc). Flowers is an Assistant Professor at California State University Northridge.

I’ll copy their posts into something like a narrative. Carl von Clausewitz wrote about total war in his classic “On War,” and the thread is a riff implicitly  on Clausewitz and explicitly on Sherman. The thread starts here.

Sherman was an advocate of “total war,” which is essentially ensuring that the enemy’s warfighting capacity was broken by whatever means necessary. For example, when confronted with torpedoes (early land mines), Sherman forced Confederate POWs to march in front of his lines to demine the road.

When confronted with sabotage on the march, Sherman burned houses within a specific radius to indicate to the Confederacy what would happen if you provided shelter to the CSA or assisted them in their operations against the Union Army. He was not a man with whom to fuck.

Sherman’s prosecution of total warfare intended to break the CSA’s warfighting capacity, to make the prosecution of war so painful, so repugnant to the CSA and its allies, that they would reject any future attempt at war and the politics that gave rise to it. This is why Sherman was so effective.

Taken in our current political context, total political warfare (there is a reason we call these things CAMPAIGNS) would be to break the Republican’s policy making and “culture warfighting” capacity through whatever means necessary, including calling them weird-ass motherfuckers.

That is, a “total war” philosophy in politics would make the pursuit of political power, the passing of policy, so painful for the republicans that they would repudiate the MAGA party line that brought them to this moment in politics. It would be to repeatedly demonstrate just how weird they are.

Indeed, in many cases, this is a strategy that Trump and his MAGA hordes have already adopted. They are willing to use any strategy, any claim, any policy proposal to ensure that they take and hold power, regardless of the effects on the people they claim to govern. Moreover, they do so maliciously.

The entire republican platform, for the past four years, has been one of othering and dehumanization for the sake of maintaining cultural power and not passing actual policy. A political party like that is an existential and material threat to its citizens and DESERVES to be burned to the ground.

From a perspective of “total war,” [Kamala] Harris’ March to the White House should cut a bloody swath through the Republican party, destroying their political and social works on the way, and making it either impossible or incredibly difficult for them to govern or pass policy in the ways they have.

Once she has power, a philosophy of total political warfare would have her govern not only with an eye to supporting her constituency, but ensuring the continued destruction of the political works, the political materiel of the republican party. It would be a style of politics UNSEEN in the US.

Now, if you think this harsh, recall that Sherman said this of the Confederacy during the Civil War: “There is a class of people (in the South), men, women and children, who must be killed or banished before you can hope for peace and order.”

And honestly? There’s a class of Republican, not JUST MAGA, who must be politically killed or banished from political life before we can hope for peace and order. Project 2025 and the uncritical Republican support for it makes this clear. Burn that fucking party to the ground.

A later thread continues the theme.

One more thing: “War is the remedy our enemies have chosen. Other simple remedies were within their choice. You know it and they know it, but they wanted war, and I say let us give them all they want; not a word of argument, not a sign of let up, no cave in till we are whipped or they are.”

In the contemporary political context, Trumpism was the remedy that the Republicans chose to advance their agenda. Other methods were available to them, other ideologies, but they went with Trumpism and its politics of violence and hate. Even supposed “moderate” Republicans enabled this shit.

When I said the whole party needed to burn under a politics governed by “total war” philosophy, I meant that shit: you cannot have a party that appeals to Trumpism and its politics of hate and violence and expect political and social order once power is transferred to the Democrats.

As Sherman said, “They dared us to war, and you remember how tauntingly they defied us to the contest. We have accepted the issue and it must be fought out. You might as well reason with a thunder-storm.” Once the issue has been accepted, it ends with their complete surrender or our own.

And, to be clear: in my view, the survival of trans people, queer people, people of color, disabled people, depends on the complete and utter destruction of the MAGA wing of the Republican Party and any the centrist and moderates who enabled and benefitted from its rise. They all have to go.

Finally, I’d like to end on a prescient note from Sherman: “Three years ago by a little reflection and patience they could have had a hundred years of peace and prosperity, but they preferred war; very well,” and now annihilation should be their reward. I see no reason why this should be otherwise.

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