Kash's Enemies List

Three fantastic stories.

“Is you taking notes on a criminal f***ing conspiracy?” —Stringer Bell in “The Wire”

**

Pete Hegseth appears to be a dead man walking staggering, which should do wonders for his sex life. Tucker is in Moscow to reprise his Putin suck-up tour; and the Democrats pick up another seat in the House. And every once in a while, a story comes along so multilayered and delicious that we have to take a moment to savor it.

Today, we have three of them.

Happy Wednesday.

To the Contrary is a reader-supported publication. You may disagree with me from time to time (and I expect you will, because I’m not promising you a safe space here). But I’ll always try to give it to you straight. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. (And I’m immensely grateful for your generous support.)

The Oxford Dictionary’s Word of the Year: “Brain Rot”

The other day we mused about whether “enshittification” or “kakistocracy” should be the defining word of 2024. But I defer to the great minds at Oxford, who in their recognition of [waves hands again] all of this… picked “brain rot.”

‘Brain rot’ is defined as “the supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging. Also: something characterized as likely to lead to such deterioration”

We have had, as you know, many occasions this year to resort to the word:

As Oxford University notes on its website the term has a rich literary history:

The first recorded use of ‘brain rot’ was found in 1854 in Henry David Thoreau’s book Walden, which reports his experiences of living a simple lifestyle in the natural world. As part of his conclusions, Thoreau criticizes society’s tendency to devalue complex ideas, or those that can be interpreted in multiple ways, in favour of simple ones, and sees this as indicative of a general decline in mental and intellectual effort: “While England endeavours to cure the potato rot, will not any endeavour to cure the brain-rot – which prevails so much more widely and fatally?”

And this, of course, was long before the advent of TikTok, Xitter, AI, or Trumpism.

In 2024, ‘brain rot’ is used to describe both the cause and effect of this, referring to low-quality, low-value content found on social media and the internet, as well as the subsequent negative impact that consuming this type of content is perceived to have on an individual or society.

Brain rot, we are told, is painless. It is “dulling, numbing, something more like a steady drip,” writes John Hendrickson in today’s Atlantic.

You know you have it when you have consumed but you are most certainly not filled up. And the deluge of disposable digital stuff often feels like a self-fulfilling, self-deadening prophecy: Rotting brains crave more slop.

The Trump era, and especially the current phase in which we find ourselves, is likewise the era of brain rot, of junk, of exhaustion.

We know. We know. We know. But speaking of brain rot…

Dinesh D’Souza is a scummy fraudster…

…according to Dinesh D’Souza.

One of the Trump era’s most deplorable charlatans now admits that his highly touted and presidentially-endorsed “2000 Mules” mockumentary was utter bullshit. This was known, but history ought to take note of the thorough and complete humiliation of one of our age’s most repellent hucksters.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Ann Coulter, who knows a bit about this sort of thing:

Via the Independent: Dinesh D'Souza apologizes for false claims in election conspiracy theory film ‘2000 Mules’

Far-right provocateur and pardoned felon Dinesh D’Souza has issued an apology over false accusations he made in his 2022 election conspiracy theory movie 2000 Mules, acknowledging that his claims about illegal “ballot trafficking” during the 2020 presidential election were misleading and inaccurate.

In a lengthy statement posted to his website on Sunday, D’Souza said that his movie — which asserts that “mules” were paid to fraudulently deposit harvested ballots in swing states — had relied on “cell phone geolocation data” provided by conservative non-profit group True the Vote. That data, D’Souza noted, had turned out to be false.

Translation: I was going to get my ass sued off for my lies because my whole lying premise was a lie. The result?

Kash Patel’s Enemies List

He wrote it down. And published it. And I still can’t get over this.

Trump’s pick to run the FBI has repeatedly talked about going after the members of the “deep state,” especially Republicans who retained enough principles to break with Trump.

“We will go and find the conspirators—not just in government, but in the media,” Patel said on Steve Bannon’s podcast last year. “Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens to help Joe Biden rig presidential elections. We’re going to come after you, whether it’s criminally or civilly.”

It now turns out that Patel has actually published this Enemies List — which names his targets for retribution — in a book titled “Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth, and the Battle for our Democracy.”

David Corn has the details.

Patel’s list names what would for a MAGA activist be the obvious purported cabalists: President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, Attorney General Merrick Garland, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, national security adviser Jake Sullivan, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, former CIA chief John Brennan, former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, and former or current FBI directors Chris Wray, Robert Mueller, and James Comey. (Patel doesn’t explain why Comey, a supposed anti-Trump Deep State player, torpedoed Clinton’s presidential bid in 2016 when he reopened an FBI inquiry into her handling of State Department emails in the final days of the campaign.)

This line-up also includes a number of Republicans and onetime Trump appointees.

These include Bill Barr, who served as attorney general for Trump;

John Bolton, one of Trump’s national security advisers in his first White House stint;

Pat Cipollone, Trump’s White House counsel;

Mark Esper, a secretary of defense under Trump;

Sarah Isgur Flores, who was head of communications for Trump’s first attorney general, Jeff Sessions;

Alyssa Farah Griffin, the director of strategic commissions in the Trump White House;

Stephanie Grisham, former chief of staff for Melania Trump.

But, wait, there’s more.

There are other Republicans on Patel’s Deep State inventory:

Robert Hur, the US attorney who investigated Biden’s handling of classified documents;

Cassidy Hutchinson, the twenty-something aide who worked for Mark Meadows, the final White House chief of staff during the first Trump presidency;

Charles Kupperman, a deputy national security adviser for Trump;

Ryan McCarthy, a secretary of the Army under Trump;

Pat Philbin, a deputy White House counsel for Trump;

Rod Rosenstein, a deputy attorney general for Trump; and Miles Taylor, a Department of Homeland Security official under Trump.

Presumably we can also add Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger. Exit take: Winter is coming.

Nota bene: We still have a functioning justice system and I suspect that judges not named Aileen Cannon might find this sort of thing interesting, if not probative.

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers (and sisters)

Baby Eli

Big Boy Eli