Absurd Stories You Won't See in Mainstream Media
Jewish tunnel builders. Russian fan-fiction hackers. Banning the dictionary. Attempted assassinations. And a Texas takeover of a federal agency. (Wait... like an insurrection?)
This week, I’ve been looking at the world through the lens of the absurd, inspired by my daughters’ roommate, Natalie, who is a “weird TikTok” aficionado, and possesses an impressive breadth of knowledge.
Natalie came up to me one evening and said, “Have you heard of the guy who swore on X that Jewish people were under his ground-floor apartment, even though the building doesn’t have a basement? Everyone said he was being paranoid and antisemitic. But it turned out Jewish people were under his apartment!”
This led me to the best lede I may have ever seen, from the New York Post:
“An unholy riot broke out in a historic Brooklyn synagogue when a group of rogue members armed with shovels dug a secret tunnel to gain access — and cops and hardhats tried to thwart them.”
Here’s more of the story from The Post:
Young renegades from the Chabad-Lubavitch movement wielding “very elementary tools’’ began religiously digging the tunnel under the sect’s world headquarters in Crown Heights on the Eastern Parkway during the pandemic because higher-ups were dragging their feet on expanding the synagogue’s sanctuary, sources said.
The idea was to force the establishment into growing the space by essentially starting the effort for it — beginning with the roughly 3-foot-high, 20-foot-wide, 50-foot-long tunnel, sources said.
“The crowd keeps getting larger,’’ a source somewhat sympathetic to the rebels’ cause told The Post on Tuesday. “It’s packed on Shabbos, and during the High Holidays, it’s unbearable.”
Well, I guess that’s one way to solve the High Holidays problem.
The young men who dug the tunnel, all in their late teens to early 20s, were students from a Chabad-Lubavitch city in Israel. The Forward described the sect as “messianic.” The students started digging the tunnel at least a year ago, though The Post also has written it may have started with an earlier group of students who began digging during the early days of the pandemic.
Subsequent Post stories have debunked the original theory that the tunnel was related to space issues.
Rabbi Motti Seligson, spokesman for Chabad-Lubavitch “told The Post that the students were trying to carry out a religious promise to Lubavitcher Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson — known as the Rebbe — who vowed to expand the sect’s synagogue in 1988, six years before his death.”
Seligson called the young men “extremist students,” adding “They are fanatical. They are part of a small extreme group. The concept of Chabad is to be kind to everyone, and we are kind to them, but we never thought for a second they would make such problems. It’s a big mistake to let them into the community. The school will now close the visas to them.”
When the tunnel was found - because residents, alarmed by the sound of people speaking Yiddish under their apartments, called the authorities - the young men involved rushed into the tunnel to protect their project from being filled with cement. That’s when the clash with police happened, during which the tunnel builders took sledgehammers to the sanctuary.
They really wanted that tunnel. With a religious fervor.
The funniest part to me was The Post’s follow-up story on how the group decided the digging was a bit too much for them, and hired Latino migrant laborers to finish the tunnel. The laborers actually lived in the abandoned building where the tunnel started during the duration of their work so as to not raise any alarms. And they may have saved people’s lives. Because when they were brought in, the migrants insisted on adding support beams to the tunnel.
‘Cause these young, messianic, Jewish men had no idea how construction works.
Russian Hackers Attack Fan Fiction Writers
Seriously, folks, if there is any group of people that deserves to be protected and nurtured, it is fan fiction writers. And yet, one of the biggest fan fiction websites, An Archive of Our Own (known to fans as AO3), was targeted by a Russian operation with a denial of service attack.
The group asked for a $30,000 ransom, which the site couldn’t pay, because they are fan fiction writers and have no money.
The hackers called themselves Anonymous Sudan and, at first, played themselves off as extremist Muslims who were punishing AO3 for “normalizing smut and sexual exploitation.”
Which sounds a lot more like U.S. Christian nationalists to me.
The leaders of AO3 wrote on X:
“We do not condone anti-Muslim sentiments under any circumstances. Additionally, to reiterate: cybersecurity experts believe the group claiming responsibility is lying about their affiliation and reasons for attacking websites.”
“Since everything Anonymous Sudan does seems to fit the Kremlin’s narrative, we assume that it comes from Russia and is [supported by] someone in the Russian government,” an international security expert told Cyber News.
Russia’s narrative, of course, is to sow chaos and distrust in other countries. Pretending to be Muslim stokes anti-Muslim anger. Pretending to be against “smut” in fiction writing feeds into the narratives of folks like Victor Orban and Ron DeSantis.
How Do You Spell Fascist?
Which leads us to a weird story this week that has gotten a lot of attention. I first saw it in Judd Legum’s Popular Information, but it was picked up by other national outlets after PEN America put out a press release.
The story, of course, is about a school district in the Florida panhandle that was so zealous in adhering to DeSantis’ “don’t say gay” law that they removed dictionaries from libraries.
Legum reports: “HB 1069 gives residents the right to demand the removal of any library book that ‘depicts or describes sexual conduct,’ as defined under Florida law, whether or not the book is pornographic.
Dictionaries - and thesauri - have words like “sex” in them. They have words like “gay” and “queer” in them. They have words like “transexual” in them. They have WORDS. All the words! All the words are dangerous! We cannot let our children have access to all the words! They might have… THOUGHTS!
It’s been a while since I read “The Giver,” but I’m pretty sure the point was to show how bad it is to keep knowledge from people, not as a blueprint for the future.
The Art of Assassination
A tape was released this week of Trump crony Roger Stone asking a former New York City police officer after the 2020 election to help with the assassination of Congressmen Eric Swalwell or Jerry Nadler.
Stone, you might remember, was convicted of lying to the FBI and intimidating witnesses before he was pardoned by Trump. He was also one of the people in the Willard Hotel “command center” on January 6.
But after Mediate published the tape this week, Stone turned it into an assassination of truth. He said it was an AI fake.
This was all over second-level media, but did not rate mention in the Washington Post or the New York Times. Nor does it come up in a search of NPR or any of the broadcast TV networks. But all of those media outlets reported every single day on the Iowa caucuses, and polls, and what Trump was allowed to say in court at the end of his civil case. Though they neglected to report on Trump making an Aryan Nation white power sign as he walked out of the courthouse - which the AP caught in a video I screen-shotted below.
Seriously, folks, a man who was convicted of witness tampering and lying under oath in service to Donald Trump was caught on tape calling for the assassination of one of two Congressmen, and national journalism yawned.
And if that wasn’t absurd enough, we found out last night that on Friday, a mother and two children died while trying to cross the Rio Grande, and Texas National Guard soldiers physically prevented Federal National Guard soldiers from rescuing them. CBS reported this.
Even more chilling - yes, more chilling - is that the Texas National Guard was able to make the call because, earlier in the week “Texas National Guard soldiers abruptly seized control of a public park in Eagle Pass that Border Patrol had been using to hold migrants.”
CBS also reported that “federal officials said Texas has used armed soldiers, vehicles and fences to physically block Border Patrol agents and at least one federal National Guard soldier from accessing roughly 2.5 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border.”
In what world is this not an insurrection? In what world is this not the start of a civil war?
The matter has been taken up with the Supreme Court, though there is no reporting on the actual request by the Biden administration. My fear, though, is that the press is going to treat this as a “both sides, political story” if Biden sends in troops to take control of the border. I’m also afraid that more states will commandeer federal property where migrants are held.
But by all means, let’s talk about how cold it’s going to be in Iowa on Monday. Or how a climate activist perpetrates political violence. While not giving context to the threats made to members of Congress and judges and prosecutors. The absurdity is becoming all too real.
Substack and Nazis
Some news in this regard since I wrote about it in December. Some of the bigger sites met with the owners of Substack, and got an agreement that they would take down some of the Nazi sites. But the Substack tech bros don’t seem to understand how social media can stoke hate. And, more troubling to me, they seem to be in agreement with people who think devaluing someone’s humanity is just a difference of opinion.
There are some bigger sites that have decided to leave the platform. But there are still folks like Joyce Vance, Robert Reich and Heather Cox Richardson who are staying. And, so am I. For now.
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