◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

The Method Let me be clear about something before I say anything else. I have no regrets. I want to establish that immediately because people always expect regrets — always wait for the moment when the monster acknowledges what the monster was — and I am not going to give you that moment. Not because I lack self-knowledge. I have more self-knowledge than almost anyone I ever destroyed. Because self-knowledge and regret are not the same thing. I knew exactly what I was doing. I did it anyway. I would do it again. That is what makes me useful to you now — not as a cautionary tale. As a manual. McCarthy had the technique. I had the refinements. Joe was blunt. Joe needed the crowds — needed the fear he generated reflected back at him as power. I needed results. The result is the only thing that matters. The method is whatever produces the result. Joe was a senator. I was a lawyer. Senators come and go. Lawyers are forever. When Joe was finished I was just getting started. The rules of the method. Rule one. Never defend. Always attack. The moment you defend yourself you have accepted the premise that the accusation requires a response. It does not. It requires a counter-accusation — louder, faster, more outrageous — so that the original accusation is buried under the noise. The goal is never to win the argument. The goal is to exhaust it. Confusion is victory. Clarity is the enemy. Rule two. Deny everything. Admit nothing. Not because the denial is believable. Because it forces them to prove what they know. And proving what they know takes time. And during that time you are doing three other things they will also have to prove. Rule three. Counterattack disproportionately. Make the person who raised the original issue become the story — their motives, their history, their hidden agenda. By the time you are finished no one remembers what they accused you of. Rule four. Punish disloyalty before it acts. Preemptive destruction is more efficient than reactive destruction. I found him in New York in the seventies — a young man from Queens burning with the fury of the man who knows he is more powerful than the people pretending he doesn’t exist. I recognized the hunger. I gave him the rules. He was undisciplined, emotional, needy. But he understood the essential principle: the rules do not apply to you if you refuse loudly enough and long enough to be the kind of person the rules apply to. I taught him that. He learned it better than I taught it. I died of AIDS. I called it liver cancer. To the end. Not because I expected anyone to believe it. Because accepting what I was — gay, sick, dying of the disease I had spent my career making it easier for the government to ignore — would have been a kind of defeat that no amount of dying was going to make me accept. The man I had made did not visit me in the hospital. I did not expect him to. I had written the rules. The dying man is a liability. I would have done the same. What I am watching now is the method without the lawyer. Instinct can win elections. Instinct cannot sustain the method without someone who understands that the weapon requires someone who knows when not to fire. He never learned that distinction. I have no regrets. The method worked. The student surpassed the teacher. What happens to the country — the institutions, the republic, the constitutional architecture that other voices in this collection wring their hands about — is not my department. My department was the method. The method is operational. That is all I was ever asked to do. That is all I ever did.