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Proud to Be Something I Suppose

By Lewis Stanchion for Policy Pet

Chap Butler stands to greet us. The first thing that strikes you other than his cloying exuberance to shake hands with our photographer and her assistant who happen to both be women of color are the graying temples. Jutting out from a full head of dark brown hair, Butler’s gray accents look to be not of the mold but the actual mold the Republican party used to mass produce its lawmakers- local, state, and federal. He’s wearing pleated khakis and a trim polo shirt. His shirt is a pastel dandelion yellow that he’s tucked into his belted slacks right at the navel. Argyle socks poke out from the saddle shoes he’s wearing which as far as we know don’t have any spikes fixed in. Butler invited us to his members only country club because he said it’s where he feels the most comfortable these days. Even though Butler does not golf he maintains private clubs and associations are the lifeblood of American democracy. Of course, during times that were less cloaked in controversy and criticism for him and the growing Pride Guy hate syndicate he founded, Butler might have been more assertive with such a claim. Because what really concerns him and has concerned him for at least the last decade on record, is white American democracy.

Or white American anything for that matter. “America is the last possibility for a truly white and free nation upon this earth.” That was Butler quoting his own self-published manifesto and bestseller My Country ‘Tis of Us: A White National History of these United States on the homepage of Pride Guy international’s website before his tech team scrubbed it in favor of a more inclusive seeming “God Bless OUR America” banner. That was a full week after Butler praised mass shooter Daniel Yates on Twitter for his initiative and tactical acumen in gunning down dozens of his fellow Americans while they were stuck in rush hour traffic between Seattle and Tacoma. At first, when public outcry was gathering force against him and the amalgamated Pride Guy chapters he leads, Butler doubled down. He offered explanation instead of much needed and desired atonement.

To Butler, murdering citizens trying to get home to their families after an honest day’s work with an assault weapon was not at issue. No. The real culprit in Butler’s self-serving and condescending diagnosis for America’s ills and evils was the traffic itself. Traffic, he argued and still does, that is a direct result of overcrowding, which is in turn a direct result of unchecked immigration- legal and illegal.

Control is excruciatingly important for Butler. Before the Latinx waiter, whose immigration status we’re still praying for, could reach our table with menus Butler snapped his fingers and pointed at his near empty high ball glass. Decaffeinated iced tea is his preferred beverage and that meant it would be our only option for food or drink over the next two hours. Iced tea spoons, as it turns out, are a real thing. This might be the only knowledge I gained from my encounter with Chap Butler, who happens to use iced tea spoons to great affect, clinking and clanking the long thin handle against ice cubes and glass to break up an endless stream of facts that point out the obvious. He is a white supremacist. As such, he is evil. (Even for an opinion piece, the following marks barely qualify as parenthetical. If they see publication at all, I apologize to my mother and father who worked so very hard to cover the costs of my education in journalism. This is all to the good considering a single drop of caffeinated iced tea probably would have put this writer over the edge. There is only so much insufferable ignorance a person can take and I’ve yet to meet the editor who would turn down a byline that reads: Butt Chapler American Shit Whisperer.)

Like most control fetishists, Butler displayed great difficulty in regulating himself during the course of our interview. He turned the aforementioned spoons, which again I did not know existed before our meeting, into instruments better suited to a long-lost absinthe ritual. God, were it only absinthe instead of iced tea. At least then there’d be the glimmer of hope Butler would keel over from syphilis off a pont and into the Seine. But no, it was decaffeinated iced tea, because it’s an impotent potable he can control. Obsessing over control seems to cloud our ability to see with any clarity just how little we do have control over. As you might expect, that level of emotional immaturity and general lack of self-awareness can make someone rather poor company. Butler was no different.

Seconds after the decaf iced teas we did not want were gently lowered on club insignia coasters, a volatile Butler launched into the first of many diatribes.

“You can’t reduce complex problems of this nature to gun bad/man good thinking. Nobody right now is better at explaining this than New Hampshire Senator Nathaniel Spragg, who I had the pleasure of helping win reelection. You can make all the fuss you want over this body count or that tragedy, but it is crystal clear our founders enshrined in our sacred Constitution a right to self-preservation by means of firearms. That is the unclouded intent of our Second Amendment. As lawful citizens we can have and use firearms, because firearms are fundamental for American survival.”

Like a moth drawn towards flame, I couldn’t help but ask how he knew with such exactitude just what his beloved founding fathers meant when they drafted and adopted the Second Amendment. Without batting an eye, Butler told us that he doesn’t have to know and neither do you. What’s important he says is that the foremost Constitutional legal scholars who comprise the Supreme Court have upheld the interpretation he happens to champion. I pressed him on his professed belief in judicial infallibility. To name the few and obvious, what of Dred Scott and Homer Plessy? Were Roger Taney and Melville Fuller channeling the founders with the same precision as Thomas and Roberts? And what about the justices who sign onto opinions in favor of abortion? Are their pens no less guided by James Madison’s ghost?

Oh, no. Never. Butler defaulted to his go-to move. Yet again, he disguised lengthy provocation as simple, straightforward explanation by overplaying his confidence in his own contradictory positions. Basically, as far as Chap Butler is concerned, it comes down to this. If a Supreme Court justice agrees with him, he or she is a top notch legal arbiter of the United States Constitution. He or she is to be listened to, supported, agreed with, and congratulated as a savior of the American people. If a Supreme Court justice disagrees with him, he or she is unfit for any bench. Mind you, Butler communicated this in the most indifferent anodyne manner. And herein lies a general ignorance masquerading as sadistic brilliance. Butler ran imaginary circles round Scott, Plessy,and Brown at my insistence and never once referred to anything, nor anyone, as black or white. Much more on this later.

For now, I would be remiss not to point out the obvious. Brown v. Board of Education is a landmark civil rights decision with an actual color in its fucking title. A coincidence, but not a subtle one. Of it, Butler only comments upon it as an important example of the founder’s brilliance in establishing three branches of government with the Constitution’s first three articles. Segregation and integration are reduced to mere footnotes by Butler’s schema. And it is such intellectual sins of omission that more often than not bring about the rank-and-file Pride Guy’s worldly sins of commission. Not wanting to let him gloss over the real-world implications of his unpracticed preaching, I did my best to return Butler’s attention to the mass shooter he openly praised as ‘ingenious’.

“When I explained, or attempted to explain this on Twitter myself, in the case of what’s his name- Yakes [sic], Dan Yakes [sic]- our enemies from within and without are so hell bent on making sure a free America and free Americans do not survive that they immediately browbeat me with this gun bad, man good rubbish. Like they always do and I am sure will continue to do. For all I know you’re ready to do it to me right now. Or maybe you’ll wait and do it like a coward once you get back to your flaptops [sic]. My point was, someone with Dan Yakes’ [sic] twisted mind would find a way to perpetrate that tragedy one way or another. And if you really cared about the lives lost that day and on the growing number of tragic days like it, you would stop waging this childish playground war of words on the American firearm industry and on America’s lawful, citizen firearm owners. Had there been Pride Guys on that stretch of highway, Dan Yakes [sic] would have been put down posthaste. He would have been laid low by a firearm, because as our founders pointed out with their extraordinary, God given genius so many years ago, the firearm is our best tool for self-preservation. All the more so when the firearm is in the hands of a well-regulated militia. Now I’m not trying to describe the Pride Guys as such, because people like yourself prevent us from taking that natural step. We want to protect freedom in this great nation. We want to protect this country’s citizenry as a Constitutionally guaranteed well-regulated militia, but we just can’t because of all the unconstitutional, anti-constitutional, and counter constitutional hurdles your side puts in place. Maybe one day, with the right persons on the Court and with enough right-minded patriots running for office at the local, state, and federal level, we can consider those steps. We can move towards becoming the well-regulated militia this country deserves.”

This is one of Butler’s favorite stratagems. He loves to talk heroes. The founders, the Reagans, the veterans, and on and on. All people he has no real connection with and no demonstrable claim to. The only thing approaching heroics in Butler’s life was riding the bench on an unlikely state championship basketball team in 1986. None of his former teammates, except one, wished to talk about Butler. That team’s captain and to this day, the Prudent Academy High School’s all-time leader in assists, simply wanted this and nothing more on the record: ‘Fuck him.’ I envy his economy with words. Because anyone party to reality, no matter how compassionate, must come to the same conclusion. And I hate to insert myself yet again in what was supposed to be a profile of Chap Butler, but nothing in my training as a journalist prepared me for dealing with someone who refuses to acknowledge any reality other than his own self-serving solipsism. For whatever reason- and that reason is racism, as it always is- it seems to be as seductive to uneducated white people as it is shoddy. It is difficult to combat so much bullshit with integrity. There is little doubt he will carve out choice phrases and use my own honesty against me. After all, this is what professional liars do and Chap Butler is a tip top pro when it comes to bullshitting. I can see it now, off in the murky distance, polluting the twitterverse:

See, journalists have no integrity!!! They say it themselves!!! We should cheer on the Saudi princes while they pull their toenails off one by one in luxury hotel suites!!! America, do your partGuzzle oil!!! Buy another pickup truck that will never see a construction site!!! Give the Saudis discount room rates!!! #Proud2Be #UsA #TRUTH

On the other hand, the villains, who on more than one occasion he has publicly blanketed with praise, he never seems to know. Once Butler’s over rehearsed Second Amendment pontifications ground to a halt of faulty logic and wishful unthinking, I showed him screenshots of his deleted tweets connected to the Seattle-Tacoma murders. I was not about to let him pretend as though he did not know Daniel Yates’ actual name. He tweeted Daniel Yates’ name with correct spelling and capitalization no less than fourteen times in three hours.

“You sit here trying to provoke me into conversation about Daniel Yates and the evils of firearms. You’ll have to sit there until the cows come home as porterhouse steaks to get me to bite on that nonsense. The root cause is not firearms. The root cause is the mental health crisis that a once free and brave America for Americans has become. The root cause is the desperation men in this great nation face. Where does this desperation come from? It is most certainly not part of our cultural, political, or spiritual heritage as Americans. This desperation is not what one generation of American fathers pass down onto their American sons. No. We know where it comes from. It comes from outside this country. Since this country has filled up with the foreign person and the foreign person’s desperation, we have been drowning our lawful American citizens in it. It has been shoved down our throats and now there is almost nowhere for an American man to go and feel real American freedom. That is why I started the Pride Guys almost ten years ago. I saw the need to give American men one last frontier. One final safe place where we can enjoy and express our pride in our free American ancestry. But not only that. The Pride Guys is also an organization that can reclaim a destiny that was once manifest. It is a private institution of free American association that aims to return America into a nation of free American association once more.”

“You keep bugging me about Yates and others like him. Let me ask you this. If Yates and the other nervous breakdowns we see end American lives so tragically short each and every day, if they had a free America to live in, would this be happening? If there were still open plains for us to roam, these men would be cowboys. And the only harm they would do would be to each other in duels of American masculinity. One to one. Man to man. Gun to gun. No shooting into crowds or any of this other cowardly crap that goes on today because the open plains are openly packed with illegal aliens who take up the space and opportunities that are our birthright- our rightful inheritance. What would that America look like? The America where Daniel Yates and others could enjoy real American freedoms. You and I know it would look not only superior to the wasted America we are fighting to hold together today; it would look superior to all other nations at all other times.”

Finally, some progress. I know it doesn’t seem like much, and it possibly couldn’t to anyone who hasn’t had the displeasure of a meet and greet with Chap Butler or any other white national sophist for that matter; however, getting under his skin to the point where he finally replaced ‘gun’ for ‘firearm’ in his every-other-word a euphemism repertoire was a coup I find worth recounting. Butler is a white supremacist who has never so much as said on record the words white, black, brown, person(s) of color, Caucasian, Africa, Hispanic, et cetera and so and on and so forth. We looked this up. Not only by eye but also by computer science. Policy Pet hired a team of experts in linguistic data mining to comb through every self-published piece, every social media post, and every television appearance Mr. Butler has made. For all their expertise, algorithms, and almost instantaneous adjustments via deep machine learning they came up with nothing.

Meanwhile, the most cursory snapshot of Pride Guy online activity presents a very different image. And as expected, when the same data analysis techniques were applied to content Mr. Butler’s followers are responsible for, the top ten most used words came out as this:

1. America
2. American
3. Freedom
4. Libtard
5. Founding Fathers
6. Liberty
7. Faggot
8. Illegal
9. Black
10. Mexican

The most used phrases, as one with any critical faculties might expect, were similarly startling. And if we extend the list to the top twenty-five most used words, yes the N-word does in fact make a sickening if not unsurprising appearance at number twenty-two. Don’t worry about feeling too left out ladies. The Pride Guys have something in store for you as well. ‘Feminazi’ almost cracked the top ten as the thirteenth most used term and not far behind was the c-word, which placed a dishonorable seventeenth.

Once Butler ran out of xenophobic steam, I presented him with both our research and its rigorous methodology. You’ll never guess what happened next. He objected to its findings on rather tenuous grounds. First, that the research was funded by Policy Pet and thus would reflect its biased liberal agenda or something to that effect. When I calmly pointed out that Policy Pet masked its identity as the party of interest by both securing separate sponsorship from the ACLU and Southern Poverty Law Center to fully fund the research, and furthermore transferred those funds through encrypted block chain transactions led by researchers at the Nashaway Institute of Technology, Butler merely shrugged his shoulders. But not so high as to untuck his Easter sunshine polo shirt from his starch stiff pleated khakis. He simply couldn’t be bothered to admit the connection between himself and the members of the white supremacist organization he established and continues to lead. Anyone can post anything online he objected. No kidding Chappy. No kidding.  Or in his own words:

“There’s just no way to tell if these posts from invitation only Facebook and Instagram groups were bona fide members of our Pride Guy community. I myself am shocked and ashamed by such language. That doesn’t mean I can turn that outrage into a campaign against our most sacred of First Amendment rights. Nor does it mean anyone else should. What we do need to do, and this is why I began the Pride Guys, is trust in our founders. In difficult times we need them and their peculiar genius more than ever.”

And that leads me back to the unfortunate staff photographer who drew this short straw of an assignment. As she and her assistant were packing up their extensive array of unused equipment on the longest, most winding idyllic Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride Macadam road the country club valet parked us on, I got to hear what truth sounded like again.

“Who believes any of this shit?” she asked in genuine confusion.

Chap Butler certainly won’t tell you. At least he didn’t let me in on his any of his poorly kept secrets. Despite his choreographed bullshit, I still know this much is true. It’s not the tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free. No. It’s the lazy, stupid, and self-serving. That is who believes this shit. They have to. Otherwise, their sense of Anglo-Saxon entitlement would lose the white bedsheet cloaks and daggers they’ve hiding behind all along. Because behind Oz’s grand wizard has always been the lazy, stupid, and self-serving. And the degree to which they get away with it is up to how lazy, stupid, and self-serving the rest of us choose to be.

It may astonish you, but another favored phrase uncovered by our analysis is that tired and untrue chestnut ‘those people’. As in government not of those people, never by those people, and very much against those people. That is Chap Butler’s ongoing address to his adherents. Well, having finally met the guy, let me end by telling you what type of person Chap Butler is and who his people are. Those people are the ones you should ignore in civilized public discourse. Those people are the ones you should exclude from gainful employment. Those people are the ones you should deny healthcare and other necessary social services. Those people are the ones you exclude from your nation if your aim is to build and keep a prosperous one. Those people make you want to build walls and barb fences, or better yet put an entire ocean between yourself and them. Maybe the Atlantic would do since their claims on power all reduce to Europa’s divine birthright. I could be wrong, but I think you know the type. If not, you can always drink iced tea with Chap Butler.