Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Jeffrey Vagle

@jvagle.me

8.7K followers 1K following 14K posts

Law professor | Privacy, Cybersecurity, AI*, Technology and Society, National Security | Veteran | There is music yet to play | https://tractatus.org

Posts Replies Media Videos

Jeffrey Vagle

@jvagle.me

Minnesota folks are known to be nice, but they can also put up a hell of a fight when the cause is right.

(Also, they're keeping VA's confederate flag)

January 11, 2026 at 12:34 AM

Jeffrey Vagle

@jvagle.me

And I think this fits well into Vance's chip-on-his-shoulder approach to life. See if this character from Thompson's Who Goes Nazi? fits Vance's profile:

The saturnine man over there talking with a lovely French emigree is already a Nazi. Mr. C is a brilliant and embittered intellectual. He was a poor white-trash Southern boy, a scholarship student at two universities where he took all the scholastic honors but was never invited to join a fraternity. His brilliant gifts won for him successively government positions, partnership in a prominent law firm, and eventually a highly paid job as a Wall Street adviser. He has always moved among important people and always been socially on the periphery. His colleagues have admired his brains and exploited them, but they have seldom invited him—or his wife—to dinner.

He is a snob, loathing his own snobbery. He despises the men about him—he despises, for instance, Mr. B—because he knows that what he has had to achieve by relentless work men like B have won by knowing the right people. But his contempt is inextricably mingled with envy. Even more than he hates the class into which he has insecurely risen, does he hate the people from whom he came. He hates his mother and his father for being his parents. He loathes everything that reminds him of his origins and his humiliations. He is bitterly anti-Semitic because the social insecurity of the Jews reminds him of his own psychological insecurity.

There he sits: he talks awkwardly rather than glibly; he is courteous. He commands a distant and cold respect. But he is a very dangerous man. Were he primitive and brutal he would be a criminal—a murderer. But he is subtle and cruel. He would rise high in a Nazi regime. It would need men just like him—intellectual and ruthless. But Mr. C is not a born Nazi. He is the product of a democracy hypocritically preaching social equality and practicing a carelessly brutal snobbery. He is a sensitive, gifted man who has been humiliated into nihilism. He would laugh to see heads roll.

January 10, 2026 at 6:15 PM

Jeffrey Vagle

@jvagle.me

January 10, 2026 at 4:48 PM

Jeffrey Vagle

@jvagle.me

January 10, 2026 at 4:41 PM

Jeffrey Vagle

@jvagle.me

American law enforcement officers are also "civilians."

January 10, 2026 at 3:52 PM

Jeffrey Vagle

@jvagle.me

Governance by the administration is almost entirely about an aesthetic, trolling/mocking enemies, and flooding the zone with shit. The conscious choice by Bovino to have his photo taken in full SS cosplay regalia is all about this approach.