16 September 2020

Buy nice stuff

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Want to buy nice consumer products from providers I like? Here are unsolicited endorsements of some of my favorite Stuff, and places to get Stuff.

Other lists

Indices like this one

  • Cool tools — Kevin Kelly’s index of reviews of all kinds of things, talking not just about the qualities of the product, but about how and why it's useful, like tongue depressors or those glue sticks made of post-it note glue; many entries are just tips and tricks that don’t require buying anything
  • Wirecutter — exceedingly in-depth reviews explaining what the best version is for numerous key products — especially electronics — including why that thing is the best and what difference it makes if you go for the best cheap or best spendy alternative
  • The Future Of Stuff Store — particularly resiliently-designed products, especially ones which take advantage of cutting-edge materials; the creator also maintains an open list “some things that are really quite good”: “it’s just amazing how good the quality end of manufactured goods is, particularly compared to the landfill-fodder which is the norm”
  • Better Living Through Design — various kinds of cunningly-designed kit; the bags and desk accessories are my particular weaknesses
  • Pack Hacker — advice for travellers, relevant here because they have a huge library of thoughtful product reviews and recommendations
  • Alex Kwa — the kind of minimalism nerd who has an article about how to wear only black; he has assembled a bunch of fun reviews & guides to one-bag travel, minimalism, and more
  • The Strategist — a bit lifestyle-magazine-ish, but I forgive it because it has pretty darned good taste in a range of products
  • Buy Me Once — many kinds of solidly-made stuff, again described with a bit of lifestyle magazine flavor
  • The Ones — a site maintained by some hip but (mostly) practical industrial designers listing their favorite, rock-solid products
  • The Sweet Setup — a guide to applications for Apple devices, including not just the best solutions but a lot of advice about using them well
  • The Macrumours’ buyers guide — informed guesses about when new versions of Apple products will come out, reducing your chances of getting something and then feeling frustrated to see a spiffy new version released right after you buy it
  • “What life-changing item can you buy for less that $100?” — a wooly but fun and helpful Reddit discussion
  • Kitty Unpretty’s office supply recommendations — some smart eccentric ideas
  • Independent map artists — a list of sellers of good weird maps
  • Typeface lists — what folks colloquially call “fonts”; a bunch of good ones, and a bunch of type foundries which make good ones

Eccentric product catalogues

Stationery & pens

Catalogues

Pens

  • The Pen Type-B — it is a crime that the website does not have a sound-and-video clip of the satisfying pop of sliding open my all-time favorite pen; it is designed to use refills with the ink for …
  • Pilot Hi-Tec C — a very good gel pen available in various colors & formats
  • Pilot G-2 — the Hi-Tec C’s cousin, IMHO the cheap pen best for graceful writing
  • Zebra Mildliners — highlighter-style felt-tip pens in subdued colors, useful for highlighting, structuring written notes, and sketching
  • Pilot FriXion pens — the only good erasable pens I have used, not just spiffy on the merits but also useful combined with …
  • Pocket pens — I have a section on those under EDC below

Other goodies

  • Rocketbook — an array of notebooks and other stationery made with reusable ”paper“ which easily wipes clean with a damp cloth if you use FriXion pens, supported by an app for easily scanning snapshots of what you write; though the “paper“ is plastic-y to the touch it writes very nicely so I love using the index cards for games and the Orbit pad for work meeting notes which I will transcribe into electronic form
  • Chromalabel — an array of color-coding stickers … including kraft paper
  • Studio Neat — a handful of very spiffy office tools; the unique things I recommend are their giant panobook “desk notebook” and matching-size panopad sticky notes
  • The Cortex podcast store — offers a few nifty, unique bits of stationery including my all-time favorite notebook that isn’t the classic Leuchtturm 1917

Computer & office gear

Brands

  • Anker & Belkin — the two big manufacturers I trust most for stuff like chargers, cables, and other USB accessories (and related kit)
  • Elevation Lab — good cables and device stands; it is worth watching the video for their QuickDraw desk cable clip
  • Twelve South — unique accessories for computers, phones, and other electronics
  • Ergomi — an array of desk tools, especially interesting if one is on the go and needs to be able to bring one’s “desk” anywhere
  • Gustav — when I was working a job which had me running from conference room to conference room with my laptop and other kit, I daydreamed about a specialized Laptop Bucket; too late for me, these folks make one, and a few bits of similar gear (Ikea also makes something similar)
  • DTTO — cases for Apple devices, including the iPad Mini case I settled on after a long hunt: inexpensive, protective, grippy without feeling gross, with a stand good for both portrait and landscape use
  • The Magic Sleeve — a cunning magnetic felt gear pocket/desk pad; watch the video to get seduced
  • Conway Electric — nifty, very spendy extension cords and related gear with an Industrial aesthetic
  • SuperCalla — USB cables with a set of magnets along the length which make them easy to wrap or fold neatly
  • Native Union — makers of overdesigned tech accessories; I am tickled by their whimsical USB phone handset and their Anchor Cable with a weighted end
  • Rolling Square — charging gear and similar; I keep one of their tiny multipurpose USB cables in my go bag, and they have a nifty modular magnetic arm for attaching phones, lights, and chargers to one’s laptop

Classical office supplies

  • Grovemade — preposterously swanky desk accessories
  • Scotch package scissors — good scissors designed so that one can also use them to open packages
  • swivel stapler — a stapler where one can rotate the stapling mechanism 90° away from the lever to make it easy to staple booklets Fluidstance — a line of steel desk whiteboards which I have all over my desk (plus they make cool balance boards to stand on)

Input & output

  • Elgato Stream Deck — a highly-customizable “keyboard” with tiny LED displays on each key which knows what application you are currently using to can give you shortcut keys and more; it did so much for my productivity that I eventually upgraded to the XL version
  • TourBox — another programmable input device which knows which app you are using and can give you appropriate shortcut keys; their marketing materials do not explain that the weird button & dial design is meant to make it easy to identify the controls by touch with your left hand while your right hand is working a mouse or trackpad
  • Keyboario & Ergodox — cool weird ergonomic mechanical computer keyboards; I have a few words which may help you decide if you want one of these
  • Protoarc Foldable Ergonomic Bluetooth Keyboard — the best portable keyboard I have found; one can also find a similar, even lighter version branded a few different ways (GoTek Voyage, Targus, iClever, Perixx, Moko, Gomcv, etc) which is pretty good, but charges via micro USB, which I am trying to purge from my life

Videoconferencing

  • Elgato Prompter — if you spend a lot of time on videoconferences, using this widget with your webcam will reduce your stress by enabling you to make “eye contact”
  • On Air Warning — a little ecosystem with an app, dedicated buttons, and a status light for toggling one’s camera and microphone on and off; one can set the app to freeze your video rather than black it out, which I find convenient when doing something momentarily awkward at my desk
  • AnkerWork speakerphones — the voice isolation on the S600 is uncannily good at filtering out all other sound; I presume that other models (and the headphones) use the same tech
  • Logitech H390 headset — this inexpensive headset is surprisingly good, though I ordinarily rely on a USB mic Audio-Technica don’t make any more
  • Airtime & Boom — useful tools for managing one’s outgoing image in a videoconference; a Setapp subscription includes the latter

Cable management

  • Wrap-It cable labels — little colored bits of velcro stuff you can write on to identify what cable connects to what; I also like the velcro cable wraps in matching colors
  • Cable Turtles — the tidiest and easiest way to make a long cable shorter
  • BlueLounge — a bunch of well crafted solutions to your cable clutter; I dig their CableBox, though one can find equivalents which are less expensive
  • braided mesh wire looms — the most convenient way to keep a bunch of cables tidy when stringing them all to the same place

Apple ecosystem apps

  • SetApp — a subscription service which provides a big, well-curated catalogue of apps all for one fee, so whenever I need a little utility I start there because they probably have a solution — I have a few favorites:
    • Session — a pomodoro timer with a lot of little advantages, including strong Apple Shortcuts support which I use to automagically start and stop music
    • Bartender — a utility which manages the icons for background apps in the menu bar
    • Mosaic — a utility for tiling windows neatly
    • TaskPaper & Bike — a pair of crisp, simple notes apps made for graceful outlining (from the same developer!)
    • CleanMyMac — a longtime-classic tool for keeping one’s hard drive from getting crufty
    • TypeFace — a font manager for addicts like me
    • NotePlan — a notes app with sophisticated support for time-based organization, tagging, to-dos, et cetera; it has nerdy advantages like having its notes available in the filesystem as plaintext Markdown, and a plug-in architecture for lots of configurability, which I have been migrating to as a replacement for …
  • Agenda — a notes app with comparable organizational tools to NotePlan and a bit more polish
  • Mailsmith — A crisp email app with good support for GMail
  • Things — a very graceful To Do app
  • BBEdit — the classic plaintext editor
  • Bear — a Markdown app really good for composing writing, with a good browser extension for doing clippings from web pages
  • OmniGraffle — a drawing app built for making diagrams which I abuse to do a lot more; it has a Shared Layer mechanism useful for making a big batch of similar images / pages

Other goodies

  • Ergodriven — the weird ridged floor mat I use at my standing desk every day
  • Bellemond — makers of a superior alternative to the Paperlike tablet screen protector; it reduces glare and makes drawing & handwriting with the Pencil a lot better, though if one only writes on the tablet intermittantly, you may prefer …
  • Astropad make a magnetic-removable equivalent tablet screen surface for writing which comes with matching pen tips, Rock Paper Pencil, an anti-reflective screen protector for iPhones which is admirably clear, and a few other interesting implements
  • Desk service bell — the ding-for-service bell your parents told you not to ring when you were kid; I have one at my desk and ding it when I finish something

Travel

Clothing

  • Bluffworks — makers of travel clothing that doesn’t make you look like a cyberpunk shadowrunner or safari nerd; their Gramercy Blazer has cunning pockets and uses a resilient technical fabric which looks and feels indistinguishable from wool suiting (and yes there are matching trousers)
  • ScottEVest — makers of incredibly pocket-rich travel clothing; I like wearing their LightEST Vest under another jacket to keep my stuff handy and organized, there’s even a wacky system for threading cables through the lining so that it is easy to charge devices while they rest in pockets
  • Aviator — makers of a lot of travel kit; I love their travel hoodie
  • Mizzen & Main — another maker of technical fabric men’s clothing; I dig their dress shirts
  • Flip My Tie — A brand of reversible neckties, to get a few more changes when travelling light

Other travel gear

Luggage

  • Evergoods — my single favorite maker of bags and packs, cunning designers of camping gear who turned their attention toward stuff for civilians with a minimalist look that belies sophisticated organizational details; all their stuff is superb and their medium-size travel backpack is the best airplane under-seat bag I have ever used and their CIVIC Access Pouch 2L, is the best dopp-kit-size organizer I have ever encountered
  • Tom Bihn — simple, superb soft travel gear; their Aeronaut 30 bag has taken me around the world (and the newer laptop-friendly Techonaut incorporates the improvements I daydreamed about when I did that), and their Synik 22 & 30 laptop / travel backpacks have super organization
  • WaterField Designs — their design sensibility straddles classy enough to look professional without looking too fussy in more casual circumstances (especially in their use of waxed canvas); their videos explaining how their bags are meant to be used are worth a watch if only as explorations of thoughtful design; their Air Porter Backpack is a hyper-optmized under-seat carry-on to pair with a rolling case, and their newer Air Travel Backpack is the most professional-feeling one-bag solution I have seen
  • Peak Design — camera gear and bags (and the phone cases mentioned above); I use their Everyday Backpack as the name describes; their travel backpack may be the most clever design of the type — note that Huckberry offers handsome variant versions
  • Piorama — make some interesting eccentric bags; their A10 duffel has a system of drawstrings so one can expand it from a pretty-big 30L bag to twice its volume, their giant tote is the best design for that I have seen, and their Omni laptop sleeve has pockets and magnets which transform it into a useful desk organizer for office kit or whatever
  • Aer — intriguingly designed travel & EDC bags a peer to the makers above, though cannot vouch for having seen them in the flesh; I dig their Capsule Pack
  • Babboon To The Moon — bags for people who share my sensibilities about how bags should be structured but want something more colorful
  • Freitag — an array of clever bags, each unique because they are made by upcycling the colorful tough canvas they use to cover trucks in Europe; the groovy stop-motion animations showing the bags in use are a delight even if you don’t want to buy one
  • Mission Workshop — my favorite fancy bicylists’ bags; they also make some interesting technical clothes
  • Saddleback Leather — gorgeous, heavy, sturdy leather luggage; I carried one of their backpacks for years and got compliments on it every day
  • Away — the most inexpensive sturdy rolling pullman cases (or the sturdiest inexpensive ones) I have found; their Aluminum Carry-On is spendy but satisfied my lifelong lust for an unattainably expensive Zero Haliburton
  • Sottos — makers of cases with huge wheels that make it easier to roll over surfaces like grass or cobblestones, and to lever-thump up and down stairs
  • The Ogio locker bag — cleverly designed to organize gym gear and fit into locker just so — for years I had one which I did not even take back and forth, it just lived in my locker
  • Notabag — a simple lightweight bag which folds up small and has a simple, beautiful design which makes it graceful to carry things in one hand, over one shoulder, or as a backpack
  • Nanobag — by far the best packable tiny bags I have ever found; these easily pack down to almost nothing but the material is neither flimsy nor weird
  • Eagle Creek — my favorite maker of packing cubes; you may prefer to use cubes from the same maker as your bag, but you definitely need packing cubes if you travel

Everyday carry

Keyring

  • Craighill — a bunch of spendy, meticulously-designed stuff for a gent’s pockets and desk (their design videos are seductive) and they make several different keyring solutions
  • Key Wrangler — a sturdy, unique carabiner keyring which puts keys on a straight bar, which is helpful if one’s keyring has turned into a pocket tool ring; for a compact key solution, check out …
  • Keysmart — makers of a line of super-compact key holders; they also make my all-time favorite keyring multitool
  • AirNotch Pro — a better tracker than the Apple Airtag for one’s keyring
  • RovyVon flashlight — my favorite maker of tiny flashlights, though as Maurice Moves notes, we are embarrassed for choice of little flashlights these days from makers like Fenix and Boruit

Wallet

  • Bellroy — the most thoughtfully designed leather wallets I have found; I carry their Hide & Seek bifold when I need more than just the essentials in my …
  • Peak Design Mobile Wallet — a super-minimalist wallet which clings to my iPhone via MagSafe and provides a little folding stand
  • AirCard — a tracker compatible with Apple FindMy which fits in a wallet card slot
  • On-The-Go Notebook — a tiny notebook which fits into a wallet card slot from Rite In The Rain, using their indestructible paper

Pocket pen

Pocketknife

I have become a devotée of the pocket boxcutter as the right solution — the replacable blades mean one can always have a nice sharp edge despite abusing that handy blade. I have three options I like:
  • Pichi Utility Knife — spendy but worth it; small, elegant, overdesigned, and fidget-tastic
  • NexTool Explorer E20 — the one I carry most often; the built in “magazine” of replacement blades deploy easily, and the screwdriver & bottle-opener elements are useful despite catching on the pocket just a bit
  • The Gerber Prybrid — the bulkiest, but also the best in the hand for demanding jobs

Sling

Electronics

  • Peak Design Mobile — a system of elegant, protective phone cases which lock to various stands and implements; if you use one of the newer MagSafe iPhones, these are compatible, which means that you can combine best-of-breed solutions to pair it with the slightly better magnetic card wallet / mini stand from …
  • Moft — nifty portable stands for computers, tablets, and phones; I carry one of their Snap Flow notepads stuck to my iPhone with MagSafe

Covid safety

  • Breathe99 — a silicone mask with good filter inserts and an integrated cloth cover which keeps one from looking too medical; the one I bring when I know I am going to be popping my mask on and off
  • 3M Aura 1870 N95 masks — my favorite disposable masks, with the boxy Korean-style pleats for a comfy good seal, though one must put up with the dorky 3M logo on the white mask
  • Nukit Torch UV — spendy portable battery-powered 222nm emitters sufficiently powerful to help protect a few people
  • 4Lite Personal HEPA filter — the only personal filter I am confident provides substantial benefit, pointing a stream of filtered air at one’s face; it is a bit too bulky to routinely bring everywhere
  • PureZone HEPA filter — the handiest real HEPA filter I know about; I honestly don’t know how beneficial it is, given its small size

Other EDC

  • Nerdwax — squirt, microfiber wipse, and more for eyeglasses; the tortilla is my favorite of their many whimsical designs for cleaning cloths
  • Reflexology pen — one can get an array of inexpensive blunt-ended sticks for very targeted massage; having one in stainless steel turns out to have an array of random applications
  • Nite Ize — makers of a bunch of nifty keyring dinguses; their tiny locking double carabiners turn out to have a million uses
  • Havhaf hair ties — not just the best hair ties I have found, these look nice waiting for duty on a wrist, and turn out to have occasional random applications

Toys

Nerd-ish art

Clothing

  • Outlier — spendy-but-worth-it technical clothing in a mix of plain and eccentric designs
  • American Giant — exceptionally well-made cotton basic clothes for men, including “the greatest hoodie ever made”
  • Mack Weldon — more cotton basics; my enthusiasm for their One Mile Slipper proves that I am a middle-aged guy
  • Quince — a big catalogue which also includes housewares; after a lot of experimentation, they have become my favorite maker of merino wool basics
  • Hollow Socks — made from Alpaca fiber, I like ’em better than wool for the stuff one asks wool socks to do
  • Cleverhood — nifty rain ponchos designed for bicyclists
  • Woobie Coats — simple, very warm hooded coats cunningly designed to take advantage of existing mil-spec blanket material; inexpensive enough that you can buy them in bulk to give to your whole camping crew, or to houseless strangers
  • Gustin — clothes “like they do not make any more”, in denim and other interesting fabrics; they keep expenses relatively low by pre-selling short runs, so their mailing list offers fresh temptations on the regular
  • Vestige — T-shirts with abstract graphics that are just really nice
  • Winkworth Ladies’ Goods — a Brooklyn designer of my acquaintance whose cozy / classy / sexy work I admire (and I gotta say that the models on their Instagram are all dreamy)
  • Katherinesummer — nifty knitwear
  • Camouflage wizard hats — useless but delightful

Grooming

  • Hairstory — New Wash is a no-shampoo shampoo which will change the chemistry of your scalp; they also have other cool haircare stuff, including a really nice scalp brush
  • Acne.org — a line of good, simple skincare products which are great even if you don’t have acne; I cannot describe what AHA+ does but it is great for your skin
  • The Ordinary: Peeling Solution — if, like me, you sometimes feel tempted to take turpentine to your oily skin, this is the stuff you want
  • The Tangle Teezer — does one thing very well; my hair will start to tangle in five minutes if I just stand still and will quickly turn to ’locs if I let it, but this magic device sets it right in just a few swipes
  • Gilette Mach3 razors — in my experience, categorically better than any other disposable solution, but …
  • Henson Shaving — after giving up on safety razors as hard on my skin while not shaving close enough, these beautiful precision-machined safety razors brought me back; in the long run, one saves money on the blades
  • Edjy — a unique fingernail-cutter which produces a clean edge
  • Glass nail files — better than emery boards for smoothing out that rough edge; the link points to a (relatively) sturdy version a friend recommeds
  • Seki Ear Hair Trimmer — tweezers with a little coil between the gripping ends that make it easier to pluck hairs wherever they are causing trouble
  • Beautiful Freak Cosmetics — gorgeous handmade bath & body products with a goth-y sensibility
  • Mando Body Care — the best deodrant I have found

Housewares

  • TubShroom — bath and sink filters which catch gunk without clogging
  • Kaufmann Mercantile — a range of well-made housewares and “accessories” and whatnot
  • Ikea 365+ food containers — one can mix-and-match nesting containers made of cheap plastic, strong glass, or stainless steel with lids made of bamboo, latching plastic, or silicone; containers have different heights but only a few different footprints, so there is no heartache matching lids to containers
  • Ikea Kuggis boxes — simple storage boxes in an array of colors & sizes which stack nicely (their Uppdatera bins also stack neatly onto them)
  • Skura — really nice kitchen sponges and related cleaning stuff
  • Ovalware’s cold brew coffee maker is just a pleasing, solid bit of kit
  • Purist Collective — nifty insulated cups & bottles for home or on the go
  • Mighty Mug — the insulated travel cup I use at my work desk; it has clever suction device which keeps it from spilling when set on a smooth surface
  • Gigogne Tumbler — stackable glass tumblers from French makers of classic nearly-indestructible glassware
  • Onsen — waffle-style towels which sucked me in to a Kickstarter; they are really nice
  • The Swag — a cotton bag which one dampens and uses to keep vegetables fresh in the fridge; surprisingly, it works
  • WeatherPro storage bins — they are inexpensive, solid-enough, stackable, and the lids clip on almost-watertight

Miscellaneous consumables

  • Slate Milk — shelf-stable lactose-free not-too-sweet quality chocolate milk in a can; these make such a great afternoon treat that I have a subscription
  • Nickel Dime Cocktail Syrups & Portland Syrups — a treat I have taken to now that I have slowed down enough that I am enjoying soda concoctions more often than actual cocktails
  • U-Haul paper packing tape — so much better than all other box tape that it is worth going out of your way; it sticks nicely to cardboard but does not tend to get stuck to other stuff, tears easily by hand, and you can write on it
  • Hydro Seal Band-Aids & Tegaderm Dressings — are two different styles of hydrocolloid bandages which are flexible, comfortable, waterproof, and stay on for several days; I like to trim the edges as they progressively pull away so that by the time the whole thing finally drops off, minor wounds have usually completely healed
  • Spenco’s moist burn pads — an essential adjunct to those bandages; they belong in every first aid kid because for a burn there is no substitute
  • Biltong — it’s like jerky, but better; expensive, but worth it

Everything else

  • Graf Lantz — a bunch of cool things made of wool felt
  • Garrett Wade — such beautiful tools that their gardening implements tempt me to take up gardening
  • Oxford Pennant — camp flags that are just cool
  • Bibliotheca — an exceptionally handsome edition of the Bible, designed for one to enjoy reading; it uses an idiosyncratic Protestant translation which attempts to marry formal literalism with contemporary language
  • Manta — by far the best sleep blindfolds; their Bluetooth sound mask is the most comfortable way to have personal sleep sound
  • Upcart — a sturdy little folding dolly with a wacky triangular wheel design which enables one to use it to carry things up and down stairs
  • PowerTye net — a net made of bungee cord with hooks designed to gather the net into shape
  • Conceirge bell — you can buy one of these cheap and ding it any time you want
  • Guasha massage wand — a useful massage tool which turns out to occasionally have other applications because it is a satisfying lump of stainless steel


Of course the real reason I made this list is so I have a place to tuck cool stuff I find so I can go shopping for toys later. Or if you want to get me a present ….

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11 September 2020

The Paranoid Style In American Politics

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This article by historian Richard Hofstadter was published in Harper’s Magazine in November 1964. It is an indispensible classic, so I am transcribing an archive of it into a readable form here without permission, if only for my own convenience.

The Paranoid Style in American Politics

It had been around a long time before the Radical Right discovered it — and its targets have ranged from “the international bankers” to Masons, Jesuits, and munitions makers.

American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the Goldwater movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind. In using the expression “paranoid style” I am not speaking in a clinical sense, but borrowing a clinical term for other purposes. I have neither the competence nor the desire to classify any figures of the past or present as certifiable lunatics. In fact, the idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.

Of course this term is pejorative, and it is meant to be; the paranoid style has a greater affinity for bad causes than good. But nothing really prevents a sound program or demand from being advocated in the paranoid style. Style has more to do with the way in which ideas are believed than with the truth or falsity of their content. I am interested here in getting at our political psychology through our political rhetoric. The paranoid style is an old and recurrent phenomenon in our public life which has been frequently linked with movements of suspicious discontent.

Here is Senator McCarthy, speaking in June 1951 about the parlous situation of the United States:

How can we account for our present situation unless we believe that men high in this government are concerting to deliver us to disaster? This must be the product of a great conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man. A conspiracy of infamy so black that, which it is finally exposed, its principals shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all honest men. … What can be made of this unbroken series of decisions and acts contributing to the strategy of defeat? They cannot be attributed to incompetence. … The laws of probability would dictate that part of … [the] decisions would serve the country’s interest.

Now turn back fifty years to a manifesto signed in 1895 by a number of leaders of the Populist party:

As early as 1865-66 a conspiracy was entered into between the gold gamblers of Europe and America. … For nearly thirty years these conspirators have kept the people quarreling over less important matters while they have pursued with unrelenting zeal their one central purpose. … Every device of treachery, every resource of statecraft, and every artifice known to the secret cabals of the international gold ring are being used to deal a blow to the prosperity of the people and the financial and commercial independence of the country.

Next, a Texas newspaper article of 1855:

… It is a notorious fact that the Monarchs of Europe and the Pope of Rome are at this very moment plotting our destruction and threatening the extinction of our political, civil, and religious institutions. We have the best reasons for believing that corruption has found its way into our Executive Chamber, and that our Executive head is tainted with the infectious venom of Catholicism. … The Pope has recently sent his ambassador of state to this country on a secret commission, the effect of which is an extraordinary boldness of the Catholic church throughout the United States. … These minions of the Pope are boldly insulting our Senators; reprimanding our Statesmen; propagating the adulterous union of Church and State; abusing with foul calumny all governments but Catholic, and spewing out the bitterest execrations on all Protestantism. The Catholics in the United States receive from abroad more than $200,000 annually for the propagation of their creed. Add to this the vast revenues collected here. …

These quotations give the keynote of the style. In the history of the United States one find it, for example, in the anti-Masonic movement, the nativist and anti-Catholic movement, in certain spokesmen of abolitionism who regarded the United States as being in the grip of a slaveholders’ conspiracy, in many alarmists about the Mormons, in some Greenback and Populist writers who constructed a great conspiracy of international bankers, in the exposure of a munitions makers’ conspiracy of World War I, in the popular left-wing press, in the contemporary American right wing, and on both sides of the race controversy today, among White Citizens’ Councils and Black Muslims. I do not propose to try to trace the variations of the paranoid style that can be found in all these movements, but will confine myself to a few leading episodes in our past history in which the style emerged in full and archetypal splendor.

Illuminism and Masonry

I begin with a particularly revealing episode — the panic that broke out in some quarters at the end of the eighteenth century over the allegedly subversive activities of the Bavarian Illuminati. This panic was a part of the general reaction to the French Revolution. In the United States it was heightened by the response of certain men, mostly in New England and among the established clergy, to the rise of Jeffersonian democracy. Illuminism had been started in 1776 by Adam Weishaupt, a professor of law at the University of Ingolstadt. Its teachings today seem to be no more than another version of Enlightenment rationalism, spiced with the anticlerical atmosphere of eighteenth-century Bavaria. It was a somewhat naïve and utopian movement which aspired ultimately to bring the human race under the rules of reason. Its humanitarian rationalism appears to have acquired a fairly wide influence in Masonic lodges.

Americans first learned of Illumism in 1797, from a volume published in Edinburgh (later reprinted in New York) under the title, Proofs of a Conspiracy Against All the Religions and Governments of Europe, Carried on in the Secret Meetings of Free Masons, Illuminati, and Reading Societies. Its author was a well-known Scottish scientist, John Robison, who had himself been a somewhat casual adherent of Masonry in Britain, but whose imagination had been inflamed by what he considered to be the far less innocent Masonic movement on the Continent. Robison seems to have made his work as factual as he could, but when he came to estimating the moral character and the political influence of Illuminism, he made the characteristic paranoid leap into fantasy. The association, he thought, was formed “for the express purpose of ROOTING OUT ALL RELIGIOUS ESTABLISHMENTS, AND OVERTURNING ALL THE EXISTING GOVERNMENTS OF EUROPE.” It had become “one great and wicked project fermenting and working all over Europe.” And to it he attributed a central role in bringing about the French Revolution. He saw it as a libertine, anti-Christian movement, given to the corruption of women, the cultivation of sensual pleasures, and the violation of property rights. Its members had plans for making a tea that caused abortion — a secret substance that “blinds or kills when spurted in the face,” and a device that sounds like a stench bomb — a “method for filling a bedchamber with pestilential vapours.”

These notions were quick to make themselves felt in America. In May 1798, a minister of the Massachusetts Congregational establishment in Boston, Jedidiah Morse, delivered a timely sermon to the young country, which was then sharply divided between Jeffersonians and Federalists, Francophiles and Anglomen. Having read Robison, Morse was convinced of a Jacobinical plot touched off by Illuminism, and that the country should be rallied to defend itself. His warnings were heeded throughout New England wherever Federalists brooded about the rising tide of religious infidelity or Jeffersonian democracy. Timothy Dwight, the president of Yale, followed Morse’s sermon with a Fourth-of-July discourse on The Duty of Americans in the Present Crisis, in which he held forth against the Antichrist in his own glowing rhetoric. Soon the pulpits of New England were ringing with denunciations of the Illuminati, as though the country were swarming with them.

The anti-Masonic movement of the late 1820s and the 1830s took up and extended the obsession with conspiracy. At first, this movement may seem to be no more than an extension or repetition of the anti-Masonic theme sounded in the outcry against the Bavarian Illuminati. But whereas the panic of the 1790s was confined mainly to New England and linked to an ultraconservative point of view, the later anti-Masonic movement affected many parts of the northern United States, and was intimately linked with popular democracy and rural egalitarianism. Although anti-Masonry happened to be anti-Jacksonian (Jackson was a Mason), it manifested the same animus against the closure of opportunity for the common man and against aristocratic institutions that one finds in the Jacksonian crusade against the Bank of the United States.

The anti-Masonic movement was a product not merely of natural enthusiasm but also of the vicissitudes of party politics. It was joined and used by a great many men who did not fully share its original anti-Masonic feelings. It attracted the support of several reputable statement who had only mild sympathy with its fundamental bias, but who as politicians could not afford to ignore it. Still, it was a folk movement of considerable power, and the rural enthusiasts who provided its real impetus believed in it wholeheartedly.

As a secret society, Masonry was considered to be a standing conspiracy against republican government. It was held to be particularly liable to treason—for example, Aaron Burr’s famous conspiracy was alleged to have been conducted by Masons. Masonry was accused of constituting a separate system of loyalty, a separate imperium within the framework of federal and state governments, which was inconsistent with loyalty to them. Quite plausibly it was argued that the Masons had set up a jurisdiction of their own, with their own obligations and punishments, liable to enforcement even by the penalty of death. So basic was the conflict felt to be between secrecy and democracy that other, more innocent societies such as Phi Beta Kappa came under attack.

Since Masons were pledged to come to each other’s aid under circumstances of distress, and to extend fraternal indulgence at all times, is was held that the order nullified the enforcement of regular law. Masonic constables, sheriffs, juries, and judges must all be in league with Masonic criminals and fugitives. The press was believed to have been so “muzzled” by Masonic editors and proprietors that news of Masonic malfeasance could be suppressed. At a moment when almost every alleged citadel of privilege in America was under democratic assault, Masonry was attacked as a fraternity of the privileged, closing business opportunities and nearly monopolizing political offices.

Certain elements of truth and reality there may have been in these views of Masonry. What must be emphasized here, however, is the apocalyptic and absolutistic framework in which this hostility was commonly expressed. Anti-Masons were not content simply to say that secret societies were rather a bad idea. The author of the standard exposition of anti-Masonry declared that Freemasonry was “not only the most abominable but also the most dangerous institution that ever was imposed on man. … It may truly be said to be HELL’S MASTER PIECE.”

The Jesuit Threat

Fear of a Masonic plot had hardly been quieted when the rumors arose of a Catholic plot against American values. One meets here again the same frame of mind, but a different villain. The anti-Catholic movement converged with a growing nativism, and while they were not identical, together they cut such a wide swath in American life that they were bound to embrace many moderates to whom the paranoid style, in its full glory, did not appeal. Moreover, we need not dismiss out of hand as totally parochial or mean-spirited the desire of Yankee Americans to maintain an ethnically and religiously homogeneous society nor the particular Protestant commitments to individualism and freedom that were brought into play. But the movement had a large paranoid infusion, and the most influential anti-Catholic militants certainly had a strong affinity for the paranoid style.

Two books which appeared in 1835 described the new danger to the American way of life and may be taken as expressions of the anti-Catholic mentality. One, Foreign Conspiracies against the Liberties of the United States, was from the hand of the celebrated painter and inventor of the telegraph, S.F.B. Morse. “A conspiracy exists,” Morse proclaimed , and “its plans are already in operation…we are attacked in a vulnerable quarter which cannot be defended by our ships, our forts, or our armies.” The main source of the conspiracy Morse found in Metternich’s government: “Austria is now acting in this country. She has devised a grand scheme. She has organized a great plan for doing something here. … She has her Jesuit missionaries traveling through the land; she has supplied them with money, and has furnished a fountain for a regular supply.” Were the plot successful, Morse said, some scion of the House of Hapsburg would soon be installed as Emperor of the United States.

“It is an ascertained fact,” wrote another Protestant militant,

that Jesuits are prowling about all parts of the United States in every possible disguise, expressly to ascertain the advantageous situations and modes to disseminate Popery. A minister of the Gospel from Ohio has informed us that he discovered one carrying on his devices in his congregation; and he says that the western country swarms with them under the name of puppet show men, dancing masters, music teachers, peddlers of images and ornaments, barrel organ players, and similar practitioners.

Lyman Beecher, the elder of a famous family and the father of Harriet Beecher Stowe, wrote in the same year his Plea for the West, in which he considered the possibility that the Christian millennium might come in the American states. Everything depended, in his judgment, upon what influences dominated the great West, where the future of the country lay. There Protestantism was engaged in a life-or-death struggle with Catholicism. “Whatever we do, it must be done quickly.…” A great tide of immigration, hostile to free institutions, was sweeping in upon the country, subsidized and sent by “the potentates of Europe,” multiplying tumult and violence, filling jails, crowding poorhouses, quadrupling taxation, and sending increasing thousands of voters to “lay their inexperienced hand upon the helm of our power.”

The Paranoid Style in Action

The John Birch Society is attempting to suppress a television series about the United Nations by means of a mass letter-writing campaign to the sponsor,…The Xerox Corporation. The corporation, however, intends to go ahead with the programs.…

The July issue of the John Birch Society Bulletin…said an “avalanche of mail ought to convince them of the unwisdom of their proposed action—just as United Air Lines was persuaded to back down and take the U.N. insignia off their planes.” (A United Air Lines spokesman confirmed that the U.N. emblem was removed from its planes, following “considerable public reaction against it.”)

Birch official John Rousselot said, ”We hate to see a corporation of this country promote the U.N. when we know that it is an instrument of the Soviet Communist conspiracy.”

— San Francisco Chronicle, July 31, 1964

Anti-Catholicism has always been the pornography of the Puritan. Whereas the anti-Masons had envisaged drinking bouts and had entertained themselves with sado-masochistic fantasies about the actual enforcement of grisly Masonic oaths,1 the anti-Catholics invented an immense lore about libertine priests, the confessional as an opportunity for seduction, licentious convents and monasteries. Probably the most widely read contemporary book in the United States before Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a work supposedly written by one Maria Monk, entitled Awful Disclosures, which appeared in 1836. The author, who purported to have escaped from the Hotel Dieu nunnery in Montreal after five years there as novice and nun, reported her convent life in elaborate and circumstantial detail. She reported having been told by the Mother Superior that she must “obey the priests in all things”; to her “utter astonishment and horror,” she soon found what the nature of such obedience was. Infants born of convent liaisons were baptized and then killed, she said, so that they might ascend at once to heaven. Her book, hotly attacked and defended, continued to be read and believed even after her mother gave testimony that Maria had been somewhat addled ever since childhood after she had rammed a pencil into her head. Maria died in prison in 1849, after having been arrested in a brothel as a pickpocket.

Anti-Catholicism, like anti-Masonry, mixed its fortunes with American party politics, and it became an enduring factor in American politics. The American Protective Association of the 1890s revived it with ideological variations more suitable to the times — the depression of 1893, for example, was alleged to be an international creation of the Catholics who began it by starting a run on the banks. Some spokesmen of the movement circulated a bogus encyclical attributed to Leo XIII instructing American Catholics on a certain date in 1893 to exterminate all heretics, and a great many anti-Catholics daily expected a nationwide uprising. The myth of an impending Catholic war of mutilation and extermination of heretics persisted into the twentieth century.

Why They Feel Dispossessed

If, after our historically discontinuous examples of the paranoid style, we now take the long jump to the contemporary right wing, we find some rather important differences from the nineteenth-century movements. The spokesmen of those earlier movements felt that they stood for causes and personal types that were still in possession of their country — that they were fending off threats to a still established way of life. But the modern right wing, as Daniel Bell has put it, feels dispossessed: America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialistic and communistic schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners as of old but major statesmen who are at the very centers of American power. Their predecessors had discovered conspiracies; the modern radical right finds conspiracy to be betrayal from on high.

Important changes may also be traced to the effects of the mass media. The villains of the modern right are much more vivid than those of their paranoid predecessors, much better known to the public; the literature of the paranoid style is by the same token richer and more circumstantial in personal description and personal invective. For the vaguely delineated villains of the anti-Masons, for the obscure and disguised Jesuit agents, the little-known papal delegates of the anti-Catholics, for the shadowy international bankers of the monetary conspiracies, we may now substitute eminent public figures like Presidents Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower, secretaries of State like Marshall, Acheson, and Dulles, Justices of the Supreme Court like Frankfurter and Warren, and the whole battery of lesser but still famous and vivid alleged conspirators headed by Alger Hiss.

Events since 1939 have given the contemporary right-wing paranoid a vast theatre for his imagination, full of rich and proliferating detail, replete with realistic cues and undeniable proofs of the validity of his suspicions. The theatre of action is now the entire world, and he can draw not only on the events of World War II, but also on those of the Korean War and the Cold War. Any historian of warfare knows it is in good part a comedy of errors and a museum of incompetence; but if for every error and every act of incompetence one can substitute an act of treason, many points of fascinating interpretation are open to the paranoid imagination. In the end, the real mystery, for one who reads the primary works of paranoid scholarship, is not how the United States has been brought to its present dangerous position but how it has managed to survive at all.

The basic elements of contemporary right-wing thought can be reduced to three: First, there has been the now-familiar sustained conspiracy, running over more than a generation, and reaching its climax in Roosevelt’s New Deal, to undermine free capitalism, to bring the economy under the direction of the federal government, and to pave the way for socialism or communism. A great many right-wingers would agree with Frank Chodorov, the author of The Income Tax: The Root of All Evil, that this campaign began with the passage of the income-tax amendment to the Constitution in 1913.

The second contention is that top government officialdom has been so infiltrated by Communists that American policy, at least since the days leading up to Pearl Harbor, has been dominated by men who were shrewdly and consistently selling out American national interests.

Finally, the country is infused with a network of Communist agents, just as in the old days it was infiltrated by Jesuit agents, so that the whole apparatus of education, religion, the press, and the mass media is engaged in a common effort to paralyze the resistance of loyal Americans.

Perhaps the most representative document of the McCarthyist phase was a long indictment of Secretary of State George C. Marshall, delivered in 1951 in the Senate by senator McCarthy, and later published in a somewhat different form. McCarthy pictured Marshall was the focal figure in a betrayal of American interests stretching in time from the strategic plans for World War II to the formulation of the Marshall Plan. Marshal was associated with practically every American failure or defeat, McCarthy insisted, and none of this was either accident or incompetence. There was a “baffling pattern” of Marshall’s interventions in the war, which always conduced to the well-being of the Kremlin. The sharp decline in America’s relative strength from 1945 to 1951 did not “just happen”; it was “brought about, step by step, by will and intention,” the consequence not of mistakes but of a treasonous conspiracy, “a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man.”

Today, the mantle of McCarthy has fallen on a retired candy manufacturer, Robert H. Welch, Jr., who is less strategically placed and has a much smaller but better organized following than the Senator. A few years ago Welch proclaimed that “Communist influences are now in almost complete control of our government” — note the care and scrupulousness of that “almost.” He has offered a full scale interpretation of our recent history n which Communists figure at every turn: They started a run on American banks in 1933 that forced their closure; they contrived the recognition of the Soviet Union by the United States in the same year, just in time to save the Soviets from economic collapse; they have stirred up the fuss over segregation in the South; they have taken over the Supreme Court and made it “one of the most important agencies of Communism.”

Close attention to history wins for Mr. Welch an insight into affairs that is given to few of us. “For many reasons and after a lot of study,” he wrote some years ago, “I personally believe [John Foster] Dulles to be a Communist agent.” The job of Professor Arthur F. Burns as head of Eisenhower’s Council of Economic Advisors was “merely a cover-up for Burns’s liaison work between Eisenhower and some of his Communist bosses.” Eisenhower’s brother Milton was “actually [his] superior and boss within the Communist party.” As for Eisenhower himself, Welch characterized him, in words that have made the candy manufacturer famous, as “a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy” — a conclusion, he added, “based on an accumulation of detailed evidence so extensive and so palpable that it seems to put this conviction beyond any reasonable doubt.”

Emulating the Enemy

The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. Like religious millenialists he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to set a date fort the apocalypse. (“Time is running out,” said Welch in 1951. “Evidence is piling up on many sides and from many sources that October 1952 is the fatal month when Stalin will attack.”)

As a member of the avant-garde who is capable of perceiving the conspiracy before it is fully obvious to an as yet unaroused public, the paranoid is a militant leader. He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated—if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention. This demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s sense of frustration. Even partial success leaves him with the same feeling of powerlessness with which he began, and this in turn only strengthens his awareness of the vast and terrifying quality of the enemy he opposes.

The enemy is clearly delineated: he is a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman — sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving. Unlike the rest of us, the enemy is not caught in the toils of the vast mechanism of history, himself a victim of his past, his desires, his limitations. He wills, indeed he manufactures, the mechanism of history, or tries to deflect the normal course of history in an evil way. He makes crises, starts runs on banks, causes depressions, manufactures disasters, and then enjoys and profits from the misery he has produced. The paranoid’s interpretation of history is distinctly personal: decisive events are not taken as part of the stream of history, but as the consequences of someone’s will. Very often the enemy is held to possess some especially effective source of power: he controls the press; he has unlimited funds; he has a new secret for influencing the mind (brainwashing); he has a special technique for seduction (the Catholic confessional).

It is hard to resist the conclusion that this enemy is on many counts the projection of the self; both the ideal and the unacceptable aspects of the self are attributed to him. The enemy may be the cosmopolitan intellectual, but the paranoid will outdo him in the apparatus of scholarship, even of pedantry. Secret organizations set up to combat secret organizations give the same flattery. The Ku Klux Klan imitated Catholicism to the point of donning priestly vestments, developing an elaborate ritual and an equally elaborate hierarchy. The John Birch Society emulates Communist cells and quasi-secret operation through “front” groups, and preaches a ruthless prosecution of the ideological war along lines very similar to those it finds in the Communist enemy.2 Spokesmen of the various fundamentalist anti-Communist “crusades” openly express their admiration for the dedication and discipline the Communist cause calls forth.

On the other hand, the sexual freedom often attributed to the enemy, his lack of moral inhibition, his possession of especially effective techniques for fulfilling his desires, give exponents of the paranoid style an opportunity to project and express unacknowledgeable aspects of their own psychological concerns. Catholics and Mormons — later, Negroes and Jews — have lent themselves to a preoccupation with illicit sex. Very often the fantasies of true believers reveal strong sadomasochistic outlets, vividly expressed, for example, in the delight of anti-Masons with the cruelty of Masonic punishments.

Renegades and Pedants

A special significance attaches to the figure of the renegade from the enemy cause. The anti-Masonic movement seemed at times to be the creation of ex-Masons; certainly the highest significance was attributed to their revelations, and every word they said was believed. Anti-Catholicism used the runaway nun and the apostate priest; the place of ex-Communists in the avant-garde anti-Communist movements of our time is well known. In some part, the special authority accorded the renegade derives from the obsession with secrecy so characteristics of such movements: the renegade is the man or woman who has been in the Arcanum, and brings forth with him or her the final verification of suspicions which might otherwise have been doubted by a skeptical world. But I think there is a deeper eschatological significance that attaches to the person of the renegade: in the spiritual wrestling match between good and evil which is the paranoid’s archetypal model of the world, the renegade is living proof that all the conversions are not made by the wrong side. He brings with him the promise of redemption and victory.

A final characteristic of the paranoid style is related to the quality of its pedantry. One of the impressive things about paranoid literature is the contrast between its fantasied conclusions and the almost touching concern with factuality it invariably shows. It produces heroic strivings for evidence to prove that the unbelievable is the only thing that can be believed. Of course, there are highbrow, lowbrow, and middlebrow paranoids, as there are likely to be in any political tendency. But respectable paranoid literature not only starts from certain moral commitments that can indeed be justified but also carefully and all but obsessively accumulates :evidence.” The difference between this “evidence” and that commonly employed by others is that it seems less a means of entering into normal political controversy than a means of warding off the profane intrusion of the secular political world. The paranoid seems to have little expectation of actually convincing a hostile world, but he can accumulate evidence in order to protect his cherished convictions from it.

Paranoid writing begins with certain broad defensible judgments. There was something to be said for the anti-Masons. After all, a secret society composed of influential men bound by special obligations could conceivable pose some kind of threat to the civil order in which they were suspended. There was also something to be said for the Protestant principles of individuality and freedom, as well as for the nativist desire to develop in North America a homogeneous civilization. Again, in our time an actual laxity in security allowed some Communists to find a place in governmental circles, and innumerable decisions of World War II and the Cold War could be faulted.

The higher paranoid scholarship is nothing if not coherent — in fact the paranoid mind is far more coherent than the real world. It is nothing if not scholarly in technique. McCarthy’s 96-page pamphlet, McCarthyism, contains no less than 313 footnote references, and Mr. Welch’s incredible assault on Eisenhower, The Politician, has one hundred pages of bibliography and notes. The entire right-wing movement of our time is a parade of experts, study groups, monographs, footnotes, and bibliographies. Sometimes the right-wing striving for scholarly depth and an inclusive world view has startling consequences: Mr. Welch, for example, has charged that the popularity of Arnold Toynbee’s historical work is the consequence of a plot on the part of Fabians, “Labour party bosses in England,” and various members of the Anglo-American “liberal establishment” to overshadow the much more truthful and illuminating work of Oswald Spengler.

The Double Sufferer

The paranoid style is not confined to our own country and time; it is an international phenomenon. Studying the millennial sects of Europe from the eleventh to the sixteenth century, Norman Cohn believed he found a persistent psychic complex that corresponds broadly with what I have been considering — a style made up of certain preoccupations and fantasies: “the megalomaniac view of oneself as the Elect, wholly good, abominably persecuted, yet assured of ultimate triumph; the attribution of gigantic and demonic powers to the adversary; the refusal to accept the ineluctable limitations and imperfections of human existence, such as transience, dissention, conflict, fallibility whether intellectual or moral; the obsession with inerrable prophecies … systematized misinterpretations, always gross and often grotesque.”

This glimpse across a long span of time emboldens me to make the conjecture — it is no more than that — that a mentality disposed to see the world in this way may be a persistent psychic phenomenon, more or less constantly affecting a modest minority of the population. But certain religious traditions, certain social structures and national inheritances, certain historical catastrophes or frustrations may be conducive to the release of such psychic energies, and to situations in which they can more readily be built into mass movements or political parties. In American experience ethnic and religious conflict have plainly been a major focus for militant and suspicious minds of this sort, but class conflicts also can mobilize such energies. Perhaps the central situation conducive to the diffusion of the paranoid tendency is a confrontation of opposed interests which are (or are felt to be) totally irreconcilable, and thus by nature not susceptible to the normal political processes of bargain and compromise. The situation becomes worse when the representatives of a particular social interest — perhaps because of the very unrealistic and unrealizable nature of its demands — are shut out of the political process. Having no access to political bargaining or the making of decisions, they find their original conception that the world of power is sinister and malicious fully confirmed. They see only the consequences of power — and this through distorting lenses — and have no chance to observe its actual machinery. A distinguished historian has said that one of the most valuable things about history is that it teaches us how things do not happen. It is precisely this kind of awareness that the paranoid fails to develop. He has a special resistance of his own, of course, to developing such awareness, but circumstances often deprive him of exposure to events that might enlighten him — and in any case he resists enlightenment.

We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well.



(1) Many anti-Masons had been fascinated by the penalties involved if Masons failed to live up to their obligations. My own favorite is the oath attributed to a royal archmason who invited “having my skull smote off and my brains exposed to the scorching rays of the sun.”

(2) In his recent book, How to Win an Election, Stephen C. Shadegg cites a statement attributed to Mao Tse-tung: “Give me just two or three men in a village and I will take the village.” Shadegg comments: “In the Goldwater campaigns of 1952 and 1958 and in all other campaigns where I have served as consultant I have followed the advice of Mao Tse-tung.” “I would suggest,” writes senator Goldwater in Why Not Victory? “that we analyze and copy the strategy of the enemy; theirs has worked and ours has not.


Richard Hofstadter is DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History at Columbia University. His latest book, “Anti-intellectualism in American Life,” was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction earlier this year. This essay is adapted from the Herbert Spencer Lecture delivered at Oxford University in November 1963.
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Bikers

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I hate “heartwarming” news stories. Except this one. It got linkrotted, so I am capturing the whole thing for reference. Teach your kids that when they need help, they should look for a goth, a punk, a grandma, a Sikh, or a biker.

Have a hankie ready. Or keep your shades on.

These leather-clad bikers will do whatever it takes to make abused kids feel safe

Karina Bland at The Republic | azcentral.com
Nytro (left) and Rock hang out with little Fast Track. They are member of Bikers Against Child Abuse.

The 11-year-old girl hears the rumble of their motorcycles, rich and deep, long before she sees them. She chews her bottom lip, nervous.

They are coming for her.

The bikers roar into sight, a pack of them, long-haired and tattooed, with heavy boots and leather vests, and some riding double. They circle the usually quiet Gilbert cul-de-sac, and the noise pulls neighbors from behind slatted wood blinds and glossy front doors.

One biker stops at the mouth of the street, parks in the middle of the road and stands guard next to his motorcycle, arms crossed.

The rest back up to the curb in front of the girl’s house, almost in formation, parking side by side. There are 14 motorcycles in all, mostly black and shiny chrome. The bikers rev their engines again before shutting them down.

The sudden silence is deafening. The girl’s mother takes her hand.

The leader of this motorcycle club is a 55-year-old man who has a salt-and-pepper Fu Manchu and wears his hair down past his shoulders. He eases off his 2000 Harley Road King and approaches the little girl.

He is formidable, and intimidating, and he knows it. So he bends low in front of the little girl and puts out his hand, tanned and weathered from the sun and wind: “Hi, I’m Pipes.”

“Nice to meet you,” she says softly, her small hand disappearing in his.

Pipes — the bikers all go by their road names for security — steps back and another biker comes forward, also bent low and hand out, smiling. She has a long blonde ponytail, and her name is Nytro. Next is D’Animal, his arms thick with muscles, a do-rag covering his head.

Rock, who is as solid as one, assures the little girl: “I’m really a nice guy.” She smiles. And then there’s Pumpkin and, whoa, the girl looks way up, squinting against the morning sun. “Hi, I’m Tree,” he says, and he’s as tall as one.

Sassy. Rembrandt. And then Harmony and Shiraz, and the child does a double take. Yes, there are two of them, twin biker chicks. Surely. Uno. Smiles. Tool. Mo Money. Bigg Dogg. Fat Daddy. Ghost Daddy. Father Time. And Trucker, who’s louder than all the others.

The girl chewing on her lip was abused by a relative, according to police reports — someone she should have been able to trust. He’s not in the state any longer, but the criminal case is progressing slowly, so he’s not in jail, either.

He still terrorizes her at night, even though he’s nowhere near. She wakes, heart pounding. The nightmare feels real again. She never feels safe, even with her parents just downstairs.

The unruly-looking mob in her driveway is there to help her feel safe again. They are members of the Arizona chapter of Bikers Against Child Abuse International, and they wear their motto on their black leather vests and T-shirts: “No child deserves to live in fear.”

This one is very afraid.

A tough image

Even kids know that nobody messes with bikers. Bikers look big, and strong, and mean, both in real life and in how they are portrayed on television and in films. They are easy riders, sons of anarchy, not afraid of anything. And they take care of their own.

A child who has been abused by someone bigger and stronger knows too well what it feels like to be small and vulnerable. BACA shifts that balance by putting even bigger and stronger people — and more of them — on the child’s side.

And if those even-bigger and stronger people are scary-looking too, perhaps with flaming-skull tattoos, chains on their belts and scars of questionable origin, so much the better.

“The biker image is what makes this work,” says Rembrandt, 54, who is tall and wiry strong. “Golfers against child abuse does not have the same feel. The pink alligator shirt and golf shoes standing in the driveway doesn’t do the same thing.”

(No offense to golfers. Some bikers golf, too.)

What Rembrandt knows is that a biker’s power and intimidating image can even the playing field for a little kid who has been hurt. If the man who hurt this little girl calls or drives by, or even if she is just scared, another nightmare, the bikers will ride over and stand guard all night.

If she is afraid to go to school, they will take her and watch until she’s safely inside.

And if she has to testify against her abuser in court, they will go, too, walking with her to the witness stand and taking over the first row of seats. Pipes will tell her, “Look at us, not him.” And when she’s done, they will circle her again and walk her out.

“When we tell a child they don’t have to be afraid, they believe us,” Pipes says. “When we tell them we will be there for them, they believe us.”

Earlier in the day, when the bikers met in the parking lot of a nearby CVS pharmacy, Pipes reminded them to be mindful of their emotions. That means no hugging unless the child initiates it.

“Nytro,” Pipes says, raising his eyebrows in her direction. Nytro hides her face behind her hands, and everyone laughs. She’s quick to hug.

And then Pipes says, more sternly this time: There will be no crying.

“I don’t want to see any tears coming out of your eyes, and the child doesn’t either,” he says, making sure everyone is looking at him when he says it.

“Remember why we’re here: to empower the child. If you can’t handle it, keep your shades on.”

Part of the family

The little girl in the driveway needs to be able to believe. Her parents, the police and her therapist all tell her that she is safe. But it’s hard when someone you once trusted ended up hurting you.

After all the bikers introduce themselves, Pipes holds up a small vest covered in patches, just like the bikers’ but made of denim instead of leather. On one patch is the girl’s new road name: Rhythm, for a girl who dances and plays music.

“Rhythm,” she repeats, and smiles.

“This means now you’re part of our big, ugly family,” Pipes says as he helps her into the vest, first one arm and then the other.

“Speak for yourself — we’re not all ugly!” a voice calls out, and the bikers laugh.

Pipes bends low again and tells Rhythm, “If you’re afraid, you call us. Whenever you need us, we will be here.”

Rhythm nods, tears in her wide blue eyes.

He gives her a T-shirt just like the one the bikers wear. He unfolds a do-rag for her but then hesitates: “I don’t know if you want to wear it.”

“It’s cool,” Rhythm says, and turns around so Nytro can tie it on her head.

“Is that too tight?” Nytro asks. Rhythm shakes her head no and turns back around, grinning.

The girl turns suddenly, bolting from the group. She is gone, through the open garage door and into the house. Five minutes pass. And then a different Rhythm emerges, one who shed her lavender girly T-shirt, shorts and flip-flops in favor of her black BACA T-shirt, blue jeans and new biker vest.

The bikers cheer and clap.

Father T and other members of the Arizona chapter of Bikers Against Child Abuse International wear their motto on their black leather vests and T-shirts: “No child deserves to live in fear.” “It doesn’t mean you go out and get a tattoo,” Trucker teases. Rhythm assures him that she’s afraid of needles, and he gives her a few temporary tattoos with BACA’s logo on them.

There is one more rite to Rhythm’s welcome into the BACA family: She gets to go on a ride with the group, and she gets to choose her bike. Whoever owns the motorcycle she picks has the honor of taking her.

Rhythm walks along the row of bikes, looking them over, one by one. She decides on a black 2005 Yamaha Road Star Midnight Edition.

Tree lets out a whoop. She picked his.

Tree is a 43-year-old father of four, a truck driver training to be a certified motorcycle mechanic. He’s so big that Rhythm can’t get her arms around him, so she reaches up and grabs hold of the arm holes of his vest instead.

Few of the bikers wear helmets, as they are not mandated by law in Arizona, but they make the kids do so. Rhythm’s is fastened in place and then she and Tree are surrounded by another half-dozen bikes. The group roars out of the cul-de-sac together.

Rhythm shouts up at Tree: “This is so cool!”

Fifteen minutes later, they are back, and Rhythm slides off the bike, taking Rembrandt’s offered hand.

“It was fun!” she announces as Smiles pulls off her helmet, and then to Tree she says, “Sorry, I probably was squeezing you really hard.”

“Thanks for going on a ride with me,” Tree tells her. “That was really fun.”

“Can I ask you a question?” Rhythm asks him. Sure, Tree says.

“How tall are you?”

He’s 6 feet 10.

“Wow,” she says. “You’d be a great basketball player.”

Tree, a member of Bikers Against Child Abuse, is excited that a new child that the group is serving has chosen his motorcycle to ride during the group’s initiation process. In just the short time the bikers have been here, not even an hour yet, there has been a change in Rhythm.

She slowly moved into the half-moon of bikers, and they closed in around her. She’s answering questions about school, the chickens out back and what kind of music she likes.

And she’s laughing.

To her parents, it is like music. Her mother wipes her eyes with her fingertips; her dad takes pictures.

“Look how bright her face is,” says Rhythm’s therapist, who is there on the driveway, too. “It hasn’t been that bright in a long time.”

Two of the bikers will be Rhythm’s “primaries,” her main contacts in the group. Sassy, 34, a mother of six and a former paralegal, and Tool, 46, a co-owner of a payment-processing company, will be hers. They will be available to her 24 hours a day by cellphone.

“Now you realize you’re stuck with all of us,” Pipes says, and Rhythm nods, smiling.

Pipes tests to see whether Rhythm understood what he meant earlier when he told her that these people are her family now. He puts his hand on Uno’s shoulder and asks her, “Who’s this?”

“Uno, my big brother,” she answers.

“Who’s this?”

“Tool, my big brother.”

Pipes points: “Who’s that?”

“Harmony, my big sister.”

“Who are all of these people?” Pipes asks, holding his arms wide.

“My family,” Rhythm says firmly.

And then she hugs Pipes, burying her face in his vest: “Thank you for coming to see me.”

Sassy turns away so no one sees her tears.

And one after another, the bikers put their sunglasses back on.

Why they do it

The bikers are all volunteers, giving five, 10, 20 or more hours a week. There’s no reimbursement for gas or the time they take off work. They have to go through background checks and prove themselves to the group. But each has a reason for doing so.

Nytro is a 54-year-old mother of three, all grown now, and grandma to six. She and Rembrandt have been happily married for almost 30 years, and they run a residential and commercial painting business.

Her life was not always as sunny.

The mistreatment started at about 7, after her father left. She learned to hide in the closet to cry, because if her mom saw tears, she would hit her again. She spent years in a cycle that sent her from her mother to her grandparents and back, to social workers and foster homes and back again.

“There wasn’t anybody there for me,” Nytro says. “I know how it felt to tell people, ‘I don’t want to go back. Please don’t make me go back,’ and no one would listen to me.”

Finally, she ran away. She lived outside for a while, bathing in a lake and doing odd jobs for money to buy food. Pregnant at 17, living in a home for unwed mothers, she was asked to give up her baby for adoption.

“Hell no,” was her answer. “God gave him to me.” She promised her tiny son that she would be the best mother. At 38 now, he tells her that she made good on her promise.

Now Nytro does for children what no one did for her. If she tells a child she will be there, she’s there.

“I get to stand up for a child and say, ‘No one is going to hurt you anymore,’” Nytro says.

“If that means we die, dang it, we stand ready to be that obstacle.”

What therapists can’t do

There’s a knock at the front door, and 6-year-old Fast Track hides around the corner in the dining room.

“Who are you hiding from?” a voice floats in through the doorway, and Fast Track giggles, giving away his location.

Nytro throws her long blond ponytail over her shoulder and crouches down in the entry, arms open. Fast Track hugs her around her neck, where a black industrial filigree tattoo disappears down her shirt.

Nytro and the boy in her arms met in August for the first time with an initiation like Rhythm’s. Nytro and Rock, 47, a sculptor who works in stone — thus his road name — are his primaries.

“You’re our little brother, huh?” Nytro asks Fast Track. He nods vigorously: “I’m in the family!”

“I get to stand up for a child and say, ‘No one is going to hurt you anymore,’” Nytro says of being part of Bikers Against Child Abuse.

Fast Track’s father died when he was a baby. He told his uncle and grandparents that he was abused by his mom’s boyfriend. The little boy lives with his grandparents, who now are his legal guardians.

“He was scared, and he was scared for us because he was told that if he ever told anyone what happened, they would get hurt, too,” his grandmother said.

“We’d do anything to keep him safe, but he doesn’t know that,” his grandfather adds. He nods toward the bikers. “They make him feel safe, and they make him feel like we are safe.”

Fast Track’s grandfather says he learned more from Pipes and Sassy about such things as how to navigate the child-welfare system and how to file for a restraining order and guardianship than he had from the boy’s state child-welfare caseworker.

“Until we got involved with BACA, we just 100% felt lost and alone,” he says. “It’s just such a relief that there’s someone else on his side.”

Fast Track is not paying attention to what his grandparents are saying. He wants to hear Nytro whistle. She puts two fingers in her mouth and blows, sharp and loud.

“That’s really good,” Fast Track tells her. He tries it, but no noise comes out. Nytro repositions his fingers and reassures him that she couldn’t do it right until she was in eighth grade.

“I just kept practicing and practicing until I got really good,” she says, and then asks, “So how’s school going?”

Fast Track takes his fingers out of his mouth. “I took the day off,” he says. His grandmother says he is scared to go out on the playground at recess in case his abuser shows up there.

Nytro will have none of that: “If he needs us, we will go to school and be there at recess, so he can play. We will do whatever it takes.”

DeAnna Wahlheim is a licensed family therapist in Phoenix. Fast Track is the second child she has referred to BACA after hearing founder John Paul Lilly speak at a conference here a few years ago.

“There are things I can’t do as a therapist,” Wahlheim says. She can call Child Protective Services or the police, but there isn’t always enough evidence to put away an abuser. And although she can help young victims recover mentally, she can’t protect them physically.

“Just by connecting them with BACA, I know they have a support system in place that will be there forever,” she says.

“When kids are coming from a situation where they are terrorized, they need to have people say, ‘We have your back, we’re going to keep you safe,’” Wahlheim says.

She allowed Fast Track’s primary bikers and Pipes to be in her office in February while she had Fast Track participate in a therapeutic role-playing activity. The boy took a rubber sword to an inflatable punching bag, a stand-in for his abuser.

“You’re never going to hurt me no more,” Fast Track yelled.

“You’re never going to call me stupid again,” the boy said between strikes, his chest heaving. “You don’t scare me anymore.”

Pipes, a father of two, grandfather of three, admits that he teared up on his motorcycle on the way home from Wahlheim’s office: “Fast Track is finding his own strength now.”

Somebody has his back

Fast Track’s other primary, Rock, roars around the corner toward the little boy’s home.

“What’s going on, little brother?” Rock says, easing off his bike and bending low so he can hug the boy.

Despite Rock’s size — he’s 6 feet 2, bearded and bulky — kids aren’t afraid of him. In fact, his size is why Rock makes Fast Track feel so safe, his grandmother says.

“I think just that presence will help him understand that he has someone who has his back,” Rock says of Fast Track, a child who Bikers Against Child Abuse has pledged to help. Rock has two daughters, ages 12 and 18. He says he joined BACA three years ago because he wanted the camaraderie of riding in a group but with a positive purpose.

Rock calls Fast Track every week and has a special ringtone on his cellphone that alerts him when the boy calls him.

“I want him to know that we’re around. We’re always going to be around if he needs us. I think just that presence will help him understand that he has someone who has his back,” Rock says.

Fast Track stands on the top of Rock’s foot, holding on around his leg. He wants to show Rock pictures from his last go-kart race.

Rock went to watch Fast Track’s first race in January. When Fast Track spotted the biker, he ran to hug him.

But a chain-link fence separated the track from the parking lot. Rock crouched down and intertwined his thick fingers with Fast Track’s small ones through the metal links.

They pressed their foreheads together, Rock’s do-rag against Fast Track’s new helmet, and then Rock shooed the boy back to his go-kart.

As Fast Track pulled away from the starting line, he took one hand off the steering wheel to give Rock a thumbs-up.

“It was pretty cool,” the big biker of few words says, with a grin. “It was pretty cool.”

Group’s beginnings

Bikers Against Child Abuse is an international non-profit with an annual budget of $200,000 and more than 160 chapters in 36 states and five countries.

But it started with just one frightened 8-year-old boy in a therapist’s office in Utah.

John Paul Lilly is a licensed clinical social worker and play therapist and a professor at Brigham Young University. In 1995, he was working with that 8-year-old boy, who was so afraid that he wouldn’t leave his house, even though it was July and the other neighborhood kids were outside playing.

The boy would do well in therapy, but then his abusers would show up at his house at night, or leave a note on his bike, warning him that they were watching. The boy stayed terrified, and Lilly stayed frustrated.

Lilly knew how the boy felt. He also had been abused when he was young. When he was 8, living in a tough Los Angeles neighborhood, he was befriended by some bikers who gave him a road name: Chief.

“They became my family,” Lilly says. “I just never felt more secure than when I was with them.”

So it was instinctual, years later, for Lilly the therapist to turn to bikers he knew in the area for help with his small, scared patient.

“Bikers have a soft spot for kids,” says Lilly, 54, who has been riding since he was a teenager. “I couldn’t quote you a figure, but I know that a lot of bikers had been abused as kids.

“When they see a chance to step in and release some of their own demons, they have no problem standing up for a child. It was just such a natural fit.”

Twenty-seven motorcycles carrying about 40 bikers lined up for that first ride. By that afternoon, the boy was outside riding his bike, wearing a vest with a Harley-Davidson patch on it.

Members of the Bikers Against Child Abuse speak about their mission to church groups, social-service agencies, rotary clubs. And BACA bikers go to events like festivals and art walks, handing out brochures and answering questions.

In Utah over the past 16 years, bikers have helped about 1,200 children. BACA’s work has been cited in numerous academic and scholarly journals, including Play Therapy. Lilly does speaking gigs at child-welfare conferences across the country and is speaking at the International Play Therapy Conference in Cleveland this October. He even got an invitation to the White House in 2005 from first lady Laura Bush as part of the “Helping America’s Youth” initiative. (The first lady allowed him to wear his biker vest, T-shirt, Levi’s and boots instead of a suit and tie.)

Here in Arizona, Pipes started the Maricopa County chapter of BACA in 2006 and received an official charter in 2007. The Pima County chapter got its start in 2010. Together, about 30 members juggle about 25 active cases, with about 100 children on their rolls.

The bikers must be tough, not only to protect the kids but to be able to stomach knowing what their young charges may have been through. An 8-year-old beaten by Mom; a 6-year-old molested by his mother’s boyfriend. A girl, 10, raped. They are trained by a licensed mental-health professional affiliated with the chapter. Each biker must be fingerprinted and undergo a thorough criminal-background check, the same one required for state child-welfare workers and law-enforcement officers, before they can join the group.

They are bikers, not Boy Scouts, so if the background check turns up an arrest or a stint behind bars, they can still be in the group. The crime just can’t involve children, domestic violence or something comparable. They visit children only with permission and only in pairs, so no one is ever alone with a child.

Lilly says BACA has been watched closely for a long time, both by law enforcement, who want to make sure they stay on the right side of the law, and by motorcycle clubs, who want to make sure they don’t become extensions of the police in biker circles.

Indeed, BACA members walk in two worlds. They all have jobs — in this group are an architect, a social worker, a college student, a law-enforcement officer, a paralegal, mechanics, business owners, parents and grandparents. They go only by their road names in their BACA lives; if you were to ask one what another’s actual name is, he or she likely wouldn’t have any idea. Road names are part of biker culture, but they serve a different purpose here: By never using a biker’s or child’s given name, it is less likely that an abuser could attack a biker in retribution or follow a biker to find a victim who has moved. (The Republic and azcentral.com have chosen to abide by the BACA rule.)

“We don’t hide our intentions. We’re straight up out there. We’re very clear that if you come against this child, and you get hurt in that process, that’s your problem,” Lilly says.

Because BACA’s members go by their road names and operate across the world, it is impossible to know whether there have been any physical confrontations between them and abusers, or any mishaps on motorcycles, though Lilly says there haven’t been.

“We don’t hunt anybody down. We’re just who we are. We don’t become somebody else.”

But anyone who wants to get to one of their kids has to get through them first.

Called into action

Rembrandt’s phone rang at 3:15p.m. on a Saturday. He was on his way home from his grandson’s karate tournament, about 5miles from his Mesa home.

It was Sassy. A BACA kid was in trouble.

Her road name is Music, and she’s 10. She belonged to a BACA chapter in another state but is now living in Arizona with her grandmother. That makes her Sassy’s and Rembrandt’s kid now.

Her abuser is in jail, but his family members had tracked the girl down in Arizona and were banging on the grandmother’s front door, demanding that she turn the girl over to them, shouting up at the second-floor window where the child was huddled in her bedroom. Her grandmother called BACA and then dialed 911.

The bikers know the drill well. Rembrandt called those who live closest to him — Rock, Uno and Fat Daddy. He stopped to change out of his grandpa clothes — shorts, T-shirt and sandals — and put on his biker garb — jeans, boots, leather vest, holster and handgun.

The bikers carry weapons on stakeouts only when there is a threat against a child and they feel that as citizens they also could be threatened. Otherwise, Rembrandt says, they do not wear weapons around children. He says most of the bikers are licensed to carry concealed weapons.

Rembrandt stuffed water bottles into his saddle bags and jumped on his 2000 purple-and-orange Indian Chief.

By 3:40 p.m., the four men were on their way to Music, the rumble of their bikes announcing their arrival. Music’s grandmother rushed outside when she heard them, hugging Rembrandt and giving him a piece of notebook paper with a description of the people and their license-plate number.

Sheriff’s deputies had been there, she said, and had escorted the people out of the neighborhood. But it is a public street, and law-enforcement officers just don’t have the manpower to stay for long. She feared that once the deputies left, the people would be back.

She was right. But when they did return later that evening, they saw something different: four big bikers, all wearing shades even in the dimming light, their motorcycles backed into the mouth of the driveway.

Rock had something resembling a cannon strapped to his leg; Rembrandt wore his gun on his hip.

To someone trying to mess with a little girl, a group of large, strong bikers sends a certain message, Rembrandt says. “It just has a different feel than a cop,” he says. More unpredictable, maybe.

“Cops are actually handcuffed by specific rules and laws that we are not. A cop has to work within a framework,” Rembrandt says. “You can flip off a cop. You don’t want to flip off Rock.” Just knowing that a biker doesn’t have to follow rules or honor boundaries can intimidate a person trying to make trouble.

That night, Music’s grandmother pitched a small tent in her granddaughter’s bedroom, right under the window, so the little girl could look out the window whenever she wanted to see the bikers at the end of the driveway.

Bikers guarded the house in shifts for the next 2½ days. Some rode two hours from Tucson, kept watch for eight hours and then rode home again.

They talked in low voices, and once Music was asleep, the red embers of their cigarettes glowed in the dark.

Rembrandt got involved with BACA four years ago, dragged into it, really, by his wife, Nytro.

“She’s the kid lover. I’m not a real kumbaya kind of guy. It’s just not in my personality,” Rembrandt says.

Members of the Bikers Against Child Abuse ride up to Payson. But Nytro wanted to get involved, and Rembrandt was her ride. If he was going to be around, he had to undergo a background check anyway — “I still had no intention of joining” — but then he went on a ride to bring a child into the group.

He watched a scared little girl transform before his eyes. She came out from behind her mother, raised her eyes to look at the bikers and, eventually, gave a smile.

“That’s it. I was done,” he says. “You can’t experience that and not get involved.” Yeah, yeah, he knows. It’s a little kumbaya. He’s now vice president of the local chapter and is the primary for two children in addition to Music.

The next day, the family members who were after Music came back again, but in a different car. They looked but didn’t stop.

“Overall, it was fairly uneventful,” Rembrandt says. “The people were all full of muster when it was a grandmother and a child. They changed their minds when they saw us there.”

“I would have loved to have been able to introduce ourselves,” he adds in mock disappointment.

The bikers aren’t looking for trouble. They are there so the kids don’t feel so alone, or so powerless. Pipes recalls going to court with an 8-year-old boy, and how tiny he looked on the witness stand, his feet dangling a foot off the floor.

“It’s scary enough for an adult to go to court,” he says. “We’re not going to let one of our little wounded kids go alone.”

In court that day, the judge asked the boy, “Are you afraid?” No, the boy said.

Pipes says the judge seemed surprised, and asked, “Why not?”

The boy glanced at Pipes and the other bikers sitting in the front row, two more standing on each side of the courtroom door, and told the judge, “Because my friends are scarier than he is.”

Funding their mission

Although the biker image is good for intimidating the kind of people who hurt kids, it can be off-putting for potential donors.

The group is a 501(c)(3) non-profit and relies on donations and grants — including one for $5,000 from The Arizona Republic and 12 News’ Season for Sharing campaign — for its annual budget, which ranges from about $5,000 to $12,000 a year, depending on the kids’ needs.

Since each biker pays for his or her own gas, maintenance and food or drink, and since there is no rented office space or cubicles or receptionist, one might think that money would go a long way. The expenses they do have, however, add up quickly: $2.75 to $5.50 for T-shirts they give the kids, $20 each for BACA blankets, $4 for a do-rag printed with BACA’s logo. To cover a child’s denim vest with patches that cost $6.50 to $12 each can easily total $50.

And there are bigger expenses, too. The bikers also pay for different things that help kids heal, such as therapy, karate lessons, horse-riding camp and punching bags.

Each member of Bikers Against Child Abuse pays for his or her own gas, maintenance and food or drink, but expenses for the organization, such as the children’s T-shirts, do-rags, blankets and jacket patches add up. And there are bigger expenses, too. The bikers also pay for different things that help kids heal, such as therapy, karate lessons, horse-riding camp and punching bags. Sometimes they end up spending their own money, like the time five of them each kicked in $100 to take a teenage girl who had been sexually abused to get some new clothes and to have her hair and nails done.

So Pipes speaks to anyone who will listen — church groups, social-service agencies, rotary clubs. And BACA bikers go to events like festivals and art walks, handing out brochures and answering questions.

At a recent Saturday morning meeting of the men’s club at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church in Mesa, a dozen bikers sat in the metal folding chairs scattered among the tables set with paper place mats.

At the microphone, Pipes begins, “I know you were all hoping for a good-looking speaker, but I’m afraid you got me,” and gets a laugh.

He explains what BACA does and how children are referred to them by child-welfare agencies, therapists and police. He explains, “Our mission is very narrowly focused; we empower children not to be afraid of the world in which they live.

“... We don’t apologize for being bikers. We are bikers first,” Pipes says, though they are not affiliated with any motorcycle clubs. “We ride a lot of the same streets they ride, but we have a different path.”

The kids become part of their biker family, and Pipes explains: “When you’re a part of our family, we don’t run, and we don’t hide.”

It’s tough talk. But then Pipes’ words shift to talk about the kids, and even a tough, aging biker can’t hide how he feels.

“To see the life that was beaten out of them return is amazing. To see that transformation, to give them a chance at a normal childhood again ...” he pauses, swallows hard, and then says, “It’s why we do this.”

There is silence, and then applause.

“This is wonderful, just wonderful,” says Rita Belle, pulling her checkbook out of her purse. Ed Tynan has his checkbook out, too: “I never in a million years would have guessed you guys existed.”

Another man grasps Pipes’ arm with one hand and hands him a $20 bill with the other and says simply, “God bless you.”

That’s the kind of reaction the bikers garner, for the most part.

Michelle Morley, a judge in the 5th Judicial Circuit in Sumter County, Florida, has been involved in four cases with BACA in four years.

“You see kids who are so withdrawn and depressed and no sense of self-esteem, and then BACA gets involved, and they come back to life,” Morley says.

“You have to think that every time they hear motorcycles, they think of their friends in BACA, even if it isn’t them. They must think, ‘I have these guys and gals looking out for me.’”

She tells of a case in a neighboring county where prosecutors were worried that the 8-year-old victim would be too afraid to testify against her abuser.

But on the stand, the girl, nicknamed “Cheetah” by the bikers, sat on the lap of a BACA member, a woman whose road name is Lamb Chop, pointed at that man charged with molesting her, and said, “That’s him.”

In one case, the defense attorney did protest that the child victim likely would not have testified without the bikers there, Morley says, and that probably was true. Often children are too young or too afraid to testify and without other witnesses, cases can be dismissed.

By the way, Morley adds, the defendant was convicted in that case.

Last month, Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery met with Pipes and Sassy and was impressed with their work. He says he plans to look for opportunities to use the group to help young victims.

One of his attorneys, Michelle Arino, successfully prosecuted a child-abuse case in 2009, in which the bikers escorted the 5-year-old victim, Sporty, and his 9-year-old brother, Skater Boy, to court twice.

“(Sporty) was a different kid when the bikers were around,” Arino says. “He was much more happy, he was much more confident.”

Sporty testified holding a stuffed bear wearing a tiny BACA shirt, a handful of bikers sitting where he could see them.

“They were there so he could have his voice heard,” Arino says, “and he did.”

Earning the patch

Every year on the third Saturday of May, bikers in BACA chapters everywhere hold 100-mile awareness rides. In Arizona, each member had to raise at least $100 in pledges or wear a dress on the ride.

Which explains why this year, Dom wore a sundress with spaghetti straps for the ride from Mesa to Payson, his black chest hair curling over the low-cut neckline, the bright yellow fabric bringing out the flames in his tattoo.

(His friends told him their checks were in the mail.)

At the campground, Pipes gathered the bikers in a circle under the pine trees. There are two levels of BACA members — support members and patched members. Being a support member comes first, and you work your way to becoming a patched member by attending monthly meetings, going on child rides, attending court hearings and participating in other BACA events for at least a year. The chapter’s board of directors must unanimously agree that a support member is worthy of moving up.

Members of Bikers Against Child Abuse work their way to becoming a patched member by attending monthly meetings, going on child rides, attending court hearings and participating in other BACA events for at least a year. The chapter’s board of directors must unanimously agree that a support member is worthy of moving up. And when a biker makes the grade — which takes an average of 18 months in Arizona — he or she earns the ultimate patch, the one with a BACA logo large enough to cover the back of their vest from shoulder blade to shoulder blade.

Today, three members are receiving patches. Pipes starts with D’Animal.

“This brother has proven himself. We call him. He’s there. He’s ridden in some real crappy stuff — cold, rain, hail — to get to a child,” he says.

Tree, the biker who Rhythm thought would make a good basketball player, had been a patched member in Utah. He moved here in March and already has proven himself a valuable member, turning up for every ride and stakeout.

“You deserve it, brother,” Rembrandt calls out.

Then Pipes calls for Tool, who clearly is surprised — and touched. He presses his thumb and forefinger to his eyes.

“This man has given us a lot,” Pipes says, clapping him on the shoulder.

“I’m proud to have you guys as brothers,” Pipes says, shaking each of their hands. “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.”

Nytro calls out, “I have a needle and thread for each of you!”

Actually, someone has brought a sewing machine, and with an extension cord stretched to an outlet in the restroom, D’Animal spends the next three hours attaching the new patches.

Staying through the dark hours

The first time the bikers went to meet Rhythm, Sassy unfurled a thick black blanket with the group’s logo on it, a clenched fist with the initials “B.A.C.A.” tattooed on the fingers, and a skull and crossbones.

Rhythm thought it was cool. But before they gave it to her, Pipes explained, they had to fill it with love. He rolled the blanket into a ball and squeezed it, and then passed it to Nytro, who hugged it tight, her eyes closed.

As the blanket passed from biker to biker, and Rhythm watched it go, Pipes told her: “When you think this blanket is out of love, you call us, and we will come and fill it back up.”

Two weeks later, a call from the girl’s therapist brings them back, not because the blanket is empty, but because Rhythm still is having nightmares.

Sassy and the girl text every day, back and forth. Rhythm carries a coin with the BACA logo on it with her always, turning it in her palm, running her fingers along its edges. But when she sleeps, her mind is vulnerable to the memories of what happened. She is torn out of her slumber, terrified and calling out for her parents.

The bikers are all volunteers, giving five, 10, 20 or more hours a week. There’s no reimbursement for gas or the time they take off work. They have to go through background checks and prove themselves to the group. But each has a reason for doing so. “We can tell her she is safe and fine,” her mother says, but then her voice trails off. Because Rhythm knows that’s not always true.

So Rembrandt and Tool pull up to the little girl’s house at 8 p.m., park their motorcycles in the driveway and knock on the door. Sometimes a stakeout is to calm fear and build trust.

“I told her that we were going to stay there for the night, so she would know that there was no way anyone was going to get past us to hurt her,” Rembrandt says.

Rhythm came outside a few times to make sure the men were all right, or maybe to check that they were still there. Before she went to bed, she brought out an ice-cream sandwich for Rembrandt, a popsicle for Tool and a big bowl of popcorn for them to share.

The men talked low in the dark until 2a.m., when the sound of more motorcycles rattled the quiet street. Mo Money and Bigg Dogg pulled up, ready to take the next shift.

When Rhythm woke up, she looked out the window and called to her mother, “Mom, they’re still here!”

“The whole backbone of what BACA does is showing up,” Rembrandt says. “We show up when we say we are going to show up, and we do what we say we are going to do.

“We said we were going to stay, and we stayed.”

Just before 8 a.m., the sun up and already hot, the front door opens and Rhythm carries two glasses of orange juice out to Mo Money and Bigg Dogg, where they sit on the front porch in the shade.

Smiling, she tells them she slept, the entire night, with not one nightmare, nestled under the blanket the bikers filled with love.

A few days later, the nightmares will return.

The bikers will as well.

About Bikers Against Child Abuse

Mission statement:

BACA exists with the intent to create a safer environment for abused children. We exist as a body of bikers to empower children to not feel afraid of the world in which they live. We stand ready to lend support to our wounded friends by involving them with an established, united organization.

We work in conjunction with local and state officials who are already in place to protect children. We desire to send a clear message to all involved with the abused child that this child is part of our organization and that we are prepared to lend our physical and emotional support to them by affiliation and our physical presence.

We stand at the ready to shield these children from further abuse. We do not condone the use of violence or physical force in any manner, however, if circumstances arise such that we are the only obstacle preventing a child from further abuse, we stand ready to be that obstacle.

About this story

Reporter Karina Bland spent several months with members of Bikers Against Child Abuse (BACA) as they rode their motorcycles to work with the children under their care and to raise awareness of their non-profit organization.

Because the children involved are victims of abuse, The Republic is not identifying them or their families.

BACA policy is that its members use only road names in their work with children, making it less likely that an abuser could trace one of them back to a child. (Recognizable photographs do not have the same potential to be traced, and therefore are not considered a concern.) If a biker were to be identified in the media by his or her legal name, he or she would no longer be allowed to serve as a child’s “primary” contact with the group.

While The Republic knows the full names and identities of the bikers, it is honoring the organization’s policy.

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