Tuesday, December 18, 2007

The First Rule About Campus Conservatives… (4:48 pm)

A lot of folks are having a laugh over this story, about Francisco Nava, a campus conservative, anti-condom activist at Princeton, who beat the crap out of himself in order to blame it on “thuggish,” pro-sex activists. (The New York Sun, Robbie George and—wait for it—David Horowitz all bought Nava’s pretty transparently dubious story hook, line and sinker.)

I wonder, however, if there isn’t a deeper, more profound and quite radical political logic at work in this incident, something along the lines of Slavoj Zizek’s reading of Ed Norton’s self-flagellation in Fight Club—that “in order to attack the enemy, you first have to beat the shit out of yourself.” Perhaps leftists can learn something from Nava, when it comes to committing ourselves to the point of physical sacrifices if that’s what it takes to realize our political ideals. Perhaps…nah, nevermind. This dope’s antics are just too frickin’ hilarious.

posted by Brian Cook

Reader Comments

Weird. But leftests are already familiar with the technique. It is reminiscent of the “anti-racists” (nuts) who hung nooses or put up racist notes to prove racial hatred.

http://xpress.sfsu.edu/archives/news/000424.html

Nuts are on all sides of the political spectrum.

posted by stephen on 12-19-07 at 10:13 AM

This young man obviously has psychiatric problems and needs help. We liberals sometimes get fooled by fake victims, too, so we shouldn’t gloat too much, tempting as it is. But for the far right, which has largely dominated American politics for the past 27 years, to see itself as oppressed is absurd, and mean-spiritedness, much less violence, are certainly far more commonly employed by the right than the left.

posted by AlexLawyer on 12-20-07 at 1:15 AM

I wonder if the guy was actually so stupid. Maybe he understood that the first news about him would get all the conservative press, but the confession would be buried. In other words, years from now some conservatives will still believe he was truly beat up, never having known about the confession. Sort of like Iraq WMDs, still to this day there are conservatives that believe Saddam was a threat to the US.