Barrett Brown in meltdown mode, Sept. 12, 2012
“Thinking himself a sort of one-man Woodward and Bernstein who would heroically expose the Hidden Secrets of the Surveillance State, Brown instead exposed himself as a blundering amateur who got himself in so far over his head that he couldn’t handle the catastrophic result.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, “The Kook Who Knew Too Much,” The American Spectator, June 27, 2013
Look, if you melt down on YouTube in a paranoid rage threatening to “destroy” an FBI agent and his family, you belong in jail.
Quod erat demonstrandum.
Some people have accused me of hating Barrett Brown, but that’s like saying I “hate” my 14-year-old when he gets a D on his report card.
No one could deny that Barrett is intelligent and humorous. However, neither can it be denied that Barrett was an arrogant punk, full of irrational resentments and overweening ambition, a narcissistic “famewhore” (thank you, Adrian Chen) who decided that being the public spokesman for an international criminal conspiracy would be his ticket to the wealth and glory he imagined himself to deserve.
Glory days: Barrett Brown interviewed by Michael Isikoff, 2011
So now, the Boy Genius once described by NBC’s Michael Isikoff as “an underground commander in a new kind of warfare” is sitting his ass in jail. Back in January, his lawyer waived Barrett’s right to a speedy trial, evidently with the idea that they could turn “Free Barrett Brown” into a lucrative fundraising franchise, portray the defendant as a First Amendment martyr and somehow score a political victory that would result in Barrett’s acquittal and vindication.
Can this legal equivalent of an Underpants Gnome scheme actually work? We can’t rule out that possibility, but in the meantime, Barrett has spent 14 months in jail — not actually in a federal facility, but in some sort of privately operated rent-a-jail.
There is a profound irony that the guy who spent a year and a half “investigating” the practices of government security contractors like HB Gary is now being held in a private jail run by government contractors. But profound irony isn’t something that Barrett has much opportunity to relish under the circumstances, and his lawyer provided Vice.com with a genuinely interesting article the erstwhile Boy Genius wrote about jail life and what inmates watch on TV:
There is little to be said about what the English-speaking inmates watch, with one exception. One particular program is viewed religiously not only in our 24-man tank, but also in the two others into which I can peer through windows connecting us across a hall. This particular show appears, oddly enough, on the Oxygen channel, which I seem to recall being Oprah Winfrey’s network for women. . . .
This program on the Oxygen network, though, being of the reality show genre, is called The Bad Girls Club. A flock of tacky twenty-something women are thrown together in a big fancy house in some American city where tacky twenty-something women can easily be assembled, like Miami or Atlanta. Episodes proceed more or less as follows: All of the women venture out together to a prominent local nightclub in a limo. The ride is punctuated by cheers to the effect that they are The Bad Girls. They get to the club, where they quite naturally sit in the VIP section and order bottle service. There follows a jump-cut montage of the girls drinking, dancing, and half-jokingly humping each other. Then a dispute invariably arises out of nothing. For this dispute to be resolved, there must first be performed a sort of ritualized catharsis. First, the woman who wrongly considers herself to be the offended party must address the other women as “y’all fake-ass bitches” on the limo ride home. Upon arrival, at least one or two women must flee crying into the house. Others must huddle together by the pool, smoking and airing their imaginary grievances. One will go back inside to get some more wine coolers and as she walks down the hall: BAM, SOME OTHER CHICK RUNS UP AND JUST FUCKING CLOCKS HER IN THE FACE AND THEN THEY GO DOWN SLAPPING THE SHIT OUT OF EACH OTHER! Until the security guards who are on hand for the purpose pull them apart. Thus the conflict is resolved. I’ve decided not to draw any wider conclusions from this.
Read the whole thing. It’s actually very good, and is the sort of observational cultural commentary that Barrett Brown is good at.
Too bad the arrogant punk couldn’t be content with that kind of work, and instead got himself into this miserable situation.
Well, at least his mom only got probation.
