Fighting The Darkness: Richard And Tracy Story Archives

An “incident” with a friend that turned out very differently than Richard and Tracy

As I sit here getting ready to routinely look over and update a post from 2010 about the blowup with Richard and Tracy, I’m thinking of a very similar “incident” that just happened between me and a male friend who will remain nameless.

We’ve been friends for about 5 and a half years now. He said something about me a couple of weeks ago in front of his significant other that made us both wonder what exactly his feelings and intentions were towards me. Caused some issues with his SO. Considering that he and I had been friends before she came along, while I’d been married the whole time, it was reasonable to wonder if he had some feelings he’d never expressed.

Turned out it was just the friend trying to express how dear a friend I am, running his mouth a bit much and making a faux pas, a gaffe. Just like I did with Richard.

There’s a huge difference, though: people’s reactions. People talked and it all got sorted out. I don’t know what the SO said to my friend, but I know she’s a good, sweet person, so I doubt she said anything unforgivable or that wasn’t understandable. I do know that nobody said nasty things to me or cussed at me or started dragging up all their baggage and false accusations they wanted to throw at me and blame me for. Nobody was being abusive.

And now we’re all friends again and things are back to normal.

Amazing how that works.

Confirmed: Richard lied about Executive Order

More than a year ago, I posted this about my years-long search to verify Richard’s story that Clinton ordered border guards to shoot migrants on sight in a super-secret Executive Order. Please go there and read it to see what I uncovered then.

Well, a few weeks ago, I finally spoke on Twitter to Jenn Budd about this. She said that NO, THERE WAS NO SUCH ORDER.

I also said that Richard claimed to have shot and killed a migrant woman who had a baby, that the guilt drove him out of the force. Budd said that wasn’t likely and he sounds like a wannabe.

She was on the force at the same time Richard was. She verifies his claims that many border guards are corrupt and participate in such things as smuggling and human trafficking, but she says that this Executive Order DID NOT EXIST.

Why did Richard lie about such a thing? As I wrote in my post last year,

The only reason I can think of for Richard’s claim of murdering somebody, is political, to suit his usual narrative that Democratic presidents are evil and only conservative presidents can be trusted to do the right thing. Or maybe it was from some narcissistic desire to paint an image of himself as bigger and badder than he really was, in order to impress people.

You can see the Twitter thread here.

WHAT ELSE DID YOU LIE ABOUT, RICHARD?

Friends & pod people & Christians wanting power & Weimar Prussia

While watching a John Oliver video on COVID Conspiracy Theories, I was inspired to check out Chris’ Facebook page. Chris is in my story of Richard and Tracy; he was a friend Richard made here in town, who basically supplanted me as Richard’s BFF, inspiring some jealousy–but I also liked Chris. However, over time, he’s turned out to be–well, how to put this charitably–nutty.

I’ve watched his Facebook over the years; there’s been everything from birther theories to fluoride to anti-vax to Oathkeepers to Obama putting us in concentration camps to aliens to flat-earth. He was very upset with his ex for vaccinating their son. He’d been quiet for some time, but COVID has inspired a whole bunch of posts lately about how it’s all a hoax and Trump is great and drain the swamp and masks will kill and COVID doesn’t kill but the vaccine will! Then there was a post about how the vaccine was going to inject nano-bots into our bodies. He pulls from such respectable sources as Alex Jones and Infowars.

One recent post said, Do you actually know anybody who’s been killed by COVID? Like nobody *really* has died from it. I saw this, like, a day or two after learning that my old online friend Enema had died of it, and that my mom and brother are dealing with it. The brother of one of my college friends also died of it a few months ago. So yeah, it happens, and you don’t have to be elderly.

This is the danger of these conspiracy theories that go around these days. Before, they were annoying but mostly harmless; now they can get people killed.

Years ago, I pulled up some stuff about Chris on the Internet, as I described here–a history of people calling him a con and a psychopath and even clinically paranoid. This is the person who replaced me as Richard’s BFF?

I remember writing this post after discovering that Chris had unfriended me on Facebook in 2011. I was afraid of what Richard and Tracy had been telling him about me. Three years later, I wrote this post because Chris had friended me again, making me wonder what had happened. I’m amazed that with all my political posts over the past year, he has said nothing–heck, nothing about anything to me, really. Makes me wonder if he even remembers me.

Given that, and given what I seriously think is some kind of mental illness, I finally decided to take him off my Facebook. This is just crazy. Is this QAnon? I don’t know a lot about QAnon, but that may be where it’s coming from. I just read about a Reddit support group for people who’ve lost loved ones to the Pod People (ie, QAnon).

This is the kind of thing that’ll lead to the end of this great democracy: people too far into their conspiracy theories to have any idea what’s really going on, while the Truth has been heavily documented and proven for all Americans to see in legitimate sources: government documents, videos, transcripts, news articles. And these QAnon people call *us* “sheeple,” while they’re blindly following some anonymous poster on the Net. They’re sucking on the Fog Machine.

Oh yeah, and this article, Christianity Will Have Power, came out today, trying to explain why white Evangelicals are so heavily supporting Trump even now. It described a deeply religious community in Iowa, and a Trump speech which for the rest of us was about him saying he could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and not lose any voters. But for the people at the speech, it was about giving white Evangelicals power and domination.

For anybody who knows white Evangelicals, and follows ex-vangelicals and political and religious commentators, this is hardly news. But it inspired me to share it on social media with the comment: “It’s Weimar Prussia! I recommend “Sanctity of Rural Life” by Shelley Baranowski. The parallels are uncanny.”

I read that book back in 2016 or 2017 as research for my work-in-progress. It was published 20 years earlier and had nothing to do with today’s American political climate. But it described how Prussia’s farmers were deeply religious, and while they depended on immigrants from Poland to do farm work (Germans wouldn’t do it anymore), they hated the Poles bringing Catholicism into Protestant Prussia. It was also controversial to let all those immigrants in. The deeply religious Prussians saw their way of life eroding, with their kids going off to the cities for work, and the cities full of every kind of sin and iniquity. The Weimar Republic took away the titles of their nobility, and, as far as they were concerned, also took God out of the schools. They were upset that they didn’t say prayers in schools anymore.

Sound familiar?

Then the Nazis stepped in and said they would fix all that. They would save Germany. They would save Christianity. They were a kind of “Christ.” They would stop abortion. They had all the same concerns as the Prussians. Christian Nazi groups sprang up. Junkers, the landowners and military and political class, thought Hitler and the Nazis were barbaric, but figured they could use Hitler as a tool to change things back the way they wanted (monarchy etc.). They could keep him under control! They also spread conspiracy theories about the Jews, such as the “stabbed in the back” theory and the story that Jews were behind everything, controlling everything, influencing everything.

Sound familiar?

Since I read that during Trump’s campaign, the alarm bells have been going off for me for years. Everything I’ve seen since then, has only confirmed those alarm bells. He’s just as bad as we feared he would be, if not worse. And huge groups of our population are so entrenched in their alternate realities that they don’t even see it. They think Trump is the savior of America–just as Prussians thought Hitler was the savior of Germany. And GOP leadership thought they could control him, use him as a tool to turn America back the way they wanted.

I’ve been studying history and literature for most of my life; I have seen written in those pages just how entrenched conservatives can get in power and control, how much they want to keep it, and how it prevents society from progressing in ways that help the downtrodden, that help everyone have a better life. It especially struck me when reading a book about Asia, but also when reading about humanists and many religious societies such as the Puritans. I realized–from reading the Bible through many times and seeing what it really said–that over and over again, liberals would try to bring values to society that would make them more Christian as Christ taught it, but conservatives would step in and turn it all back again. I began to realize who the real Christians are (and you don’t have to be named a “Christian” to fit the bill).

The people who believe these conspiracy theories are not just harmless kranks anymore (and, depending on the theory, weren’t always before, either). They could actually lead to the end of our Great Experiment. Already, I see leaders like Macron and Merkel taking over where we once stood as leaders of the Free World. They have to.

I will leave you with this video by Wiegand:

Thought I’d recognize the 10-year-anniversary, but it slipped right by me.

July 1, 2010 is the day we felt forced to end the friendship with our narcissistic abusers, Richard and Tracy. It was a trying day, when I was blasted with abuse by Tracy as she crowed about it on Facebook, while Richard betrayed me by never telling anyone the truth, instead deflecting all blame onto me. Meanwhile, Tracy felt convinced she was right, when she was all wrong.

It felt like the end of the world. I couldn’t stop crying or my mind going over and over it. I felt like I wanted to die.

I struggled going to church, which only reminded me of Richard. I struggled with sleep. I struggled with getting up and going about my day. I longed for my betrayer to apologize. I longed for Tracy to finally recognize she was wrong and admit how she’d abused me.

The ten-year anniversary has passed. On the one hand, wow has time flown by. In many ways, 10 years ago feels like yesterday. But on the other hand, that feels like a totally different world, like it was so long ago.

So long ago, in fact, that when the anniversary finally came, I forgot about it, and it passed.

But I still want to celebrate 10 years since we finally kicked Tracy to the curb. She was the worst person I’ve ever known, and I’ve known some abusive a**holes. She was racist, ableist, abusive, controlling, foul-mouthed, vicious. She was no Christian, though she pretended to be one. The entire time I knew her in person (and not just on the Internet), I struggled because I didn’t want to be around a bully like her, but felt forced into friendship with her whether I liked it or not. Seriously, forcing somebody to be friends with you does nothing but create resentment.

And the fact that I did finally gather up the strength to cut her off, has given me more confidence in myself. It has proven to me that I can trust my own instincts, even when other people tell me I’m being ridiculous. This experience also taught me about narcissism and other Cluster B disorders, something I knew nothing about, before. Without that knowledge, would I have recognized Trump for the monster he is, or tried to tell myself (like so many others–especially the news media–have done the past few years) that he isn’t really so bad as he appears?

This experience taught me that even the person I consider my best friend can be a narcissist, the telltale signs of it. My subsequent friendships have been healthier, as I stay away from problem people and enforce boundaries.

I am much happier now, ten years later.