Your Weekend Message From The Master

(Editor's note: Charles Pierce writes daily at The Esquire Politics Blog at Esquire.com. He is an award-winning writer and author, most recently Idiot America. Every weekend, he sends out a weekly newsletter to subscribers, of which, I am From now through the election, I will post his weekend musings on here)

The New Republic has a nifty, if scarifying, report on how various right-wing militants are organizing themselves in a secret off-ramp of the Information Superhighway — and doing it on the basis of their own special brand of armed sociopathy.

…I've been reading excerpts from a private WhatsApp group chat established last December by Erik Prince, the founder of the military contractor Blackwater and younger brother of Betsy DeVos, the secretary of education during President Donald Trump's administration, who invited around 650 of his contacts in the United States and around the world to join. Prince, who has a long track record of financing conservative candidates and causes and extensive ties to right-wing regimes around the world, named the group — which currently has around 400 members — “Off Leash,” the same name as the new podcast that he'd launched the month before.

Prince has been an international blight for decades now. His pot has been cracked for longer than that and, if TNR 's reading the excerpts correctly, Prince is no more tightly tethered to this earthly plane in secret than he is in public. Now, though, he's got all the dunces in…