The conspiracy of Beto O’Rourke, AOC, Sex, Politics, Furries, Hackers and the 1980’s internet.

by Patch O'Furr

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Hang on, this will be a weird ride. Start with recent furry news about this guy:

The story goes like this – this dude was deep in Jesusland and high on snake venom and arm-wrestled The Zodiac Killer, and … OK, I can’t do serious writing about political battles here, but Beto almost won a Senate seat from Ted Cruz in Texas. I think it’s kind of unusual for a Democrat to do so well there. It’s unusual enough that he joined the 123547 people who want to unseat Trump in 2020. That made some Republicans want to embarrass him with typical anti-sex, anti-gay stone age bullshit, so they dug up an old video of him wearing a sheep costume on stage when he was briefly in a punk band, and called him a furry with insinuation about freaky sex. (Like that’s bad? Could anything else make him seem cooler? Yeah, wait for it…)

This Washington Examiner story links this to a study with sex numbers that are out of context, but also… not false? The writer works for right-wing tabloids, so it would be silly to expect better than baiting for clicks as if freaky sex isn’t fun and cool. So it might be useless to put on a serious face and try to educate and win an apology and be the better man (or manimal), while also being in a group that’s known to hit on yiffable cereal mascots sometimes.

Why seek approval from fun haters? If Republican beigists get you down, forget them and be weird. Be the media.

Such is politics these days. It reminds me of when they also dug up a video of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in college, dancing like a “nitwit” (AKA a charismatic young person who knows how to let loose,) and tried to ham-fistedly smear her for it. It backfired. (Her video pings my furdar too!)

AOC dances with a yiffable mascot – deepening the furry conspiracy.

Remember when a Republican rep pulled a lame move of putting on a fursona, like “hey fellow kids”, but it was a faux-pas with stolen art? With these other cases, at least they look like they’re having sincere fun, not staging it to exploit a subculture for attention.

I wish there was even more obvious connection to furries, because it would link so well to this story:

Why would it link well? Because, like everyone knows, Furries Make The Internets Go. That story about O’Rourke’s membership in 1980’s internet culture is tantalizingly close to some of the earliest furry fandom activity (there were furry BBSes as early as 1982.)

That’s why I had fun chatting about that activity with one of those first generation furries – Changa Lion, of the Prancing Skiltaire furry house.

Patch:

Beto O’Rourke was one of the hackers in the Cult of the Dead Cow. I remember looking at their “forbidden files” in the library in the 90’s! Funny that the news called him a furry, and he used the net handle “Psychedelic Warlord” in 1987. So Changa, does anything in there ring a bell?

Changa Lion:

Very aware of Cult of the Dead Cow. I was hacking back at that time. I avoided groups at the time but I did know about them. Very surprised by that news about Beto.

Patch:

Got any good stories of what you did?

Changa Lion:

So I was more a tourist. Funny, some of the early chat systems I got into are mentioned in the book Hacker Crackdown. (A really good book by Bruce Sterling that does a great job of explaining the start of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.) Also covers this: Steve Jackson Games – Raid by the Secret Service.

A lot of what I was doing was pushing my way on to the early internet (1989ish) where I was getting into college systems. I used to get into the Harvard computers. In fact I got called out while hanging on somebody’s account at Harvard when they realized I wasn’t the person the account was meant for and they said to me, “Why don’t you just ask for an account?” and my young mind was blown. It turns out over at project GNU at MIT, all you had to do was just ask for an account. The place was nuts. They even let you edit the sendmail alias file. Things were open there in ways you’d never allow today and it was where I really got a crash course in Unix.

So my first legit account online was on the Project GNU servers. The origin of the Free Software Movement that was launched by Richard Stallman. He was nuts enough to just give out accounts – he was about spreading the love.

Stallman is wonderful and kinda nuts. He was just like “hey y’all can just make your password an empty line you know!” He’s the Star Trek utopian we don’t deserve. His account had no password and I remember poking about and noticing his shell was set to a blank file in his home account. So I was like “Ok, so nobody can log into that…” but then I realized that file was world writable and all it would take is copy a shell there and get into his account. The funny thing is I never tried as I respected the place too much to break things.

Always wanted to spend some time at a hackerspace but never had the access.

Furries did help build the early internet, like this wonderful ad in Confurence 7.

So there you have it, it’s a glorious mess of a story from smushing furries together with politicians and more. Keep Furry Weird.

The point is, if furries run the internets, their power is incalulable. What else will they take over? They may already be in high places and you just don’t know it.

If furries pulling the strings of power sounds far fetched, remember that Obama already invited a furry to do a photo op with him on the White House lawn. And this picture speaks for itself:

The worldwide conspiracy is growing. Join us.

– Patch

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