The story is there's no story
Aidan Kearney, State of the City, budget "review"
Hello everyone! Decided to get this out before the long weekend because I’m sure many of you would rather think about anything besides Worcester on the one Sunday of the year most closely associated with cracking cold ones!
I’ll be quick with the intro, there’s a lot to get to: First Aidan Kearney’s big Boston Magazine splash, then a dispatch from the State of the City address, then thirdly a word on how the annual council budget review is not, in fact, a review. Then some odds and ends.
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And here’s a Tweet that ties the whole post together.
Company versus No Company
In her 2020 book Lurking: How a Person Became a User (really good by the way, recommend it) Joanne McNeil puts a pervasive problem with the media class into focus. In a passage about how white supremacists have bred in online spaces as said spaces emerge, McNeil cites a 2017 Medium post by an anonymous writer named Immolations on the very not anonymous Milo Yiannopolis. Remember him?
The post is titled “How Class Produced Milo, and How Class May Absolve Him.” McNeil pulls a quote which may ring familiar around here.
He has been afforded the privilege of being rendered as a ‘unique voice’, ‘charming’ and ‘provocative’ simply because he shares a similar background to many of those in media.
On Sunday, Boston Magazine published a long long long profile of Aidan Kearney, running some 7,600 words, complete with a glossy photoshoot of Kearney wearing t-shirts with his own face on them. “‘Free Karen Read’ Blogger Turtleboy Will Not Go Quietly,” reads the headline.
The subhead: “Controversial Massachusetts blogger Aidan Kearney says he’s a confrontational truth teller intent on righting wrongs. Critics, though, say he’s a mean-spirited bully. Maybe he's both?”
A ‘unique voice,’ you might say. ‘Charming’ and ‘provocative.’
On Kearney’s role in the Karen Read drama, BoMag writes, it “made him a public figure women can’t seem to resist. (By Kearney’s own estimation, he’s the beneficiary of an average of two sex propositions a week.)”
That’s just one of a number of lines that paint Kearney as some sort of hot new debutante at the proverbial ball.
But back to Lurking. After McNeil pulls from that Milo article, she offers her own assessment of the media class and the way it launders certain fash provocateurs:
Upholding race- and class-based allegiance, certain members of the media might see themselves as the antagonistic peers of Yiannopoulos and [Richard] Spencer—splitting hairs with scolding banter—while they were no company to the people put in danger by what these men say.
It was a happy accident that I read this passage a few hours after I read the Boston Magazine profile. There was something weird happening under the surface of the Kearney story I couldn’t quite place. The “splitting hairs with scolding banter” line, especially, allowed me to place it.
Throughout the story, writer Catherine Elton (a senior editor at BoMag) illustrates McNeil’s point. She splits hairs and she scolds Kearney, but only on balance. Moreso, the piece posits Kearney as an antagonistic peer. A few of the people he’s put in danger appear in the story. But they aren’t the story. Kearney is the story. The resources BoMag dedicated to telling that story—many days, seemingly, of a senior editor’s time, a proper feature-length piece with magazine feature placement, a photographer and a photo set, several editors I’m guessing, print layout and cover design for the June issue—amount to a welcome party for Kearney.
It was a statement: He is one of us. We might scold and banter and spar, but in the way siblings do. The people Kearney has ruined or tried to ruin—the heads he stepped on like some cruel ladder to influence—will never have a welcome party like this. Kearney is company. They are no company.
Toward the end of the piece, Elton gets dangerously close to saying the quiet “welcome party” part out loud.
If, however, independent investigators conclude that there was a police cover-up in Canton, that would give Kearney’s brand a new level of credibility. “I would get rich,” he said, “because that would just validate everything that I’ve been saying. And this would be the biggest story in the country. A bunch of cops get indicted for covering up a murder. And I would be at the center of it. I’d be the guy that did all the research…that went to jail for investigating something that turned out to be a thousand percent true. There would be book deals. It would be wild.”
This is a guy who wants to go national–who might! Book deals!!–getting written about by a woman who wants the same damn thing. The story attempts to serve a shared goal.
Kearney’s body of work is significant, but not in the way that this profile illustrates. In fact the interesting part is actively obscured here.
Given the same assignment and access and resources as Elton, the story I’d have written would be different: Kearney as an innovator in the cruel weaponization of digital spaces. He saw an opportunity afforded by Wordpress then Facebook then YouTube to capitalize on punishment. Convert it to entertainment and entertainment to eyeballs and eyeballs to cash. He tested the limits of that opportunity to the point he caught criminal charges for it. He has parlayed those charges into a magazine feature story.
The “brand” he’s built (hate that word but what else can you call it?) relies on two things: One, the penchant for cruelty in the collective consciousness of Massachusetts, which is especially strong in Worcester (and we can’t untangle his early success from that reality). Two, the digital spaces that allow, encourage, and reward him for the way he punishes people. That opportunity is built into these platforms. It was always there, Kearney was just the guy who took it.
Kearney’s real contribution is a demonstration of the cold, cynical logic governing these platforms. The business of extracting wealth from our desire to express ourselves makes no distinction between our worst impulses and our best. And it’s the bad ones that tend to make more money, it turns out. So really it’s a simple matter of fiduciary responsibility. You have to reward them. The shareholders demand it.
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State of the Shitty
“Worcester has a chance to be a model of progress,” City Manager Eric Batista said midway through his State of the City speech last night.
“Discourage apathy…”
He delivered the line with an emphasis, slashing his hand through the air. As he did so, a sign taped to the podium in front of him fell off and rippled to the ground. It read “STATE OF THE CITY ADDRESS.” He glanced down at it then continued.
“…and to be the best managed city in the country.”
Couldn’t write a more perfect bit. As Jeff Raymond put it on Twitter, “parks and recreation was a documentary.”
All in all it was a decent production, and Batista showed he can be a good public speaker. When he spoke from the heart it felt genuine. Less so when he got into specifics.
The half hour speech was a bit light on those, but there were a few takeaways of note.
He said “zoning reform” out loud, for instance, saying the city is planning on doing some of it as part of the Now | Next Plan. Unfortunately, it is remarkable to hear a Worcester politician say that. What sort of zoning reform? He didn’t say. But the Now | Next Plan has some modest proposals for “growth areas” throughout the city. (For more on that, pages 13-17 of the draft plan presentation are a good start.)
Townies and cranks be damned, he was firm on the need for road redesigns, using the term “traffic violence prevention.”
“Even that term, ‘traffic violence,’ reflects a new way of thinking,” Batista said. To his administration’s credit, they have been pretty good on this front, and the recent refusal to capitulate to the cranks over Mill Street has been refreshing to witness.
Gun violence was also a focus, understandably. He described an approach which blends public health with public safety, and he lamented the fact the two ideas are often in conflict.
What he didn’t say was that in the budget he wrote for the next fiscal year, the police budget is increasing handsomely while the already meager public health budget is taking some major hits. It’s nice to say we need more public health to go along with our public safety but when you have the former getting $5 million and the latter getting $112 million, sincerity is called to question.
More on that in the next section.
Let’s see what else what else…
There’s going to be an overall strategic plan getting made public soon.
When he talked about the need for more affordable housing, he offered market-rate housing as the solution—the party line for a state that refuses to touch public housing or real affordability measures.
“We need to make housing more affordable to retain graduating students and working professionals, so they aren’t priced out of the city. New market-rate housing is key to keeping up with our new growth and reducing housing scarcity and driving down rents.”
He says thousands of potential units are in the proverbial tube, but leaves the part out about the rash of developers who’ve dropped out or downsized proposals due to money not being free to borrow anymore.
The developers will get us out of this mess, he says, as the developers are very obviously backing away from said mess.
On homelessness he leaned into permanent supportive housing, touting some 40 units built since 2018 and plans for 150 more. Meanwhile the unsheltered homeless population is twice that number at least and growing. He did say there’s plans for a day center, though, so that’s good. If it takes as long to get that up and running as it did these 40 units we’ll be looking at 2030 or so.
No mention of the routine sweeps of course.
The part that chapped my ass the most was public participation in government.
“Government is often referred to as ‘the system,’” he said, throwing up air quotes.
“People often assume that I, or the mayor, or the council, create policies and inform policies in a vacuum and I stand before you to refute that assumption.”
Um... citation needed.
“The fact is that people are the system. Everyone here and tuning in tonight are part of that system.”
Let’s interrogate that claim a bit, shall we?
Was it a decision made “in a vacuum” when Batista spiked the push for municipal broadband by simply saying so on the radio?
Were people the system when they wanted him to do something about crisis pregnancy centers and he spent a year trying to get out of even talking about it?
Was the Affordable Housing coalition really part of the system when they put forward an inclusionary zoning policy with some teeth, and his administration took it upon itself to rewrite it so as to remove the teeth?
He’s beefing with the Human Rights Commission currently over his refusal to provide internal police records. In a recent memo, he told the HRC he’ll no longer be communicating with them directly, but rather through a staff liaison. Actively hostile to them trying to do what they’re supposed to do. Mad they’re not doing exactly what he wants them to do.
We just saw almost the entire Cable Advisory Commission resign over a post he wrote on his Substack. They did some four years of work and he unilaterally decided to throw it all away and let everyone know via a blog.
The way he was even hired in the first place is perhaps the best example of decisions getting made in a vacuum. There wasn’t even a sham process for public participation in that decision. We still have no idea how it was made. Joe Petty just announced it, disguised as a suggestion, and a few months later it was so.
It sounds nice to say people are the system, but when you throw a statement like that up against the available receipts, it rings awful hollow.
He concluded his speech with a call for collective vision.
“I want you to close your eyes and envision what you want for Worcester.”
He asked the audience to close their eyes and think about what they want for Worcester and paused for a few seconds to allow them to do so.
Like it matters.
“Now I ask you. Join me. Join me in building that vision together.”
Like “together” means something.
The dancers he brought out to open for him were cool though.
So there’s that at least.
The story is there’s no story
The freedom to not pretend that certain stuff is important has been one of the true blessings of going independent. Like the budget hearing on Tuesday night, for instance. Not even a little bit important. But looking at why it’s not important is pretty interesting. The story is there’s no story.
The local press is incentivized or handcuffed into playing into a certain kayfabe about our city council as the primary newsmaker of the city. If the city council does something, it’s news. If the city manager does something, he doesn't really have to tell you. You don't have access to that level of bureaucracy of city hall. So you have to report on the city council as if it actually matters. That creates a feedback loop of presenting to the public a narrative where the city council is in charge, that it actually does things, and that is useful for the people who actually have power and actually do the things.
There’s a kayfabe here in city government and the way the press participates illustrates it, mostly because they’re not allowed to say that something is bullshit when it’s bullshit.
The city council budget hearing Tuesday night was a great example of an event that should be news, and may get covered like news, but simply isn’t. It was bereft of anything important. Going over four hours, which I watched almost all of, the meeting was best described as a pastiche of government.
The public-facing budget approval process should be a marquee responsibility of the city council. It just isn't. Maybe on purpose, maybe by way of mutation. They set revenue by way of a tax classification hearing in the fall, and then “approve” the budget in the spring, and don’t make any rhetorical effort to connect those two processes. They get a headline in the fall about how they’re looking out for homeowners by setting their tax rate the lowest they possibly can. In the spring, they go “why don’t we have any money?” Like it’s some unknowable mystery. It’s a process either designed by an evil anti-democratic genius, or a casualty of sustained generational incompetence.
Either way, the effect is the same. The manager’s budget proposal passes every year without the council changing a damn thing about it. Weeks of budget hearings like the one held Tuesday night necessarily result in an untouched proposal, no matter how much councilors complained or pontificated along the way.
Left to pull blood from that four-hour stone, the Telegram’s Marco Cartolano focused on the fracas over the Rec Worcester budget, which was the correct choice. It was the only thing that came close to news, but still, councilors didn’t really do anything but whine. As Cartolano reports, Rec Worcester—a summer jobs program for teens—lost the $450,000 in state funding that comprises most of its budget.
Youth programming temporary staff funding is projected to be down from $897,403 this fiscal year to $447,403 for fiscal 2025.
That’s a massive cut! The council could do something concrete about it. They could cut money from somewhere else, as they have a right to do, and make a formal request that the manager direct that money to Rec Worcester. Last week, for instance, Councilor George Russell motioned to cut $500,000 going to the Chamber of Commerce via Discover Central Mass, a spurious “tourism” initiative. That motion failed badly, of course. The council never seriously augments the city manager’s proposed budget, despite holding multiple four hour meetings to review it every year. The $450,000 would have been covered if they did what Russell wanted. The 450,000 could be covered easily by parting ways with ShotSpotter too! We don’t know for sure how much it costs because of course we don’t but best guess is it’s in the $600,000-700,000 range annually. You could fully fund Rec Worcester and then some with that money.
But the closest the council got Tuesday night to a proposed solution was a call from Khrystian King to direct $500,000 toward the program this year and commit to $2 million over the next few years. He didn’t specify where the money should come from.
Otherwise, the councilors who spoke simply bitched about it, and in revealing ways.
District 2 Councilor Candy Mero-Carlson’s comments on the matter are worth looking at closely. She begins:
I clearly know what Rec Worcester is and what it’s done for my district.
Ok, and?
What some of us are trying to say, and it’s our job to say it, is how important this program is to us.
Is that your job, really? Are you just an advocate? Do you not have the authority to veto line items? Vote the budget down?
When I hear tonight that there’s a possibility of that not being in every district, that’s really scary for us as a city.
The scary part is… not having it in your district?
But I do think and I believe with every fiber in my being that it is our job to find a way to make sure that this does get funded this year.
If it’s your job to find a way, why aren’t you even suggesting even one way?
This city is in a crisis right now with our youth. And I know Mr. Manager you know that. Nobody needs to tell you that. But again I do believe that it is our job as a council to make sure no matter how we find the money, we need to find the money to make sure we are at a bare minimum doing the same as what we did last year. I say that and I mean that with every fiber in my body. We need to figure out how it is we’re going to as a minimum what we were doing last year. And what is happening in this city with our youth, it’s obvious we need to do more.
Oh, that’s why you want it so bad. It’s not because the youth deserve to have nice summer programs. It’s because the youth left unchecked are a threat to you.
Some way, somehow, this money needs to be found to make sure that Rec Worcester is in all five districts, and that we do not have to cut those hours, because they are so critical to all of these different neighborhoods.
Again, I know all the work you all do throughout this city and there is, quite frankly, never enough money for most of the things we want to do. But I hope and I know that we are all dedicated to making sure that this happens going forward.
What we see here is a city councilor speaking to the manager the way a miffed restaurant patron speaks to a waitress. “I know it’s not your fault but I asked for this steak well done, and this is medium well. Can you send it back?”
It’s just flat out not leadership. Not even pretending to be leadership. There’s no assumption in these comments of responsibility or agency over the issue. There’s no effort to propose a solution. Several times she used the phrase “it is our job,” and each time, it was in reference to complaining. That’s the job as she sees it. Complaining.
And she’s not alone in that. It’s how most of the councilors see their job. They expect that by complaining they will be placated. There’s a long tradition and set of mores that confirm that expectation. But that’s not what councilors should be doing.
That’s not how the government is designed. They are supposed to be leaders who act as a body to set a clear direction for the city manager. Instead, we have 11 disparate voices lodging disparate complaints and setting no direction save for “don’t do something that pisses me off.”
The city manager is left to make all the decisions they should be making. The net effect is a city council that’s objectively fake. A forum for the city’s most elite complainers to complain on the big stage for all the complainers watching at home. It’s like a weekly sporting event, maybe, or a reality TV show as I’ve suggested before.
Whatever it is, it’s not governance.
Odds and ends
Really sad to hear about the cuts at GBH. They’re going down 31 positions and it seems a lot of them are in the newsroom. Not sure how this effects the new Worcester office.
Times like these I’m very thankful I’ve been able to sustain a modest living off this newsletter all these years and I hope I can keep it going for many years more. But local journalism is just a tough fuckin’ business.
Also I’m just six subscribers shy of 4,000! It would be great to hit that today. Share my newsletter with a friend?
The Telegram posted a flat out libelous letter to the editor, which my IG admin did a great job of pointing out.
Shout out to State Sen Robyn Kennedy for continuing to push for tolls on the Massachusetts border despite everyone else in state politics going crazy about it. Tolls on the Holden border too, I think.
Another promising new restaurant bites the dust. RIP Black Sheep.
So excited for Sort of Late Show next Friday night with Matt Shearer from WBZ!!! So awesome I love him. Ticket link. See you there!
Earlier this week I read Aint It Fun, a graphic novel about Cleveland punk legend Peter Laughner, and was pleasantly surprised to find it's also one of the best books about a city I’ve ever read. Inspiring. It also gave me a merch idea...
He he he he
One more thing this is my favorite song ever I think.
Ok until next week, then. Have a good weekend everyone!
The cranks are out in full force now after that speech. There was a woman collecting signatures at Big Y on May street today. When she asked me what I thought about the redesign I said "I think people need to stop driving into parked cars". She didn't ask me to sign after that.
I stopped bothering with Kearney's site years ago because it was so clogged with browser-freezing ads that it took ages to load and his writing voice quickly slid from occasionally funny smartass to toxic hater - of, like, everything. But I know from personal experience (I got my start as a professional writer by being an amateur dumbass - but with better than average research skills - who got hired by a big crime site to cover major cases) that this probably won't end well for him. For me it was simply that covering nothing but crime proved to be a bad idea for a lifelong clinical depressive, and I crashed, hard, into a major, near-fatal bout of the blues. I stuck with writing but went more and more legit, acquiring solid journalistic training along the way, covering different, less soul-killing subjects.
Then again, I never got arrested or accused of harassing or intimidating anyone. I did get death threats and a subpoena to testify at a double-murderer's appeal of his life sentence (he lost, thank God), which was stressful enough. Either way, there's a flipside to coverage like the magazine gave him, potentially for the journalists tasked with publishing all 7,600 words and for him, and it's almost always bad. Like turning over a rock and finding an angry poisonous snake bad.