u/kordlessss

Ex-founder of something, something here. Build this for myself. Agentic orchestration, on steroids.

Code is open, so if you are going to complain about something non-substantive, git forked.

https://github.com/DeepBlueDynamics/nemesis8

Get out and vote. Tell 10 people.

Get out and vote.

There's a name for what we watched at the council meeting last night. It's called DARVO — Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender. It's a documented behavioral pattern. You deny what was said, you attack the person who said it, then you flip the script and claim you're the real victim. Watch French's pattern across the past two meetings and the last week of social media and it tracks one-for-one.

The civility call after the runoff announcement was a reverse-victim play. Claim the moral authority for calm in others, then proceed to behave in the opposite way yourself. Tonight he stood at the podium for his comment period and made the entire thing about himself — how he'd been wronged, how people had attacked him personally. He didn't talk about the city. He didn't acknowledge the council. He didn't thank anyone. He closed by telling a sitting council member he'd see him in court and then walked off without yielding time.

A few things worth being precise about, because precision matters.

On veterans. Lawrence Spradley served 27.5 years in the U.S. Army. Airborne, 82nd Airborne Division, 307th Engineer Battalion. Operation Just Cause, Desert Shield, Uphold Democracy. Meritorious Service Medal. Sturgis Medal as top NCO Engineer in the entire U.S. Army for 2001. Casualty Assistance Officer for a fallen Special Forces SSG. That's documented service with specific units, dates, locations, and people who can corroborate it. That's how the trust system in the military works — you name where you were, when, with whom, and what you did, and the people who were there confirm it.

French's campaign bio claims 17 years Army, 6 at the White House Communications Agency, 6 as a Pentagon intelligence analyst, 5.5 cumulative years deployed across 37+ FOBs. Those are big claims. The mechanism for verifying them is well-established: the DD-214. Anyone can request limited releasable information (dates of service, rank, branch, awards) via Standard Form 180 to the National Personnel Records Center. A candidate who's been publicly asked for transparency on these claims for a week has the option to voluntarily clarify. Tonight, instead of clarifying, French threatened legal action against a fellow veteran who asked the questions any veteran would expect to answer easily.

On accountability. The dynamic playing out — French and his amplifiers demanding apologies from the council, demanding admissions of wrong, demanding public shaming — is what people who don't want to be accountable do. They make other people accountable. The only way to escape accountability yourself is to keep everyone else perpetually accounted-for. That's the load-bearing mechanic of the movement, not a side effect.

On the actual issue. While all of this is going on, the city has a charter that contradicts state law and federal constitutional law in at least five places beyond §4.05 — filing deadlines, petition signature rules, purchasing thresholds, the Public Utilities Board freeholder requirement, dead 1966 transition language. None of that has been in the news. All of it is in the citizen petition filed at City Hall on May 12. The May 2 crisis isn't a one-section drafting error. It's the section that finally broke loudly.

Practical: the runoff is June 13. Whoever you support, please vote. Then ask ten people you know to vote. These movements lose by voter turnout from people who don't normally pay attention to municipal races. They're betting on low turnout because their base is mobilized and yours isn't. That's the actual fight — not in arguments on Facebook, in showing up.

Don't argue with the maximalists. You won't move them. They're following a playbook that's designed to convert your arguments into evidence of their victimhood. Talk to the people who haven't picked a side yet. Talk about water, infrastructure, growth management, the river improvements, the shade that wasn't there on the tubing shuttle stops. Talk about what actually affects daily life. Those people are persuadable. The base isn't.

P.S. — Mayor Pro Tem Spradley: thank you for your service. Next time, don't post.

https://preview.redd.it/j20iykrd1t0h1.png?width=1448&format=png&auto=webp&s=11f4d24a2bed137b90c1fa2cc7a802908a6783df