The Work Of Clouding Discourse

To know one chaos goblin is to know them all, because whatever factors created them, they all operate from the same playbook.

To the people who recently subscribed to this newsletter at the recommendation of

Oliver Bateman Does the Work

, thank you. Oliver and I typically share stylistic similarities when it comes to the work of writing, but for this article, I will pay homage to his branding, and explain the work of clouding discourse. We’ll return to the usual format next time.

What’s Left

People think carrots are a staple of rabbits’ diets because in 1940, Bugs Bunny ate a carrot in the film A Wild Hare—a nod to the 1934 film It Happened One Night, where Clark Gable did the same. Bugs Bunny has long faded from peak pop culture, and Clark Gable—once famous, later a legend—is now mostly film buff trivia. Kids aren’t watching Gone with the Wind these days.

The widely held belief that bunnies love carrots persists—repeated and distorted long past Bugs Bunny’s tribute to a one-time A-lister. All that remains is the idea itself, the source obscured by time and tributes that once needed no explanation. One day, the idea of carrot-devouring rabbits may survive, even as the memory of Bugs Bunny fades into mere trivia.

The collective human unconscious evolves over time. I’ve covered this concept before as it relates to AI: works build upon each other, and citations are forgotten. Bluntly, a child swinging a plastic lightsaber likely has no idea how much Akira Kurosawa influenced George Lucas.

Beyond tributes and parodies outliving their originals, even once-common knowledge known by so many as to be unworthy of writing about is forgotten. How Roman concrete was made so much more durable than modern concrete is a subject of much scientific research. In the last decade discoveries like hot mixing with quicklime and mixing with sea water have been relearned by scientist — but these methods were likely well known to Roman concrete workers of the time.

Whole kingdoms have been lost. We know Egypt engaged in significant trade with the land of Punt for over a thousand years, but the exact location of Punt is now debated by historians. I can here the conversations now: “I’m going to Punt. you Know where it is. No reason to write it down.”

Modern Chaos Goblin’s Search For A Soul

If time is a stove slowly boiling away context from our collective unconscious, some people are pressure cookers, creating confusion and abstracting what is commonly known in weeks not centuries. I call these people “chaos goblins” They have their own sort of collective unconscious; an archetype of a dickhead, if you will. To know one chaos goblin is to know them all, because whatever factors created them, they all operate from the same playbook.

They are people who crave chaos, because only in an utterly chaotic environment can they thrive. These goblins are manipulative, deceptive, and act without regard for the consequences of their actions. Such people are searching for something, perhaps not a soul, but a place to self-sooth the jagged edges of their fragile broken minds.

We are all a little chaotic. But most of us aren’t actively working to create confusion for everyone around us. Chaos goblins seem to have a fundamental need to confuse others. While they will accept some constrains on their behavior from government, bosses, perhaps spouses who will leave them if they don’t act right, they can be found in all areas of life creating havoc.

They, the chaos goblins gravitate often to jobs and industries where disorder is tolerated allowing them to spread their wings. The HBO show Silicon Valley portrayed the inner workings of startups far more accurately than most people will ever understand. Early-stage tech startups attract Machiavellian people, the disarray of an early stage company masks behaviors that most find unsavory. I’ve gone so far as saying the normal behaviors of chaos goblins are the same as those encouraged by the CIA’s precursor in a guide to sabotage organizations.

Without constraints, these chaos goblins are free to act as they wish. The Department of Government Efficiency brought an unconstrained startup founder’s approach to government. The approach is: move fast, break things, fire those who warned you something was going to break, claim nothing is broken, make several conflicting claims to flood the zone, fight those trying to hold you accountable, argue the nature of reality, and make it impossible to tell a concise story of your actions.

Full-Power Psy-ay-ay!

If you are dealing with a chaos goblin, it can feel like you are under constant attack. When you care about reality, someone working to warp it feels like an act of aggression. I’m going to tell two stories from my perspective, because it’s the only one I know. One story is a big problem; the other is, to quote Leonard Cohen, “middle-class and tame.”

My Lame Little Struggle

I had a hearing with a company where I was the CMO. The hearing resulted from lies told by the founding team and nearly a year of ignored communication. I won’t name them or share the facts of the original dispute until the ink dries on the final judgment with the last appeal in the rearview mirror. But I must talk about the hearing.

If either party was to bring evidence, they were required to mail it out before the hearing, to both the other party and to the hearing officer. I sent envelopes with identical evidence. Early in the hearing, my one-time boss claimed they never received anything. I offered to give the hearing officer the USPS tracking number showing the envelope was picked up from a Smart Parcel Locker the day after it was sent.

The hearing officer continued with the hearing and allowed the evidence I submitted to be admitted. During the hearing, my former employer was so contradictory it was hard to keep up. At one point during cross-examination, my old boss screamed, “You will not talk over me.” All I had done was ask if he was aware he was contradicting himself.

They brought up irrelevant details, spinning a confusing and chaotic narrative where I was employee and contractor, where I didn’t do any work, but also had 20+ hours of phone calls, where we never talked about work, but they offered me a job that I accepted, where I refused to start, but did so within their internal chat system. They chose to provide evidence for none of this. I’d call them liars, but I’m not sure people like them are even capable of lying in the way those with normal brains do. Not that the internal motivations matter much.

Feeding The Confusing Flames

“Normal brain” is a broad term here, including anyone not a goblin of chaos; when we lie we know the reality but disregard it. When these chaos goblins lie, I suspect they occupy a space where nothing is objectively true or false. Facts, if not directly in front of them, don’t exist,, and every interaction is an isolated win-or-lose scenario. These beliefs spawn behaviors that create convoluted narratives that are hard to explain.

I attempted to pen something about Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a man whose name I should not know. Abrego Garcia’s story should be simple: that he wasn’t deported because a judge’s order prevented his deportation. But his story is hard to explain—in a sentence, a paragraph, or a short article.

A Partial Timeline Of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia

Abrego Garcia is a citizen of El Salvador. However in 2019 he was legally granted withholding of removal by a United States immigration court based on his fear of persecution by gangs in El Salvador. He has no criminal record and his wife is a U.S. citizen.

On March 12, 2025, Abrego Garcia was pulled over by ICE officers in an Ikea parking lot while on his way home from a Baltimore, Maryland. Abrego Garcia’s son, who has special needs, was in the back of the car. His wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, received a call from someone identifying themselves as being with the Department of Homeland Security, telling her she needed to arrive within 10 minutes to pick up her son or they would “call child protective services

On March 15, 2025, Abrego Garcia was sent to the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) in El Salvador.

On March 24, 2025, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, the wife of Abrego Garcia sued the United States listing herself, Abrego Garcia, and their son as plaintiffs.

On March 31, 2025, The Trump administration acknowledged in a court filing that they mistakenly deported Abrego Garcia to El Salvador and claimed that U.S. courts lack jurisdiction to order his return.

On April 4, 2025, Judge Paula Xinis ruled that Abrego Garcia’s deportation to El Salvador, without any kind of judicial documentation warranting it, was illegal and that he would be irreparably harmed if he remained in El Salvador. Judge Xinis ordered the government to ensure his return to the U.S. no later than April 7.

On April 10, 2025, the Supreme Court of the United States unanimously ruled that Abrego Garcia’s deportation to El Salvador was unlawful. The Court dismissed the administration’s argument that it lacked the legal authority to assert jurisdiction over El Salvador and facilitate his return.

What’s Left Out

This summary is entirely inadequate to capture what has happened to Abrego Garcia, who, at the time of writing, has not been returned to the United States. Some of the information left out of Abrego Garcia’s story includes:

A multi-day, convoluted timeline involving U.S. Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland traveling to El Salvador to try to meet with Abrego Garcia. This story could fill several hundred words with details of meetings and willful obstruction. Senator Van Hollen was ultimately able to meet with Abrego Garcia on April 18, 2025.

I have left out “Margarita-gate,” in which El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele reportedly placed glasses meant to look like margaritas in front of Senator Van Hollen and Abrego Garcia for a photo op, later taking to social media to claim that Abrego Garcia was in a tropical paradise.

I have left out numerous statements from the Trump administration, including those made by Trump himself disparaging Abrego Garcia. I’ve excluded these details because including them would drive this story into the thousands of words. The function of the chaos goblin is always to create as much chaos as possible—because in chaos, they thrive. It’s the rest of us who suffer.