Stalking Scaife
Carlson, Tucker
Stalking Scaife by Tucker Carlson WHILE MANY INTELLECTUALS on the left are content to complain about America’s rightward drift, Steve Kangas prided himself on a pragmatic approach. A few years...
...Kangas acted strangely, and the maintenance man spoke to him for only a moment before deciding to call the police...
...It wasn’t always obvious that Steve Kangas would wind up dead in a men’s room...
...He was always touting the little guy, the underdog,” she says...
...Meanwhile, Kangas’s other on-line venture, Liberalism Resurgent, seemed to thrive...
...After completing high school in North Carolina, Kangas joined the Army and apparently did well...
...Kangas shot sadomasochistic movies with a digital camera in his apartment and tried to sell them on-line...
...This site is absolutely WONDERFUL...
...Apart from a 46-word item in the Pittsburgh PostGazette four days later, the suicide received no coverage in the press...
...I am a high school history and government teacher, and this site will be a terrific resource for me...
...The trick,” Kangas wrote in an essay on the site, “is to find the quickest but most efficient and effective form of activism possible...
...On that day, Kangas walked into a Las Vegas gun store and paid about $300 for a Kel Tek 9 mm semi-automatic handgun...
...The fact is, Christmas today has become a thoroughly illiberal event, at odds with everything that liberals stand for,” Kangas wrote...
...He stopped at the door of the Sarah Scaife Foundation, pressed his face against the glass, then walked away...
...Scaife has long been an obsession with conspiracy nuts, both on-line and in the White House, and the theories quickly multiplied: Kangas was killed by Richard Scaife...
...Or maybe they did...
...A little over two weeks later, Kangas entered an office building in downtown Pittsburgh and took an elevator to the 39th floor...
...But if there is blame to be shared, it doesn’t come from the right...
...Unfortunately for him, says Denise Waddell, an acquaintance from Las Vegas, “he spent all the money on hookers...
...The 9 mm in his pocket, he walked down the hallway peering into office suites...
...wrote an on-line fan named Robin P. McAlexander...
...But what is pornography if not exploiting the littlest guy, the real underdog...
...His politics didn’t seem to mesh with what he did at all...
...Kangas was particularly humorless on the subject of rich people...
...Chief among these killers, Kangas wrote, was Pittsburgh newspaper publisher Richard Scaife...
...Furthermore, Christmas as practiced in modern America is deeply Euro-centric and Christian...
...The next thing you know,” says Denise Waddell, “he’s in Pittsburgh...
...At some point, Kangas began to believe the things he was writing about Scaife...
...Kangas was obsessive but intelligent, and he spent a great deal of time writing essays meant to edify “workers, consumers, women, minorities, the poor, children, the elderly, environmentalists, and other historically liberal constituencies...
...When the maintenance man left, Kangas sat down in a stall and shot himself in the face...
...Kangas left Santa Cruz in 1996 and wound up in Las Vegas, working for a time as a clerk at a company that produces statistical-analysis software for horse racing...
...By Juanita Broaddrick...
...In another, he attacked Christmas...
...Happily, there are several things you can do that take only minutes a year out of your schedule, and yet have dramatic and long-lasting effects...
...Steve Kangas Found Shot To Death In Richard Mellon Scaife’s Bathroom,” read the headline over hundreds of newsgroup conversations...
...By an as-yet unknown right-wing cabal...
...Returning to his $700-a-month two-bedroom apartment in a seedy part of the city, he prepared a meal...
...It is absolutely critical to identify what the true core problem is, because all other problems in society stem from it...
...Thank you, thank you, thank you...
...In one essay, Kangas ranted for no fewer than 2,200 words about the effect of Pinochet’s economic program on the Chilean environment...
...Several hours later, a mainenance man found Kangas in a men’s room on the same floor as the Scaife Foundation...
...In 1989, he traveled to the crumbling Soviet Union, an event he later described as “one of the most incredible experiences of my life...
...The Internet, however, took notice...
...The business apparently flopped...
...Waddell knew Kangas fairly well over a period of a couple of years—her husband worked with him at the horse-racing business—but she was surprised to learn he had set out to shoot somebody...
...Sometime around January 21, 1999, Kangas decided he had identified the core problem...
...The charges were outlandish—though no more so than those Geraldo Rivera regularly throws around on cable television—but they found an instant audience...
...Last summer, Kangas quit the business to start one of his own, Sunset Dreams, an Internet pornography company...
...Around 1986, he drifted to Santa Cruz, where he enrolled in the University of California and became involved in left-wing politics...
...In 1983, he graduated from the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, and several years later received an honorable discharge...
...By the American Spectator...
...Tucker Carlson is a staff writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...However, even these efforts can be wasted if they are not directed at the heart of the problem...
...Strictly speaking, of course, Kangas was killed by Steve Kangas...
...A few years ago, Kangas, a 37year-old Internet pornographer from Las Vegas, created a Web site called “Liberalism Resurgent: A Response to the Right” designed to offer helpful tips to the action-oriented liberal...
...The wealthy, he wrote, “are causing an inequality that kills hundreds of thousands of people each year...
...On the other hand, Waddell says, Kangas was hard to figure out...
...Then, without even cleaning the dishes, he set out to shoot Richard Mellon Scaife...
...Kangas accused Scaife of everything from secretly running the CIA to destroying American democracy...
...Not surprisingly, Kangas listed Al Gore’s Earth in the Balance as one of his favorite books...
Vol. 4 • March 1999 • No. 26
