The Last Rat Launderer Archetype: How Men Like James Comer Cling to Power - Rats Too Pseudointellectual to Jump Ship Because They Have No Fallback
- john raymond
- 6 days ago
- 5 min read
Every collapsing political cult has a predictable endgame. The loudest zealots eventually become liabilities. The opportunists sense the wind shift and pretend they were always “independent.” The true believers fracture into feuds and purity tests. Yet one figure remains, white-knuckled on the railing as the ship lists and floods: the Last Rat Launderer—the credential-costumed functionary whose entire value is not what he believes, but what he can legitimize. He does not merely lie. He converts regime lies into something that can be repeated by people who still want to sound respectable. And because his status is produced by that conversion, he cannot survive a world where the lie is openly named as a lie.
This is why men like James Comer belong in the same category as Kevin Hassett. The shared trait is not intellect, or even ideology. It is dependency. The Hassett–Comer type is “pseudointellectual” in the strict sense that matters: he deploys the outward signals of analysis—tone, vocabulary, institutional posture, the appearance of seriousness—to conceal the absence of an honest relationship with evidence. He is not the visionary; he is the embalmer. He preserves a decaying narrative long enough for it to be used again, one more time, by the people whose power depends on it.
Under the Raymond Method, this archetype becomes legible the moment you stop interpreting a Last Rat Launderer’s words as argument and start interpreting them as regime behavior.
Pillar One—Regime Security Is the Prime Directive—explains the loyalty. The regime does not recruit a Last Rat Launderer because he is correct; it recruits him because he is useful. His function is to keep the coalition intact by supplying rationalizations that permit the coalition’s better-dressed members to remain in the coalition without feeling the shame of naked complicity. In practice, that means he is paid—politically, socially, institutionally—to defend whatever must be defended today, and to forget whatever must be forgotten tomorrow. If the regime needs an enemy, he provides the “responsible” pretext. If the regime needs a delay, he calls it “prudence.” If the regime needs brutality, he calls it “order.” The public experiences harm; he experiences advancement.
Pillar Two—Asymmetric Warfare—explains the method. In an asymmetric environment, the lie is not a defect; it is a weapon. It creates confusion, exhausts attention, multiplies interpretations, and forces opponents to spend scarce time refuting what should never have been dignified as debatable. The Last Rat Launderer is the weapon’s stabilizer. His job is to make the lie repeatable inside institutions that still maintain rules, norms, and reputational costs. He is the adapter that lets propaganda plug into credentialed spaces. He takes crude regime claims and refines them into a form that can be carried by mainstream language without immediately triggering immune response. That laundering is not peripheral to the project; it is how the project scales.
Pillar Three—the Byzantine Traitor-General paradigm—explains why this figure is so dangerous even when he appears bland. The most damaging collaborator is rarely the overt fanatic. It is the insider who enables betrayal while looking like procedure. The Last Rat Launderer is structurally positioned to do exactly that: he can slow accountability without announcing he is slowing it; he can redirect scrutiny without announcing he is redirecting it; he can grant cover to aggression and corruption while insisting, with an injured tone, that he is merely being “serious.” When the regime requires a bridge from raw impulse to institutional action, he becomes that bridge, then pretends the bridge was always there.
Now add in the minimax corollary: when your proven enemy makes a move, assume the move is meant to harm you and ask what harm it enables. The Last Rat Launderer enables a specific harm: he delays the moment when the public can coordinate around reality. He makes it harder for ordinary people to see the pattern, because he keeps offering them one more reason to doubt their own eyes. He is a machine for extending ambiguity on behalf of power.
This also explains why he is the last rat. The opportunist can jump because he has a life raft: money, media gigs, donor networks, a personal brand that can be repainted. Even the demagogue can jump because he has charisma and a crowd. The bureaucrat of course can jump because he can disappear into process. The Last Rat Launderer has none of these options. His only asset is proximity—the reflected light of the regime. If the regime collapses, the reflected light vanishes, and the man is left holding nothing but the record of what he said to keep the light on. That record, however, is not a portfolio; it is an indictment. So he clings.
His clinging is not loyalty. It is panic dressed as principle. He stays because jumping ship would require him to admit that his “analysis” was always an instrument of power. He stays because he has no fallback identity that survives contact with the truth. He stays because he has wagered his entire public existence on the proposition that the lie will outlive the evidence.
The public consequence is straightforward. Every day the Last Rat Launderer remains in place is another day the regime’s harm is metabolized as normal. He teaches the public to accept political fraud as just another opinion. He converts moral emergencies into procedural disputes. He replaces the question “What is true?” with the question “What is advantageous for my side to say?” That shift is how democracies are hollowed out: not in one dramatic coup, but in a long, dull campaign to make reality optional.
The strategic implication is that you do not defeat a regime of deception by arguing with its laundromat. You defeat it by removing the laundering function from the ecosystem. That means treating the Last Rat Launderer as a signal, not a source. When you see him performing seriousness, you infer desperation. When you see him multiplying excuses, you infer weakness. When you see him defending the indefensible with procedural language, you infer that the regime’s real defenses have failed and it is now living on institutional inertia and social reluctance.
When President Trump and MAGA finally implode, the world will not be surprised that opportunists fled early. The real tell will be the men still aboard at the end, insisting—over the roar of water—that the ship is fine, that the tilt is normal, that the passengers are overreacting, that the engineers are liars, that the alarm is partisan, that everyone should remain calm and trust the people who lied to them yesterday. Those are the Last Rat Launderers. They do not go down with the ship because they are brave. They go down with the ship because they cannot live anywhere else.