Monument to the futility of ego Steven Seagal has been in the news that isn’t real news lately for spouting his bad opinions on affairs both foreign and domestic. Just the other day, The Guardian gave us the gift of this image of Seagal, bearmored and enhorsebacked in accord with the cultural heritage of the Eurasian Steppe, and wearing the traditional amber sunglasses and black bandana of what Americans call a “bad motherfucker”:

Fun fact: If you download this photo from the Guardian website, the filename defaults to “3000.jpeg,” which is 10x more badass than 300.

Seagal was apparently in Kyrgyzstan — which according to The West Wing is “on the side of a hill near China and has mostly nomads and sheep,” unlike Kazakhstan which is “four times the size of Texas and has a sizable number of former Russian missile silos” (Sam Seaborn gets them confused; it’s adorable) — for the opening ceremony of something called the World Nomad Games. And, obviously, for “world peace.”

Time’s website, too, recently had cause to publish as a lede this tiny masterpiece of culture-desk contempt: “Belarusan President Alexander Lukashenko welcomed Steven Seagal with a carrot and two watermelons on Thursday during the former action-star’s visit to the strongman’s Minsk residence.”

And here’s the thing about that: This wasn’t some kind of high-concept satirical nonsense, like the Borowitz Report if it weren’t paralyzingly stupid. No — Time was not fucking around. Seagal really was hanging out with “Europe’s last dictator.”

The Ripe Melons of Belarus

Seagal, see, has a sour-smelling soft spot for Eastern European martinets. He has publicly defended Ramzan Kadyrov of Chechnya, who is by all sane accounts a power-hungry strongman and realpolitikal jagbag. And, since Kadyrov is tighter than a synchronized swim team with Vladimir Putin, you won’t be surprised to learn that Seagal is fully on board the Putin train. Their friendship, which proves either that God is dead or that he never stops laughing at us, apparently approaches bosom buddyhood.

You became the light on the dark side of me

And besides all being handsome alphas, Kadyrov, Putin, and Seagal have one surprising thing in common (allegedly): All three have (allegedly?) conspired to contract the murder of their enemies!

In 1993, Spy magazine published a withering exposé of Seagal by a reporter and former cop named John Connolly. “After a six-month-long investigation,” Connolly wrote, “Spy has concluded that Seagal is not simply a fraud, a liar, a coward and a bully but also a onetime bigamist who on at least two occasions said he wanted to contract out a murder, who had to settle a nasty sexual-harassment claim and who, not surprisingly, hires and does business with people having ties to organized crime.” According to Connolly’s sources, Seagal tried to farm out hits on two people: a former business partner and screenplay collaborator who had weaseled out of a deal, and a journalist who said unflattering things about him in a GQ profile.

Now, let’s not be dramatic, here. Steven Seagal has never actually contracted anyone’s murder, as far as I can tell. But, if Connolly is to be believed, Steven Seagal has mostly never succeeded in contracting a killing because Steven Seagal is terrible at contracting killings. His attempts to do so basically amounted to him telling a provisional contract killer, “If I gave you some money — wink-wink, nudge-nudge — would you be willing to, if you will, hypothetically, assassinate someone, pardon the pun, no pun intended?” and then brandishing an open attache case full of crumpled $5 bills in the open air. And then the person, the provisional contract killer, Seagal is talking to says something like, “No, Steven. That’s fucking ridiculous. What’s wrong with you? You’re an idiot” And then they all go their separate ways.

E.g.,

From John Connolly’s “Man of Dishonor,” in Spy

Spy magazine doesn’t exist anymore, but it was not, in its day, what one might call a paragon of journalistic objectivity. If you’ve heard of Spy recently, that’s probably because it was the outlet that kept calling Donald Trump a “short-fingered vulgarian” — an epithet and a reputation that has so haunted our nation’s history’s most implausible executive candidate that, in March of this year, Trump’s press secretary Hope Hicks said of her boss, “I think he’s made pretty clear that he has wonderful, powerful, beautiful hands.” Only the Blue Dog who sleeps and dreams can say for sure if this claim is true, be it seems very much in doubt.

So, if Spy is the only source for the claim, there is reason to doubt that Steven Seagal — a man who has dedicated his life to the tranquil wonders of Eastern philosophy — has, not once but twice, tried (and failed) to take out contracts on the murder of his enemies.

But then, like a light on the dark side, there’s this: In 1993, a parking lot attendant sued Seagal for beating him (the attendant) up in a fight — which, losing a fight to Seagal is understandable, but getting into a fight with him is dumb as hell, because even if he weren’t a master of the least-legitimate of all the legitimate martial arts, he’s at least 6'4" and has never not been zaftig at best. Seagal settled the suit, but not before being deposed. Apparently the parking-lot attendant’s lawyer was a feisty dude, or maybe he was just feeling froggy that day, because during the deposition, “a visibly agitated Seagal was asked whether he’d ever solicited murder. His response? He took the Fifth.” (This is from another withering Seagal profile, this one by Vanity Fair’s Ned Zeman in 2002.)

Murder is a very bad crime indeed, even when you’re not actually the one murdering someone, but only paying someone else a lot of money to do the murdering. But at least we know for sure that Steven Seagal has never bragged to friends about having personally killed anyone himself — specifically not as a paid hitman for the mob.

So there’s that.

Last month, in an interview with Russia Today, Seagal said, “every country has a right to defend its own country.” So that was confusing. But then, he laid a perfect golden egg of Alex Jones real-talk:

Every man has the right to defend his own wife and children and home, and I also believe that right should triumph over evil. And so, I don’t have anything against guns because guns in and of themselves don’t kill people. People kill people. So, a gun is just like a plant or a tool, you know, and you can either do good with it, which is to protect and nurture humanity, mankind, or destroy — and I’m here to nurture and protect people.

You know who isn’t here to nurture and protect people, according to Seagal? The U.S. government. You know how he knows? Because they keep engineering false-flag mass shootings to take your guns away!

I believe in the Second Amendment. And I believe that — I hate to say this — a lot of these mass murders and all this funny stuff that’s going on, I believe a lot of this is engineered.

So there you have it — Seagal argues mass shootings are false flag attacks orchestrated by the government as assaults on your God-given rights and Constitutional liberties. Here’s another thing Steven Seagal once argued: “There are no Buddhists among the people who finance movies. They are Jews and have no interest in anyone’s philosophy.”

Incidentally and unexpectedly, probably the best overview of Steven Seagal’s filmic persona, and the moral vision that attends it, comes from a dope rapper. An AV Club interview with Run the Jewels — which is mostly about Steven Seagal’s filmic persona, and the moral vision that attends it — makes it clear that El-P has thought a lot about this, perhaps the defining issue of our times:

What you have to understand is that Steven Seagal isn’t about being a good action hero. He’s always about being a complete fucking asshole. That’s, like, his duty. … The thing about Steven Seagal is that he clearly wants to be a great person, but he just doesn’t know how. He’s just a cruel, fucked-up guy, but he likes to paint himself as sort of like a philanthropist, in a way, and a man of the people.

You really cannot understate the raw, atavistic sadism the generic Steven Seagal hero exhibits in the generic Steven Seagal movie. If a non-Seagal guy does anything bad enough — even if it’s not really all that bad, in the scheme of things — to become a nominal “bad guy,” Steven Seagal is by that very fact well within his rights to rip out that motherfucker’s motherfucking trachea with his bare motherfucking hands. It is a morally Manichaean vision wherein good things (little kids, most all women, the environment and trees and all that shit, indigenous peoples) must be protected from bad people (gangsters, mercenaries, shadowy government agencies, toxic waste companies).

The best way to protect the good? Destroy the the bad. The best way to destroy the bad?

Break its fucking neck.

This is fairly standard action movie logic. But there is a Seagal-specific caveat that I will call the Narcissism Corollary: Since Steven Seagal is, in his own moral imagination, a good guy, it is impossible for him to do a bad thing. His goodness encompasses not just his essence but also all of his actions. To do cruel things to bad people is necessary and just, and not at all bad. So, if Steven Seagal snaps some dude’s arm in half like a lonesome spaghetti stick, you can bet your ass that that jabroni had it coming.

According to the Narcissism Corollary, if Steven Seagal does a thing, it is a good thing — Q.E.D.

Since Steven Seagal is, by his own lights, entitled and justified to do basically whatever he wants in the name of goodness, truth, and justice, it will not surprise you that he seems to be a miserable son of a bitch, and that a lot of people not only hate to be around him, but complain vigorously about him when he’s not around anymore.

Maybe the most forceful way of complaining about someone who you were around at one point, but aren’t around anymore, is to accuse them in public of a sex crime. Here’s a pretty rough sentence from his wikipedia page that has passed the scrutiny of the site’s unpaid army of editorial vigilantes:

In the last few decades, Seagal has been charged, sued, and/or accused of probably less than 100 sex crimes — for example, sexual harassment, sexual assault, kidnapping, and sex trafficking. After four women quit working as assistants on one of his films amid accusations of impropriety by the notorious ne’er-do-well, three of them sued Seagal. (The studio settled all three suits for $50,000 a piece, so let that be a lesson: If you’re going to molest a whole bunch of people, allegedly, it’s best to have the might and fury of a whole multinational legal team and offshore slush fund in your corner.)

Seagal has been accused of sexual harassment frequently enough just by famous women to provide fodder for a whole paragraph of adumbratory prose. To wit:

Steven Seagal tried to get Jenny McCarthy to take off her dress, which was the only unit of outerwear she was wearing, during her unnervingly private audition for Under Siege 2: Dark Territory. Or so alleges Jenny McCarthy. Seagal also told Jaime Pressly that he was an expert masseuse, and then he grabbed her boobs. Or so darkly hints Jaime Pressly (and repeats Rob Schneider). When Seagal’s ex-wife (one of his ex-wives, to be technical), Kelly LeBrock, said she had “been constantly raped and abused my whole life,” reporters asked if this meant Seagal had raped her, to which LeBrock responded, “I had a life before Steven Seagal, and a life after him. … But good or bad, he is a part of my life.” Which… that doesn’t sound great for Seagal.

But I’m not a lawyer, I’m just a Doctor.

Here is Seagal making Under Siege 2 costar Kathryn Heigl very comfortable and not at all uncomfortable:

“I didn’t think it would be like this.” -Kathryn Heigl, I assume

Makes you wonder if the experience of filming Under Siege 2 had anything to do with Heigl’s later willingness to call Knocked Up “kind of sexist” for painting women as “shrews, as humorless and uptight,” while glorifying its male characters “as lovable, goofy, fun-loving guys.”

You guys? Maybe we should all go ahead and reconsider that Kathryn Heigl backlash, because it’s almost like she had a whole lifetime of experience informing her perspective? Just a thought.

Really makes you think.