Notes from a cluttered mind
Episode 12: Repulsion and other sensations
Hosts of MSNBC’s “The Morning Joe,” Joe Scarborough and his wife, Mika Brzezinski, took time out from assuring their viewers that Donald Trump and his supporters were existential threats to democracy — a dangerous combination of a Hitleresque strongman bent on throwing liberals, LGBTQIA+ citizens, and brown people into camps, and the craven lackeys who unconsciously bob their heads to his every command — to sojourn at Mar-a-lago, where they met with President-elect Trump for the first time in seven years.
The duo laid out there reasons for visiting Trump, but the truth is, I don’t care, because whatever they said will be cynical and perfunctory — and will come with an implied expiration date: whenever they can find someway to harm Trump politically, they’ll do so, without giving it a second thought. These are fundamentally dishonest people. Charlatans. Users. Who lack a moral center. Their willingness to help divide this country by spouting the most incendiary rhetoric about Trump — only to go kiss his ring now, hoping to maintain access to the President and his Administration — shows just who and what these people are. All of them, not just Joe and Mika. They just happen to be some of the most revolting and transparent frauds.
If you truly think Trump is Hitler, you don’t go to his and have a pleasant visit with him at his Florida estate. Fuck them. And frankly, I’m disappointed Trump gave them an audience — which I’m sure he did only because he, too, knows that they never believed most of what they were drilling into the minds of their viewers.
And yes, I’m particularly salty about people like the oily Scarborough and his harridan of a wife. One need look no further than Tik Tok or Instagram to find insane rants from leftists hysterical over Trump’s victory, which came as no real surprise to half the country. But media personalities like these, who make their living off of sowing Trump derangment, do so as a for profit vehicle, all the while knowing that it’s infotainment — and that the man and his supporters who’ve they endlessly dehumanized are not the monsters they’ve made them out to be.
But the consumers of their media aren’t always in on this scam. Which is how you get assassination attempts — or in at least two instances now, family members who’ve snapped as a result of the spector of inevitable “fascism,” with horrifying consequences:
A United States man, Anthony Nephew, shot himself, his wife, ex-partner, and two children after the November 5 election that brought President-elect Donald Trump into office.
According to authorities who spoke to the New York Post on Sunday, the 46-year-old Minnesota father had expressed anger over Trump’s election.
The shooter, aged 46, had a “pattern of mental health issues,” Duluth Police Chief Mike Ceynowa said on Friday — one day after authorities found five people dead inside two homes in the city.
[…] Before the tragedy, Anthony Nephew had been sharing left-wing and anti-Trump posts on his Facebook account.
“My mental health and the world can no longer peacefully coexist, and a lot of the reason is religion,” Anthony Nephew wrote in July.
“I am terrified of religious zealots inflicting their misguided beliefs on me and my family. I have intrusive thoughts of being burned at the stake as a witch or crucified on a burning cross.
“Having people actually believe that I or my child are Satan, or the anti-Christ, or whatever their favourite boogeyman they are afraid of this week.”
In another post, he accused Republicans of “making it harder for women to leave” abusive relationships.
“Gilead here we come,” he wrote, referencing The Handmaid’s Tale, a dystopian novel turned Hulu series in which women, stripped of their rights, are forced to reproduce for the ruling class.
Anthony Nephew also shared other political posts, including an image of former President Barack Obama, Trump, President Joe Biden, and Vice President Kamala Harris. The word “hate” was under Trump’s face, while the words “hope,” “heal,” and “grow” corresponded with the Democratic politicians.
Smug, facile, insincere, blow-dried anchors like Scarborough and Brzezinski would never accept that their easy catastrophism may have influenced this man’s monstrous actions — just as these same types refused to pull back on demonizing rhetoric even after attempts were made on Trump’s life. For the left, there is never any honest self-evaluation; just a “reset” of the narrative, and a repositioning of themselves with respect to the people in power.
I despise these people. And I’m not looking for any “healing” that doesn’t begin with their begging for forgiveness from those they’ve worked so desperately to defame and denature. Because what they feign, true believers adopt:
A space rocket program manager butchered her father with an ice ax on election night after a breakdown following President-elect Donald Trump’s victory — and was found smiling and clapping, covered in her loved one’s blood, cops said.
Corey Burke considered the bloody rampage — in which she allegedly strangled, bit and hacked her 67-year-old father in the $800,000 Seattle home they shared — an “act of liberation,” charging documents allege.
Burke, 33, is a training program manager at Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’ spacecraft company, according to her LinkedIn, and is married to prominent transgender writer Samantha Leigh Allen, public records show.
Allen is the author of the acclaimed book “Real Queer America: LGBT Stories from Red States” and an editor at Them, a Conde Nast transgender news publication.
The killing was meant to “help people change their attachment to their parents” and “had to happen today,” Burke told police, her face covered in her father’s blood, according to court documents.
Burke had been upset about the election and knew Trump would handily beat Vice President Kamala Harris when she allegedly snapped — apparently when her father, Timothy Burke, refused to turn off the lights.She then went upstairs, grabbed an ice “pickax,” tripped her father, choked and bit him on the floor, and struck him repeatedly with the blunt and sharp ends of the tool, police said.
Burke sat down next to her father and watched him die, then smashed all the windows in the house in what she described as “an act of liberation,” officers reported.
When cops arrived, they found Burke “clapping … because she was so happy.”
I’m aware that my take on this is not in keeping with the sober, respectable conservative view that we can’t blame malignant speech from politicians or news actors for the actions of crazy people who react to that speech. For instance, Ben Shapiro would likely tut-tut me for suggesting that Scarborough, Mika, and that ilk have a tangible role in these atrocities.
Years ago, I would have agreed with him. But watching as these media vampires tried almost viscerally to stoke violence against Trump and his supporters — even after the President-Elect narrowly escaped a public execution — showed me that our refusal to call them to task for their responsibility in ginning up such incoherent rage, is becoming both their permanent excuse and our growing complicity.
No more. I want every one of these awful people to pay professionally for their obvious and intentional agitation. I want our house cleaned.
Why are we still counting votes for an election going on two weeks old?
It’s not that the delay in final tallies is embarrassing; I mean, it would be, were it a product of simple government incompetence and bureaucratic inefficiency, which it is not. Instead, it’s a malignant and filthy series of parochial operations, stinking of corruption and illegal power grabs and stuffed ballot boxes.
If Trump and the GOP complete his second presidential term without having pushed serious efforts to change how our elections are held, they will have failed spectacularly. Right now, I suspect that several Senate seats and several more House seats will be “fortified” in a way that the extended counting we’re seeing throws those legislative seats toward the Democrats. In Pennsylvania, in fact, they aren’t even hiding their contretemps.
This chaotic state of affairs should be an outrage to everyone who believes in representative government. But it isn’t. We let it happen. Again and again. And then we point to those who complain and accuse them of adopting “conspiracy theories” — mostly because such an affect is too often rewarded, with cowards being granted the label of “respectable” and “moderate,” praise that incentivizes both their intellectual laziness and their craven surrender of the public trust.
Stepping away from political jeremiads for the moment, here’s something I’ve been mulling over for a couple days now: why was nearly everyone in the continental US so damn interested in a truncated boxing match between a YouTube influencer and a 58-year-old former heavyweight champion?
And more importantly, how would Joy Reid’s answer to that question be different than, say, Dana White’s answer?
Personally, I think the whole thing was part of a psy-op to see how much engagement a streaming event, marketed in a particular way, could cultivate — with the data being analyzed and tucked away by the intel community until such time as they decide to unleash some awful technology on we useless eaters.
— or maybe we as a culture just tacitly agreed, en masse, that watching a villainous YouTuber and a thuggish felon club each other in the face and torso for about 16 minutes on a Friday night wasn’t altogether too dismal a way to spend quality time together eating chips and drinking beer.
“Monday Night Football” tonight (Cowboys vs Texans)? Or slicing open an eyeball with a rusty razor blade, then treating the wound with a sodden poultice of salt and lemon juice?
I don’t know about you all. But hearing the hysterical shrieking of the NRO crew over some of Trump’s cabinet picks? Has me feeling young again in the pants.
I’m petty that way, I guess.
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