I should know something about politics and madness. Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly have both questioned my sanity on national television. But they and other mainstream purveyors of partisanship may be the crazy ones. Below are my thoughts on that subject. For a different take, listen to Jim Fetzer push back against my criticism of some of his work on Sandy Hook, and opine on politics and madness, when he sits in for me on Revolution Radio this Friday September 20 noon to 2 pm Eastern—click on Studio B. (Please note that I am traveling this week and doing fewer broadcasts than usual.)
Can politics drive people crazy? Or do crazy people naturally gravitate to politics? And do psychopaths, who are not crazy but just evil, deviously manipulate the craziness of politics and its partisans?Those are among the questions raised by the latest alleged Trump assassination attempt. The suspect, Ryan Wesley Routh, apparently spent the night in the bushes outside Trump International Golf Club last Sunday, then took a potshot at the ex-president and fled when Secret Service agents returned fire.
Routh was, shall we say, “political.” Substacker Eugyppius writes:
As we would expect from a crazy person, Routh’s political allegiances show no clear pattern. He claims to have supported Trump in 2016, but he didn’t vote in that election. Later he turned on Trump and used his Twitter account to express support for Bernie Sanders and Tulsi Gabbard, to deride Biden as“sleepy Joe,” and to advocate for Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy in the 2024 Republican primary. All the while he appears to have made various small donations to Democratic organisations.
The war in Ukraine pushed Routh over the edge. He flew to Kiev with ambitions of fighting the Russians, but because he was in his mid-fifties and mentally unstable, the International Legion turned him down. He responded by styling himself as a military recruiter working to fly under-occupied Afghans to Europe to defend Ukrainian democracy. Of course, he did not recruit anybody. What he did do, was set up a creepy protest tent at Independence Square in Kiev, which he called the “International Volunteer Center” …
“No clear pattern”? Sorry, Eugyppius, the pattern is clear: Routh was a left-leaning Democrat who followed that ideology all the way to its logical conclusion—madness. His claim to have supported Trump in 2016 is likely false. (If he really had supported Trump, the least he could have done is vote for him.) Interestingly, during Trump’s presidency, Routh supported two of the least-worst Democrats, Bernie Sanders and Tulsi Gabbard. Both represent what passes for the peacenik wing of the Democratic Party these days.
It was the US war on Russia through Ukraine that transitioned Routh from politics to full-blown madness. Like many American “mainstream leftists” (oxymoron alert!) he loved imbibing empty idealistic slogans that bear little relation to the real world. So when mainstream Democrats, who are owned by oligarchs who orchestrated the war in hopes of crushing and dismembering Russia, started piping out propaganda about how “we must save poor innocent little Ukraine from the big bad Russian bear” Routh lapped up the bullshit and grew increasingly divorced from reality.
That’s the narrative, anyway. But since Routh is a caricatural “crazy leftist” who, by taking a wild potshot at Trump, provided the latter with valuable PR, one has to wonder whether this apparent assassination attempt, like the first one, might be a publicity stunt designed to enhance Trump’s chances in the election. Is there any evidence for that scenario?
Not really, at least as far as I know. Routh’s apparent connections with dicey people working the looniest pro-Ukraine side of the war does suggest the possibility that he could have been MK-Ultraed and set up as a would-be Trump assassin for the Trump camp’s political benefit. But normally it’s the war party that does such things. Why would they pick a rabidly pro-Ukraine patsy? That makes pro-Ukraine people look bad, which is not the message they want to send.
In 1968 the people who orchestrated the murder of Robert F. Kennedy Sr. chose a Palestinian patsy. And we all know who would do that, and why.
In short, unlike the highly suspicious July 13 “Trump shooting,” last Sunday’s golf course pot-shot by a pro-Ukraine fanatic comes with a plausible official story featuring no obvious red flags. For lack of better alternatives, we might as well tentatively accept the official version, and interpret the shooting as emblematic of the way partisan politics is increasingly indistinguishable from madness.
Let’s dive a little deeper into the specifics of the Democrats’ pro-Ukraine anti-Trump madness. In both cases, emotion-based propaganda caricatures have crowded out nuanced appreciations of the complexities of reality. With regard to Ukraine, the “save poor little Zelensky from big bad Putin” trope has turned the once pro-peace anti-US-empire leftie Democrats inside-out. The former opponents of US imperial wars in Vietnam, Central America, and West Asia are now supporting a blatantly imperialist US war of aggression against Russia designed to cripple that country, loot its resources, and maintain US global dominance. As Gen. Smedley Butler would remind us if he were still with us, there really isn’t much difference between the dozens of imperial wars the US has waged during the past century and the current war on Russia through US-occupied Ukraine.
In the past, left-wingers were smart enough not to fall for propaganda calls to “save poor little South Vietnam from evil Ho Chi Minh” or “save poor little Central America from communism” or “save poor little Kuwait from Saddam.” The reality—that those wars and dozens more were sheer US imperial aggression (often driven by Zionist neocons who needed the US to be a big aggressive bully who could protect their genocidal occupation of Palestine)—was obvious to most thinking left-wingers.
Today, the leftie Democrats have taken leave of their senses and opted for a fantasy world. They think the world will end if Russia defeats the US in Ukraine. And they think it will end even more decisively if Trump returns to the White House. So hey, let’s save the world and go down in history as a hero by ambushing Trump at his golf course.
Biden’s statement deploring Routh’s potshot at Trump sounded like a non-denial denial. What Biden needed to deny was the Democratic consensus that “Trump is such a threat to democracy and Ukraine and the free world that it’s actually too bad the shooter missed.” So Biden said something like “Political violence is absolutely and completely unacceptable and inexcusable under any and all circumstances [even the current ones, in which we Democrats all wish Trump would be assassinated and the world thereby saved].”
Another Symptomatic Loonie-Lib?
For every Ryan Wesley Routh who acts out, there are untold thousands if not millions of slightly less crazy-political people out there. Consider Alice of Spring Field, Wisconsin. (Not her or the town’s real name.)
A friend recently spent some time in Spring Field and inevitably ran into Alice. Their first encounter was when she barged into the public library and announced at the top of her voice: “If you’re against abortion, get a vasectomy!” That slogan was also printed on some of the pin-on buttons and stickers festooning her shirt and bike helmet. Other slogans included “Harris and Walz—We’re Not Going Back” and “Trump Loves Dictators.”
After spending a few more days in Spring Field, my friend came to understand that Alice spends her days biking around town inflicting political slogans on its inhabitants. She tells everyone that they must vote for Harris and Walz or Earth’s ecosystems will collapse and the world will end. Alongside global warming, she is apparently concerned about collapsing insect populations—a not-unfounded worry, but neither is it a problem that is likely to be quickly solved through the election of Harris and Walz.
Alice, who is white, bikes around the nearly-all-white middle-class town of Spring Field nodding approvingly at the “Hate Has No Home Here” signs and rainbow emblems that adorn houses and lawns. The many Harris-Walz yard signs, and paucity of Trump-Vance ones, further assures her that her town utterly loathes hate. She often stops to harangue passersby about the many black people who have been murdered throughout the history of the United States. To stop this sort of thing, she believes, we must keep Trump—who is planning to abolish not only the Education Department but even the U.S. Postal Service—out of the White House.
Is Alice crazy? Or just, shall we say, engagée? That fine line seems to be getting finer all the time. In fact, it’s pretty much the only thing in America that is getting finer.
But partisan craziness is, shall we say, bipartisan. So let’s not just pick on the Democrats. Republicans who think Trump is going to save the world, and Harris is going to end it, are just as crazy. Low-hanging-fruit evidence for that assertion is available in any Q Anon or Q-adjacent online forum. Even smart people like Mike King, formerly of the Tomato Bubble website, buy into it. For them, every evil and/or idiotic thing Trump says or does, meaning most of what he says and does, is just another brilliant gambit in his game of 3-D chess.
Another smart guy, my old friend Jim Fetzer, has at times fallen victim to Pro-Trump Derangement Syndrome (PTDS). For all I know, Jim may be planning to vote for Trump in November. (Listen to him refute my take on his Sandy Hook claims, and explain his take on Trump, Friday Sept. 20 noon to 2 pm Eastern on Revolution.Radio – click on Studio B.)
And don’t get me started about another Trump-loving friend, Rolf Lindgren, my former Libertarian campaign manager, now a hardcore Trump-loving Republican operative. Like Mike King, Rolf thinks Trump will save the planet from the Deep State and the New World Order. But unlike Mike, Rolf hasn’t figured out that both the Deep State and the New World Order are…well, not to put too fine a point on it, let’s call them the millenarian-messianic Zionists. And they own Trump at least as much as they own the Democrats.
Mike, Jim and Rolf, like Alice of Spring Field, have some valid points, along with some less-valid ones. But their willingness to buy into partisan narratives, and emotionally commit to them, has brought on confirmation bias. They seem blind to information that contradicts the pre-fab positions engineered for them by professional political operatives.
That blindness to important aspects of reality, if it goes too far, becomes indistinguishable from madness. That may be why Machievellian operatives with no political beliefs as such, just a self-serving lust for whatever enhances their own wealth and power, are inciting the extreme partisanship that is driving America crazy and producing people like Ryan Wesley Routh.
