JEFFREY BLEHAR: Something Wicked Is Being Loosed in an Online World.
The starting point here is mental illness. But the ending point is the online sump into which mental illness now collects itself, like a malarial pool, cross-fertilizing into ever more virulent strains of social disease. Our modern world is breeding nihilistic evil, even as it lets age-old demons loose. The killer’s (apparently semi-renounced) transgender identity is relevant, but only as a symptom of a much broader, and darker, underlying problem facing America.
Others are less philosophical about such things, however, and just couldn’t help themselves. So I’ll chime in only to point out what a malevolent ghoul the Democratic Party’s self-appointed national mascot Gavin Newsom has become in his pursuit of the spotlight. Newsom let it be known a week or so ago that he had actually hired a spicy young social-media whippersnapper to write and post his recent Twitter/X material. And I had to laugh, because it was a transparent attempt to disclaim personal responsibility for his account’s contents, disguised as “sharing the credit.”
Perhaps he was trying to get ahead of the game. Because last week, in response to White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt defending the value of prayer as a reaction to the atrocity, Gavin Newsom (or “Gavin Newsom”) felt compelled to respond on Twitter by mocking the idea of prayer itself as utterly worthless: “These children were literally praying as they got shot at.” (Left implied: “Fat lot of good it did them, or will do you.”)
I now understand why the staffer who purportedly writes Gavin’s tweets is paid for her work: She captures his “voice” with such eerie perfection. Because that right there is the true Gavin Newsom, his spirit in one rotten sentence. The callow glibness, the contemptuously dismissive tone, the clangingly materialist hollowness: Either Newsom wrote that tweet himself (and I suspect he did), or this lady deserves a raise for being an incredibly gifted impersonator.
Newsom, of course, is chasing controversy, and what disgusts me the most is that he may be onto something, however cynical his calculus. He has a sufficient left-wing base already prepared to back him on this specific case for the simple reason that it beats having a long and unpleasant discussion about the nexus between transgenderism and mental illness. And all the while, as this mindless political thrum carries on in the background, my thoughts instead turn to even darker quarters, those more indebted to W. B. Yeats than Gavin Newsom.
I fear we are on the verge of a great societal breakdown — one right out of the late Sixties and early Seventies — and we are not prepared for it. Something wicked this way comes. The atrocity in Minneapolis is but one articulated edge in a far larger fractal pattern of violence and madness creeping across our landscape. Once the progress was imperceptibly slow, but technology has proven to be the accelerant. The threat is pre-political, generational, and perhaps even civilizational. The worst are full of passionate intensity. Things are falling apart, crumbling at both the margins and the center of our societal self-conception.
The “great societal breakdown” has already happened; recall the numerous riots of the Obama era, and as leftist William F. Buckley biographer Sam Tanenhaus recently noted, “I think the year 2020 is one that’s going to reverberate in our history for a long time. It feels to me a little bit like 1968, one of those watershed years of violence and militarism, militancy. And we know how a lot of liberal publications, including my former publication, The New York Times, treated what were serious uprisings in some of the major cities in this country, rather what they didn’t report about them.”
Anti-journalism to obfuscate reality, in other words. Which has spread to numerous otherwise seemingly disparate topics:
