ROGER SIMON: To Change the Left, Be Their Psychiatrist.

If you think of these people as victims of that mass formation psychosis, you will realize they aren’t in their right minds. The word psychosis is there for a reason.

I hate to say this, because, as noted above, family and friends are often involved, but think of these people, bluntly, as mental patients.

If you wish to have any success at all in changing them, treat them that way. I know it sounds mean, but there really is no other way.

That means no arguments. Instead, ask them questions kindly about their views. Let them explain them as long as they wish. Don’t interrupt. Let them finish and then ask another question—gently. Don’t go too far. You are the psychoanalyst, ironically, in an era when the field of psychiatry has been almost entirely taken over by the left.

Nevertheless, you can do it. You don’t need a credential. As with many things, that’s meaningless. Be patient. Keep asking those questions. Never argue, just ask. (Do this subtly, of course, so you won’t seem condescending. And resist the temptation—it will be there for sure—to prove you are right.) Let them lead themselves to whatever conclusions they make.

Ultimately, those conclusions may surprise you. After all, the reality of life is largely conservative. It’s mostly common sense. Beneath their years of indoctrination, these are still human beings, dealing with the same daily issues we all do. They have to take out the garbage and drive their kids to school. When they are more comfortable with you, change will … very slowly … begin. Don’t rush!

In some cases, they may even be grateful to you because most liberals and progressives, in my estimation, are depressed. They will welcome the opportunity to talk without judgment.

And remember, people change without us anyway. Joe Biden came into office one of the most popular of all presidents and is already, in about a year and a half, close to the least popular of all time and headed downwards. Few of us—not even pundits (ahem!)—had anything to do with that.

He did it all by himself because, whatever his mental level, he has no common sense.

So gently and kindly ask those questions. It will seem slow but things will move faster because of them. Do it.

As has been said, “You can’t get there by trying, but you won’t get there if you don’t try.”

(No, don’t ask me to explain that. It’s a Zen koan!)

Related: My Biden-Voting Friend Had ‘No Idea’ Things Could Get This Bad. Buckle Up, Buddy, We’re Just Getting Started. “‘How can the most experienced politician in Washington f*** up this badly?’ he asked. That’s when I guffawed. ‘This isn’t a mistake,’ I told him. ‘This is intentional.’”

IF WASHINGTON IS HOLLYWOOD FOR UGLY PEOPLE, HOLLYWOOD IS HOLLYWOOD FOR TRASHY PEOPLE: Will Smith HITS Chris Rock during live Oscars broadcast after firebrand comedian joked about his wife Jada Pinkett Smith’s ‘GI Jane’ haircut. “Meanwhile, the organizers of the Oscars are under fire for paying ‘tribute’ to the people of Ukraine without mentioning the country by name or directly addressing Russia’s invasion, despite the hosts’ eagerness to go after domestic political issues.”

Well, to be fair, the Oscars is a garbage show about a garbage industry run by garbage people.

UPDATE (From Ed): Here’s the video (language warning, needless to say):

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Reminder — Some Teachers Are Truly Horrible People. “While not all teachers are awful people, the same can’t be said for the union higher-ups. They’re evil. As I wrote a full year ago, COVID has exposed them for the garbage human beings that they are, especially Weingarten.”

WHAT COULD GO WRONG? San Francisco is finally building tiny cabins for homeless people. One reason: it may be cheaper than tents.

After years of resistance, San Francisco is finally jumping onto the trend of sheltering homeless people in tiny homes, with plans to install them on two parking lots about nine blocks away from City Hall.

The lots at 33 Gough St., between Market and Mission streets, have been used since December as a city-sanctioned “safe sleeping village,” holding 44 tents for unhoused people while they get counseling aimed at routing them into permanent homes. Those tents will be replaced by late fall with 70 tiny homes, dubbed cabins, similar to those already in use for years in Oakland, the Peninsula and San Jose.

HE’S TOO KIND: The Establishment Democratic Media Complex Is Utter Garbage. “Conservative had long known of the media’s leftwing bias, and the open Obama adulation pretty much disabused any conservatives of the notion that the press was a neutral reporter of truth. The difference is that the Trump years showed the media wasn’t even bothering to try to hide that bias anymore, and were caught nakedly, blatantly manufacturing fake news to support their narrative.”

Related: US ranks last among 46 countries in trust in media, Reuters Institute report finds. “Just 29% of people surveyed in the U.S. said they trust the news.”

Not even American lefties believe what the media tells them.

KURT SCHLICHTER: Do We Even Have A Republic Anymore? “The idea of a republic is that the people, through their representatives, get to make the laws that govern the country, but it appears that’s no longer a thing. What if you made a law, and no one enforced it? Is there even any point to the exercise? And if we can make all the laws we want and not have them enforced except in the limited manner that the people hired to enforce them choose, are we even a free country? Well, it appears that our garbage elite does not think so, and it’s ecstatic about it.”

OUR GARBAGE ELITES ARE IN THE MIDDLE OF YET ANOTHER WAVE OF MASS HYSTERIA: Gone With the Wind, Breakfast at Tiffany’s among TCM’s nearly 2 dozen ‘problematic’ films.

It’s easier to succumb to mass hysteria when you’re garbage people performing for other garbage people, unrelieved by much in the way of intellect or values.

HUMAN GARBAGE: LA DA George Gascon slams victim’s family as they protest sentencing plan.

Los Angeles’ controversial new district attorney told the family of a murder victim they should “keep their mouth shut” — unwittingly, he later said — as they protested his office’s kid-gloves handling of the accused killers.

“It’s unfortunate that some people do not have enough education to keep their mouth shut for a moment so we can talk,” George Gascon said in a video obtained by FOX 11 Los Angeles.

“My son can never speak again because he was murdered,” shouts a woman identified as the mother of Joshua Rodriguez, who was kidnapped and killed in 2015.

“My son matters!” she screamed as Gascon walked away. “And you’re going to do nothing about it!”

Gascon — who was elected last month promising a sweeping left-wing overhaul of the criminal justice system — was speaking to the press in front of a Pomona courthouse Friday when he was confronted by the family about his intention to drop the punishment sought against Rodriguez’s killers, eliminating the chance they could receive no-parole life sentences.

Why does he hate Hispanic victims and their families? Also, why does he look like a Disney villain?

JILL BIDEN’S DOCTORATE IS GARBAGE BECAUSE HER DISSERTATION IS GARBAGE:

Insisting on being called “Doctor” when you don’t heal people is, among most holders of doctorates, seen as a gauche, silly, cringey ego trip. Consider “Dr.” Jill Biden, who doesn’t even hold a Ph.D. but rather a lesser Ed.D., something of a joke in the academic world. President-elect Joe Biden once explained that his wife sought the degree purely for status reasons: “She said, ‘I was so sick of the mail coming to Sen. and Mrs. Biden. I wanted to get mail addressed to Dr. and Sen. Biden.’ That’s the real reason she got her doctorate,” Joe Biden has said.

Mrs. Biden wanted the credential for its own sake. As for its quality, well. She got it from the University of Delaware, whose ties to her husband, its most illustrious alumnus if you don’t count Joe Flacco, run so deep that it has a school of public policy named after him. That the University of Delaware would have rejected her 2006 dissertation as sloppy, poorly written, non-academic, and barely fit for a middle-school Social Studies classroom (all of which it is) when her husband had been representing its state in the U.S. Senate for more than three decades was about as likely as Tom Hagen telling Vito Corleone that his wife is a fat sow on payday. The only risk to the University of Delaware was that it might strain its collective wrist in its rush to rubber-stamp her doctoral paper. Mrs. Biden could have turned in a quarter-a**ed excuse for a magazine article written at the level of Simple English Wikipedia and been heartily congratulated by the university for her towering mastery. Which is exactly what happened.

Do I even need to add the obligatory read the whole thing at this point?

UPDATE: ‘Let me tell you, avoid her!’ Doctor Jill Biden’s professor ratings are not great, like at all (straight from the students!).

(Updated and bumped.)

AOC AND HER COLLEAGUES ARE HORRIBLE PEOPLE, AND UNAMERICAN: AOC And The Radical Left’s Call For “Accountability” For Trump Supporters Echoes Dictatorships Of The Past.

Leftists always want to make opposition a criminal offense. That’s because they’re garbage people who ultimately can only rule by force.

ICYMI, TWITTER IS GARBAGE: ‘Die in a fire’: Twitter employees reveal deep hatred for Trump.

The tweets are running the asylum.

Twitter’s senior executives have a long history of anti-Trump hatred, a Post review of dozens of accounts of top employees found.

The venom, vitriol and, in some cases, vows to help Joe Biden across the finish line in next month’s presidential election continue to live online as the company earlier this week decided to censor The New York Post’s revelations about Hunter Biden’s emails to a consultant for the Ukrainian energy company Burisma.

“GET HIM OUT,” posted a senior site reliability engineer on Aug. 18. “What a f–king baboon.”

One manager with almost nine years on the job said he was quite keen to watch Biden “crush [Trump] in the election” and that he hoped the president would “be utterly humiliated while also suffering greatly from #COVID19.” In another post he fantasized about the president being put on a ventilator.

He calls Trump “a f–king idiot” and the voters who elected him — “hysterically f–king stupid people.”

At the same time the employee has been a consistent cheerleader of his company’s efforts to rein in the president on the platform and curb the spread of “misinformation.”

Goebbels’ 21st Century cousins.

TWITTER IS GARBAGE (CONT’D): A reader emails:

Everyone I’ve talked to who is ‘minor’ on the right on Twitter (including me) is being blacked out. ‘Twitter is overloaded.’ ‘Sorry, we can’t post this right now.’ Etc.

I think that Twitter realized it couldn’t kill the big accounts without blowback so it’s trying to cut off the oxygen by killing the retweeters.

I don’t have any contacts with major players in this field. And because of how it’s happening, I’m not even sure they’re aware.

But people like me (100 followers) aren’t being allowed to post, comment or retweet. And it seems to be twitter wide.

If you’ve got contacts that can get the word out, so much the better.

Well, maybe this will help.

Related:

Related (From Ed): Twitter’s Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Week Continues: Massive Outage Hits Right Before Presidential Town Halls.

WHEN PEOPLE DECLARE WAR ON YOU, BELIEVE THEM:

Related: Kelley Paul: Our harrowing, dystopian night.

Thursday night felt like being in a terrifying dystopian novel. The mob swarmed me and my husband, Sen. Rand Paul, in a tight circle, screaming expletives, threats, and shouting, “Say her name.” We rushed up to two police officers, and I believe that is the only thing that kept us from being knocked to the ground. Even pressed against the officers, we were greatly outnumbered.

As the mob grew and became more threatening, we literally could not move, and neither could the two officers for several minutes. The rioters were inches from us, screaming in our faces.

That was the worst part. At first, I attempted to meet the eyes of one of the protesters and tried to explain that Rand authored the Justice for Breonna Taylor Act, but it seemed to just infuriate them more, as they called me a “bitch” and “racist wh—” alongside an endless torrent of “f— yous.”

Mobs are terrifying. They looked at us with no humanity — just a vicious and righteous zeal. After that, I just kept my eyes down and prayed. All I could think of was the driver who was pulled from his car, viciously kicked in the head and left lying in his own blood in Portland, Oregon, last week.

Now the Associated Press is reporting that Rand used the word “attack” to describe our ordeal “without evidence.” This is disgusting and utter proof of their bias.

When you are surrounded by throngs of people screaming in your face and preventing you from getting away, that is an attack.

Think of the press as garbage people actively opposed to civilization, and you won’t go far wrong.

KAROL MARKOWICZ: How To Bring New York City’s Refugees and Middle Class Back Home.

Will people ever return to New York City? Should they?

Walk around Gotham right now, any random day, and you will find an empty, hurting city. Boarded up windows still dot the streets of ghost-town neighborhoods such as SoHo. Greenwich Village is a deserted wasteland of garbage and disarray. Graffiti is rampant. Emotionally disturbed people are prevalent. The homeless problem, which had been growing steadily for the past few years, has now exploded. Crime is up. Way up. Including and especially shootings.

Our politicians are completely absent. Mayor Bill de Blasio is musing on the Marxist canon. Gov. Andrew Cuomo spends his time celebrating himself on late-night television.

In May, The New York Times reported that 5 percent of New Yorkers, or about 420,000 people, had left Gotham. Many more have left in the months since. What does our city offer to induce those people to return?

What, indeed.

DEAR JOURNALISTS: IF YOU DON’T WANT TO BE THOUGHT OF AS GARBAGE, TRY NOT BEING GARBAGE. DeSantis Slams Media for ‘Waxing Poetically’ about Impending Florida Outbreak That Never Materialized. “We’ve succeeded, and I think that people just don’t want to recognize it because it challenges their narrative.”

THE WUHAN VIRUS, VIETNAM, and our Garbage Media. “The fact that publications all over the corporate media world wrote essentially the same story within a couple of hours of each other suggests one of two things: (1) That many different oh-so-‘brave’ journalists have been waiting for this moment for days now because it provides a handy opportunity, if nonsensical, to connect the Trump administration to one of the great disasters of American policy and to associate Trump’s policy failures to the last century’s most anti-American moment, or (2) this is actually a Democratic Party talking point emailed around to editors a few days ago. We suspect both are true, at least to some extent. Both purposes are shameful in the current moment.”

Plus: “There was a day when the press did not actively try to make people feel worse during a period of national crisis. If, during the Great Depression, the media had run endless irrelevant stories about policy failure (‘More Americans have died from hunger than died during the Spanish flu pandemic!’), our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents would have viewed the publishers as ignoble and unpatriotic. Does anybody doubt that? So let’s not hear anything more about the nobility of today’s press. They are trying to make you feel worse, which is the last thing you need.”

Message to the press: If you don’t want people to think of you as garbage, stop being garbage.

SPOILER: IT WAS, IN FACT, GARBAGE. Public university fired professor for calling microaggressions handout ‘garbage’: lawsuit. “Also named in both official and individual capacities: the Board of Regents, Chancellor Lesa Roe, President Neal Smatresk, Provost Jennifer Evans-Cowley, Dean of the College of Science Su Gao, and Associate Math Department Chair William Cherry.” Bring the pain. It’s the only way these people will learn.

NOT HARSH ENOUGH, BUT VERY FAIR:

If the press wants people to stop thinking of them as garbage, they should stop being garbage.

UPDATE: Who Would Have Thought My Pillow’s Mike Lindell Would Trigger Lefties? To be fair, what doesn’t trigger them, these days.

KURT SCHLICHTER: The People Our Loser Elite Look Down Upon Are Saving Our Bacon.

Here are some people who are useless, especially now: Performance artists, diversity consultants, magic crystal healers, sociology TAs, members of the mainstream media, and gender-unspecified entities who brew kale kombucha.

Here are some people who matter, especially now: Soldiers, nurses, truckers, cops, the guy who stocks the shelves at Ralphs, farmers, and that dude rebuilding your roof.

The Chinese Bat Soup Flu has certainly clarified some of the blurred lines between what is important and what is frivolous garbage.

Indeed it has.

KURT SCHLICHTER: The Media Is Even More Garbage Than Usual. Analysis: True. Excerpt:

The Chinese Coronavirus Bat Soup Syndrome has taken what’s left of the media’s reputation, poured gasoline on it, then lit it on fire before flattening it with a bulldozer and finally having a Scat Francisco hobo download last night’s free bologna sandwich on the remains.

This was the media’s time to shine, a moment when we needed clear, objective information delivered by intelligent people who asked the important questions people care about so Americans could protect themselves and their families. It was a critical juncture when the media could step up and show us all that yes, the media is still important. It still matters. It still deserves our respect.

Instead we got, “Mr. President, isn’t accurately pointing out that the coronavirus originated in China racist?”

Really. . . . Trump’s masterful handling of this crisis, in contrast, is something you can’t handle. Since he’s doing all the right things – blending transparency, leadership and optimism with calm and focus – you have to manufacture lies.

They really are awful, and the contrast with Trump and the people from industry hustling to fix this is even more striking than usual.

PEOPLE WHO CALL TRUMP HITLER 24/7 ARE OFFENDED BY AN AD: Ilhan Omar Blasts GOP Ad Depicting Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Burning: ‘Pull This Garbage Off the Air.’ The truth hurts.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Baby Bedbug Bret Stephens Edition. “The only people more tedious than the ones who complain on social media are those who complain about social media. Those who complain about social media on social media are a special sort of bottom-feeding class. It’s always done with a garbage ‘above the fray’ attitude and the implication that the whiner is off to a moral high plane to revel in newfound emotional superiority.”

CNN WINS CRONKITE AWARD FOR THAT GARBAGE GUN-CONTROL TOWN HALL IT HELD AFTER PARKLAND:

Dana Loesch was suckered into attending in the belief that this would be some sort of civil moderated discussion about the pros and cons of gun control. As it was, she was jeered for noting that some rape victims wished they had a gun during their attack, had people shout “murderer” at her, and allegedly needed a security detail to exit the event safely. Loesch reminisced about the magical evening she had earlier today on Twitter:

* * * * * * * *

It was embarrassing all the way through, less town hall than mob catharsis, and of course they’re being rewarded for it by industry watchdogs rather than reprimanded. If you wonder why big media is frequently so terrible, this is a small part of the answer: They’re incentivized to be that way by their own gatekeepers.

As long as it’s remembered that Cronkite himself, far from being the Mr. “And that’s the way it is,” was one of the original Democratic Party operatives with bylines, and would have loved CNN’s hard left coverage, then it’s an absolutely appropriately named award for CNN’s train wreck.

Related: ‘Go be a company man’! Dana Loesch calls out Jake Tapper for pulling this after she told truth about CNN’s Parkland ‘town hall.’ As Glenn posted earlier, Tapper unfollowed Dana — and also her husband Chris, “for pointing out what a sham this award is. Dana presented the facts and truth on that stage which were subsequently proven correct,” as Chris tweets.

GENTLEMEN, YOU CAN’T DEPOSIT YOUR GARBAGE HERE, THIS IS A TRASH CAN! New York City Removes Trash Cans on the Upper West Side:

What happened to the baskets? Did they get removed in anticipation of some windy weather? Surely the Department of Sanitation [DSNY] would soon restore the baskets – thereby easing the overflow trash – she thought.

A neighbor who shared her concerns called 311 and was told that the baskets had been removed because people leaving Riverside Park were putting their trash in them. “You can’t make this up,” says Melissa.

Nope.

Counterintuitive as it may seem, DSNY says having fewer trash baskets increases area cleanliness. “For some reason, when there’s a garbage can on a corner, it attracts litter,” DSNY Community Liaison Nick Circharo told West Side Rag. “The corner without a basket is the cleanest corner. If you take away the baskets, people will take their garbage elsewhere.”

* * * * * * * *

Circharo says the basket reductions, “Are not a money-saving thing, but a cleanliness-increasing thing,” noting that DSNY crews empty baskets on West End Avenue every day, twice a day, except for Sundays when there is no pickup.

Found via John Podhoretz, who tweets, “In my neighborhood, the Department of Sanitation is removing garbage cans because apparently they…produce garbage. The people who run this city are demented.”

LEFTISM SUCKS, AND EVEN LEFTISTS ARE BEGINNING TO CATCH ON: Call-Out Culture Is a Toxic Garbage Dumpster Fire of Trash.

“Trash”—as well as its sister term “garbage”—has become the word du jour to describe everything from men to Tinder to, perhaps most frequently, Lena Dunham. It’s a term hurled, not tossed, and the feeling it seems to convey is “You are a terrible person/place/thing, no better than a pile of wet newspapers moldering in a roadside ditch.” While plenty of terms convey exactly the same thing (“scum,” “vermin,” “dregs”), “trash” has an extra bite to it, because it doesn’t just mean you suck, it also means you aren’t woke.

“Woke”—for those of you who don’t spend a lot of time on Twitter—indicates, roughly, that one is enlightened to the social causes of the day. You believe black lives matter (or you believe it enough to put a sign in the window of the palatial $1.5 million townhouse you just built in the Central District); you unequivocally support the #MeToo movement; and you would never, ever, ever, ever vote for Donald Trump (although you might vote for Jill Stein, which is basically the same thing). “Woke” may have entered internet consciousness in the last few years, but according to the invaluable internet resource Know Your Meme, “The earliest known instance of the ‘woke’ as slang for political or social awareness comes from an article in the New York Times Magazine. On May 20, 1962, the Times published a piece on white beatniks appropriating black culture by African-American novelist William Melvin Kelley entitled ‘If You’re Woke, You Dig It.’” Woke, today, is still being appropriated by white people, plenty of whom will happily tell you, if you’re not woke, you’re trash. . . . Progressives used to be able to handle dissent. The Democrats were the party of free speech and free thought. No more. Among far too many leftists, if you disagree, you are wrong. And if you are wrong, you are bad, and if you are bad, you are trash.

The ungrammatical phrase “get woke” indicates the intellectual level of the entire concept. But when sanctimony is your only coin, people will try to accumulate it.