I don’t know how America got so mentally ill. Trump and his comrades keep wanting to take us back to a mythical 1950’s, when America was supposedly “great.” Greatness is a relative concept but I can say that in the 50’s there wasn’t the level of conspiracy theory and sheer battiness that the internet has made possible. So maybe Trump should think twice about wanting to take us all back there.

All great technological developments have an upside and a downside: in the 50’s television reigned. It was our central community and cultural well. We all drank from it. That’s the good news. The bad news is that families who once gathered around the dinner table gathered around the TV set instead. They stopped talking to one another and watched I Love Lucy.

Now we’re in the 21st century and we have the internet. It’s a wonderful tool. Like TV was, it’s a community bulletin board and a cultural well at which we all gather. It also is a wellspring of falsehood and lies. And with the introduction of artificial intelligence into the mix, the internet can frequently be toxic. Take a look at the latest madness.

They’re impugning CNN but nowhere is anybody in Trump world mentioning that the TASS Russian news service was in the Oval Office last Friday when the beatdown of Volodymyr Zelensky took place. They didn’t just slip through the walls like ghosts. They were let in. It wasn’t until a reporter for The Independent realized TASS was in the room and tweeted it out that the TASS journalist was escorted out and a cover story released that the reporter didn’t have permission from the White House to be there. Please. You don’t get into the Oval Office of the White House without being cleared.

But as I predicted last week, you won’t hear a thing about TASS. It’s an unstory, like in Orwell’s 1984 when enemies of the state became unpeople and all history of their ever having existed was eradicated. I said that the brawl was staged for Putin. Now three days later we are hearing about an assassination attempt being staged and CNN hired to cover it. This is straight out of Joseph Goebbel’s playbook, “Accuse the other side of doing that which you yourself are doing.” Bingo.

The only logical answer here is that Trump got hit by shrapnel. As to the hiring of an assassin, anybody believing that they would get off of those grounds alive is some kind of a world class fool. Maybe this young man, Mathew Crooks, was that. But I think it’s more logical that he was mentally disturbed and acting out against a cruel world. Or, maybe he was promised he would be safe and not captured or killed and again, if he believed that, he was seriously stupid.

Trump was minutely injured. He did not lose a piece of his ear. But he sported a bandage on the ear during the Republican National Convention and then the convention goers began wearing ear bandages, too. And don’t forget the MAGAs who started wearing diapers in solidarity with Trump. This is one sick cult.

I can’t wait to see if this new conspiracy theory gets any traction or if it dies stillborn. And I’m going to make a prediction: you are going to hear a lot of whacky things in days to come because Trump needs to keep us at each other’s throats and control the news cycle in order to detract from the awfulness of his administration. Watch.

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7 COMMENTS

  4. America home of the free and of the brave? More like the land of spoiled toddlers who want what they want when they don’t know exactly what they want. No worries mate. Our country has become the worst nightmare of the world. Bring hell on…we surely deserve it when we abandoned our principles and voted FOR LIES. The only way addicts recover is if/when they suffer for their addiction to the brink of death and hit bottom. We’re not there yet. On the way.

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  5. I agree on everything, EXCEPT the notion that there weren’t conspiracy theories dominating the air waves in the “50s. TV was new, and Tailgunner Joe McCarthy,’s hearings were televised.He saw communists under every bed, and now Trump.can’t. recognize a murderous dictator when he trips over Putin.

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  6. I’ve got mixed feelings on Trump having staged an attempt on his life, at least one where actual shots were fired. If anything the FL golf course incident where the would-be assassin was ‘discovered’ before Trump was ever in harm’s way seems more likely. Hell, that might have been in the works and the guy had gone off the grid so they couldn’t call it off!

    A big part of me thinks it was just a mentally unbalanced young man who was a lousy shot. An attention seeker who probably expected to get caught before ever getting up on that roof, or spotted and arrested before Trump ever took the stage. People do crazy shit to become famous. Think about it.

    As for him taking money or some arrangement for him to shoot into the crowd, he might have been crazy enough to know he’d wind up dead by counter-sniper fire. “Suicide by Cop” happens every day but in this case his name would be in history books. Again, not as crazy as it sounds. But maybe he thought he could slip away in all the confusion. We’ll never know. I agree completely that Trump was hit by shrapnel. The firefighter who died was at least ten to twelve feet away but a piece of his skull could have done the job. Or since there were multiple shots a bullet could well have struck a railing on the grandstand and sent shrapnel Trump’s way. I think the nick to Trump’s ear was real – a shrapnel strike and that’s why he was so pissed IF the whole thing was staged. That would have been way the hell more than he bargained for and he’d be plenty angry with all the adrenaline flowing.

    His TV instincts served him well. I doubt he actually remembers those moments of showing defiance to the crowd but looking at the photos and seeing the post shooting coverage he knew all too well how to take full advantage of it. But whether it was all staged or not here’s a question NO ONE in the news biz has raised and damn well should have before voting started – what about PTSD? Granted, given how much Trump had clearly devolved since leaving office in 2020 it’s hard to tell but you can’t convince me he’s not suffering from it. And woe to the person(s) close to him suggesting he sit down with a shrink to deal with it. But it’s there and as bad as we knew he’d be he’s even worse because of it. Not a good thing to have in a President.

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  7. Do stupid people know they are stupid? My experience and observations say no, otherwise they’d never post the nonsense they do online for the whole world to see. For more proof we only need to look at our new president. How can anyone watch and listen to the nonsense coming from this man and tell themselves they understand and agree with it? I suppose it could be a mental disorder, but man, it’s a pandemic of mental disorder if so.

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