“In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs, it is the rule.” –Friedrich Nietzsche
It’s a free society. Matt Walsh and other believers are entitled to describe what the nearly 37 million television viewers, and tens of millions more who watched on streaming services, witnessed Tuesday night during Trump’s speech before a joint session of Congress as “demonic.” I am not a believer, so I try to avoid using that word to describe anything. I will also avoid describing our present situation as a “spiritual war.” The word that came to my mind as I watched the antics of Democrats during Trump’s speech was “pathological.” I will use that word instead.
In the behavioral/psychological sense, pathological refers to abnormal, excessive, and extreme behavior that suggests an underlying mental disorder. Ideology can certainly derail empathy and reason and manifest in a collective way as a mental disorder (e.g., mass psychogenic illness), so the term is in that sense applicable. More generally, what we witnessed Tuesday night was pathological in the sense of a habitual and irrationally intense reaction to a person or a situation. Maybe those who are reluctant to psychologize collective human behavior prefer that sense.
Whichever sense of the word one prefers, demons and spiritual warfare to one side, Walsh is pitch perfect (as he often is) in his podcast account of the event. He was present in the room and thus able to escape the camera’s selective gaze, so we have an eye witness in addition to the coverage. What the cameras allowed was bad enough. Nonetheless, Walsh usefully highlights the key moments.
I watched the whole speech not to hang on Trump’s every word (although he is funny as hell, I often don’t make it through his speeches, which are typically overlong), but to see whether Democrats might actually rush the podium and attempt to assault the President. Early on, one member—who appears to fashion himself after the affectless character Gaff in Blade Runner—threatened the President with a cane and had to be removed from the chamber by the Sergeant at Arms. (Had he been a granny in the Capitol on January 6 2021 that would have made him an “armed insurrectionist.”)
I thought about publishing a play-by-play of the madness, but Walsh has me covered, so I will work on something else instead. However, I do want to emphasize a couple of points before doing that.
As those who watched the spectacle know, Democrats couldn’t bring themselves to display any empathy for the several American citizens whom Trump rightly recognized for their bravery and suffering—except at one moment, and it had nothing to do with empathy or suffering, but war. On second thought, it did have something to do with empathy and suffering: the lack thereof.
The moment is covered in Walsh’s podcast, so pay attention to it. What you will see is a confirmation of points raised in my recent essays on the matter (see Progressivism and the Plea for War; Robots and Zombies Assemble! We Must Have War!). It was the only part of Trump’s speech Democrats applauded for: when Trump noted that the United States has sent hundreds of billons of US taxpayer dollars to Ukraine to fight a proxy war by the West on Russia. Even when Trump asked Democrats if they wanted to keep the bloodshed going for another five years, the Party of War kept cheering. (It’s difficult to avoid describing the war pig’s reaction as “demonic,” frankly.)
The other note I wish to make is the way the media attempted to fact-check Trump’s speech. One item in particular exposed the propaganda machine. The fact-check was so obviously false, they had to correct the record. Trump reported in his speech that, under the Biden Administration, the National Institutes of Health doled out more than eight million dollars in taxpayer-funded grants for institutions across the country to perform transgender experiments on mice. CNN fact-checked him, then corrected the record: “An earlier version of this item incorrectly characterized as false Trump’s claim about federal money being spent for ‘making mice transgender.’ The article has been updated with context about the spending, which was for research studies on the potential human health impacts of treatments used in gender-affirming care.” The fact-check worked on the zombies, however; my X feed full of progressive posts mocking the president.
Polls taken in the aftermath of the speech found overwhelming support for the President’s speech. A CBS News/YouGov poll found that 76 percent of those who watched the speech approved (half of the sample was Democrats and Independents). Other networks found similar numbers in their polling. The CBS poll also found that 77 percent supported Trump’s plan to cut government waste and spending. The same percentage backed his border and immigration policies. Three-quarters said his speech was presidential. Likewise, nearly three-quarters support his stance on Russia and Ukraine. Nearly 70 percent said that his performance made them feel hopeful and proud. The same number said he has a clear plan to tackle inflation and that he accurately described America’s crime crisis. Nearly two-thirds said the President is focused on issues they care about.
This is probably the best result though: 76 percent approve of House Speaker Mike Johnson having Al Green physically removed from the chamber. Today, Green was censured by the House for his antics. The vote was 224 to 198 (surprisingly ten Democrats joining all Republicans in favor of the action).
The media is finding it difficult to spin coverage of Trump in the aftermath of his crushing victory on November 5, 2024, a victory that carried the Republican Party—now his party—to victories in the House and Senate. Trump won 86 percent of counties across the nation. Elon Musk deserves a lot of credit for breaking the propaganda system. Indeed, his purchase and opening up of Twitter may very well have saved the American Republic from the inverted totalitarian system the Uniparty was entrenching.
I must admit, though, legacy media helped with their overconfidence, victims of their own hubris. Only a little more than a year ago, on March 7, 2024, Biden, his cognitive decline obvious to everybody not in the blue cult, stumbled through his annual address to Congress. It was an embarrassing performance that presaged his dreadful debate performance on June 27, 2024—the performance that finally led to his removal by his party as presidential candidate (installing in his place his thoroughly incompetent vice-president Kamala Harris). How did the media attempt to spin Biden’s performance before Congress? Check it out:
We would see a different sort of attempt to spin Trump’s speech on Tuesday, one that only served to remind Americans of the long history of legacy media lies to the American people. For those not suffering from the pathology I earlier described, one question that must come to mind when watching both of these videos is the location of the office from which the propaganda script emanates. In the one posted below, we might suppose it’s party leadership. The one posted above is scarier. It makes a rational person thankful that the hegemonic system is crumbling all around them.
freedom and reason 