Jeffrey Blehar writes for National Review Online about a crisis in American society. He begins with the recent Minneapolis shooter.
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.
