No. 7 Bookworm Room Podcast: America has become a fantasy land

America is a divided country in part because half of Americans live in a fantasy land, predicated on fear and gossip, and entirely unrelated to reality.

Jeffrey E;pstein America fantasy land
In today’s fantasy land, our beliefs about Jeffrey Epstein are the only things binding America today.

(This is a companion post to the No. 7 Bookworm Room Podcast, which is embedded at the bottom of this post, or which you can find at Libsyn or at “>Apple Podcasts. If you like the podcast, please spread the word.)

I finally realized why I’ve been having such a hard time blogging (and podcasting) for the past few days. It’s because there’s nothing going on. Despite the 24-hour news cycle, the non-stop screaming from the Left, and the insanity of social media, nothing of note has happened in the world. Nothing at all. Instead, we’re getting made up headlines intended to convince credulous people — by which I mean most of the people amongst whom I’ve lived for the past several decades — that the world is coming to an end.

And that’s not an exaggeration. These people really do believe that Trump is a colorful amalgam of Satan, Hitler, the KKK Grand Wizard, and some hysterical television evangelist who wants to kill gays. That there is no evidence to support any of those claims is entirely irrelevant. Let me walk you through some of the madness.

Exhibit A is a little video that comes up every time I open Twitter. It doesn’t matter that I don’t follow Kirsten Gillibrand. It doesn’t matter that this was posted over 22 hours ago. And it doesn’t matter that this is not news. It’s the top of my Twitter feed no matter what:

It also doesn’t matter that it was President Obama who separated families and put kids in cages.

The stunning thing about this bathetic crying child video is that the Left is advocating an entirely new standard here: If you commit a crime and have children, it’s wrong for you to be arrested or punished for your crime.

The unspoken caveat, of course, is that this applies only if you’re in this country illegally. If you’re a born and raised American, whether white, black, or Hispanic, and you commit a crime, the fact that you have children is irrelevant. You should have thought of that before you ran afoul of the law. But not if you’re in this country illegally, taking jobs from Americans, getting free education for your kids, and getting free healthcare, if only by showing up in the ER when you can’t pay. Then, children are your “get out of jail free” card.

Exhibit B is the outrage over a photograph of Donald and Melania Trump with a baby that survived the shooting in El Paso:

When I see the photo, I see an affirmation of life. Out of the carnage, a baby survived. To me, this is a good thing. To Slate’s reliably over-the-top Dahlia Lithwick, this is proof that Trump is a man bereft of a soul:

That’s the president, grinning and giving a thumbs-up, as the orphaned child is held out like a trophy. If words weren’t inclined to fail, ghoulish and surreal might serve. This child has no parents because a shooter spouting Trumpist talking points about foreign “invaders” went to El Paso to kill them. And while the president refused to speak to reporters, who were scolded by the White House press secretary, Stephanie Grisham, in a statement saying that the visits were all “about the victims” and not a “photo op,” hours later, Trump released a campaign-style video of his triumphal comforting tour.

It is clearly a horrifying spectacle of degradation when even consummate soulless showman Anthony Scaramucci is forced to say that the trip proved to be a “catastrophe” for the president, who was incapable of demonstrating the requisite quantum of “compassion” and “empathy” to win the reality show seal of approval. But for all its failures as a television event, Trump’s failure served to remind us how truly small he really is. And maybe that is enough.

(Of course, Slate also insists that all the Fast and Furious movies are gay. No, that’s not the Babylon Bee. It’s really Slate.)

The trip through a Leftist fantasy land continues with Exhibit C, which is Elizabeth Warren’s blatant lie that a white police officer murdered Michael Brown in Ferguson five years ago. Again, I’m not exaggerating. That’s what she tweeted out:

Now, I’ve always known that Warren is a liar, something I’ve been telling people going back to my unpleasant experience having her as my banking law professor. Nevertheless, the little lies she told about exams and assignments pale in comparison to her advancing her presidential ambitions by telling a lie intended to increase racial divisions in this country.

And yes, it is a lie. Obama’s own DOJ concluded that Brown was attempting to wrestle Officer Darren Wilson’s gun out of the officer’s hand when Wilson shot Brown in self defense. And the “hands up, don’t shoot” line is predicated upon that lie.

Moreover, Warren should not get any credit for using Biden’s formulation that Leftists believe in “truth over facts” and arguing that, even if Brown wasn’t the victim of a race based police murder, America is nevertheless awash in such murders. Statistics show with relentless regularity that officers are less likely to shoot black suspects, not more likely. Just the other day, Heather MacDonald again debunked the lie, relying on yet another study about officer shootings:

new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences demolishes the Democratic narrative regarding race and police shootings, which holds that white officers are engaged in an epidemic of racially biased shootings of black men. It turns out that white officers are no more likely than black or Hispanic officers to shoot black civilians. It is a racial group’s rate of violent crime that determines police shootings, not the race of the officer. The more frequently officers encounter violent suspects from any given racial group, the greater the chance that members of that racial group will be shot by a police officer. In fact, if there is a bias in police shootings after crime rates are taken into account, it is against white civilians, the study found.

Of course, Warren’s lie pales before Exhibit D, which is the fact that Joe Biden’s entire campaign is predicated upon the “very fine people” hoax. Here’s Biden’s announcement that he was throwing his hat into the ring:

If you didn’t have the patience to listen to him slur his way through his “I’m throwing my hat in the ring” announcement, Biden explicitly accuses Trump of calling neo-Nazis “very fine people.” But of course, that’s not what Trump said at all. As any person who hasn’t been brainwashed knows, Trump was referring to those who were distressed at the Orwellian impulse to destroy history. Moreover, Trump noted, quite presciently, that no figure in American history would be free from purges. He then explicitly stated that the neo-Nazis and white supremacists gathered in Charlottesville were bad people who should be completely condemned:

Regarding Trump’s prescience, just this past June, Charlottesville announced it’s planning to erase Thomas Jefferson:

Nearly 200 years after his death, Jefferson’s birthday is set to be removed as a city holiday in Charlottesville, VA. Instead, the city’s mayor proposed replacing it with “Liberation and Freedom Day” in March to celebrate the emancipation of slaves in the area. The day is already celebrated, but Mayor Nikuyah Walker appears to want that day recognized as a paid holiday instead of Jefferson’s birthday.

Again, if you haven’t yet seen the PragerU video about this vile hoax, you must — and then please share it widely:

I have one more item to add to the Exhibit list when it comes to the fact that there is no news today, there’s only a fantasy world. Exhibit E is the fact that everyone — left, right, center, outer space, pro-Trump, anti-Trump, pro-Clinton, anti-Clinton — does not believe that Jeffrey Epstein killed himself. On my Facebook and Twitter feeds, I’ve seen people say the Clintons did it (to protect Bill), Queen Elizabeth did it (to protect Prince Andrew), the Russians did it (to protect Trump), Trump did it (to protect himself), the FBI faked it and he’s in a room somewhere being debriefed, or that every single high profile person in Epstein’s famous little black book paid off the prison guards. The one thing that nobody says is that Epstein offed himself.

In other words, in the fantasy land that is the American political scene in 2019, the only thing that binds Americans together is their shared disbelief that a high profile prisoner who was supposed to be on suicide watch successfully offed himself. If we could vote on that one thing and that one thing alone, our nation would finally have harmony….