WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 27, 2025
Blue elites fail you again: We started telling you more than a decade ago:
It's all anthropology now!
At roughly that same time, Professor Norman O. Brown's presentation popped back into our heads. We don't know how or why that happened—but once again, here's part of the strange thing he said:
Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis
[...]
I sometimes think I see that societies originate in the discovery of some secret, some mystery...and end in exhaustion when there is no longer any secret, when the mystery has been divulged, that is to say profaned...
There comes a time—I believe we are in such a time—when civilization has to be renewed by the discovery of some new mysteries...by the undemocratic power which makes poets the unacknowledged legislators of all mankind, the power which makes all things new.
For the fuller passage, just click this.
Whatever he was talking about, he said that in May 1960, as part of this Phi Beta Kappa address. At that time, Professor Brown was becoming very hot in progressive circles.
He said that in 1960; he may have been wrong at the time. Plainly, though, the problem he said he believed he saw has deeply infested us now.
We refer to yesterdays "cabinet meeting"—to the more than three hour televised spectacle which Blue America's failing elites have described in a uniform manner.
To the extent that they're bothering with the event at all, they're mocking the Stepfords—the cabinet members—but largely rushing past the president's extremely strange conduct. As the Stepfords are being mocked for their embarrassing conduct, the president deeply peculiar behavior is largely being disappeared.
Likely through no fault of her own, Katie Rogers was assigned to discuss the event for the New York Times. Despite the astonishing conduct in question, her "news analysis" doesn't appear in today's print editions.
Yesterday afternoon, it appeared online. Headline included, her analysis starts like this
NEWS ANALYSIS
What, Exactly, Was That Cabinet Meeting?
What do you get for a president who commands everybody’s attention, all of the time?
For members of President Trump’s cabinet on Tuesday, the answer was apparently this: a televised meeting at the White House that lasted almost half the workday.
In front of a wall of cameras, the old “Apprentice” host offered a clear window into the way he was running his administration, starting with an ego that appeared to need frequent feeding, and blustery stamina: “This has never been done before,” the president said at one point, in between calling on secretaries to speak and marveling over the waiting reporters’ abilities to hold microphones and cameras aloft for several hours.
There in the Cabinet Room—which is starting to take on the gilded-cage look of Mr. Trump’s Oval Office—all of the president’s men and women took their turns, each working a little bit harder than the last to offer Mr. Trump praise and to assure him that they were working to tackle his long list of grievances.
It's true! Rogers starts with a glancing comment about the president's ego. We're even told that yesterday's bizarre event "offered a clear window into the way he was [sic] running his administration."
The tone about Trump is lightly mocking all through the Roger piece. Quickly, though, she starts to focus on the embarrassing conduct of the cabinet members:
On the embarrassing conduct of Lori Chavez-DeRemer, the labor secretary who "implored the president to come to her agency to look at his own 'big, beautiful' face on a banner."
On the embarrassing conduct of Secretary of State Marco Rubio; "who in his spare time is Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, acting head of the National Archives and Records Administration and acting administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development;" .
But also on the ludicrous conduct of Steve Witkoff, whose embarrassing conduct yesterday was this:
And then there was Steve Witkoff, a billionaire whose praise was so slavish that even the president seemed to pick up on the overkill. During his turn, Mr. Witkoff, the president’s peace envoy, complimented Mr. Trump’s leadership in the Israel-Gaza conflict, a war that continued this week with Israeli strikes killing 20, including journalists, at a Gazan hospital. He suggested again that Mr. Trump should receive the Nobel Peace Prize he has long coveted.
“There’s only one thing I wish for: that the Nobel committee finally gets its act together and realizes that you are the single finest candidate since the Nobel Peace, this Nobel award was ever talked about,” Mr. Witkoff said.
When he was finished, the billionaire received a round of applause from his colleagues.
Greetings from North Korea! And yes, they all knew to applaud.
For what it's worth, the conduct by the long list of sycophants—by the assembly of Stepfords—was truly astounding this day. As such, it teaches an anthropology lesson.
Until you see such conduct occur, you might not know that it would be possible to get a room full of American adults to behave in such embarrassing ways. Plainly, yes, it's more than possible—and that was Rogers' focus.
As her "news analysis" proceeded, Rogers maintained her snarky tone—and she focused on the subordinates. Also this:
By paragraphs 6 and 7 of her analysis, she had even sought escape in this:
Mr. Trump, a pop culture maven, had relatively little to say about what was arguably the biggest news of the day: the engagement of Taylor Swift, whom he has publicly insulted and threatened for not supporting him, to Travis Kelce, the Kansas City Chiefs tight end. The event rattled on for so long that the president was asked to comment on news that had broken during the meeting.
“I wish him a lot of luck,” Mr. Trump said. “I think he’s a great guy, and I think that she’s a terrific person. So I wish them a lot of luck.”
"Arguably," the engagement was "the biggest news of the day," the New York Times journalist said. She failed to see that the actual biggest event was the extremely strange presidential behavior she was now refusing to describe.
Rogers told us what the president had to say about that high-profile engagement. She didn't tell us about the endless array of very strange things he said in the course of the three-plus hours, or about the very strange demeanor he had displayed.
She didn't tell us what was plain to the eye:
Something plainly seems to be wrong with this very important person. To anyone with eyes to see, that fact should be hard to miss.
In fairness, it wasn't just Rogers. All over the Blue American firmament, Blue elites offered mockery of the cabinet members while sliding past the disturbing state of affairs which was sitting right there before them.
Maggie Haberman did it on CNN. On MSNBC, Jen Psaki started last night's program with an essay about how strange the cabinet members had been
At 6 o'clock this very morning, Morning Joe started the same way, The cabinet members had demeaned themselves, Morning Joe viewers were told. The fact that something seems to be wrong with the sitting president is something these people can't say.
In yesterday's report, we made a certain statement about Monday's press events. We said we thought it had never been more clear that something seemed to be (tragically) wrong with the sitting president.
Yesterday, the president's weird demeanor and weird behavior were even more apparent. At Mediaite, the correspondents were perhaps a bit more frank about that fact than others who sit at higher stations.
They noted the president's very strange conduct. They did so in a string of reports which sat beneath headlines like these:
Trump Claims ‘Scum’ MSNBC Is Worse Than Violent Gangs
Trump Declares, ‘I Have the Right To Do Anything I Want’ Because ‘I’m the President’
Trump Says America Would Accept a Dictator in Exchange for Less Crime
Trump Tells Fake ‘Greatest President Of My Lifetime’ Story Hours After Fox News Busted Him—With Video
Trump Crows About His Economy, Falsely Claims Gas Is Below 2 Dollars In the South
Fox’s Jacqui Heinrich Notes ‘Unusual’ Moment When a Reporter Boosted Trump Rhetoric With Personal Story
Trump Pushes Wild Autism Claims During Cabinet Meeting With RFK Jr.
To their credit, they tried to capture some—and only some—of the president's very strange claims. Journalistically, it's much more difficult to describe his remarkably strange demeanor
How strange were many of the president's claims? Yes, he actually said that the people at MSNBC are worse than violent gang members. And no, he didn't seem to be joking, as one other Mediaite reporter decided to say.
Such claims were general over the meeting. Consider the report which started like this:
Trump Tells Fake ‘Greatest President Of My Lifetime’ Story Hours After Fox News Busted Him—With Video
President Donald Trump told a fake story about being called “the greatest president of my lifetime” by a Democratic governor—hours after a Fox News host showed the claim was false by going to the videotape.
During a photo op on Monday, Trump told the tale of how Gov. Wes Moore (D-MD) came up to him at a football game and couldn’t stop praising him:
[Transcript from Monday's event event]
Hours later, Fox News dug up the behind-the-scenes video of the scene in question—from Fox Nation’s Art of the Surge — and it proved that while Gov. Moore was respectful and collegial while discussing the Key Bridge disaster, he never said anything remotely resembling what Trump claimed.
It's true! As you can see in the full report, the president had made an extremely unlikely claim about something Governor Moore had allegedly said. But, as happenstance had it, videotape existed of the exchange in question.
As the (Fox News) videotape showed, Moore had said nothing like what Trump had claimed—but then again, so what? During yesterday's event, "Trump told the story again—and even falsely claimed the video proved it."
Tommy Christopher provides the transcripts and the tapes of this remarkably strange bit of behavior. Such bizarre behaviors were given no place in Rogers' "analysis" piece.
Colloquially, the president's behavior might be called delusional. Was it also diagnosable as some sort of clinical affliction?
We don't know how to answer your question. But late in yesterday's event, as he rambled and blustered, heaping mountains of praise on himself, the very strange American president took sides, once again, with his darling Vladimir.
He offered this during a lengthy walk in the woods concerning the war on Ukraine. We apologize for the deletions, but the rambling side trips are endless:
PRESIDENT TRUMP (8/26/25): You know, Zelensky's not exactly innocent, either, OK? You know, it takes two people to tango...I have a very good relationship with President Putin—very, very good. That's a positive thing, again.
[...]
Nobody goes into a war thinking they're going to lose. They go in—I'm sure that Ukraine thought they were going to win. It's going to be, you know, "We're going to win," you're going to beat somebody that's fifteen times your size...But you don't go into a war that's fifteen times your size.
Under the circumstances, how was Ukraine supposed to avoid "going into" this war? Strange presentations of that type littered the countryside during yesterday's "cabinet meeting"—but it was the president's rambling presentations which ate the bulk of the three hours, not the bizarre behavior of the Pyongyang-adjacent sycophants he had gathered around him.
All over Blue America, tribunes have focused on the mountains of praise heaped on Trump by the Stepfords. They have ignored the much larger mountains of praise heaped on Trump by Trump himself as he told rambling, absurdly fact-challenged stories about his own inescapable greatness.
To our eye and to our ear, something plainly seems to be wrong with this important man. Long ago, Hans Christian Andersen sketched an anthropological lesson which is being enacted here:
We humans are often unable, or unwilling, to see our monarchs as they actually are. We refuse to see what's right before us. Instead, we "look over there."
Blue elites have fought, every step of the way, to avoid discussing what seems to be obvious about the sitting president. At the Times, they haven't even been willing to build a journalistic framework around this basic question:
Why does this man insist on saying things which are baldly and wildly inaccurate?
No president has ever behaved in the crazy way this president does, but the Times keeps saying there's nothing to look at. Instead, let's talk about the cabinet members, or about that engagement!
Watching tape of his conduct yesterday, it seemed tragically obvious to us that something seems to be wrong. Something's also wrong with the sycophants, but something plainly seems to be wrong with the man in charge.
That is, of course, a human tragedy—but so is the conduct of the Blue elites, who continue to run in fear from what is sitting right before them.
Andersen wrote it; our Blue elites live it. Do we need the discovery of a new mystery?
We'll guess that it could be too late.
Tomorrow: Unhelpful ideas about "mental illness"
Friday: Are we sure Maureen Dowd has it right?
Norman O Brown was a joke in his own time.
ReplyDeleteThings pop into mind because they are associated (linked in memory) with other things that are cued by something in the environment. That is what it means to be reminded of an experience by a sight, sound, smell, phrase or person associated with what comes to mind without effort.
There is nothing special about this experience. It is just how memory works.
Our own thoughts cue other thoughts associated with them too.
DeleteNorman O Brown was not an anthropologist. Wikipedia calls him a psychoanalytically oriented social philosopher. That is not any kind of empirical science but a field where people pull ideas out of their asses then examine each others’ excretions. He is largely unintelligible, much like Somerby.
ReplyDeleteUnder Biden, citizens were told virtually nothing about what the President and Cabinet were doing on the citizens’ behalf. Under Trump, we’re given enormous amounts of information. That’s more important than the disgusting fawning.
ReplyDeleteLies are not information — they are misinformation. Trump has wiped actual information off govt webpages, decreasing access to info.
DeleteIt is untrue that Biden told the public virtually nothing. Another big lie by David.
I agree with David.
DeleteBiden never should have made the mainstream media keep his lowest unemployment rate in over half a century, a secret from the people.
What did you learn, David, from the three hour sycophantic fest?
Delete"Under Biden, citizens were told virtually nothing about what the President and Cabinet were doing on the citizens’ behalf."
DeleteI disagree, David. It's not that citizens weren't being told. What was going on during Biden's term wasn't a string of daily disruptions to normal business. As a result, goings on in the Biden White House weren't headline news every single day.
I suppose "citizens" would have been better informed if Biden had called out the National Guard to take over a couple of cities, erected a few massive "detention centers," put a ketamine-fueled billionaire and his youthful acolytes in charge of, well, everything, demolished a few dozen government agencies, and on and on.
The information was all there It just wasn't nearly as unusual, for want of a better term.
"Under Trump, we’re given enormous amounts of information."
DeleteMixed in amongst the propaganda.
"Under Trump, we’re given enormous amounts of information."
DeleteMixed in amongst the propaganda.
what the President and Cabinet were doing on the citizens’ behalf.
DeleteThe president wasn't doing anything and the cabinet spent half a day kissing the president's corrupt fat ass.
What did we learn? I learned that Trump is the person most deserving of the Nobel peace prize in the history of humanity. Also, that his cabinet cannot truly express enough gratitude to be working for the best president and smartest human in the history of the universe. Very informative.
DeleteTrump Pulls From Dictator Playbook and Hangs Giant Banner of His Face
DeleteI also learned his fucking face is now adorning the Dept of Labor building. What the fuck have we become. Dic is a fucking fascist, but there cannot be that many of him.
Information helpfully provided by the White House:
Delete“Soros, and his group of psychopaths, have caused great damage to our Country! That includes his Crazy, West Coast friends,” Trump wrote.
Why couldn't Biden have been more like this?
Biden just wasn't as "grandiose" as Prince Orange Chickenshit, eh Dickhead in Cal?
DeleteThat one address by Brown is the only thing Somerby ever quotes, suggesting it is the only thing he has read by Brown. It was likely assigned in one of his Harvard classes. It is as if Somerby hasn’t read a book since college.
ReplyDeleteWhen a reporter has been assigned to write about the behavior of the cabinet members, blaming her for not focusing on Trump’s statements strike me as unfair. Trump’s own statements were described in other articles. They are the sources Somerby himself repeats as he lists Trump’s oddities. It isn’t as if Trump’s behavior was disappeared by the press. Rogers was assigned a slant. Somerby ignores that and treats her as if she decided to ignore Trump. Why does Somerby go out of his way to manufacture a nonexistent gap and then blame this hapless female reporter for it? Well, that’s what he does, and he thinks we’re all rubes.
ReplyDeleteAlso too, at this stage of billionaire media owners bowing to the orange dip shit under all his unconstitutional, illegal, and absurd threats; referring to the NYT' & Haberman as liberal is a bit outdated. (In actuality never true.)
DeleteToday Somerby is telling big fat lies himself. He says:
ReplyDelete“Long ago, Hans Christian Andersen sketched an anthropological lesson which is being enacted here:
We humans are often unable, or unwilling, to see our monarchs as they actually are. We refuse to see what's right before us. Instead, we "look over there."
Blue elites have fought, every step of the way, to avoid discussing what seems to be obvious about the sitting president.”
Somerby inseys the 2nd paragraph in italics, implying that it is a quote from Hand Christian Anderson, when he never said those words or anything like them. He didn’t generalize about humanity like that. He wrote a fable about the emperor’s new clothes. He didn’t draw cynical conclusions — those are Somerby’s clothed as a fraudulent quote of a revered and much cleverer storyteller than Somerby.
Of course, Trump is not a monarch. But it is wrong for Somerby to pretend Anderson said the words Somerby has been repeating here, when he didn’t and probably wouldn’t have agreed with Somerby.
It was the emperor’s clothes that his subjects agreed to see, in the Anderson story, not something about the emperor that the subjects were disappearing (refusing to see). Not the same thing.
DeleteBlue America is not refusing to see Trump for what he is. It is the reds pretending Trump is everything he claims to be. So why does Somerby blame blues, elite or otherwise? We are actively resisting Trump. We are not the ones Somerby should point a finger at.
The kid was delusional. The emperor actually was wearing a new suit.
DeleteIn Trumpistan we would fucking get 6 or 8 masked ICE goons to scoop that kid up and put him on a plane to Sudan or Uganda, and tell the rest of the fucking kingdom they can kiss Trump's big fat ass if they don't like it.
DeleteStop your nonsense.
ReplyDeleteAnother "trans" sicko murdered children this morning. Democrats celebrate and create this mental depravity.
ReplyDeleteGo shoot yourself in the head its so fucking bad for you. Don't forget to double tap weirdo, to make sure you are dead.
DeleteRelax.
DeleteThere are still millions of children the Republican Party can rape. You won't miss this one.
The shooter used a "gun" to commit mass murder. Republicans celebrate and create this mental depravity.
DeleteMore law enforcement is one reason why crime is down in DC
ReplyDeleteThe president’s enforcement operation began on Thursday, August 7, and since then, there have been a total of 1,094 arrests, a White House official shared with The Daily Wire. Two missing children have been rescued, and eight known gang members have been arrested, including MS-13 and Tren De Aragua gang members.
Authorities have also seized 115 firearms, the White House official shared, and cleared 49 homeless encampments through the help of multi-agency teams. The Metropolitan Police Department patrol units are working with city officials to find and clear more of these encampments.
https://www.dailywire.com/news/in-less-than-a-month-trumps-federal-d-c-force-makes-more-than-1k-arrests
David, you fucking fascist, why did Trump move a convicted child sex trafficker to a summer camp? Fuck you.
Delete"Authorities have also seized 115 firearms, the White House official shared..."
DeleteWell, if the Republican Party wasn't taking the guns from the citizens, there would have been no reason to accuse Obama and Biden of wanting to do it.
How many Right-wing accusations are really actually confessions?
All of them, Epstein.
"a White House official shared with The Daily Wire."
DeleteTranslation: we don't know how much, if any of this, is true. Or if true, attributable to the National Guard's presence. Just as we no longer know whether to trust Bureau of Labor Statistics data.
We're dealing with an administration of kleptocrats and pathological liars.
And with their enablers.
2:6,
DeleteMeh.
Call me when Trump gets to "the Jew problem".
1/6 released convicted felons have committed horrible crimes after pardoned by the crook in chief, you fucking fascist dunce.
DeleteThese fucking fascists in charge are already coming for our guns!!! What happened to our 2nd amendment??? I have the right to shoot up children in school dambit!!!!
DeleteOf course people like David in Cal, who don't care about government spending or our enormous deficit---the "no government can be too big" types---think Trump is doing a good job.
DeleteWhat did you expect?
Dickhead in Cal, can you tell us what hotel Prince Orange Chickenshit is putting all these homeless bums in? Whose authorized the money for that?
Delete"All over Blue America, tribunes have focused on the mountains of praise heaped on Trump by the Stepfords. They have ignored the much larger mountains of praise heaped on Trump by Trump himself as he told rambling, absurdly fact-challenged stories about his own inescapable greatness."
ReplyDeleteThe strange, self-aggrandizing behavior of Trump and the sycophant behavior of his cabinet are not separate phenomena. Trump assembled this collection of creatures and orchestrated the public show of praise to his own greatness. Their behavior is just an extension of his own odd behavior.
So I don't agree with Our Host that reporting on the obsequious fawning of Trump's cabinet is a "failure by Blue elites." Reporting on the cabinet's behavior is reporting on Trump.
Further, I'm not sure anyone could adequately describe the blatant bootlicking of the cabinet without opening oneself to accusations of being snarky That's a needle I'm glad I don't have the thread.
I will agree with Our Host that major media outlets' inability to honestly deal with Trump's weird and erratic behavior is a failure that will haunt this country for many years. Noticing that there's something wrong with the people surrounding Trump isn't part of that failure.
I agree that something is "wrong" about Trump - but probably not the same way TDH does. He wanted to be president - the most powerful office on the planet - and accomplished it twice. He succeeded. He could only succeed if millions of people voted for him. these voters apparently were ok with him being elected. Maybe a lot weren't crazy about him, but they thought the dems were worse. what is the "blue" media started focusing the way TDH want them to - apparently by writing even more than they already do about Trump, listing all the bizarre statements he makes, and citing expert shrinks to comment about how clinically off his skis mentally the President is? What would be the reaction? I don't know, and it will never happen until Trump maybe claims to be Napoleon and walk around naked. But Trump wanted to be President - and whatever he's done, as crazy as it may seem, he's the one who got elected. It worked.
ReplyDeleteWhat the hell is a "blue media"?
DeleteOne where they discuss the efficacy of investing in one's people?
AC/ MA,
DeleteIt was the economy.
LOL.
Nobody ever talked about "groceries" before until King Orange Chickenshit came along, right AC/MA? Dems are so stupid, we never work on populist ideas that make life better for the working man. I am the fucking Czar of all the Russia's.
Delete