TUESDAY, JULY 1, 2025
...came over the walls doing this: It must have been the summer heat—the not yet midsummer madness—which led us down this path.
This very morning, at 5 a.m., it was 86 degrees outside; the humidity was high. It must have been a recent attendant madness which led us to think that we could find a way to describe our nation's ongoing decline by searching amid various portraits of various previous arrivals.
Who or what arrived on the American scene when Candidate Trump came down the escalator in June 2015? By whom would Blue America be assailed in the years which followed that date—during the extended, aggressive arrival which continues along today?
We've long favored the Iliad as a portrait of the current fall. That portrait begins with The Rage of Achilles, along with the corresponding rage of Agamemnon himself.
From the earliest parts of that poem of war, Agamemnon, lord of men, is a highly erratic, rage-fueled commander of the Achaean troops—a man whose command stays on track thanks to the intercession of respected advisers like Nestor, the seasoned charioteer, and Odysseus, the wily tactician.
In that sense, Agamemnon is the first-term President Trump—a ruler subject to constant emotional breakdowns who is persistently saved from himself by the superior judgment of the lieutenants around him.
In this, the gentleman's second term, it has been widely noted that the Nestors are largely gone. The president's fury seems to have built over the course of these ten years, just as the Achaean fury had built during their ten-year siege of Troy.
(The fury has also built within the sitting's president's supporters, including those at the Fox News Channel. These corporate players have all sorts of legitimate complaints, but they seem to have little ability to regulate their anger.)
Here within our own failing nation, the rage has grown in these past ten years. In his lengthy introduction to Professor Fagles' 1990 translation of the Iliad, Professor Knox offers this portrait of the way the Achaean rage expressed itself when they suddenly came over Troy's towering walls—when, at long last, they arrived:
[T]he death of Hector seals the fate of Troy; it will fall to the Achaeans, to become the pattern for all time of the death of a city.
The images of that night assault—the blazing palaces, the blood running in the streets, old Priam butchered at the altar, Cassandra raped in the temple, Hector's baby son thrown from the battlements, his wife Andromache dragged off to slavery—all this, foreshadowed in the Iliad, will be stamped indelibly on the consciousness of the Greeks throughout their history, immortalized in lyric poetry, in tragedy, on temple pediments and painted vases, to reinforce the stern lesson of Homer's presentation of the war: that no civilization, no matter how rich, no matter how refined, can long survive once it loses the power to meet force with equal or superior force.
So it went in the aftermath of the Iliad.
In their vicious night assault, the Achaeans fought with the weapons of the Late Bronze Age. In our current situation, the fury of Red America's leadership cadres is expressed through the weapons of the Information Age—misinformation, disinformation, distraction, the flooding of the zone.
(Did we mention the fact that these furious players do have real complaints? This cadre does have real complaints, but in their fury, these players often seem to have little ability to regulate their emotions.)
What happened in that night assault hasn't quite happened here. On the other hand, even after the Minnesota murders on June xx, people like Watters, Failla and Gowdy keep attacking CNN's Natasha Bertrand in the most irresponsible and fact-challenged ways.
Watters, Failla and Gowdy oh my! The basic background is this:
A few days after the June 21 attack on Iran, Bertrand filed an accurate report about a preliminary damage assessment from within the DIA. Please note:
Stating the obvious, this damage assessment didn't come from CNN's Bertrand herself. The assessment which she reported had come from within the intelligence agency of the U.S. Defense Department.
That said, the DIA report had differed from the instant assessment which had been offered by this nation's impetuous president. For that reason, players at the Fox News Channel had to go on the attack.
Let's give a measure of credit to the silly child Jesse Watters! In his ridiculous presentation on the June 25 The Five, he didn't state the name of the reporter in question.
Elsewhere, the assaults have shown less restraint. This past weekend, D-list comedian Jimmy Failla and former congressman Trey Gowdy went go after Bertrand by name in a pair of inanely fact-challenged Fox News Channel attacks.
The victims in Minnesota were being memorialized even as Failla and Gowdy came over the walls in that remarkably dangerous manner. First though, here was the silly child Watters, on last Wednesday's edition of The Five, teed up by the former VJ who now performs as "Kennedy."
Here's what these (useful) idiots said:
KENNEDY (6/25/25): So Jesse, it almost seems like CNN and the New York Times are using this leaked report, whatever it is, to cheer triumphantly that perhaps the bunker buster bomber strike wasn’t quite as effective as the administration is claiming.
What do you make of that? And will the president get credit if he did, in fact, dismantle Iran’s nuclear program?
WATTERS: [Silly initial patter]
Now, the woman is the same reporter who said the laptop was Russian, and now she says our bombs don’t work. You’d think she would have been fired for getting hoodwinked by the deep state couple of years ago, but she actually got promoted. She got promoted for being wrong! She got a raise for being wrong!
Now she’s on CNN getting hoodwinked all over again, because that’s the point. She’s not there to be right. She’s just there to hurt Donald Trump.
[...]
The Israeli intelligence team, Petraeus, Rubio, the CIA, the IAEA. Everybody says, "Direct hit, years to come back from it." And then there’s CNN, alone in the corner in last place, spewing enemy propaganda. I don’t think they can come back from it.
KENNEDY: Do you think they’re getting it from some sort of nefarious Iranian sources and it’s wishful thinking?
WATTERS: A hater in the Pentagon leaked an early report that had no confidence and just relied on some camera up in the sky. That’s it...
For Alex Griffing's report at Mediaite, you can just click here.
Kennedy seemed to have no idea where the damage assessment had come from. Presumably, she was playing dumb, a task these stars are paid to perform.
Kennedy was casting herself as clueless with respect to the leaked assessment. In his response, the silliest child said that CNN had been "spewing enemy propaganda" in the report by the hoodwinked woman who was "just there to hurt Donald Trump."
According to Watters, CNN had been "spewing enemy propaganda" by issuing an accurate reports about an initial assessment from within the Defense Department's intelligence agency. But then, this is the way the garbage flows on this nation's most-watched "news channel."
In that exchange, Kenndy was playing the fool, as was the silly Watters. In truth, Watters' on-air comic persona is a highly sophisticated blend of the sacred and the profane—is part of the ongoing use of comedy stylings on the Fox News Channel to help make the propaganda go down.
According to Watters, CNN had been spewing the views of the enemy! As for the unnamed woman herself, she had somehow said "that our bombs don't work."
That was stupidity beyond the reach of the stupid. Such porridge is dished on this channel all day and all night, with the finer people at the New York Times and the Washington Post—but also at CNN and MSNBC—agreeing that this conduct must never be reported or discussed.
This manufactured stupidity is part of the warfare of the Information Age. So was the conduct of the president—the conduct which Kennedy and Watters were working to reinforce.
On the previous day, the furious president had repeatedly referred to CNN as "scum." Early on that same June 25, he had attacked Bertrand by name, saying that she should b fired by CNN—should be "thrown out like a dog."
(So raged Agamemnon, long ago. So rages this man today.)
The players on the set of The Five were working to help that conduct along. Minnesota had happened just one week before, but they took no warning from that murderous conduct. Instead, they told some crackpot somewhere that the CNN reporter in question has been spewing enemy propaganda in her latest attempt to hurt Trump.
How stupid does it get on this corporate "cable news" channel? The silly boy Watters inanely said that Bernard had said that our bombs don't work! He also claimed that she'd once said that "the laptop was Russian."
That claim was breathtakingly bogus too. In fact, fifty major intelligence figures had signed a letter describing that as a possibly. She had simply reported what those public figures had said.
Yes, it actually does get that stupid on this corporate messaging service. Four nights later, here was a certain D-list comedian spreading this (dangerous) messaging to whoever might be unbalanced enough to decide to act upon it:
FAILLA (6/28/25): Long story short, CNN quoted anonymous sources to cast doubt on the attacks. And they did it using a reporter named Natasha Bertrand, who is actually the one responsible for starting the false claim that Hunter Biden's laptop was Russian disinformation, OK?
Like all reporters, Natasha would like to win a Pulitzer Prize one day, but (insert stupid commentary here about former President Biden falling off his bike).
It doesn't get dumber than that—and it doesn.t get more irresponsible.
Two weeks after Minnesota, the flyweight Failla was spreading the hate to the next potential assassin. Astoundingly, former Rep. Gowdy did the same thing the following night, savaging Bertrand by name while employing the helpful term, "aiding and abetting."
You can watch his presentation here. We return to the arrival which occurred when the rage-filled Achaeans were finally able to come over the walls at Troy.
The Achaeans expressed their fury through the tools of Bronze Age war. Today, people like "Kennedy," Watters, Failla and Gowdy express the fury of the past ten years through these more modern means.
In the immediate aftermath of the murders in Minnesota, they were willing to go on TV and behave in such dangerous ways as these. Meanwhile their own Agamemnon was crying "scum" and asking that the reporter in question be "thrown out like a dog."
Our view? The rage and the fury are the are the same emotions portrayed from the Iliad's first verses forward. In fairness, today's players have perfectly valid complaints about various aspects of Blue America's conduct. But even at this dangerous time, their ability to regulate their fury barely seems to exist.
We've long been drawn to Professor Knox's portrait of that "night assault"—of that ancient arrival. It starts to give us a way to understand the arrival which is now sweeping Blue America to the side.
Then again, there's the arrival which was recalled last Friday night by this new PBS program:
S39 Ep 5
Hannah Arendt: Facing Tyranny
Discover Hannah Arendt, one of the most fearless political thinkers of the 20th century, who transformed her time as a political prisoner and refugee during World War II into daring insights about totalitarianism which continue to resonate today.
So reads the synopsis from the American Masters program itself. The program discussed a catastrophic arrival which took place in the Germany of the 1930s.
Should American Masters have done such a thing? Tomorrow, we'll show you what the program said.
Tomorrow: To be perfectly clear, President Trump has never done anything like that
