NORMAL AND NOT: This morning, we saw Blue America die!

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, 2025

It happened on Morning Joe: We apologize for briefly returning to a certain famous text. But in Book VI of the Iliad, Hector, the noble Trojan prince, gives voice to a chilling prophecy.

He's speaking to his sister, Cassandra. According to Greek mythology, it was she who was "fated by [Apollo] to utter true prophecies but never to be believed."

This time, it was her brother, Hector, who spoke:

"The day will come when sacred Troy must die."

So the noble Prince Hector said.

This morning, we ourselves had the misfortune of seeing, with something resembling a startling clarity, that our own sacred Blue America seems to be fated to die. We saw it as watched the first hour of Morning Joe, and then as we gaped at fifteen more minutes after that.

Several ironies obtain. One irony would be this:

On average, the smartest discussions in all of American cable news take place during Morning Joe's first hour. More specifically, we refer to the discussions of world affairs which routinely take place at that time.

Typically, those discussion involve Richard Haass, former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Washington Post's deeply experienced David Ignatius. 

Back in February, Admiral Stavridis "shifted his flag," leaving NBC for CNN, where he now serves as senior military analyst. Despite his unfortunate absence from Morning Joe, the program's serious conversations continue.

They're easily the smartest conversations in daily cable news. The existence of these serious discussions has created one of the several sick pleasures available to the "cable news" watcher—the chance to see a never-ending assortment of flyweights, stumblebums, dumbbells and stooges over at the Fox News Channel as they batter the Morning Joe program around for its alleged major dumbness.

Frequently, the D-minus students support their claims through the use of videotape clips which have been edited down past the point of recognition.  We've often groaned at such ludicrous conduct. 

This morning, we saw the worm turn.

We refer to the way the Morning Joe gang ignored the elephant in the room—the news event which was being  discussed when we briefly flipped over to Fox & Friends at 6:06 a.m. It's had to be dumber than the Fox & Friends show, but Morning Joe accomplished that feat today by an enormous margin.

The regular friends were on duty today. One extremely dumb thing was said as we  watched—but Ainsley quickly stepped in to correct the groaner. 

Let's say the three friends' names:

Fox & Friends: September 10, 2025
Lawrence Jones: co-host, Fox & Friends
Ainsley Earhardt: co-host, Fox & Friends
Brian Kilmeade: co-host, Fox & Friends

Steve Doocy has been dispatched, apparently for being too soft. But when we flipped over, the friends were discussing the remarkable news event which the New York Times was reporting at length in today's print editions:

A Fatal Stabbing on a Train in Charlotte Ignites a Firestorm on the Right

The video, captured by a security camera in Charlotte, N.C., shows a 23-year-old woman named Iryna Zarutska sitting on a light-rail train one night in late August, dressed in the uniform of the pizza parlor where she worked.

She is looking at her phone when suddenly, a man sitting behind her stands up, gripping a knife in his raised right hand. Moments later, the police say, he stabbed and killed Ms. Zarutska, a Ukrainian refugee, in what appeared to be a random and unprovoked attack.

The police arrested Decarlos Brown Jr. soon after and charged him with first-degree murder. But the brutal killing did not capture widespread attention until the security footage was released on Friday, at which point it became an accelerant for conservative arguments about crime, race and the perceived failings of big-city justice systems and mainstream news outlets in the Trump era.

That's the way the news report starts. It didn't appear on the Times front page. Instead, it was a lengthy report inside the paper's National section—but if you were watching Morning Joe, none of this has ever occurred.

Full disclosure! The Times is already being criticized for the framework it dropped on these events. The criticism starts with that headline. For ourselves, we can't say that the criticisms are totally wrong. 

In our view, the report in the Times had clearly gone off the rails right here, in just the fourth paragraph of the lengthy report:

The outrage over the Charlotte killing is a part of a pattern in which President Trump and his allies highlight horrific crimes to bolster their case that the country is plagued by “American carnage,” as Mr. Trump put it in his first inaugural address, despite statistics that show crime is dropping. In Charlotte, overall crime was down by 8 percent in the first half of this year compared with the same period last year, according to the police, while violent crime was down by 25 percent.

We Blues! We instantly run to that "crime was down by 8 percent" framework. In other words, our instinctive reaction is this:

It was even worse last year!

That's our tribe's scripted reaction! Except on the Morning Joe show, where they talked and talked, then talked and talked, about everything except this event.

They talked about the Red Sox and Yankees—did so two separate times. Starting at 6:27, they burned a full seven minutes away with an inane discussion, full of convivial tribal laughter, about Mika's inane appearance on Andy Cohen's inane podcast.

(That foolishness involved an inane discussion about a pointless practical joke performed by Howard Stern.)

They kept burning time in such ways. We viewers even got to learn what Mike Barnicle thinks about Pedro Martinez!

Starting at 6:56, four additional minutes were burned away in an inane discussion about the way Siri's performance has allegedly flagged of late. Then it was on to the first excerpts from Kamala Harris' forthcoming book—a perfectly serious news topic, except on a morning when the program was working extremely hard to avert its gaze from the elephant in the room.

In fairness,  let's be fair:

The program had started with one of those serious discussions. After a few minutes of Red Sox chatter, the discussion concerned yesterday's attack inside Doha by the Israeli air force.

That discussion continued until 6:17. At that point, the serious discussion continued, switching over to this startling new topic:

Poland Says It Shot Down Russian Drones That Entered Its Airspace

Those serious discussions continued until 6:24 a.m. At that point, Mika teased a discussion concerning Howard Lutnick—but after a commercial break, the gang burned a bunch of time away, chuckling and laughing about that nonsense involving Howard Sterm.

The gang was really enjoying itself by this time. On this campus, we thought we were seeing the ongoing process by which our tribunes in Blue America have been working to let our sacred nation die.

As that New York Times report continues, so does that possible impulse. It should be noted, at this point, that President Trump has already said this about the murder in Charlotte:

‘Stop This Madness’: Trump Calls For ‘Vicious’ Law And Order After Charlotte Train Murder

President Donald Trump on Tuesday called for law and order to counteract the “senseless crime” infecting Democrat-run cities like Charlotte, North Carolina, where the president said liberal policies allowed a “deranged monster” to recently slaughter Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska aboard a train.

“We cannot allow a depraved criminal element of violent repeat offenders to continue spreading destruction and death throughout our country,” Trump said. “We have to respond with force and strength. We have to be vicious, just like they are. It’s the only thing they understand.”

And so on from there. 

We have to be vicious, just like [the criminals] are? That strikes us as very unwise.

That strikes us as an example of a possible disorder—one we Blues have agreed to ignore. On Morning Joe, the reaction was to pretend that none of this has even occurred.

As for the New York Times, its lengthy report about this killing was full of information. That said, the report also slipped away to this familiar framing—to this familiar plea for Blue America's death:

The idea that mainstream news outlets downplay crimes committed by Black people has become more of a talking point in some conservative circles in recent years. The critique has emerged even as liberal critics of the news media have argued that crime coverage by American news outlets is distorted by anti-Black bias.

In North Carolina, as in other Southern states, newspapers in the Jim Crow era often egregiously exaggerated stories about Black criminality. Among other things, such stories served as a precursor to a white supremacist uprising in Wilmington, N.C., in 1898, in which at least 60 Black men were killed.

Sad. Our Blue elites insist on talking about what the deplorables did in 1898. We can't seem to quit this self-defeating practice, which seems to emerge from a desire to signal our own (non-existent) Blue American moral greatness.

We simply can't stop doing these things! Through these behaviors, we continue to light the way to Blue America's possible death.

This morning, the three friends had it right! A million very serious questions are raised by that murder in North Carolina. Could the talk about the Red Sox wait? How about all the joking around about Siri, and also about Howard Stern?

On Joe, they preferred to laugh about Stern. This was an insult to the American public interest. In our view, it displayed an instinct for the impending death of our own sacred Troy.

Some Blues will be inclined to insist that what we're saying is wrong. We'll then want to turn back to the birthday book. In fairness, that's an actual serious topic, until we Blues beat it to death.

Sadly, the impulse to fiddle while sacred Troy burns is the most normal thing in the world. In 1990, Professor Knox described the lesson Greek citizens drew from the Iliad:

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.

After ten years, the Trojans succumbed to the weapons of Bronze Age war. The final line of the Fagles translation is this:

Such was the burial of Hector, breaker of horses.

Eventually, the more civilized Trojans succumbed to the weapons of Bronze Age war. We Blues seem to be looking for ways to lose an Information Age war, in which the weapons are vastly different.

Mika had a lot of laughs with Andy Cohen. So they said today, on Morning Joe, as our sacred Troy burned!

Final point:

It's no longer 1898. We need to stop hiding behind that.

Tomorrow: Whatever's next