Radical Kooks

When political violence occurs, sorting out the crazy from the politics can be difficult.

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David DePape. (Photo by Michael Short/San Francisco Chronicle/ Getty Images.)

Gerald Ford was the least objectionable kind of politician, and they tried to kill him—twice that we know of. 

Ford, the moderate Republican who did his best to try to quiet things down after Watergate (please let us give up the idolatrous pretense that a president can “heal the nation” or should try to) is mainly remembered for pardoning Richard Nixon and then losing in a kind of public sacrifice to the grim and sanctimonious Jimmy Carter. As in the case of Sarah Palin, the public figure himself has been supplanted in the American consciousness by a Saturday Night Live parody. (No, Palin never said, “I can see Russia from my house,” that was Tina Fey—and Ford, possibly the finest athlete ever to serve as president, was far from Chevy Chase’s klutzy caricature.*) Of course, the median 1970s Midwestern Republican politician looks like Cincinnatus compared to what the Trump-era GOP puts forward. 

The two attempted assassinations of Gerald Ford came only 17 days apart, and both would-be assassins were women. Perhaps we should for that reason consider September of 1975 the apex of American feminism, a fortnight and change in which American women finally proved that they had it in them to be as insane and violent as American men.

The first attempt happened on September 5, 1975, when Squeaky Fromme (given name Lynette), a senior lieutenant in the Charles Manson cult, decided to kill President Ford in retribution for his perceived failure to act on environmental issues. Happily, Squeaky was a well-heeled suburban child of privilege who didn’t know how a semiautomatic handgun works, and so she put a magazine into the .45-caliber M1911 pistol she procured for the assassination but did not rack the slide to chamber a round. “Can you believe it? It didn’t go off!” she said after the failed attempt. 

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  1. Avatar photo
    Ben Connelly

    Good piece. You can’t map political allegiances directly onto the actions of psychotic and deranged assassins or would-be assassins. That isn’t a defense of MAGA or of any political group for that matter. But acknowledging reality shouldn’t be seen as excusing Trumpism.

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  2. Avatar photo
    Ed P

    National politics is very much analogous to our personal psychological struggles, resolving conflicts within our own mind vs resolving conflict as a national society. Unhealthy politics and unhealthy personalities are fundamentally related. We project non dominant parts of our psyche on our political opponents on the other side of the aisle. If one is crazy enough, literally willing to try to kill parts of their own psyche, they might be willing to try to kill opposing politicians.

    I see how the 60-70s, the manipulations of the Soviets were most effective on our left wing - as they were ideologically closer. Today we have Russia former soviets with the same secret services. pushing far harder on their ideologically aligned right wing. But the massive difference is the power of the internet to divide and the usefulness of Donald Trump and interested modern media to exact polarization and resentments difficult to resolve. The elected mainstream Republican party most fundamental position today is that it is more important to let Trump and Republicans off the hook for the power grabs than it is to punish them for it. Or at least, that is what they have demonstrated with their actions, by conscious choice or not.

    As as such today’s Republican party is mentally ill and dangerous and must not be supported. The threat to our freedoms now is so much worse than it was then.

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    1. Avatar photo
      Ben Connelly

      I wonder if the Russian secret service is also in bed with Opus Dei and the Freemasons and the Mafia…

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      1. Avatar photo
        Ed P

        Such conspiracy theory nonsense in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, eh?
        https://phys.org/news/2021-09-left-wing-authoritarians-key-psychological-traits.html

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        1. Libertyforallusa2

          Yes. That was a kook article, based on research by a grad student. You didn't link to the actual journal, you linked to a website that discussed the article...with no relevant data or methodology.

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          1. Avatar photo
            Ed P

            If you were a scientist, you might realize the first author on most pieces of published research is usually a graduate student (in collaboration with their dissertation advisor, who oversees the larger research campaign). You also might know how to track back the source paper (which is linked there btw lol)

            Or maybe you can find another reason to give yourself license to deny considering my rational arguments.

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        2. Avatar photo
          Ben Connelly

          Exactly…

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          1. Avatar photo
            Ed P

            Your suggestion that I am acting as a left wing authoritarian is exactly the co-opted nonsense of Republicans or cynical nonsense if Russian propagandist. It is the heart of their propoganda arguments. As js the opposite, that right wingers are all authoritarian because they are responsible for all the unfairnesses of the natural world, including racism and the male’s physical dominance. They are both irrational arguments but can be psychologically appealing.

            I am merely stating a reasoned opinion I think would help resolve our conflicts. I do so earnestly in attempt to resolve the conflict.


            What I see as attempts to obvious stymie rational conversation raise red flags to me after all this experience

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          2. Avatar photo
            Ed P

            Exactly what? Exactly what I wrote in the comments above the one you discarded as psychological mumbo-jumbo?

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      2. Avatar photo
        Ed P

        I apologize that reasoned psychoanalysis seems a crazed conspiracy to you. Perhaps consider that is a function of your own psychological lack of awareness

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        1. Avatar photo
          Ben Connelly

          If “lack of psychological awareness” means “doesn’t subscribe to Freudian psychologizing” then I accept that description.

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          1. Avatar photo
            Ed P

            Fascinating Ben.

            Do you have a rational basis for this discussion or are you just trolling with the Ruskies?

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  3. Jonnyd7606

    Kevin, get Charlie to come over here so I can cancel my NR subscription.

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  4. Avatar photo
    Cpipkin

    "To Elsie," by William Carlos Williams

    The pure products of America
    go crazy--
    mountain folk from Kentucky
    or the ribbed north end of
    Jersey
    with its isolate lakes and

    valleys, its deaf-mutes, thieves
    old names
    and promiscuity between

    devil-may-care men who have taken
    to railroading
    out of sheer lust of adventure--

    and young slatterns, bathed
    in filth
    from Monday to Saturday

    to be tricked out that night
    with gauds
    from imaginations which have no

    peasant traditions to give them
    character
    but flutter and flaunt

    sheer rags succumbing without
    emotion
    save numbed terror

    under some hedge of choke-cherry
    or viburnum--
    which they cannot express--

    Unless it be that marriage
    perhaps
    with a dash of Indian blood

    will throw up a girl so desolate
    so hemmed round
    with disease or murder

    that she'll be rescued by an
    agent--
    reared by the state and

    sent out at fifteen to work in
    some hard-pressed
    house in the suburbs--

    some doctor's family, some Elsie
    voluptuous water
    expressing with broken

    brain the truth about us--
    her great
    ungainly hips and flopping breasts

    addressed to cheap
    jewelry
    and rich young men with fine eyes

    as if the earth under our feet
    were
    an excrement of some sky

    and we degraded prisoners
    destined
    to hunger until we eat filth

    while the imagination strains
    after deer
    going by fields of goldenrod in

    the stifling heat of September
    somehow
    it seems to destroy us

    It is only in isolate flecks that
    something
    is given off

    No one
    to witness
    and adjust, no one to drive the car

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  5. Mary Stine

    Whenever people want to bend my ear about how crazy some group of foreigners are, I like to point out that the good ole USA does a fine job of producing crazy people. We don't have any real competition.
    As someone who ran a retail business for years, I can attest that at least 10% of us are borderline "crazy" . (yes, I know that is not a professional term, bear with me) . Some of my crazier clients were actually funny and entertaining in their looniness. Others, especially the ones claiming to have a gun with them, were a lot scarier.
    What united them all was their absolute belief in their own rightness. I learned fairly early on that arguing with truly crazy out-there types is useless. Often, they'll argue with themselves! Let 'em ramble on while nodding and smiling.

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  6. Avatar photo
    Bel

    If a yogi finds themselves busting into the Capitol they have lost the thread, abandoning a number of yogic guidelines, most obviously discernment and nonviolence. Compassion, equanimity, acceptance...

    They are doing the yoga wrong. Similar to how some MAGA evangelicals are doing the evangelical-ing wrong.

    Yoga is a kook magnet, to be sure, usually of the crystal healing/wellness quackery/astrology varieties. I guess the existence of MAGA Yogis demonstrates how slippery magical thinking is, but it's a weird combination.

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  7. Brook

    Agree there are crazies on both sides, and, yes, it has been going on for a long time.
    Agree it is impossible to draw a direct link between irresponsible rhetoric by politicians and talk show hosts and a crazy’s violence.
    But, I do strongly believe BOTH sides need to tone down the rhetoric. And, I am damn sure we do not need our ex-president falsely yelling “steal” and deliberately agitating his base. He knows what some small percentage are capable doing.
    PLEASE, AMERICA, ELECT GROWN UPS!

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    1. Robert j terranova

      Well said.

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    2. Dlnevins

      Random kooks committing political violence have always been around, and are a problem. Organized movements threatening political violence, and especially elected officials giving political violence a wink and a nod, are the much more serious problem.

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  8. Pohl

    Horoscopes. Nice touch. There’s a LOT of low-grade and medium-grade crazy out there.

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  9. Neelfoster

    The Democrats continually state or allude to the actions of Republicans that “ threaten democracy”. Why not write a column or post an observation that the laws, regulations, executive orders, et al, that clearly are illegal and unconstitutional and have been declared to be so by the judicial system are truly a threat to democracy. When a party continues to negate the law and does so willingly, that truly undermines democracy.

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  10. Campyman99

    Good one, Kevin.
    Kooks are everywhere - almost like sleeper cells waiting for the secret call to action, some combination of words that trigger them to finally plan and execute their imagined mission. Putting them on an ideological spectrum is somewhat comforting because it then assumes that they have some sort of world view that predicated the terrible acts so all you need to do to stop the acts is to tamp down on that political talk. On the other hand I do think there are actual terrorist organizations that are acting rationally in respect their deluded world view - so if you were a member of The Order, you thought that the FBI was a tool of the Zionist Occupational Government, and thereby evil and must be met with armed response. Terrorists have all kinds of kooky theories that prop up their doomsday scenarios but it sort of works as a world view that can be examined and tracked, and hopefully infiltrated and brought down by good police work.
    I do think that kooks will be happy to adopt any sort of left or right wing ideology that is willing to tolerate them just to have the attention. I wonder if this guy would have been fine 30 yrs ago just tuning in to Coast to Coast With Art Bell to validate his kookiness.
    (Edit to add a thought I just had). I would like to nominate Oliver Stone as the prime example of a kook. He's a very successful and talented writer and director that had a home for his kooky theories in Hollywood for a long time. Now that he's outside that system he's glommed onto Venezuela and Russia. I am able to divine an underlying world view though - I think he just hates America - so maybe he doesn't fit my definition of kook? Maybe it needs a little more work.

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    1. Avatar photo
      Dave the Liberty Barfly

      Coast to Coast with Art Bell was awesome! Must-listen if you were in a car late at night.

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