By Roger L Simon
I’m not sure social media was so great in the first place, so giving it the Trumpian stamp of greatness AGAIN may be a bit of a reach.
Nevertheless, like it or not, it’s become a fixture in our lives, and it behooves us to take some control over it.
Yet, particularly of late, I find myself getting extremely depressed when logging onto X. I feel as if I am walking into the cuckoo’s nest, and I’m Jack Nicholson.
Yes, I’m aware I shouldn’t log on, just say no, as Nancy Reagan once told us. But part of my job is to stay abreast of what’s happening, and X, again for good or ill, is ground zero.
But to do that, I am confronted with endless screeds, pro and con, concerning the latest opinions of what many of us, including me, would call certifiable lunatics.
By that I mean—it should be no surprise— Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Candace Owens, and Nick Fuentes.
Yes, their antisemitism appalls me, but just about everything they say appalls me. None of it tracks with reality, or even makes an effort to. They’re nuts.
So I decided today I would turn them off, block them, to the extent I can, from all my social media, starting with X.
Does this mean I am restricting their free speech? In a sense, yes. But in reality, no. These people do nothing but speak. Oh, how they speak! I just don’t want them to speak to me. In that sense, I guess you could say I am exercising my freedom of hearing.
I am also clearing my brain. Their lunacy is dangerous. It’s communicable. Trying to argue with them, which I have done to a small extent, only drags you down to their level, which is not that far from the Ninth Ring of Dante’s Inferno, where the poet consigned the worst of the worst, including traitors.
And if you do argue with them, all of a sudden, you’re actually telling Megyn Kelly, “The Israeli government never paid me $7000 for my opinions! Where’d you get that idea?” as if it weren’t absurd in the first place.
In his latest mindboggling proclamation, Tucker informs us that Chabad—a peaceful branch of Hasidic Judaism that, for years, has led the way in drug rehab for Jews and non-Jews—is the instigator of the Iran War. As the Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello wrote, “Right You Are If You Think You Are.”
Unfortunately, I will not be able to escape Tucker et al entirely. They will be talked about and talked about. But I will do my best.
One method is to spend more time reading actual books. A second is Substacks. There’s no question they are far better and more informative than most social media or media in general.
Slowly, I am beginning to put my money down as a paid subscriber for some that have caught my eye. There will be more. I’m still ruminating on whether to charge here, but for now, it will remain free. Nevertheless, you would honor me by preordering or eventually ordering my new book here.
Now I am going to X to block those people. I’ll let you know to what extent I think I’ve made social media great again (MSMGA).
Maybe you’ll want to follow suit. You do know you’ll be doing the very thing they most fear—ignoring them.
LAST THING
Putting up the One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest knock-off above, courtesy of ChatGPT, got to me in a surprising way. As someone who loved movies, even wrote a few, I realized the moment they died, became boring and irrelevant, basically coincides with when Jack disappeared from the screen. Boy, do we miss him. They say he’s okay, which is good.
LAST, LAST THING
Speaking of Substacks, of particular interest now, for obvious reasons, is “Iran So Far Away,” one of whose principal writers is my old friend Banasheh Zand (Persian, obviously). Banafsheh has a new post up — The Minab School Strike: Tehran’s Information War”—highly worth reading.
First published in American Refugees
