In a 14-minute video rant that would have done Mao proud, ex-MSNBC anchor Keith Olbermann called President Trump a “terrorist” who should be “expunged” and insisted that Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett and others be “prosecuted … and removed from our society.”
Olbermann, rendering his comments Thursday on his personal YouTube channel, opened with the assertion that Trump should be charged with being an “unindicted co-conspirator” in the recently foiled plot to kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer (D-Mich.). Since then, we’ve learned that one of the ringleaders, Brandon Caserta, is an anti-police anarchist who called Trump and tyrant and who, in typical leftist style, does not like the Constitution.
In fact, the Independent Sentinel reported Friday that the “men arrested are Antifa-loving anarchists,” though I can’t confirm that all 13 plotters are of that bent.
But “bent,” mentally and morally, certainly describes Olbermann. Hillary Clinton might have in 2016 called half of Trump’s supporters “deplorables” (not actually a noun, but okay), but Olbermann apparently has gone beyond that.
At the end of his video, titled “The Worst Person in the World,” the commentator accused Trump of unleashing “terrorists” and made the case that the “fight” only begins November 3. “So, let us brace ourselves,” he said. “The task is twofold.”
“The terrorist Trump must be defeated, must be destroyed, must be devoured at the ballot box,” Olbermann continued, “and then he and his enablers and his supporters and his collaborators and the Mike Lees and the William Barrs and the Sean Hannitys and the Mike Pences and the Rudy Giulianis and the Kyle Rittenhouses and the Amy Coney Barretts must be prosecuted and convicted and removed from our society while we try and rebuild it and to rebuild the world Trump has nearly destroyed by turning it over to a virus” (video below).
Olbermann’s prosecution list should give pause. First, what has Barrett done that would warrant prosecution in any place but China or North Korea? Olbermann didn’t explain. Perhaps spending your life as a God-fearing judge and mother with seven children, including two adoptees saved from grinding Haitian poverty, is a crime in Keith’s world.
Even more significantly, it’s not just that pluralizing names (“Sean Hannitys”) indicates you’re targeting not just individuals, but groups; it’s also that Olbermann mentioned prosecuting Trump’s “supporters.” So who, aside from “woke” parroters of leftist talking points, would escape the commentator’s guillotine? (Full 14-minute video of his tirade below.)
But Olbermann is not unusual. BLM sympathizer Michelle Taylor wrote in an August 27 tweet that when seeking to achieve leftist ends, “Violence is the only way, of course.” A January Project Veritas video showed Senator Bernie Sanders staffer Kyle Jurek talking about how he wanted to kill political opponents, and former CNN host Reza Aslan essentially said in a 2019 tweet that all Trump supporters should be “eradicated.”
These are just a few examples. But they explain why renowned history professor Victor Davis Hanson warned in a September interview that leftists, upon gaining enough power, are “gonna’ want to hunt out and eradicate their opponents.” “That’s what cultural revolutions always do,” he explained. “They’ll do it again.”
As for the Olbermann “unindicted co-conspirator” business, let’s follow his logic. With more than 550 violent leftist demonstrations since May 26 — involving riots, looting, arson, assault, and even murder — how many co-conspirators are there? After all, Nancy Pelosi told college graduates in 2014 to “be disruptors,” Representative Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) urged supporters in 2018 to publicly confront Trump officials, Kamala Harris said in June that the protests “should not” stop, Representative Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) encouraged “unrest in the streets” in an August interview, and leftists from Reza Aslan to an author to a screenwriter to a professor to a state commissioner have advocated burning the system down to stop Judge Barrett’s confirmation.
So since the “pen is mightier than the sword” (words are powerful), how guilty are these rabble-rousers? What should be their punishment for destabilizing our nation?
The reality is this: While Olbermann’s unhinged nature speaks for itself, he’s not all wrong — in implied principle. Insofar as any person facilitates evil in any way, he’s complicit in it. This is why philosopher Joseph de Maistre noted, “Every country has the government it deserves.”
For a concrete example, because of the mistakes of commission (e.g., errant voting) and omission (failure to robustly oppose error) of tens of millions of Americans, tens of millions of other Americans have been killed in the womb. Should the former be tried for murder or, at least, negligent manslaughter?
The Bible informs that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God”; and insofar as we sin, we make the world a worse place. Thus does Christianity teach that we all deserve damnation. But it also teaches something else:
We don’t have to suffer such because God is merciful.
These realities should inform and temper our judgments of others. Justice does matter — but it must be balanced with mercy.
Yet we should also note the reason we increasingly see harsh judgments today, with no small number of “Americans” seeking, roughly speaking, one half of the country’s demise:
We’re no longer one people.
There was a time in America when, as family psychologist John Rosemond once put it, people’s values were “explicitly the same.” But today, it’s not just that you say “potayto” and I say “potahto.” Rather, we’re divided over fundamental issues, from faith to family to marriage to sexuality to sex (as in male and female) to what our nation should be and what freedoms we should enjoy. If the United States were a marriage, a split would have occurred long ago.
Olbermann’s rant, in other words, is exactly what you’d expect from a godless, relativistic person when the incompatible share borders and masks begin to drop. The only saving grace is that now, at least, you should know exactly what to expect if voters empower the Left.
