When my wife first started reading the story on her phone to me, I was not prepared to believe what she was saying. A surfer dude from Santa Barbara in California had killed his two children - the elder was two years old, and the little one was ten months old - with a spearfishing gun because his wife possessed serpent DNA and had passed it on to their children. (For stories, click here and here and here.)
The surfer-dude-perp, who at age forty was old enough to know better, had apparently worked all this out by assiduous study of QAnon. He told the FBI that, by murdering his children, he was saving the world.
For a while I've been watching the tide go out on America's latest tsunami of crazy, and I thought I had a good grasp of the creatures left flipping and gasping on the wet sand.
Ron DeSantis. Greg Abbott. Florida. Texas. Arguments that are internally inconsistent, and of course also decoupled from external reality. A seeming wish to visit death and devastating disease on their own followers. Jonestown, anyone?
And how does moving the Covid death toll from 600,000 to 700,000 gain you the keys to the White House?
But spearfishing your own children was something new to me.
I wasn't going to write about it. I've actually been trying to write less about these matters. It's getting harder and harder to summon humor. But in the end I felt a need to mark the event.
See also The 800-Pound Gorilla in the Oval Office, And So the Worm Turned.
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