Source: Bigstock

Actor Michael Landon, born Oygenglayben Schmuelowitz (memo to self: Confirm that before press time), was the handsome star of Bonanza and Little House on the Prairie (I just lost every millennial reader).

Landon’s mother was severely schizophrenic, and his father was emotionally ill-equipped to handle it. Landon’s childhood was marred by traumatizing incidents. One in particular stands out as especially harrowing. When Landon was barely a preteen, the family went to the beach for a picnic. Landon’s mother had a manic episode, declaring that she was going to kill herself by walking into the sea.

As Landon’s dad and sister egged her on, the mom waded into the waves. Michael, who couldn’t swim, tried to pull her out, but she fought him.

In a panic, he socked her on the jaw, knocking her out cold. He dragged her to the shore.

Fifteen minutes later the mom, dad, and sister were laughing and eating lunch, as though nothing had occurred. And young Michael was sitting there, in disbelief. “Isn’t anybody gonna acknowledge what just happened? Am I the only one who even remembers it?”

Everyone else was content to live with the crazy. That was their way of coping.

But Michael couldn’t. He couldn’t act like the abnormal was normal.

Let’s shift a bit, but hopefully you’ll see where the Landon story fits in.

Remember “Laserman”? You know, Laserman! From last year.

I wrote about him (twice).

Dr. Robert Malone, the physician/biochemist who claims to have invented mRNA vaccines, did a week of appearances on Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson promoting his thesis that the “deep state” has used “mass formation psychosis” to “hypnotize” the general population so that they have “laser focus” that the state can exploit.

At the time, I argued that the converse was true. The “deep state” is best-served by dulling the focus of the population. Focus means you see something, examine it, remember it. That’s what the state doesn’t want you to do. Don’t see crime. Don’t see who’s doing the crime. Don’t notice Soros DAs. Don’t remember the abuses of Covid lockdowns. Don’t remember the science of biological sex. Don’t notice inflation. Don’t worry about who’s coming in through the open border.

“Hey, didn’t a black man park in front of a suburban house and slaughter a white father and daughter just for the sake of it? I wonder whatever happened to….oh look, a squirrel!”

“Hey, didn’t a red-state jury just declare that it’s permissible for a black man to kill a white while robbing him, if the white tries to fight back? That seems kinda…oooooh, ICE CREAM TRUCK!”

It was January 2022 when Malone made the rounds acting like some bozo philosopher (and seriously, when I see an MD trying to be a philosopher, my response is the same as if it were an actor or singer: Shut the fuck up and do the thing you’re supposedly good at). That entire week, every rightist in America was squawking like a parrot, “Mass formation psychosis, BRAAACK! Mass formation psychosis, BRAAACK! Mass formation psychosis explains our world. BRAAAAAACK!”

So lemme ask you a question.

When’s the last time you thought about “mass formation psychosis”?

Be honest.

Isn’t the fact that you likely haven’t thought of it in a year proof that Malone was wrong?

“Laser focus”? You forgot his “groundbreaking theory” the very next night when Tucker talked about UFOs.

Malone wasn’t just wrong; he was the opposite of right. That’s an important distinction. Saying “Peter Dinklage went to Swarthmore” is wrong; he attended Bennington. Saying “Peter Dinklage is freakishly tall” isn’t just wrong; it’s the opposite of the truth. The government doesn’t want you focused but unfocused. No government wants a “laser focused” populace. Leftists especially want you unfocused. They’re the ones bringing degradation. Demographic degradation (unchecked immigration), standard-of-living degradation (police defunding, decarceration, “progressive prosecution,” the end of single-family zoning), racial degradation (a de facto antiwhite apartheid), gender degradation (the erasure of biological women).

The rot spreads easier if people don’t focus on it.

There’s no mystery why the left wants you unfocused. The mystery is, why do so many rightists want it too?

I opened with the Landon story for a reason. For any normal person, the events at the beach would be significant; you’d have nightmares for months. That the rest of Michael’s family saw the same things he did and went on with their day as if nothing happened showed that they’d succumbed to the mom’s mental illness. The barrage of insanity they lived with had detached them from reality, to the extent that they didn’t notice bizarre anymore. The beach incident made no more of an impression on them than the last drink of water you took made on you.

Last year, when Trump ass-licker Darren Beattie criticized me for being mean to poor ol’ Tucker Carlson, he was like, “Why Dave always pickin’ on Tuck?”

The reason I don’t fanboy people like Carlson, Rogan, Alex Jones, and Rain (Elephant) Man Ron Unz is that their kitchen-sink cavalcade of plots, plans, and conspiracies only serves to detach rightists from reality.

Remember last month when Carlson proclaimed that the nationwide FAA grounding was caused by hackers ransoming our air traffic systems? His only “proof” was that the price of Bitcoin shot up that week.

“Almost all ransoms like this are paid in Bitcoin. So if the U.S. government was buying huge amounts of Bitcoin in order to pay a ransom, Bitcoin prices would surge, of course. So the question is, has that happened? Well yes, it has happened.”

Bullshit. As my best friend and day-one Bitcoin trader Nima Mahdjour (one of the few guys on earth I consider smarter than myself) told me, “If that was the case then that kind of event in isolation would likely rather exert downward pressure because the hackers will try to cash out a portion of the proceeds which are usually sizable and can cause short term disruption because the market hadn’t factored in the supply until the hack; this is what usually happens when a big exchange gets hacked” (visit Nima’s podcast; it’s worth your while).

But Tuck made that unproven assertion, rightists squawked about it for a week (“FAA ransom, BRAAAAACK!”), and then everyone forgot about it.

Ditto last year when Tuck claimed that Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan was part of a calculated plot to destroy America. In fact, there was a perfectly ordinary reason for the trip: Pelosi, her many faults aside, has always been an anti-China hawk. Sensing imminent retirement after the midterms, she wanted one more trip as speaker to show her support for the Taiwanese.

But just as with “mass formation psychosis” and the FAA “hacking,” the “Taiwan plot” was the subject of rightist squawking for about a week, then everyone moved on to Tucker’s next manic episode.

Which was his “CIA killed Kennedy” bombshell. And his proof? An anonymous source told him. Next manic episode? Seymour Hersh—new hero of the right—claimed the U.S. blew up the Nord Stream pipeline. And his proof? An anonymous source told him. Then last week, The Federalist and Newsmax went viral with a piece (targeting leftist journalists) about how “anonymous sources” means a news story’s a lie.

So the same people saying “The CIA killed JFK; we know because anonymous sources don’t lie! The U.S. blew up Nord Stream; we know because anonymous sources don’t lie!” are also saying “Never trust anonymous sources; they lie!”

And Hersh, who claims Russia wouldn’t sabotage its own pipeline because governments never harm themselves, is a 9/11 truther who once suggested that the U.S. did 9/11 to harm itself.

In the same week, rightists were saying “Anonymous sources rock! It’s how we know the CIA killed Kennedy and the U.S. blew up Nord Stream,” and “Anonymous sources must never be trusted; people who rely on them are lying.”

That’s reality detachment. A splintered mind. Those who encourage this pathology do more harm to the right than any leftist could.

Remember, it was Steve “I stole your money and you still love me, you gullible tards” Bannon who proclaimed back in 2018, “The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”

His solution to leftist media bias was to flood you with “shit.”

Bombard you with contradictions. Mystify the easily explicable. “False flags happen! False flags never happen! Trust anonymous sources! Never trust anonymous sources! Hey, look, a squirrel!”

A few weeks ago Donald Trump accused Ron DeSantis of being a pedophile. That should’ve been an earthquake, because it can mean only one of two things: DeSantis is a pedo, and the right should rise up against him, or Trump lied about DeSantis being a pedo, and the right should rise up against him.

There’s no “third way.” Unless you’ve grown accustomed to living with bifurcated alternate realities. Schizophrenia. Split mind. DeSantis is a pedo, but not a pedo. Trump’s a liar, but not a liar.

“Mom nearly drowned herself and got socked on the jaw but hey let’s have a picnic boy these deviled eggs are great hey why’s mom’s jaw bleeding wow deviled eggs rule!”

Bannon’s scheme, to flood the rightist media with shit, is the logical extension of Andrew Breitbart’s foul legacy: “Fight their lies with your own.”

All that does is detach you from reality. “Flooding the zone with shit” doesn’t make the left crazier; the left’s crazy enough already. It only ungrounds the right, at a time when the GOP’s best hope is to stay grounded.

Republicans lost independents in the midterms because blue-collar meat-and-potatoes white voters, looking for a better option than Democrats, found in the MAGA GOP a worse option: “Killer robot voting machines stole the 2020 election! Paul Pelosi had a gay relationship with a transient! Moloch is eating your children!”

This is gonna get much worse as Trump ramps up his all-out assault on reality as the primaries kick into gear.

Families dealing with a schizophrenic member often descend into a state of shared madness because they’re resigned to their fate. Mom’s schizo. Can’t kill her, can’t institutionalize her, and the meds don’t work.

Might as well just roll with it.

I know this. For two years I cared for my elderly mom as she was dying from aggressive Alzheimer’s. And the only way I kept my sanity as she lost hers was that I knew her condition was fatal: If I held on, kept her happy, sheltered her from trauma by absorbing it myself, I knew it wouldn’t go on forever.

But Bannon’s “flood the zone with shit” has no expiration date.

It could go on forever.

It’s up to you to decide if you want to be resigned to that fate. If you’ll surrender your sanity because you’ve lost faith that sanity matters.

You can hold to reality, or you can give yourself over to fantasy.

I’ve said my piece; I hope you make the right choice.