Something Wicked Is Being Loosed in an Online World

By Jeffrey Blehar

Tuesday, September 02, 2025

 

The last year has, I confess, been quite the education. A miseducation, perhaps, for I have learned nothing good. I have become (more) cynical with the quality of political media coverage and discourse. My true “Dark Enlightenment” came from being tasked with writing constantly about matters such as Joe Biden’s public meltdown, the fantasy-vibed Kamala Harris 2024 campaign, the Trump renascence, and our current blitzkrieg administration — and seeing how various media outlets and figures comported themselves during this period. To say that the liberal mainstream media forfeited its credibility during this era is, at this point, almost a stale commonplace; the only question is whether that credibility will ever be regained. (My guess: Betteridge’s Law applies here.)

 

It wasn’t just the “mainstream” media, or progressive outlets, that I was paying attention to. The print-centered places and even cable are no longer where the “action” is when it comes to the most pronounced hackery — it’s on social media instead. Because with the age of the social-media influencer, and with hundreds of millions of dollars in dark money floating around behind the scenes, Twitter/X has now almost completed its metamorphosis into a mindless propaganda hive mind, whose trends are often driven by cliques of networked “influencers” working from pre-arranged talking points. Nothing feels entirely real anymore, including the topics that “trend” and/or we are jostled into writing about. (Sydney Sweeney was an organic media obsession, because even journalists love gabbing about buxom starlets; Cracker Barrel was not.)

 

It is the unceasing gush of it all that ages a man prematurely. You readers, perforce, have a different relationship to the news than I do. You are allowed to look away. I used to be able to as well! Now I cannot, and the relentless, seemingly accelerating onslaught of both news and “news” in the New Trump Era has required us all as commentators to refine a set of skills: the ability to determine what does and does not matter in our glutted media environment. There is so much noise out there in the political media world nowadays, and very little true signal. The real task is to stay connected to that signal, to what matters, and to keep transmitting it to you through the wire.

 

Something Wicked This Way Comes

 

Speaking of things I wish I were allowed to look away from, I did not want to write about the shooting in Minneapolis last week. I still don’t want to address the specifics in any way, if for no other reason than that I believe that the sorts of people who commit these acts dream of laments like that being written — the promise of infamy. Aside from that, the horror is also beyond my power to describe, and I’m not sure what value would come of such an exercise in any event. There is simultaneously everything to say about it, and little at all to add.

 

For example, there is less to say about the killer’s specific motivations than most think. I’ve seen the “manifesto video.” I’ve read the translations of the killer’s inarticulate, self-contradictory journals. They are the cruel visions of a madman, little more. There is no explanation to be found there, only the pathetically warped rationalizations and half-logic of the deranged.

 

I can really only offer this: The starting point here is mental illness. But the ending point is the online sump into which mental illness now collects itself, like a malarial pool, cross-fertilizing into ever more virulent strains of social disease. Our modern world is breeding nihilistic evil, even as it lets age-old demons loose. The killer’s (apparently semi-renounced) transgender identity is relevant, but only as a symptom of a much broader, and darker, underlying problem facing America.

 

Others are less philosophical about such things, however, and just couldn’t help themselves. So I’ll chime in only to point out what a malevolent ghoul the Democratic Party’s self-appointed national mascot Gavin Newsom has become in his pursuit of the spotlight. Newsom let it be known a week or so ago that he had actually hired a spicy young social-media whippersnapper to write and post his recent Twitter/X material. And I had to laugh, because it was a transparent attempt to disclaim personal responsibility for his account’s contents, disguised as “sharing the credit.”

 

Perhaps he was trying to get ahead of the game. Because last week, in response to White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt defending the value of prayer as a reaction to the atrocity, Gavin Newsom (or “Gavin Newsom”) felt compelled to respond on Twitter by mocking the idea of prayer itself as utterly worthless: “These children were literally praying as they got shot at.” (Left implied: “Fat lot of good it did them, or will do you.”)

 

I now understand why the staffer who purportedly writes Gavin’s tweets is paid for her work: She captures his “voice” with such eerie perfection. Because that right there is the true Gavin Newsom, his spirit in one rotten sentence. The callow glibness, the contemptuously dismissive tone, the clangingly materialist hollowness: Either Newsom wrote that tweet himself (and I suspect he did), or this lady deserves a raise for being an incredibly gifted impersonator.

 

Newsom, of course, is chasing controversy, and what disgusts me the most is that he may be onto something, however cynical his calculus. He has a sufficient left-wing base already prepared to back him on this specific case for the simple reason that it beats having a long and unpleasant discussion about the nexus between transgenderism and mental illness. And all the while, as this mindless political thrum carries on in the background, my thoughts instead turn to even darker quarters, those more indebted to W. B. Yeats than Gavin Newsom.

 

I fear we are on the verge of a great societal breakdown — one right out of the late Sixties and early Seventies — and we are not prepared for it. Something wicked this way comes. The atrocity in Minneapolis is but one articulated edge in a far larger fractal pattern of violence and madness creeping across our landscape. Once the progress was imperceptibly slow, but technology has proven to be the accelerant. The threat is pre-political, generational, and perhaps even civilizational. The worst are full of passionate intensity. Things are falling apart, crumbling at both the margins and the center of our societal self-conception.

 

What comes next? I suppose we’ll find out.