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Morning Joe Host Identifies Problem With Men Today: Too Many Video Games, Not Enough Dying In War

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Vivian Kane
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Published: Aug 7, 2017 06:03 pm

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Over the last few months, MSNBC’s Morning Joe hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski have become central figures in the acrimonious war between Trump and the media. Just today, Scarborough said that the words coming out of Kellyanne Conway’s mouth are “so stupid that they make my teeth hurt.” Brzezinski identifies as a Democrat, while Scarborough is a former GOP representative, although he recently declared he was leaving the Republican Party and registering as an Independent.

But as Joe proved today on Twitter, you can take the Republican out of the Party, but you can’t take the misinformed, backwards ideology out of the Republican.

Here’s how it started:

Okay, compared to where we’re going, this tweet seems pretty banal. But that “article” he links to there is complete horseshit. The entire thing is just a letter to an author from a 23-year-old man. He starts off by talking about how he sees his peers displaying a “strong tendency to identify as in some way preferring isolation from other people.” And you know what? That may be true. Of course, I wouldn’t take this one young American Conservative reader’s anecdotal observation as any sort of actual proof. But if (if) young people are socially isolated, that problem is not unique to this generation. At least, not if you look at actual studies, like this one from the AARP that finds 1/3 of people over 45 are categorized as lonely.

Even more insulting, though, is Scarborough’s claim that “it is often younger women who suffer the most” from men’s “smartphone culture.” Because what this guy’s letter goes on to discuss is his relationship with porn. Now, he doesn’t watch porn, but he says that when he was in college, he would go to church-based men-only discussion groups, and all the other guys there did. This disturbed him because young women that he knows and “deeply respects” have crushes on these guys. But the porn must be damaging their brains, right? And the girls will go out with them and get emotionally attached before they reveal their “addiction.” As much as he wanted to swoop in and save these women, “because of the confidentiality involved, I couldn’t warn these girls off from dating these guys, and I couldn’t bear to think about the indignity these women would be subjected to in dating these men.”

First, guy, clutching your pearls and wanting to SAVE ALL THE WOMEN from the evil sexual men does not make you a good or nice guy. Second, stop diagnosing the mental states of people around you. Third, what are the porn-watching habits of the women who, according to Joe, “suffer the most” from pornography and “smartphone culture”? Oh right, you don’t know because all your evidence comes from a couple of gender-divided church meetings.

It’s bad enough for an outlet to publish this drivel but for Scarborough to then propagate it on Twitter is disgusting.

But wait! It gets worse. How are we to save young men from this “degradation into cocoons of social media, mental illness, porn, and disconnection from other people?” (Yes, that is a real quote from the letter.) Send them to war, of course!

Yes, a middle aged man who never served in the military, and who works in television and has nearly 40,000 tweets to his name, thinks the problem with young men today is that they’re playing video games instead of fighting Nazis.

Plenty of people were quick to point out the ignorance of the comparison between going to war and playing video games, as if they’re mutually exclusive.

https://twitter.com/CheekyAmriki/status/894560656162258944

https://twitter.com/Carter_PE/status/894546991719624708?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&ref_url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.thewrap.com%2Fjoe-scarborough%2F

Also, is he really saying he would prefer it if we were to institute the draft and send young people off to war in huge numbers?

https://twitter.com/ryanlcooper/status/894563167338196993?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&ref_url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.thewrap.com%2Fjoe-scarborough%2F

https://twitter.com/Atrios/status/894558640836943872

He insists that’s not what he was saying. As if he can pine for those good ol’ days when men built character by going to war while simultaneously ignoring the negative realities of war.

If your argument is more complicated than “things would be better if we had war instead of video games,” then Twitter maybe isn’t the place to state it. And if it’s not more complicated than that, well, you deserve the dragging.

https://twitter.com/KFILE/status/894567916624125952

https://twitter.com/viv_kane/status/894658649250906112

After fighting with his followers for a while, Scarborough decided he was going to follow his own advice and get some sun. (Does he think that’s the same as war?)

Which he did for 12 whole minutes, which is how long it took for him to get back on Twitter.

(image: Fox)

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Author
Image of Vivian Kane
Vivian Kane
Vivian Kane (she/her) is the Senior News Editor at The Mary Sue, where she's been writing about politics and entertainment (and all the ways in which the two overlap) since the dark days of late 2016. Born in San Francisco and radicalized in Los Angeles, she now lives in Kansas City, Missouri, where she gets to put her MFA to use covering the local theatre scene. She is the co-owner of The Pitch, Kansas City’s alt news and culture magazine, alongside her husband, Brock Wilbur, with whom she also shares many cats.
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