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:
Our smartphone culture impacts young men in the most profound way. It is often younger women who suffer the most. https://t.co/cagBUD9rUE
— Joe Scarborough (@JoeNBC) August 7, 2017
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!
Young men in the 1940s liberated Europe from Nazism and the Pacific from the Japanese Empire. Today, too many stay home playing video games. https://t.co/e7FTe0O20P
— Joe Scarborough (@JoeNBC) August 7, 2017
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?
love when these National Greatness conservatives pine for the old days when millions of young people got killed https://t.co/P2R8fB3nSW
— ryan cooper (@ryanlcooper) August 7, 2017
I actually prefer to live in a world where the young can play games rather than die in wars. But that's just me. https://t.co/bbNIOREB5s
— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) August 7, 2017
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.
Actually, go on my Twitter mentions and you will be flooded with dumber, hotter takes suggesting I want millions to die in warfare. https://t.co/nF6Oe04iCQ
— Joe Scarborough (@JoeNBC) August 7, 2017
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
Middle-aged man who never fought in or enlisted in the military wishing that young men might have the chance to be killed in battle. https://t.co/cH1wdPBALD
— corey robin (@CoreyRobin) August 7, 2017
I don't know where @JoeNBC has been. Plenty of young men are still out there fighting Nazis. https://t.co/bL1C45LR5i
— Vivian Kane (@viv_kane) August 7, 2017
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?)
The stupidity of these responses suggest an ignorance of current trends and the need to get out in the sun…which I am going to do now.😀 https://t.co/ohluLxirwS
— Joe Scarborough (@JoeNBC) August 7, 2017
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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