WTF, NPR?

Here’s a little cartoon that nicely summarizes my attitude towards all those people who voted for Trump.

Get the fuck out of my life. Don’t ask me for anything, not even sympathy. Don’t try to tell me it was nothing personal, you just wanted lower grocery prices (I have news for you — you won’t be getting them), that I’m bad for letting politics interfere with friendship. It’s you that stabbed me and all my friends and a few million innocents with your politics.

That goes for NPR, too. They have a story about a couple in which the wife leapt down the MAGA rabbithole.

Late one night in June 2020, Katrina Vaillancourt lay awake in her bedroom, overwhelmed by the stress of the COVID-19 pandemic. Unable to sleep, she pressed play on an online video series that a friend had sent.

The videos’ narrator promised to reveal “evidence of an elite plan so evil, so all encompassing, that people will be shocked to the core.”

The dizzying 10-part video series was called Fall of the Cabal. It promoted the QAnon conspiracy theory that society is controlled by a satanic cabal that is abusing children. Vaillancourt would later think back on this moment as the point at which her beliefs radically changed overnight, rupturing her closest relationships — including the one with her then-fiancé, Stephen Ghiglieri, who was asleep beside her.

This is a horror story. It couldn’t be worse if instead, she had a debilitating stroke. This was a devastating, near instantaneous transformation that would have warranted an emergency trip to the hospital. NPR treats it as a mundane change of opinion, though.

As Vaillancourt watched, her initial skepticism gave way to a feeling of devastation. She was relieved when the final episodes claimed a group of government insiders was working on a plan to take down the cabal with then-President Donald Trump’s help. The narrator called the president a “genius, a 5-D chess player, a man with a huge heart.” A “golden age” was on the way.

“I felt nauseated by the sight or the sound of Trump prior to this particular night,” Vaillancourt said. But at a time when the world felt chaotic and uncertain, the message in the series gave her hope. “My fear dissolved,” she recalled. “I felt this beaming of love” and “like the curtain had been thrown wide open.”

Dear god. Was she poisoned? Was she always this gullible and delusional? Don’t worry, though, she got “better”.

Vaillancourt voted for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. even though he had dropped out of the race. Trump has picked him to be part of his administration, which she says has given her a reason to feel optimistic.

“I have been of an opinion that’s different than Stephen’s [her husband],” she said. “And that’s a difficult thing for me to even say right here. I don’t share the fear that so many people around me do. That’s difficult to acknowledge too.”

This lunatic woman and her husband have reconciled…and NPR treats this as a happy ending. See, they just have different opinions — she may have voted for a manic anti-vaxxer, she may see a wanna-be dictator who wants to deport millions and deny health care to women, but love will find a way and she will face no consequences from her insane views.

She sounds like the kind of person who loves NPR.