Is is right for The Daily Show's Jordan Kepler to interview idiots at Trump rallies?By Hal Brown
I caught a rerun of Morning Joe from a few days ago when Joe and Mika interviewed comedian Jordan Kepler. Kepler has been following Trump around the country for years interviewing people attending his rallies.
In this segment of Morning Joe he interviews people like those shown below:
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Jordan Klepper crashes Trump's recent 'intimate event' in South Carolina, speaking with MAGA fans who think the former president is still the current president. |
Some do dress normally:
You can do a web search for Jordan Kepler YouTube and find "best of compilations" like the following:
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| Click above to view (aprox. 25 minutes) |
He interviews people who think Trump is still president, that he controls the military, and who don't know what happened of Jan. 6th. Some of those who know what happened on Jan. 6th think Nancy Pelosi planned it to blame it on the Republicans.
They think JFK Jr. is still alive having faked his death, one of the QAnon conspiracies, and he plans to expose people called globalists.
Kepler admits he seeks out people at these event s like those wearing outfits like those shown above because he doesn't have time to interview numerous random people. He told Joe and Mika that "most of the people he interviews you can tell (their views) by the capes that they wear." He doesn't claim that they represent a statistical sample of the beliefs and opinions of most Trump supports at the rallies.
Kepler is very good at eliciting what's behind these people's outrageous opinions by engaging them with empathy. He listens and repeats what they have to say as if he takes them seriously. He manages to get them to, by any objective measure, make utter .fools of themselves.
This makes me wonder whether these people know that their appearances will be cringeworthy for those like us. It isn't really the kind of comedy we see on Saturday Night Live, for example, where actors mimic various Republicans. In fact, I am not sure we can call what Kepler does so masterfully as comedy.
What I think would be helpful is having the people interviewed sit down with someone, perhaps a psychologist, and be shown the clips of themselves as used on the show. I'd like to know how they react to seeing themselves as objects of mockery. Do they "get it" or not?
A retired psychotherapist friend said after I talked to her about this that she doesn't like shaming and humiliating people who don't even realize they are so stupid. She said she finds it painful. She said it isn't their fault that they are so stupid and ignorant.
I wonder if any of these people, for example, watched the video above and looked at YouTube comments like these:
I am a psychotherapist who during the 40 some years before I retired I diagnosed and treated countless people. I am curious about how I, or another mental health professional, would diagnose these Trump supporters, and other adherents of QAnon.
Do some of them suffer from easily treatable delusional psychotic disorders? If they do it is a shame they don't receive the help that would help them.
I am sure there is a mixture of psychopathologies manifest in these MAGA cultists, and included among these people are psychologically normal people who just have very low IQ's.
Rob Liston