If there is a great soldier in the journalistic strife in which this country has been engaged all year, that person is Kurt Eichenwald of Newsweek. Eichenwald was on Fox News last night, and he engaged in a combative interview with Fox host Tucker Carlson on the topic of whether Donald Trump had been hospitalized for mental illness in 1990. The interview apparently so inflamed a Trump supporter, one "jew goldstein" of Twitter, that “jew” tweeted a GIF to Eichenwald with the words, "You deserve a seizure." And it triggered one for Eichenwald, an epilepsy sufferer.
The "interview." if you missed it, was vintage Fox News, with Carlson consistently interrupting Eichenwald with talk over and ad hominem attacks, "How can Newsweek employ you as a reporter?" This was in response to Eichenwald having the gall to paint a factual background picture of his reporting of Trump, to wit,
"I've been covering Donald Trump since the 1980's. In the late '80's I obtained medical records[...] In 1982 he was given a heavy prescription for an amphetamine derivative. [I heard] that he was getting restless, impulsive, that he wasn't sleeping, with these great variations of grandeur that he could do anything and in 1990 his whole empire was going into bankruptcy." (Carlson sputtered and shouted at this point -- more talk over -- Eichenwald began again) "In 1990 I was told that there had been a breakdown...I didn't print it and I thought that Donald Trump was a private individual and it didn't matter. (More talkover.)
At two points in the interview Eichenwald held up a thick white binder with large blue letters reading, "Tucker Carlson Falsehoods," which Eichenwald offered to send a copy of to Carlson, with the invitation that Carlson put it on the Fox News website.
The interview degenerated and I urge you to listen to the entire piece at the link above. Carlson, looking and sounding like a nasty high school boy sassing off to the principal, snidely inferred sinister motives to Eichenwald and Eichenwald said evenly, "If you don't like the answer don't have guests."
After the interview, apparently, "a deplorable" tweeted Eichenwald with the GIF in question triggering the attack. This afternoon Eichenwald tweeted:
“Last night, for the second time, a deplorable aware I have epilepsy tweeted a strobe at me with the message "you deserve a seizure' on it......it worked. This is not going to happen again. My wife is terrified. I am...disgusted. All I will be tweeting for the next few days are...[copies of the litgation documents.]
Eichenwald filed a police report this afternoon and is resting. "jew goldstein's" Twitter account has been suspended and Eichenwald is putting together his case with his lawyers. Eichenwald is no stranger to violence or threatened violence. Trump supporters have threatened his children and this is the exact same attack mounted against Eichenwald as was done in the past. In early October a Trumpite attempted to induce a seizure with a Pepe The Frog GIF. This is what Eichenwald said about that in an October 7th piece in Newsweek:
“Shortly after I wrote an article for Newsweek about how Donald Trump’s business interests could undermine national security should he be elected president, one of his supporters assaulted me. He used the internet to do it. [...] when Fox News blowhard and college dropout Sean Hannity practically drooled in delight this election season as he falsely proclaimed that Hillary Clinton suffered from seizures based on her acting goofy in a short video clip, it infuriated me. I knew how his message would be heard—people with seizures look ridiculous, they should be afraid of others laughing at them, they should listen to the voices telling them they can’t do what they want (even be president). And so I raged at Hannity in the pages of Newsweek, on cable television news shows and on Twitter
A couple of weeks later, after my article about how Trump’s business interests would create a conflict of unprecedented proportions, I received a tweet from someone with the twitter handle “Mike's Deplorable AF.” Like many Trump supporters, he has chosen to identify himself as deplorable to mock the label once used by Clinton to describe the racists, neo-Nazis, homophobes and like who have crawled out of the sewer to cheer for the Republican nominee. Mike, however, is indeed deplorable. [...] Mike made mention of my seizures and included a small video. It contained images of Pepe the Frog, a cartoon character that has been identified by the Anti-Defamation League as a hate symbol. I was carrying my iPad, looking at the still image on the video and, without thinking, touched the PLAY button.
The video was some sort of strobe light, with flashing circles and images of Pepe flying toward the screen. It’s what’s called epileptogenic—something that triggers seizures. Fortunately, since I was standing, I simply dropped my iPad to the ground the second I realized what Mike had done. It landed face down on the bathroom floor.”
Unfortunately, I know exactly what Kurt Eichenwald went through, because I suffered two grand mal seizures once in a 36 hour period as a result of an involuntary detox from a benzodiazine. I was malpracticed on both occasions because I had no health insurance and was deemed therefore worthless and expendable, even though I was a gainfully employed tax paying citizen. On the second run to the ER I almost lost my life from the seizure and suffered the classic near death experience that you read about, floating weightless through the tunnel of white light and all. So my heart fully goes out to Kurt Eichenwald, with empathy and filial concern.
It is beyond deplorable that anybody would lash out at a reporter like the Trumpites have lashed out at Kurt Eichenwald, literally trying to destroy the man. Inducing a grand mal seizure is not something that responsible people choose as a viable tool to express their disagreement with something that someone has said or written. Not in a civilized society, where divergent opinion in the free marketplace of ideas is the order of the day.
Post 11/09 we no longer live in a civilized society, that much is made manifestly clear by the headlines of each and every day. There are literally two countries now, the United States of America and the Trump States of America and I am not talking about Democratic and Republican. I am talking about civility vs. barbarism, about decency vs. degeneracy. The bottom feeders of Trump supporters defy description.