We Have To Stop #CrazyHerschel Right Now
It’s time to jump off the #CrazyHerschel bandwagon
I’d like you to make sure you’ve taken a close look at the image and the hashtag.
“Crazy Herschel.”
First, let’s deal with the surface issue: by all reliable accounts Herschel Walker lives with some quite serious mental health issues which have, in the reasonably recent past and in reasonably relevant ways or reflecting reasonably relevant potential concerns, given good cause to question whether he is fit for office.
This is a true statement. As someone living with mental illness which has in the past led to extremely problematic behavior and who would love a real shot at being elected to Congress, I think it’s morally obligatory for me to stand up and say yes, I absolutely agree this difficult discussion must be had.
It seems a near-certainty that Walker’s cognition is deeply impacted by a long career of traumatic brain injury likely leading to chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a degenerative brain diseased caused by repeated head injuries which cannot be diagnosed in a living patient. (This is the same disease that effected professional wrestler Chris Benoit, who in 2007 tragically murdered his wife and son before taking his own life during what proved to be a permanent psychotic break.)
The man is proposed to be a United States Senator. The conversation is absolutely not just reasonable but vital, and as someone living with mental illness I believe I have a moral obligation to say that before the right-wing spin machine starts trying to say that any question about this issue is unfair.
It is also, beyond question, morally obligatory for me to stand up and express my nearly indescribable outrage at this obnoxious, insulting, disgusting attempt at a hashtag campaign and the harm it’s actively inflicting on the mentally ill and on our political discourse.
The tweets pictured are only two among what is, as this article is being composed, a list of hundreds of progressive accounts growing too fast to keep up with which are promoting and circulating and propagating the #CrazyHerschel hashtag.
The most prominent of these accounts seem to be working as a unit and refer to themselves as “we” collectively (see screenshots below); there’s probably open knowledge of who’s actually running it all but it’s honestly not important enough to this article to track down. The only “real person” I can find among the core accounts that seem to be pushing this is “Chip Franklin,” and frankly have no idea who he is beyond having seen his twitter account in the past and for all my direct knowledge may or may not even be a real person or fictional character in some bit of culture I haven’t absorbed yet. Whoever it is be they one or many, they have a very serious problem.
These are absolutely accounts you, if you’re engaged in leftist politics, probably recognize, like “Brooklyn Dad Defiant” and “Tea Pain” and “Chip Franklin” and “MeidasTouch” and others. It appears to have started somewhere near here:
These are major left-wing and ostensibly progressive thought leaders who have chosen, instead of having a meaningful and substantive discussion of how to handle the very real possibility that the republicans are running a candidate whose mental illnesses preclude him from being competent to serve, to jump feet first and neck deep into wallowing in the perpetuation of stigma against the mentally ill and the wholesale silencing of our voices by sweeping every single one of us into the “crazy” bin.
It ensures that those of us with mental illness think five, ten, fifty times before we consider public service, and most of us for the sake of our very lives are pushed out of the possibility by the existence of this behavior. Because contained within the concept “You can’t vote for Herschel Walker because he’s ‘crazy’ and we should tell him that he’s ‘crazy’ and make a hashtag campaign out of his ‘craziness’,” unavoidably, is “people with mental illnesses aren’t fit for office.” They’re focusing on the mental illness rather than on the reasons why one person’s mental illness may disqualify him from office as a reflection of the particular nature of that specific person’s specific pathology or diagnoses.
It’s not about Herschel Walker, you see. It’s about crazy. You can’t validate one without the other, not with this infantile and thoughtless framing.
And that’s before we get into the hideousness of playing on racist “violent/angry black man” tropes based in fear, ignorance, and bigotry, under the aegis of a progressive political campaign.
This is part of our information diseases of disinformation, misinformation, and propaganda. This is malinformation, where factually accurate information is leveraged in service of a factually inaccurate or logically invalid proposition: Not that Herschel Walker shouldn’t be elected, bur rather that the mentally ill are, by virtue of being mentally ill, unfit for service.
Those who craft such messages will insist that’s not what they meant and I’m twisting their words around for my own agenda, to which I offer two thoughts: first, professional communicators understand their messages may be misunderstood, especially if they’re poorly constructed; second, it’s our responsibility to work and be aware and mindful so we avoid mistakes like this.
It’s understandable to me if one person behind one account with a few hundred thousand people make a mistake.
It’s not understandable, giving the actors credit for their ostensible values, that fully half a dozen of them missed it.
Half a dozen competent communication professionals wouldn’t have. Half a dozen progressives wouldn’t have let this idea leave the nest.
There is no difference between this execrable, obnoxious, bottom-feeding, trolling for rube dollars horse manure and Trump’s “Dementia Joe” routine, or for that matter his mocking of Serge Kovaleski, the reporter with arthrogryposis who Trump crudely mocked with spastic, hand-waving gestures.
There’s not a penny’s worth of difference in the narrative, and not a penny’s worth of difference in the character, merit, and honor of the people crafting and propagating that narrative. If there were, they wouldn’t have crafted it. QED.
No, Walker’s past offenses do not rationalize this narrative.
No, the fact that Walker’s mental health is a legitimate cause for concern relative to his campaign for public office doesn’t justify it.
The fact that the man may very well have legitimate and profound mental health issues in absolutely no way whatsoever justifies the stigmatizing of mental illness and the mentally ill as a tactic for criticizing him, and by framing this conversation in this glib, snide, bullying way that’s exactly what’s being done.
I’d like to say “we’re better than this,” but I don’t know that we are.
I know that I am.
This is the core of the problem your obedient correspondent finds here. It’s not simply that I relate and personally feel the direct negative impact this sort of vapid bovine excrement pretending to be a political statement inflicts.
The problem is no “progressive” or “leftist” or “liberal” person, as we use those words here in the US, would have ever considered this gallumphing technicolor vomit of a narrative in the first place.
The problem is, as it is once again my excruciatingly painful obligation to point out as a committed progressive leftist of integrity, that it’s not just the “republicans” and the “neofascists” and the “alt-right” who are behaving like ignorant othering bigots eager to punch down as hard as they can for easy social approval points from a malignant crowd of passive-aggressive brownshirts.
Nor are those “on the right” the only actors who find an eager and willing audience for such behavior among their core constituencies, and that is a very big problem for leftists and progressives of conscience and integrity in this country.
Already, as I write this article, defenders are coming out to criticize an earlier social media post and tell me how I should live my own reality, and what is valid for me to feel and perceive as a person with mental illness who feels very much ostracized and othered by the compassionate and tolerant left wing where my ideological home lies, ironically already storming the front to tear me down by way of proving that they’re not a mindless rabble ready to bark at anything that threatens their self-image.
The very people engaged in this kind of thoughtless behavior while pronouncing — and profiting mightly from — their progressive and leftist and liberal credentials to the heavens and beyond, and those who continue putting them over, are every bit of the reason people like me — and I should hope without indulging in egregious immodesty that it’s quite clear I’m not incompetent or incapable, but I am also mentally ill — are relegated to the ghetto boarding houses and homeless encampments, our voices permanently silenced by every imaginable barrier society can construct and impose. They’re not merely “as bad as” but unquestionably worse than so than the Republicans because nobody with half a brain is ever going to mistake the Republicans for allies of the impoverished and mentally ill.
If you’re qualified to even try to lead anything or anyone, you’re both intellectually capable of having this conversation without further stigmatizing mental illness and normalizing jeering and taunting the mentally ill for being mentally ill, and ethically capable of knowing better than to fail in the execution of that capability through deliberate refusal to even attempt it.
Shame on anyone who touches that hashtag or the narrative it represents for any reason but to tell those who do to go join the GOP where they belong, and shame on anyone who dares call themselves “progressive” or “leftist” or “anti-hate” and helps to propagate these types of lazy, corrosive narratives that serve no purpose but to further reinforce stigma against mental illness and the mentally ill in toto.
The icing on this moldy, ugly cake of course is that even setting aside the principled, progressive objection to these tactics, as a simple matter of political strategy it’s unspeakably stupid. Rather than working against Walker, which is supposed to be the political goal, these incompetent pseudo-intellectual bias pandering clickbaiters pretending to be activists and progressives are handing the Walker campaign a pre-fabricated narrative of leftist hypocrisy and attempts to oppress and exclude that they couldn’t dream of buying.
If the left is to represent any hope for progress in this country at all, we must stop embracing influencers and thought leaders whose influence and thoughts are manifestly, obviously, and directly counter to core principles of progressive ideology like inclusion and compassion.
John Henry is a long-time activist and expert in political communication. He makes his home in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and is the founder of “Musk For A Minute,” a fundraising initiative for innovative, evolutionary creators, and also of CUSTODE, dedicated to solving the crisis of information illiteracy. Funding for the creation of this article article comes from supporters of those organizations and JohnHenry.US.