A former president of the United States was just shot. A man was killed protecting his family in the hail of gunfire. For most people, this is cause for reflection, perhaps even prayer. However, for the Twitch streamer and liberal darling Steven Bonnell, better known as Destiny, this is hilarious.

For those not afflicted with the curse of being extremely online, the significance of this may be hard to understand because they almost certainly have no idea who Destiny is.

“A random online liberal personality is crazy? Perish the thought,” I can hear the responses coming.

Unfortunately, while understandable (and funny), such a response is misguided. For those who do experience politics primarily through the online sphere, Destiny has been a major force for years. He has been a thorn in the side of conservative political commentators (as well as an occasional signal-booster, ironically) for years. He has hosted debates with everyone from Ivy-educated Leftist academics to online conservative luminaries such as the Canadian commentator Lauren Southern and Daily Wire co-founder Ben Shapiro. As recently as 2020, Wired issued a flattering profile calling Destiny an antidote to “extremism” (read: conservatism). What made him so successful, by their telling, is that he knew how to speak the language of edgy online communities and was able to cut through the “bulls**t” by simply outlasting his opponents’ talking points. There was a time when it would not have been a stretch to imagine him becoming the sort of contrarian liberal champion that, say, Jon Stewart was during the Bush administration. In fact, like Stewart, he has even dabbled in the occasional break from the progressive catechism, engaging in such heresies as defending Kyle Rittenhouse, supporting capitalism, or taking the side of Israel in the Israel-Hamas conflict. In recent years, he has been seen increasingly as a reasonable centrist.

Not anymore. Because after the assassination attempt. Destiny’s cultivated mask of reasonable, debate-bro centrism slipped, and the bitter #Resistance liberal underneath was loose again, and ravening for delight. In the space of 24 hours, he laughed at the death of Corey Comperatore, describing him as “a person in a crowd cheering for and supporting a traitor to this country.”

He then doubled down on his disdain for Comperatore, retweeting one of the dead man’s tweets with the caption, “This is the f**king retard that got killed at the Trump rally? F**KING LMAOOOO.”

He later added, “I’m sure Corey [Comperatore] and [Ashli] Babbit are both having fun with each other in hell right now.”

He responded to a distraught fan with a friend whose mother had been splattered with Comperatore’s blood at the rally, “Tell your friend and his mom to get f**ked.”

He added, on X, “I want to profusely apologize to any Trump supporters in my audience that I’ve mislead into thinking I view them as anything beyond the unpatriotic, treacherous, anti-American scum that they are. Doing my best to rectify that ASAP.”

As if that weren’t enough, he also tweeted, “For every MAGA that was giggling along with my edgy Palestinian tweets, I hope you realize that every single Palestinian civilian that gets bombed and killed in Gaza is worth 100x more respect than any loser who gets wasted at a Trump rally. Don’t be selective with your laughs now!”

Unsurprisingly, Elon Musk has since decided his posts violate the rules of X.

I hardly need to say this, but this is not a serious person or a good person. This is a bigot, pure and simple, which is doubly ironic when you consider that Destiny has debated bigots on his stream. He should know better. But he doesn’t. He just hates Trump and his supporters that much. And what’s more, he thinks he has good reason.

Now, while the vitriol I’ve quoted above obviously lacks anything even approaching an argument, it would be unfair to treat that as the entirety of Destiny’s statements on the subject. In a (somehow) even more humiliating Twitter Spaces event on Sunday, Destiny – when you could penetrate the thicket of obscenity, childishness, and sadism that marked most of his speech – did advance an argument. That argument is roughly as follows:

1. Donald Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election by offering fraudulent slates of electors and trying to rely on the Eastman memo.

2. Trump aided and abetted the January 6 rioters, and should be in prison, not to mention ineligible to run for president, because of these facts.

3. He isn’t, because the Supreme Court made him ”a king” by granting him immunity for his presidential acts and keeping him on the ballot, in spite of what the Constitution (allegedly) says.

4. Trump and his supporters are, therefore, traitors: they are aiding and abetting the end of democracy (and of America) and if they die, no one should shed a tear anymore than they would for, say, Confederate soldiers.

In an uncharacteristic show of honesty, he even elaborated on this on X in what is (somehow) a defense of the assassination attempt: “Remember, when you make a man your King, you’re telling society there’s only one way to hold him accountable. Conservatives have no one to blame but themselves for that. Can he be impeached and convicted in the senate (sic)? No, he’s out of office. Can his criminal friends be held accountable? No, he pardoned every single one of them. Can he be kicked off the ballot for violating constitutional requirements for being president? No, the Supreme Court decided they didn’t like that rule anymore. Can he be criminally charged? No, he has absolute immunity. What do you expect?”

Now, bizarrely, I have to start by congratulating Destiny on the courage of his convictions. Unlike the other weasels who run around saying Trump is a threat to democracy, and then expressing their disingenuous sorrow at an attempted assassination and at the death of one of his supporters, Destiny doesn’t bother. He takes the logically consistent, if politically suicidal line: Trump is a threat to democracy. A traitor. Therefore, supporting him is to become an accessory to the end of democracy. Therefore, no one who believes in democracy should mourn for Trump or his supporters when they are gunned down. They should, in fact, view it as a source of relief.

If we were talking about, say, Adolf Hitler or Josef Stalin or Mao Tse Tung – all actual enemies of democracy -- not one of these ideas would be controversial. If we were talking about Alger Hiss or the Rosenbergs or the Duquesne spy ring – all actual traitors – most conservatives would say the same thing Destiny is now, and rightly so. However, we’re not talking about a Hitler figure, or even a Hiss figure. We’re talking about the leading candidate for the presidency of the United States, Donald Trump. So, knowing that, we have to ask whether any part of Destiny’s argument holds up.

Oh, who are we kidding? Of course it doesn’t. So let’s take it point by point.

Firstly, one has to reckon with the irony that Destiny is claiming that the reason Trump and his supporters implicitly deserve to die is because they’re insurrectionists, ie revolutionaries. Yet America was founded by revolutionaries who nonetheless saw themselves as patriots. One has to wonder, would Destiny have supported the hanging of George Washington? Of Ben Franklin? Of Thomas Jefferson? If all insurrectionists deserve to die, then perhaps he would have. However, having listened to his Twitter Spaces meltdown where he said he was leaning toward supporting a January 6^th-style event in 2025 in the likely event that Trump is elected this year, I think we have to admit there’s a subtle nuance to Destiny’s argument, which is that he’s not against insurrection. He’s against insurrection only insofar as it “ends democracy,” IE insofar as it aims to install a king. In other words, what he’s really against isn’t insurrection, it’s a royalist coup, which he argues Trump attempted. Granted, in the same Twitter Space, Destiny admitted that the major flaw in his argument is that Trump is poised to become president through entirely democratic means, which means democracy might not be all it’s cracked up to be, but details, details. Let’s be charitable and assume he’s sincere in his belief that anti-democratic revolutions are treasonous, not merely in law, but in spirit, because the United States was founded in opposition to monarchy.

So, what’s the evidence that Trump engaged in such an anti-democratic revolutionary act? Destiny cites three pieces of such evidence: the indictments alleging that Trump conspired with senior members of his government to try to overturn the 2020 election, the plan by Trump and his supporters to submit alternate slates of electors in certain states, and the Eastman memos detailing the plan by which Vice President Pence could refuse to count electors from the disputed states, thus throwing the election to the House of Representatives.

Now, I, at least, think it’s a little grotesque to take unproven indictments as gospel, particularly considering that what’s being alleged in those indictments may never see the inside of a courtroom. However, for the sake of maximum charitability, let’s assume that the acts alleged in the indictments actually took place. Criminal law requires two elements for an act to be a crime: the act itself (actus reus), and a corrupt state of mind (mens rea) on the part of the suspect. In Trump’s case, what this would amount to is that he had to try to “overturn” the election, already knowing he had lost. So, even assuming the acts took place, was Trump’s intent corrupt?

No doubt, Destiny – along with the authors of the indictment – would say “yes.” But why? Do we know that Trump did this with full knowledge that he’d lost? How would we know that? Can we read his mind? The argument from liberals on this point usually amounts to, there was no evidence for it, and Trump lost every court case, so he must’ve known, but does this actually prove anything? “No evidence?” Okay, how do you want evidence to be gathered? Voting rules in 2020 were unprecedentedly lax. How, exactly, would you go about proving any ballot was fake, absent smoking gun problems (like its being cast on behalf of a dead person, which is the sloppiest possible version)?

To be clear, I don’t personally believe the election was stolen, but I also don’t think it would’ve been that hard to do, given what was permitted under COVID, and given how utterly the media and other official organs of the state were captured by anti-Trump sentiment. And frankly, having seen how Destiny is reacting to (let’s not kid ourselves) an event which likely sealed Trump’s victory this November, do we really think that a party run by people like him would have any problem with doing something like that for the sake of “saving democracy” from the “losers” in the MAGA coalition? I don’t. The only reason I don’t believe they did this is because the fact that people had no reason not to do something doesn’t prove they did. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, which is the sanest explanation for why Trump lost all the court cases. You can’t ask a court to overturn an election on a hunch.

However, saying the election wasn’t provably stolen says nothing about Donald Trump’s mental state. If he genuinely believed he was trying to prevent a losing candidate from unlawfully occupying the White House, that is not evidence that he was trying to end democracy, but evidence that he was trying to save it. Granted, one could make the same argument about Hillary Clinton in 2016 and if Hillary had been president at the time, she probably would’ve done something exactly like what Trump did, if she believed (as Trump did) that she could prevail in the House of Representatives. We’ll get into how, precisely, I know that when we get to the Eastman memo.

However, for now, let’s return to the court cases. In his mid-meltdown Twitter Space, Destiny kept bringing up the fact that Trump lost every court case as cast-iron proof that his arguments about the election had no merit. This, too, is ironic, because Destiny seems to be perfectly willing to ascribe political motives to courts when they reach conclusions he doesn’t like, as in the cases surrounding Trump being removed from the ballot, and his presidential immunity. If SCOTUS can do those things for political reasons, why is it impossible that lower courts shut down Trump’s arguments for similarly political reasons? You can’t have it both ways, Destiny. You can’t say that courts which find against Trump are just looking at the facts, and then turn around and say that courts that find for him are politically compromised monarchists. Either all courts are open to question, or none are.

Personally, I think the far easier conclusion in all these cases is that the courts were applying the law faithfully and because Trump’s claims were so hard to actually prove in 2020, they got shot down. Just as the Democrats’ arguments about the Constitution were so far-fetched this year that they also got shot down. But would I say that disagreement with a court’s ruling, or suspicion of their motives, automatically makes someone a traitor whose fanbase deserves to be shot? Please. I’m not a child.

Ah, but, the walking reddit comment thread known as Destiny would retort, the Eastman memos! The Eastman memos prove they were trying to steal it! Yeah, sorry, Destiny. I’ve read the Eastman memos, too, and they prove nothing of the kind. Admittedly, they subscribe to a bit of an out-there idea of what the vice president’s powers are (which is the big flaw in them), but it’s not as out-there as some media people would have you believe. The Eastman memos, for example, don’t say the vice president can pick the president. All they say is that the vice president can refuse to certify slates of electors in states where the correct slate is in dispute, and that the likely result of such an action would be that the House of Representatives would end up choosing the presidential winner.

To be clear, no, the vice president probably can’t do that. In fact, as the Jacob memo (which was the basis for Pence’s decision not to follow Eastman’s plan) notes, even if he could nullify disputed slates of electors, he couldn’t do that unless you could find a Senator and a Representative from each disputed state to make their objections in writing: something which hadn’t happened on January 6, 2021. However, legal minutiae aside, as schemes to end the Republic go, this kind of arcane legal wrangling is pretty weak tea next to, say, rolling tanks through Washington. What’s more, despite being allegedly a far-right plan for a coup, it relies on a liberal’s reading of the 12^th Amendment: specifically, Harvard professor Lawrence Tribe. You know, Barack Obama’s mentor. In other words, while its actual merits are highly debatable, a willful plan to nullify the election and usher in a dictatorship, the Eastman memos ain’t. If your plan is to end democracy and constitutional rule, you don’t generally feel the need to bother justifying your behavior under the constitution you plan to overthrow. It’s unnecessary, if you have the army.

Which brings me to the ultimate reason why this “Trump is an insurrectionist traitor” argument falls apart: Trump moved out of the White House. He exhausted all his legal (and dubiously legal) channels by which to challenge the election, and then let Joe Biden take over. For a committed fascist, determined to mount a coup, this is rather meek behavior. “But January 6^th happened!” Yes, it did, and I’m sorry, but if you think January 6^th was ever in danger of being a successful coup d’etat, or was meant to be one, I have a bridge to sell you. One doesn’t attempt to take over a nation with one of the best armies in the world with a mob of unarmed, untrained civilians, who you then leave twisting in the wind when the police show up. If Trump had wanted to turn January 6^th into a coup, the rioters would’ve gotten backup from the police and the army; instead, both groups turned them out of the Capitol (killing one in the process, which we already know Destiny finds hilarious).

Which brings us to the question of immunity, and Trump's being removed from the ballot. And if his argument regarding the Eastman memos was tenuous, this is where Destiny reveals that he knows nothing about how the law works. To start with, the Supreme Court did not find that a president cannot be removed from the ballot, period. They ruled that Congress, not a single state, must make such a removal. As evidence, they cited the fact that multiple Confederates -- you know, actual insurrectionists -- served in Congress after the civil war, meaning that the prohibition on insurrectionists serving was obviously not blanket. Destiny might retort that there's no way Congress would ever do this where Trump is concerned. And he's right. But considering that Trump has not been charged with insurrection, let alone treason, I call that a sign that Congress is sane. The fact that Destiny can't get his own way is not proof that the law shouldn't work a certain way.

Moreover, his argument that Trump has been made a "king" thanks to the court's immunity ruling is similarly mistaken. His arguments, which were drawn entirely from Sonia Sotomayor's fanciful dissent in Trump v. US, rely on a willful misreading of the decision. Here's just one quote from Chief Justice Roberts' majority opinion: "If the President claims authority to act but in fact exercises 'merely will' or 'authority without law,' the courts may say so." In other words, if a president claims that any act falls within his core constitutional powers, the courts don't simply have to take his word for it. In many cases, they will, but they retain the right to disagree and reinstate a prosecution. The decision lays out guidelines for how that should be done, yes, and some powers -- like the right to pardon others or fire officials within the executive branch -- are absolute, but the most fanciful of Sotomayor's hypotheticals, like a president ordering the assassination of his political opponent, would absolutely still see the inside of a courtroom, and would likely make their way all the way to the Supreme Court itself, to see how they square with this decision.

Moreover, calling Trump a king invites a very simple question: was Abraham Lincoln also a "king?" Because if one wanted to get fussy about adherence to Democratic norms, Lincoln -- who imprisoned opponents without trial, and flatly ignored the right of habeas corpus -- ignored far more of the American system. I don't just bring this up to be cute; Destiny's argument that since Trump can't face "accountability" any other way, an assassination attempt was the logical next step, is exactly the kind of logic that belongs in the mouths of John Wilkes Booth's defenders. "It was the only way to stop the tyrant" is something Democrats seem to love to say when one of their own behaves badly.

But you know what? Forget Lincoln. What about our nation's first Democratic president, Andrew Jackson, who ignored the Supreme Court's rebuke when he conducted the trail of tears? Or Woodrow Wilson, who instituted mass censorship of any and all political opponents, who he jailed for speaking against World War One? King, or not? Presumably not, since the Republic is still standing, even in the face of acts far more sweeping and backed by much more indisputable presidential authority than saying nice things to the January 6th rioters.

Which is not to say that Trump did nothing wrong on January 6^th. One can very easily argue that he did. But Destiny’s contention isn’t merely that Trump acted wrongly. It’s that he’s an anti-democratic insurrectionist, who willfully and knowingly tried to steal the election, knowing he’d legitimately lost. In contrast, I argue that Trump likely believed he was trying to stop the elevation of at least a candidate who’d been given unfair advantages which rose to the point of rigging the election, if not an outright election thief. Therefore, while Trump’s actions certainly can raise eyebrows, whether he can be said to be trying to end democracy rather than save it from being hijacked is debatable, at best. What’s more, the more we learn about what happened in the bowels of think tanks, NGOs, and actual government agencies in the runup to 2020, sometimes by their own admission, the less flatly irrational this view looks.

But you know what? Let’s say for the sake of argument that Trump is, in his heart of hearts, some sort of closet monarchist. Does it follow from this that everyone who supports him over Joe Biden deserves to not only die, but have their death mocked? Of course not. Which brings me, ironically, to one of Destiny’s indictments against Corey Comperatore, who he accused in the aforementioned Twitter Space of “simping for Putin.” What Destiny is referring to is a meme which someone else posted showing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Vladimir Putin with the question, “Flames, you can only save one?” IE, if you had to save one of those four from a burning building, who would it be? Comperatore’s response: “Putin, 100%.”

Now, granted, this is a controversial take; saving the head of a hostile foreign nation over one of your fellow Americans sits uneasily with the idea of “America First.” But let’s also consider that realistically, this meme offers a very difficult choice for any conservative. Much as, say, a meme showing Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, and Xi Jinping might pose a difficult choice for progressives. In either case, a person would think the question is about the best of bad options. In other words, for some Trump supporters, saying “I like Putin better than Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden” is a bit like saying “I’d rather eat brussels sprouts than cow dung.” Such a sentiment is not exclusive to connoisseurs of brussels sprouts. Nor is choosing Putin over three of the most loathed Democrats evidence that Comperatore “simped” for him. Just that he thought Putin was the least loathsome.

Now, apply this to the 2024 election. In the eyes of many, Joe Biden’s policies have made their lives substantially worse, while Trump’s policies made them better. Moreover, many of them are likely not convinced – as I am not – that Trump constitutes an existential threat to democracy. They may even have disapproved of his actions on January 6^th, but decided that upon reflection they are symptomatic of a lack of discipline rather than a hardened desire to end the Republic, and that in any case, the platform Trump offers is more attractive than the one Biden offers. Some, meanwhile, might fully believe that the 2020 election was stolen and see Trump not as an opponent of democracy, but as its defender against a corrupt oligarchy. I’m sure there are some committed opponents of democracy among their ranks, sure – Curtis Yarvin gets his readership from somewhere – but to say all of them are accessories to treason because of the motives of a few? Come on. This is 50 percent of the country we’re talking about. Most Americans are normies; they have far more anodyne motives than wanting to destroy the country’s longstanding political traditions. In fact, if Destiny were intellectually honest, he might recognize that Trump and many of his supporters also believe that they are saving democracy…from people like Destiny himself. He might even reflect on that.

And frankly, he should. Because the fallacy at the base of Destiny’s belief that these people are accessories to insurrection is ultimately a simple failure of empathy. He apparently believes these people see the world the same way he does, and if they don’t, they ought to, and if they don’t accept that they ought to, even faced with the same evidence, then they too stupid and/or disingenuous and/or stubborn and/or evil to take seriously. You can hear these sentiments in his response to every conservative critic in the aforementioned Twitter Space. He universally derided them as “stupid,” “retarded,” “liars,” etc, and at one point said banging his head against the wall for ten minutes would make him less stupid than listening to them.

From a defender of “democracy,” this is absurd. Democracy is a deliberative process. Contempt for one’s fellow citizens and refusal to even engage with their interpretation of events, or facts, or philosophy cannot coexist with democracy. However, ironically, Destiny is not alone in this. This cognitive dissonance between seeing oneself as a defender of democracy, while simultaneously insisting that one must have the absolute right to decide which facts and interpretations are valid and which are beyond the pale, is part and parcel of the modern progressive Left. And the reason for this, frankly, has less to do with partisanship than with epistemology.

Because, you see, while Destiny is the most grotesquely arrogant example of this phenomenon, he is by no means alone. The anonymous blogger Tracing Woodgrains revealed a similar mindset infecting the highest level of Wikipedia’s bureaucracy: specifically, a disingenuous and partisan attempt to keep any information that conflicts with progressive narratives off the Wiki, using specious claims that such information comes from “unreliable sources,” which are deemed unreliable because the bureaucrats have written the rules about what counts as reliable so that only liberal publications qualify. This is almost entirely the work of one man, David Gerard, whose mindset Woodgrains sums up admirably (in his mammoth piece), as follows:

“Gerard got his start fighting scientologists and started out at RationalWiki mocking witches and 9/11 truthers. No matter his opponent, he saw reality the same way: he was the Respectable Mainstream Consensus accurately scrutinizing flimsy fringe movements, they were fringe advocates who just wanted to dodge scrutiny. When he ran into a movement whose members were happy to face scrutiny and who were willing to come into his space trying to resolve differences in good faith, he found that his true love was simple mockery.”

This is Destiny’s problem, as well. Because, you see, Twitch “debate” of the kind he hosts is usually devoted less to the clash of ideas than to competitive pedantry between two people wielding their Google Search bars like weapons. For instance, whenever a study is cited in such spaces, its methodology is immediately picked apart by both sides using principles of statistical research. In other words, the main question in such debates becomes less “who’s right” and more “whose facts count as knowledge?” There is something to be said for that method; it’s how most think tanks operate, after all. But let’s admit the obvious: it does tend to favor the people who are on the right side of modern social science, which leans (if not lurches) to the Left. Which gets to an unstated problem with this kind of discourse: it’s trying to use the strategies from one debate to win another.

Look at David Gerard. He got his start mocking scientologists, witches, and 9/11 truthers. All of these groups are people who have arguments, not with ideas, but with hard, verifiable facts: facts which can be proven or disproven with reference to factual evidence and objective, reproduceable phenomena. “Can fire melt steel beams,” for example, is a question you can answer in a lab. So is “do curses work?” So is “are body thetans real?” Reference to mainstream hard science, which can prove its theories by showing them in action, is not a politicized epistemology. It’s simple common sense. Granted, even mainstream hard science has its areas of incompleteness (Destiny’s head would probably explode if he read “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” by Thomas Kuhn), but generally speaking, hard science only follows one paradigm until a more complete one replaces it. This is good.

But social science and hard science are very different animals. Social science is messy. There’s no lab where you can test with perfectly controlled variables whether, for example, more funding for school lunches leads to less crime. Yes, some statistical methods of measuring phenomena (such as polling) can lead to more accurate results, but they’re more educated guesses than laws of reality. Treating it like hard science, in other words, is fatally mistaken.

Which brings me back to the childish mindset of both David Gerard and Destiny, the circular idea that if something is progressive, it therefore must be reliable. This notion is somehow both childish and archaic at the same time. The childishness is obvious, but what makes it archaic is that it is a clear artifact of the Bush administration, when Stephen Colbert famously said “reality has a well-known liberal bias.” However, Colbert was saying that at a time when progressives were arguing against creationists. When the Right was seen as a wholly religious movement. When the Republican president didn’t believe in evolution. In other words, appeals to hard science were an actual potent weapon against conservatives. And because they did have reality on their side, the progressives won that particular battle.

Clearly, this had a terrible effect on them. It made them think they had cracked the code to the fabric of reality. It made them believe whatever the “mainstream consensus” was, not just in the hard sciences but in all of academia, uncritically. For many, it led to a blanket trust in the mainstream media, until events like #Gamergate knocked that particular clay-footed golden calf off its pedestal. Yet, liberals like Destiny just went right on believing that reality has a well-known liberal bias, and therefore, if any part of reality seemed to conflict with liberalism, someone must be lying.

This is, in fact, the mirror image of the ideas embraced by the people they used to mock. Had a conservative Christian sought to rewrite the rules of Wikipedia to get evolution treated as an unreliable, fringe theory, everyone would’ve laughed at them. But now? Now, Wikipedia administrators literally rig the rules to say anyone who argues from a conservative perspective is unreliable. Disputing evolution makes you a stupid fundie, but disputing IQ statistics makes you an antiracist. Body thetans aren’t real, but the patriarchy is. Witches can’t cast curses, but words can kill trans people. And if you dare to do what the Left used to do to the Religious Right, and point out what a laughable, circular, self-referential and self-indulgent sack of nonsense it all is, then you want to end democracy. Because what they want isn’t actually democracy. What they want is reality, as defined by liberals.

And that, dear reader, is why Destiny and his Twitch debates are worse than useless in understanding the world, and therefore why he now cannot understand it and is lashing out. Reality was supposed to be biased in his favor. It wasn’t. The arc of history was supposed to bend toward justice as defined by progressives. Instead, it has bent toward actual justice. Everyone was supposed to just see that Trump is plotting a coup, and if they refused to be hectored into it, then they’re liars and retards and it’s funny if they die. The mainstream consensus – or, to use a perhaps more accurate phrase, the priesthood – must be defended against those evil problematic heretics who spread ideas which damage the truth: the only truth. The one passed down to pries—er, I mean liberal academics in monaste—er, I mean universities by Go—er, I mean consensus. And if anyone dissents, then burn the witch.

But Destiny and his ilk are not priests, secular or otherwise. They’re more like Sir Bedevere in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, who tries to impose a “scientific” procedure on the practice of witch burning by insisting that witches burn because they’re made of wood, and wood floats in water like ducks, and so therefore if an accused woman weighs the same as a duck, she’s made of wood and therefore a witch. Their certitude just magnifies their absurdity. And it makes it all the more pleasurable to watch Destiny go up in smoke, just like the 50 percent of the country he has decided are witches.