In March of 2024, the newsman and sports commentator Keith Olbermann tweeted that the “Supreme Court had betrayed democracy” and called for it to be “dissolved.” This was the second time he’d called for the Supreme Court to be dissolved: he did that also in 2022. This is a review of some of Olbermann’s more unreasonable and incendiary behavior over the last twenty years, with a focus on his political rage and how that relates to America’s toxic polarization problem. Because clearly there are many people around us, like Olbermann, with extreme contempt toward their political opponents, and a lot of biased, unreasonably certain takes about all sorts of events and happenings. What might we learn from Olbermann’s behavior?
Episode links:
Related resources:
- Transcript includes resources mentioned in this piece
TRANSCRIPT
“The Supreme Court has betrayed democracy. Its members including Jackson, Kagan and Sotomayor have proved themselves inept at reading comprehension. And collectively the “court” has shown itself to be corrupt and illegitimate. It must be dissolved.” (https://x.com/KeithOlbermann/status/1764672353378652544)
That was a reading of a tweet posted by Keith Olbermann in early 2024. He was upset that the Supreme Court had ruled that Colorado could not remove Trump from the presidential ballot;
When I saw Keith Olbermann had called for the Supreme Court to be dissolved, I was pretty shocked. I hadn’t thought about Keith in a long time; so it got me curious to know what he’d been up to. So I went down a Keith Olbermann rabbithole, checking out the outlandish and incendiary things he’s said over the years. So this episode will be a look at some of the more weird Keith Olbermann moments over the years, with a focus on his political rage and how it relates to our toxic polarization. This won’t be any comprehensive compilation; it will mainly be just some interesting things that stood out to me as I went down the Keith Olbermann rabbithole.
Now some people will assume that I’m picking on Keith because I’m conservative, because I’m pro-Trump, these kinds of assumptions. But no, I’m not. I wanted to do an episode on Keith because I think he’s an example of someone who’s been deranged by conflict; I think there are many people out there, with all sorts of different political beliefs, who have been deranged by conflict; that’s what conflict tends to do to us, especially I think people who already have a good amount of narcissistic traits. In a previous episode, I talked about the polarization of Elon Musk, and I’d name him as another person I see as having been deranged by conflict; he’s someone who seems to see himself, like I think Keith does, as engaged in a good-versus-evil fight, where anyone on the quote “other side” is horrible and irredeemable. There are a lot of similarities between how Elon and Keith speak: both are quick to insult and dehumanize; both speak in certain and superlative ways; both engage in confident mind-reading about their opponents, claiming to know what’s in their hearts, when clearly other explanations can suffice. For example, you can often find Elon claiming to know with certainty that Democrats’ more lax approaches to immigration are about Democrats trying to get votes and retain power. He just knows it, you see; “to hell with the fact that there are clearly other explanations for the various stances people have around us; to hell with the need for evidence to prove such a claim. Anyone with any quote “common sense” can see how bad these people are.” So that kind of thinking goes. They may not even believe all they say, but they might see their deception or exaggeration as the “ends justifying the means.”
So hopefully that helps you see that I’m not focusing on Keith out of some desire to denigrate the quote “left” or for any specific political reason. I also don’t do this to insult or demean Keith as a person. I actually feel sorry for him; just as a I feel sorry for Elon Musk. It can’t be a pleasant way to go through life, or then again, maybe it may seem exciting to them, as they’ve convinced themselves they are the hero in their own exciting good-versus-evil story; they might see themselves as on the hero’s journey, in a Lord of the Rings world, surrounded by villains. It might be fun in the same way a mentally ill delusion can be fun. But I think really, it’s a tragic way to experience the world; one that separates them from the people around them, one that amplifies their narcissism and prevents connection, in all sorts of ways, not just with people on the quote “other side” but with people they may actually have a lot in common with.
As Arthur Brooks wrote in his book Love Your Enemies: “If you have contempt for ‘them,’ more and more people will become ‘them.” I think that sums up the problem with this kind of contemptuous, warlike mentality. It makes people more miserable, more hateful, less empathetic of many people around them; and that will play out in many areas of one’s personal life.
I think what’s happened to Elon and Keith is what has happened to many people around us. It is just the kind of thinking that many of us fall pray to this kind of thinking when we’re in conflict, even as few of us have big national audiences from which to spew our contempt. The truth is that this is just what serious conflict can do to us. And then, on top of that, we’ve got social media, which maybe is the core cause at the heart of this; the way that social media makes the conflict more visceral; all the fighting Elon and Keith have done online make it easier for them to feel they’re entrenched in a good-versus-evil battle, surrounded by evil enemies on all sides.
I think some people might feel like I’m picking on someone’s who is clearly mentally unwell. You can find a lot of people saying that Keith is unwell, even his political opponents. I think that’s true, but I also don’t find his warlike mentality as much different from what many people, on the left and right, think and say these days about their perceived enemies. I don’t find him any more mentally unwell than I do Elon Musk, for example. The simple fact is that this is what many people are like these days, even as some people who feel these ways perhaps hold in the bile and emotions and insults more than does Keith.
I’d also like to say, if you’re someone in the conservative, pro-Trump camp, hopefully you don’t watch this with only the intent of saying “yeah, hes’ crazy.” I hope you consider how these kinds of approaches are present on the right; for example, you can find Elon saying similar outlandish, hateful things on his social media platform. You can find Trump himself saying such things often. Now obviously you believe what you believe, but I hope you are able to see that there is plenty on the Republican side to agitate and disturb people in these areas and to make people think “these guys are outta their minds” in the same way many think “Olbermann is outta his mind.”
Having said that, I also know the defense from the Republican side would go, “But Trump and Elon and others are just responding to such things on the left; that is why they are like that.” I myself even have a previous episode trying to get liberals to have more cognitive empathy for Trump voters and even for Trump himself, in terms of the many overly pessimistic and insulting things that are thrown that way from liberals. I realize that we all make excuses for these things, on both sides. That is the nature of conflict; we justify why it’s okay when our side does it. But that’s the problem; we all keep justifying and going “what about this stuff over there” and it all keeps getting worse. I just hope a lot of people watching this, no matter their politics, agree these things are problems, no matter who does it.
If you like the themes in this video, please consider checking out one of my books on polarization, which you can learn about at www.american-anger.com. Or sign up for my Substack, which you can find at defusingamericananger.substack.com. I’m actually working on these things full-time these days, so I appreciate any paid subscriptions or other financial support you can send my way. You can send me money via my Buy Me a Coffee page: https://buymeacoffee.com/zachelwood
As we go through this, one thing I’d like you to think about: Do you think Keith has helped create the very things he’s upset by? Do you think his two decades of insulting and dehumanizing the entire “other side” has been a factor in making similar behaviors on the right more likely? I certainly do.
[include image of polarization cycle]
“The man who sees absolutes where all other men see nuances and shades of meaning is either a prophet or a quack.”
Thank you for that observation, Keith. I agree.
SUPREME COURT STUFF
So let’s go back to Keith’s statement about the Supreme Court.
In March of 2024, after an unanimous ruling by the Supreme Court that said Colorado couldn’t remove Trump from the presidential ballot, Olbermann wrote his post on Twitter about wanting to dissolve the Supreme Court.
Now keep in mind that was an unanimous ruling. Keith is basically saying that there was no legitimate reason why the entire Supreme Court, including the ones seen as liberal-leaning, would vote that way. He allowed no room for disagreement. And that’s the wild thing about what polarization does to us; it makes us more certain, more team-based in how we think about the world. Does Keith really believe there were no solid reasons for all the judges to vote the same way? Does he really believe it was a case of corruption and incompetence? Or does his rage and frustration just lead him to speak in extreme and superlative ways? Hard to say; I don’t pretend to know, but either way it’s what we see more and more people do when they’re highly emotional and in conflict.
That tweet thread is a microcosm of how people on both quote “sides” rile each other up and serve as the basis for each other’s rage.
Gunther Eagleman, a rightwing account known for bullying and insulting and trolling people, wrote:
Cry more… 9-0
Referring to the unanimous ruling of 9 justices.
Keith responded:
Those aren’t tears, Fascist. They’re urine. I’m sure you enjoy being bathed in it.
In a video about this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQ8tctICURY ) titled “Cenk Reacts To Keith Olbermann’s Idiotic Post”, the hosts of the politically progressive show Young Turks discuss Olbermann:
00:42 There you have Keith Olbermann arguing that a major part of our system of
checks and balances should absolutely be dissolved because they had a unanimous
decision that he didn’t like. Insanity. Yeah so I think he’s lost his mind.
1:52 In this case they were unanimous for a reason. Because nobody adjudicated Trump as an insurrectionist except for a few random Democrats in 2-3 states. That’s not how the process works. That’s not how the process should work. But guys like Oberman who are have are blue Maga have lost their minds ju that’s why you call them blue Maga right red Maga thinks Trump won the 2020 election Etc lost their minds in that way it it detached from objective reality and blue Maga is just as detached
3:06: Jank we have a growing group of people on both sides who just do not
want to accept reality and that makes that makes everything so much more
difficult and what drives me insane is that the media has become super partisan
so you either watch leftwing media or right-wing media and audiences have
become so accustomed to hearing oneideologic side that once they get any information
that uh dispels preconceived notions you know they don’t react well to it and I think that’s part of the problem
This was actually the second time, that I know of, that Keith has called for dissolving the Supreme Court. Another time was in 2022, in response to the Court’s ruling overturning New York’s concealed carry restrictions (https://www.foxnews.com/media/enraged-keith-olbermann-calls-supreme-courts-dissolution-after-new-york-concealed-carry-ruling). He said (https://x.com/KeithOlbermann/status/1539983585406484480) :
It has become necessary to dissolve the Supreme Court of the United States.
The first step is for a state the “court” has now forced guns upon, to ignore this ruling.
Great. You’re a court? Why and how do think you can enforce your rulings?
#IgnoreTheCourt
The following is from a Fox News piece about this:
Olbermann’s strong rhetoric brought intense mockery from conservatives, with online critics saying he sounded “unhinged” and also taking exception to his call for lower courts to ignore the ruling.
“Sounds kinda insurrectiony, Keith,” Substack writer Jim Treacher quipped.
MADISON SQUARE GARDEN
Over the last few years, Keith’s audience has dwindled a lot. He now seems to reach some tens of thousands of people on his YouTube channel and other social media, whereas he used to reach millions years ago when he was on primetime TV.
To give you a sense of the kinds of incendiary stuff Keith shares, here’s one clip from October of 2024:
[Caption copy from his post:
HOW DO YOU NOT LISTEN TO HISTORY? It would seem to be obvious that the last thing that even Pro-Nazi Trumpists would want to do would be to invoke February 20th, 1939 and the German-American Bund rally at Madison Square Garden in New York. It didn’t go exactly as the Nazis planned. The Garden was surrounded by ONE HUNDRED thousand ANTI-Nazi protestors who three times nearly broke lines manned by 2500 police. So what have Trump and reprobate garbage Garden/Knicks/Rangers owner James Dolan scheduled for October 27? A NEW Trump-Nazi rally at the new Madison Square Garden. Trump hopes 20,000 will attend. Has he or this idiot Dolan considered how many people will be outside the Garden THIS time?]
In the copy for that post, he refers to the rally as a “Trump-Nazi rally.”
Keith often compares Trump to Hitler and his supporters to Nazis. Here’s one from November of 2024, after Trump’s election, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mSPxhF8Dn4, in which he tells Hispanic Trump voters that Trump will come after them eventually even if they’re legal citizens:
2:40 he will Deport people from the same place you or your folks are from he will Deport people who have the same names you do he will Deport your relatives and friends and when he runs out he will change the laws and he will Deport you and your parents and your children.
He goes on to say this about Stephen Miller, Trump’s immigration advisor:
3:41
So he hates Hispanics exactly the way Hitler hated Jews and Trump who hates them but less fervently because hating them takes time away from talking about himself he listens to Steven Miller and and he hears more votes and not only does he get elected president while his brains are draining out his ears like a runny yeast infection but the very people he is going to torture and Deport vote for him.
After Trump’s election, Keith could be found saying that the Russians had stolen the election, which was the same thing he did in 2016. This is from a YouTube video from November 2024 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qd-M_Jf3Ltc):
00:08 Russia has committed an act of war against this nation and our form of government we were attacked last night as certainly as if they came across the borders or as if they had bombed polling stations 40 or more polling stations 32 Russian origin bomb threats just in
Fufton County Georgia alone and what are you going to do about it President Biden what are you going to do about it Meritt Garland or are you Meritt Garland in another coma regardless of the outcome of the presidential election there is realtime evidence of Russian interference in that election Russians trying to decide who becomes president.
After Trump’s election in 2016, Keith said https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAFxPXGDH4E the following:
We are at war with Russia. Or perhaps more correctly, we have lost a war with Russia without a battle.
We are no longer a sovereign nation. We are no longer a democracy.
We are no longer a free people. We are the victims of a bloodless coup, so far a bloodless coup engineered by Russia with at best the traders in defense of the republican party and Donald John Trump, a man who to borrow a phrase from another December long ago will live in infamy.
He said that he was certain that Russia had gotten Trump elected. https://www.facebook.com/gq/videos/how-i-know-russia-stole-the-election/10155510663528098/
00:53
It might be worth saying that there’s no conclusive evidence that Russia’s actions affected the outcome of the 2016 election. There’s no evidence, for example, that Russians succeeded in hacking voting machines or changing votes. Keith’s extreme certainty here seems misplaced, as it often seems to be.
I write about liberal-side election distrust in my book Defusing American Anger, and why that’s a bad thing, and even something that made conservative-side election distrust more likely.
Many people think that the Russian social media misinformation played a role in shifting the election. But there is no evidence it shifted things.
A 2023 paper that looked into this was titled “Exposure to the Russian Internet Research Agency foreign influence campaign on Twitter in the 2016 US election and its relationship to attitudes and voting behavior.” (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-35576-9) They concluded, “We find no evidence of a meaningful relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior.”
In a New Yorker article (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/01/how-russia-helped-to-swing-the-election-for-trump) about the idea that Russia influenced us, Brendan Nyhan, a professor of public policy, argued that:
though the number of Russian-sponsored messages during the 2016 campaign might sound alarmingly large, the universe of information that most voters are exposed to is so vast that the impact of fake news, and other malicious online misinformation, is diluted. He noted, “Twitter, for instance, reported that Russian bots tweeted 2.1 million times before the election—certainly a worrisome number. But these represented only 1 percent of all election-related tweets and 0.5 percent of views of election-related tweets.” He concluded, “It’s hard to change people’s minds!”
Some people may disagree; but the point is that there are knowledgable people who do not think Russia succeeded at having a significant impact on our election, and that simple fact shows that highly certain takes that they did are opinions and are not conclusive.
Also, as I talk about in my book Defusing American Anger, it could be that Russia’s primary goal was simply to make us distrust elections as a way to increase animosity and destabilize us. It would be difficult for Russia to impact our election; it’s a lot easier to get a country to distrust their elections by making it obvious you’ve tried to manipulate an election. So when we allow our animosity and distrust lead us to too easily believe and spread “the election was rigged” ideas, we might be basically doing exactly what Russia hoped we would do. And our election distrust will in turn trigger more election distrust; our opponents will be more likely to think, “well, they do it, too.”
I won’t spend a lot of time in this video debunking Keith’s incendiary and highly certain claims, as there are so many of them, but I thought this was a good spot to show that for many of Keith’s incendiary takes, emotion and unreasonable certainty seem to play a big role.
Back in 2017, Keith also said that he was certain that the Trump campaign had colluded with Russia. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEOhXhj1QXI . The title of that video, which got more than 387,000 views on YouTube, was “Case Closed. Collusion Has Been Proven.”
00:26 Four titanic facts have now emerged. Their importance cannot be overstated. The conclusion they lead to cannot be avoided. We have all been right, all this time. The essence of the conspiracy case against Donald Trump, his Presidential Campaign, his Presidential Administration and the Government of Russia, has for all intents and purposes been proven.
I won’t play all that or describe it, but long story short: No, there is not conclusive evidence that Trump colluded with Russia. If you believe that Trump and Russia colluded, then at the very least consider that there are many smart, anti-Trump people knowledgeable about such things who do not believe there’s good evidence for that. That at least helps show that high certainty here is wrong.
But we are surrounded by people like Keith Olbermann, on the left and right, who speak with high certainty about all sorts of things related to our divides. When you hear highly certain statements about things someone can’t be certain about, that other knowledgeable people have different takes on, and when you hear such certain takes frequently from someone, that’s a good reason to be highly skeptical of that person as a source. Certainty is the mind killer. Certainty can be the country killer.
REMOVED FROM SOCIETY
In 2020, Keith said that Trump’s enablers and supporters must be quote “removed from society.”
As you’d expect, these kinds of things from Keith get a lot of attention from conservative news outlets. That video I just played was posted on the Daily Caller Facebook account and had 400,000 views. This is the kind of stuff that convinces Republicans of how evil their opponents are. We can see Keith as being part of a self-reinforcing conflict spiral.
St. Louis Cardinals
In mid-2024, Keith said he wanted to disband the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team and demolish their stadium. Here’s someone talking about that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEZ5utgYqMQ
Keith Oberman needs to get off my lawn he cries P this segment could last all week given the plethora of vile commentsMr Oberman has made over the years but we’ll start with the most recent following the assassination attempt of President Donald Trump several major league baseball players celebrated home runs by holding a fist in the air and and a hand over their ear this prompted quintessentially unhinged responses from former Sports commentator Keith Oberman who first posted quote a remind that there is still no evidence Trump was hit by a bullet and still lots of evidence he is lying about it unquote this was followed by a call to disband the entire St Louis franchise as well as to destroy its ballpark he goes quote attention MLB ban these guys from baseball for Life confiscate the Cardinals franchise and implode the stadium implode the stadium are you serious and you wonder why gunshots are being fired at a former president he continues quote Cardinals equal Trump Nazis stick to sports F the St Louis Cardinals America has had enough of this blank unquote I’ll tell you what America has had enough of the hateful and ignorant driil which spews from your mouth decade upon decade your actions are beneath the standard for what should constitute a professional and they are beneath my standard for what constitutes a man.
Here we can see another aspect of what conflict does to us: makes us interpret things in the worst-possible way. Because he is so hyper focused on all things related to Trump and our political divides, Keith was primed to see that gesture by the Cardinals as support for Trump and that set him off. We can see this kind of thing all around us; people filtering for the worst-case interpretation possible, and then somehow becoming certain of that worst-case interpretation. Conflict amplifies our negativity bias; our tendency to filter for negative stuff, especially the negative stuff about quote “them.”
Honestly, if I was more paranoid, if I was as paranoid as Keith Olbermann, I might start thinking his behavior was part of a plot to turn people against liberals. Maybe Steve Bannon and Russia have incriminating dirt on Keith and are forcing Keith to say these things to increase support for Trump. To hell with “maybe.” I’m actually sure of it. You heard it here first: I’m 100% certain Keith Olbermann is a Russian asset.” Sorry, just kidding; please don’t take that clip out of context.
PETTY STUFF, OHIO STATE, MORE
In November of 2024, Ohio State tweeted: “Congratulations to Vice President-elect JD Vance, an alumnus of The Ohio State University and native Ohioan.” This led Keith to say “Wasn’t before, is now: Shit School”: https://x.com/KeithOlbermann/status/1854888019188220414
This was reminiscent of him getting in a fight with another school back in 2015. He had a penchant for mocking Penn State students and family members; this was apparently caused by him mocking the school for their conduct during the Sandusky scandal. https://www.phillymag.com/news/2015/02/26/keith-olberamnn-worst-person-in-the-world-penn-state-thon-twitter-fight/
He told a Penn State student mother that Penn State was quote “pitiful.” He also told someone “Again – get your $ back – you didn’t learn how to read. PSU students are pitiful because they’re PSU students – period.” This kind of interaction from Keith over the years just really show how far gone in general he is, apart from the political stuff. It’s just so unnecessary and so mean.
In 2019, Keith got in some hot water with his then-employer ESPN for saying some harsh things about a hunter (https://nypost.com/2019/03/27/keith-olbermann-shames-hunter-for-killing-turkey-during-hunting-season)
A news article featured a hunter who had shot an all-white turkey. Keith tweeted, ““It be rare and beautiful so me should kill it… This pea-brained scumbag identifies himself as Hunter Waltman and we should do our best to make sure the rest of his life is a living hell.”
Keith later apologized. ESPN said in a statement: “We have spoken to him about not making personal attacks.”
So much of Keith’s life seems to revolve around attacking people on Twitter. It does make you wonder how much social media has been a negative influence in his and other people’s lives. Pre-social media, how would Keith and Elon and others who do similar things have spent their time? Where would they have gotten a similar fix in terms of fighting with people directly? I think at the heart of these things is how conflict affects us, but social media makes the conflict more visceral; it puts us in the middle of it. It allows us to strike out when angry; and then that will be seen by others, who will attack us, and so on and so on. I see the internet as a conflict amplifying machine; a place that aids in the creation and distribution of insults and threats. And there are many people who think that. If you’d like to learn more about that, check out this piece of mine on the ways that internet communication derange and divide us: https://defusingamericananger.substack.com/p/how-does-internet-communication-divide.
ASSORTED CRITICISMS
And many people know of Keith’s turn for the worse and have spoken about it.
Here’s progressive activist Kyle Kulinski in 2024 summing up the Keith Olbermann situation, as he sees it (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aASvrelsLXY) :
he had a a decent following at the time he got some good numbers so they allowed it to continue right but one of the things you always heard Whispers behind the scenes that Keith alberman is crazy that he’s just a total nutcase and uh everybody I know who’s been in his vicinity says the exact same thing the guy is off his rocker so anyway he went to current TV for a while he was a diva and a prima over there you know he’s bounced between ESPN and other places and uh remember when he did that show was it with like GQ or Vogue or something he did some weird political show at the beginning of the Trump years and it was the most cringe thing you’ve ever seen in your life basically every idiotic Trump argument one could think of he would lean into that and ignore the proper criticisms right so he would like Rush aate all day long as opposed to hitting him on like his tax policy and his neocon foreign policy so anyway the guy really really Fell From Grace.
He then examined a tweet Keith had made that was really, really bad; what Kyle called a “new low.” Keith was trying to defend Biden after Biden’s really horrible debate performance.
1:45
here’s the Tweet today’s Yuga of CBS poll should Biden stay in the race yes 55% to 45% should Trump stay in the race no 54% to 46% that says it all any effing questions now if you just read that you think oh okay fair enough decent point just wait for it wait for the specifics so should Biden be the nominee that question was of democratic registered voters should Trump be running for president that’s of all registered voters so you see how he rigged the game as it says here and by the way I don’t even think he rigged the game I just think he was Bree breezing through this stuff and thought he found a gotcha and he tweeted it without actually really looking too closely at what he was posting.
And here we see a very mature thing from Kyle; it would have been easy for Kyle to ascribe the most malicious motives to Keith; that Keith purposefully posted something untrue. But Kyle maturely doesn’t do that; he sees that it’s probably more likely that Keith’s mind is just rattled; that Keith is acting too quickly, posting too quickly, because he’s highly emotional.
We can see the same things, by the way, from Elon Musk; who often posts and shares incendiary things and then his own platform’s community notes correct him, and it’s obvious he just went off half-cocked about something. And then he just leaves the posts up anyway; he doesn’t seem to care; just as Keith doesn’t seem to care about the many untrue things he leaves littered around the internet.
Anger is a hell of a drug. Fear and anger are the mind killers. They’re contagious mind killers, too. If you’re curious for more about that, watch my previous episode about Elon’s polarization; it’s much shorter than this.
You can find a bunch of conservatives posting videos and posts about their interactions with Keith, where Keith insults them in vicious ways. https://www.facebook.com/OutkickTheCoverage/videos/keith-olbermann-going-crazy-loses-it-on-clay-over-twitter/146067096955576/
00:43 “Guy is just unhinged. To be honest, I feel bad for him. Seems clear to me he is clearly losing his ability to make any kind of rational sense.”
He then goes on to describe their covid-related social media beef.
2:36
“I wonder, on some level, does Keith have anybody that cares for him in his life. I don’t think he’s married; I don’t think he has kids. He sits around on his phone, constantly sending out insane things every day. It’s quite clear he is mentally deranged. I really want him to get help. I think this is the case for a lot of people; social media is not good for people with any kind of mental instability. I think it makes mental instability worse, because it’s an emotional medium. I am convinced that the reason the country has gone so haywire over the last 8-9 years is directly connected to social media and the ability of all of this is playing in our psyche all day long.
4:12 For people like Keith Olbermann, it’s been a disaster. I really hope he gets the help he needs.
It says a lot that even a lot of the people he has gotten in fights with mention that they think he’s mentally unwell and express pity for him.
You can find all sorts of people fighting with Keith online over the years. In 2023, when basketball player Angel Reese mocked another player, Keith tweeted, “What a fucking idiot,” which prompted Shaquille O’Neal to tell Keith “shut your dumb ass up.” Just a lot of fighting on Keith’s feed over the years.
CURRENT TV
Keith has been fired from a lot of places. In 2012, he was fired from Current TV, after only being there about a year. Current TV was a short lived TV station aimed at becoming like the Fox News of the left.
Reading from Keith’s Wikipedia:
Olbermann was fired from Current TV on March 30, 2012. In a statement from Current TV, they stated that “Current was […] founded on the values of respect, openness, collegiality, and loyalty to our viewers. Unfortunately these values are no longer reflected in our relationship with Keith Olbermann and we have ended it.”
According to Politico, Olbermann’s professional reputation suffered greatly as a result of his dispute with Current, which accused Olbermann of making “material breaches of his contract, including the failure to show up at work, sabotaging the network and attacking Current and its executives.” Purportedly, despite actively shopping other networks for offers, Olbermann was unable to find an outlet interested in hiring him. According to Politico, the fact Olbermann had been rendered unemployable as a result of the dispute, factored heavily during settlement negotiations between his attorneys and representatives from CurrentTV
SALON ARTICLE
In 2011, Salon ran an article https://www.salon.com/2011/01/23/stanage_olbermann/ by Niall Stanage about Keith’s departure from his Countdown show at MSNBC. The article emphasized an important point and one that I often emphasize in my work on polarization: that we can largely agree with someone stance-wise while thinking their approach to disagreement is very, very bad. In my op-ed I got published about Elon Musk in The Hill, that is a point that I focused on; that one should be able to largely agree with Elon while see his approach to conflict as very bad, unhelpful, and even as helping create the pushback one is working against. But we too often conflate people’s stances with how they view and speak about their enemies. We conflate political beliefs with approaches to conflict.
Niall wrote:
I cannot imagine I am the only viewer who is basically simpatico with Olbermann’s worldview, but who had come to find him and his show utterly insufferable. The glibness, the pomposity, the narcissism — all these foibles had, of late, reached gut-wrenching proportions.
He went on to write:
There was a bigger problem, too. Olbermann rose to prominence in large part through attacking other media figures — most notably Bill O’Reilly — for both their gloating self-regard and their rhetorical recklessness.
Olbermann’s claim to the moral high ground here was strictly relative. This is a man, after all, who once reported an allegation that Paris Hilton had been punched in the face under the tagline “A Slut and Battery.” Hilarious, no?
Later silliness — the risible condemnation of then-Senator-Elect Scott Brown as “an irresponsible, homophobic, racist, reactionary, ex-nude model, teabagging supporter of violence” — only strengthened the impression that Olbermann had morphed into a mirror image of those he so often attacked.
There were several pieces around that time that pointed out Keith’s hypocrisy.
A 2011 piece in Variety (https://www.huffpost.com/entry/olbermann-more-like-his-f_n_109906) read:
While it was initially amusing watching Olbermann playfully try to nudge O’Reilly off the deep end, there’s a significant difference between that and self-indulgently using his forum as a pulpit to bash enemies, which actually makes him more like his Fox counterpart than he would care to admit.
SCOTT BROWN
So that thing Keith said about Scott Brown that was just mentioned; that’s one of the more interesting highlights of Keith’s career. This made a big splash; he was mocked even by many on the left for this; and I think was kind of the moment when Keith really began going downhill. This event happened in January 2010. Now 2010 also happened to be the time when many people were starting to spend a lot more time on their mobile phones; social media apps were just getting really popular around that time. 2009 was the year that Jon Haidt points to as being significant in terms of social media apps, mainly Facebook and Twitter, changing their algorithms to make posts, especially highly emotional posts, spread more virally.
I looked up the first tweets Keith made on Twitter, and they were in April of 2010: https://x.com/search?q=(from%3Akeitholbermann)%20until%3A2010-04-10%20since%3A2007-01-01&src=typed_query&f=top So the Scott Brown proceeded this a bit. To be clear, I’m not saying that I think Keith’s conduct can be traced to social media, as clearly he’s been doing this stuff for a while, but I do think it’s at least possible that the emotional environment that social media created around that time, making it easier for Keith and others to see all these messages from across the country, to see all these messages and thoughts that made them angry, and that they could then focus on more in their shows and such; I think it’s possible all this stuff contributed to Keith becoming even more polarized and unreasonable than he was.
Looking back at his first posts on Twitter is interesting. Assuming he didn’t delete some older tweets, from the beginning of joining he was tweeting many times a day. He was tweeting a lot. On April 11, i counted about 70 tweets from him. And many of these were of the insulting, angry variety. Keith really liked to reply to random people on there; you got the sense he really really liked being able to engage with people. But if your instinct is to lash out at people often, and if that then in turn provokes people often lashing out at you, I think it’s easy to see how that creates a maddening user experience. I think it’s easy to see how these things can amplify people’s existing narcissism and us-vs-them mindsets.
So anyway, on to this Scott Brown thing.
In 2010, before the Massachusetts special election, Keith ran this segment about Republican candidate Scott Brown. As a reminder, this was when Obama was president; Obama was elected in 2008; it was also when the Tea Party had become a thing, and Keith often lashed out at the Tea Party movement as being motivated by racism:
[PLAY CLIP https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAy211oqPwc ]
here’s the second of tonight’s quick comments lost in the angst about Obama &
Cokely is the little recognized real headline of this vote you have heard
Scott Brown speculating talking out of his bare bottom whether or not the
president of the United States was born out of wedlock you heard Scott Brown
respond to the shout from his supporter that they should stick a curling iron
into ms coke leagues rectum with the answer we can do this you may not have
heard Scott Brown support a constitutional amendment banning
same-sex marriage or describing two women having a child as being quote just
not normal you may not have heard Scott Brown associating himself with the Tea
Party movement perhaps the saddest collection of people who don’t want to
admit why they really hate since the racists of the south and the 60s
insisted they were really just concerned about states rights you may not have
heard Scott Brown voting against funding paid leaves of absence for Massachusetts
Red Cross workers who had gone to New York to help after 911 in short in Scott
Brown we have an irresponsible homophobic racist reactionary ex new
model teabagging supporter of violence against women and against politicians
with whom he disagrees in any other time in our history this man would have been
laughed off the stage as an unqualified and a disaster in the making by the most
conservative and conservatives instead the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is
close to sending this bad joke to the Senate of the United States
Now there’s a lot to say about that, but long story short: Keith was really reaching for some unfair and extremely worst case interpretations of many things there. It was such an egregious moment that it led to many in the business , even on the left, criticizing Keith.
Joe Scarborough, his colleague at MSNBC called the comments “reckless” and “sad.” Various pundits criticized him.
In March, Jon Stewart talked about this, playing Keith’s segment and then talking about why this was so bad and what Keith missed. I think it’s worth including Jon’s points as they help us see just how bad and biased Keith’s thinking is.
[PLAY JON STEWART CLIP 8:05 into episode to 11:50 ]
I won’t play all of this but you get the idea; Olbermann was, as he often does, really exaggerating the bad things one might be able to say about Scott Brown. I’ll cut forward a little farther in to the segment.
13:30 Now you’re just kind of calling people names. You said this of Joe Liebermann: “ a senatorial prostitute”, of Roger Ailes “fat ass,” Chris Wallace: “a monkey posing as a newscaster.” Rush Limbaugh: “a big bag of mashed up jackass”. Michelle Malkin: “a mindless, morally bankrupt, knee-jerk, fascistic, mashed-up bag of meat with lipstick on it.” That, my friend, sounds more like violence against women than anything Scott Brown ever said. You can’t resort to childish attacks as hominem as they are nauseum. You’ve ceded the high ground and now you wallow in the fetid swamp of baseless name-calling and as we both know, sir, that’s my thing.
RALLY TO RESTORE SANITY
Later that year, Jon Stewart held his DC rally, which was called the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rally_to_Restore_Sanity_and/or_Fear . This rally was aimed at reducing toxic polarization; at trying to help people see that people like Bill O’Reilly and Olbermann, outlets like Fox News and MSBNC, were polarizing us, and making us see the worst in each other and hate each other. Regardless of the implementation and what one thought of how it played out, one has to love the attempt by Jon Stewart to work on this. I think Jon was focused on the right thing, and sadly way too few people hear the message. To many people, just as today, when they’re told “this media environment is amplifying fear and discord; we need to do something” most people just think “the other side’s media is horrible; I agree they need to be stopped.” There is very little actual contemplation of how there’s a lot of blame to go around for these things, regardless of if you believe “the other side is much worse.”
At Jon Stewart’s DC rally, they played a clip of media on the left and right that they saw as toxic and dehumanizing, and that clip included some of Keith Olbermann’s work.
This prominent feature of Keith led to Keith, a little after that, in November of 2010, announcing he’d suspend his “Worst Person in the World” segment on his Countdown show (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rally_to_Restore_Sanity_and/or_Fear) in the interest of turning down the volume and anger. But defended the content of his show by claiming that MSNBC (the network that hosted Countdown at the time) differs from Fox News in that “sticking up for the powerless is not the moral equivalent of sticking up for the powerful.”
Now of course, this is how everyone justifies contemptuous rhetoric, in any conflict. “The other side is worse so it’s not the same when I do it.” There is a fundamental way that conflict makes us into hypocrites. The political philosopher Robert Talisse has a great segment about how polarization makes us into hypocrites in his book Sustaining Democracy https://global.oup.com/academic/product/sustaining-democracy-9780197556450?cc=pl&lang=en& , which I recommend for anyone trying to understand how they can be a good citizen, and can work for their goals while avoiding amplifying contempt and discord. And so much of these things have a self-reinforcing aspect; when someone like Keith behaves contemptuously, they will understandably be seen as hypocritical by his political opponents, which will increase their rage; they’ll be more likely to engage in contemptuous actions, some of which Keith and others will see as hypocritical, and in turn increase Keith’s rage, and so on.
WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD
In a really interesting detail, Keith brought back his Worst Person in the World segment only three weeks after he said he’d get rid of it based on the criticism of him.
[Play clip https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aj3g2K36ei0&t=34s ]
Clearly he pretty quickly decided that trying to reduce political toxicity wasn’t really a plan he was onboard with.
So what was that segment?
Worst Person in the World was a segment that Keith started in 2005 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Worst_Person_in_the_World_(book) on his Countdown show on MSNBC. It featured a variety of political opponents Keith didn’t like; Bill O’Reilly was often mentioned, sometimes picked as the worst person multiple times in the same segment. It sometimes featured random citizens doing stupid things; it had a humorous flare to it often.
I think his choice of that title really says a lot about Keith. It’s just such a maximally polarizing and conflict-amplifying choice.
In 2006, Keith put out a book titled Worst Person in the World, and it goes into detail about why he chose that title for the segment. He claims it had a humorous background, based on the comedy duo Bob and Ray having a bit called ‘Worst people in the world.’ He claims it was meant to be humorous, not that serious. But really I think this is just cover for Keith’s highly angry way of viewing all disagreements. I think he wants to rouse righteous judgment; at some instinctual level, he really hates a lot of these people around him. I think the comedy history stuff is just cover for his obvious tendency to reach for extreme insults and righteous judgment.
Another interesting detail here is that Keith says he got the idea to do the segment in response to a critic harshly criticizing Tucker Carlson, who at the time was a colleague of Keith’s on MSBNC. So to recap, the Worst Person in the World segment started out of a desire to defend Tucker Carlson. Which I think is kind of interesting in terms of the polarization and changes amongst these various news people since that time.
YELLING AT BUSH
During GW Bush’s term, Keith got a lot of attention for hating on Bush. One famous incident involved him telling Bush to shut the hell up. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qvz9jyf4gUk&t=2m30s
QUESTION: Mr. President, you haven’t been golfing in recent years. Is that related to Iraq?
BUSH: Yes, it really is. I don’t want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the Commander-in-Chief playing golf. I feel I owe it to the families to be as—to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal.
KEITH: Mr. Bush, I hate to break it to you six and a half years after you yoked this nation and your place in history to the wrong war, in the wrong place, against the wrong people, but the war in Iraq is not about you. . . . It is not, Mr. Bush, about your golf game! And, sir, if you have any hopes that next January 20th will not be celebrated as a day of soul-wrenching, heartfelt thanksgiving, because your faithless stewardship of this presidency will have finally come to a merciful end, this last piece of advice . . . when somebody asks you, sir, about your gallant, noble, self-abnegating sacrifice of your golf game so as to soothe the families of the war dead. This advice, Mr. Bush: Shut the hell up!
Again, we can see Keith taking the worst possible interpretation of someone’s words. I mean, I am not a fan of GW Bush, by any means, but he was asked directly about golf; he didn’t bring it up out of the blue. And I respect him for trying to be forthright about it; it seemed like he was genuinely trying to do something good and sensitive there; would we have preferred him to lie and deflect about his reasons for not playing golf?
I see this kind of thing around us everywhere, though; this tendency, on both quote “sides” to reach for the maximally pessimistic interpretation of everything, large and small. And I see that as a self-reinforcing cycle of toxicity and contempt. Where’s the empathy? Can’t we try to empathize with and understand even people we very much disagree with? It’s a pretty easy thing to do, I think.
The following is from a 2008 New Yorker article about Keith titled One Angry Man (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/06/23/one-angry-man) :
The jeremiad against Bush was a signature Olbermann effort, the sort of stylized, mocking tirade that has lately made him a cable-news sensation, the Edward R. Murrow of the Angry Left. Olbermann was pleased with the script, and the next day, before going on the air with it, he posted excerpts on the liberal blog Daily Kos, which is a fairly good representation of the Olbermann fan base. The Kossacks wholly approved. (“You excoriated the bloodyhanded, warmongering imbecile.” “This country cannot survive without you.” “Dude, you’ve got a pair of steel ones!” “I’m gonna print it out, hang it up and memorize it.”)
At MSNBC, the feedback was slightly more cautious. Olbermann’s original script identified the “cold-blooded killers” as everyone at the Pentagon and in the Bush Cabinet; when a colleague noted that that would include such relative moderates as Colin Powell and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Olbermann modified the line. Phil Griffin, the senior vice-president in charge of MSNBC (“Phil thinks he’s my boss,” Olbermann says), raised the matter of tone. Why did Olbermann need to end his commentary by telling the President of the United States to “shut the hell up”?
“Because I can’t say, ‘Shut the fuck up,’ that’s why, frankly,” Olbermann responded. The line stayed in.
O’REILLY CLIPS AND OTHER CLIPS
Keith’s Countdown show on MSNBC ran from 2003 to 2011. As you’d imagine, it included all sorts of incendiary and insulting content and rhetoric, things similar to what we’ve examined thus far.
One thing that stood out to me, on watching a few of these segments: he was prone to picking out individual citizens’ behaviors and holding them up as significant and worthy of political rage. Here’s one example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aj3g2K36ei0&t=34s
This is what polarization and conflict lead us to do: we are prone to filtering for things that represent the badness of our opponents, as we see it, and then we’ll hold those things up as significant, even though in a country of 340 million people, there will be no shortage of horrible behaviors of citizens and leaders. It begs the question: what does the action of an individual mean in a country of 340 million people? Should there be some responsibility to try to put such things in context? To say: this is only one person. To be clear, this isn’t to say that we shouldn’t criticize bad things; or that there can’t be trends. I’m just talking about the tendency people have to hold up such incidents as highly significant, to bolster us-vs-them types of narratives and framings, to drum up anger, no matter how rare those incidents might be.
Another thing that stood out on watching those segments was just how petty there were. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mk34_hIHlRc&t=15s
As someone who’s worked in TV news and knows how common such things are, I have to say that for Keith to nitpick such misspellings for political points is one of the more sad and petty things I’ve seen. I mean, Keith knows more than anyone how common and meaningless those kinds of mistakes are.
One thing this reminded me of was some research I was reading recently on so-called “reactance,” also known as persuasive boomerang. https://defusingamericananger.substack.com/p/how-does-our-anger-at-them-create Research has found that poor arguments attempting to persuade someone can inadvertently make people go the opposite way and be more committed to their beliefs. Conflict and high emotion make many of us issue very poor arguments, which in term cause anger and which in turn make people more committed, not less, to working against their opponents and their opponents’ stances. Just another of the many aspects of how conflict toxicity can be self-reinforcing.
NAZI OUTFIT
An interesting moment in the Bill O’Reilly vs Keith Olbermann war came in 2006. I’ll read from a Guardian piece about this (https://www.theguardian.com/media/2006/jul/26/usnews.broadcasting):
But now a long-running feud between O’Reilly and his less-watched rival, Keith Olbermann, has boiled over into open warfare between networks. At a meeting of the prestigious Television Critics’ Association in California, Olbermann, who works for the MSNBC network, donned an O’Reilly mask and gave a Nazi salute, provoking a furious response from Fox’s chairman, Roger Ailes.
“Clearly he has no viewers except those he gets when he attacks Fox News,” said Mr Ailes, a former image consultant for the first president Bush. Olbermann’s Nazi gesture, he said, had gone “over the line”.
The confrontation came after several months of on-air goading by Olbermann, a professional ironist whose style contrasts sharply with O’Reilly’s populism and “no-nonsense” approach. The MSNBC presenter has given O’Reilly his Worst Person in the World award no fewer than 15 times, and frequently returns with glee to a sexual harrassment case the Fox host settled out of court in 2004. [end quote]
This apparently led to a letter of protest from the Anti-Defamation League.
Later, in 2008, that New Yorker article about Keith included this detail about their feud:
“Bill O’Reilly made Keith Olbermann,” Phil Griffin says. Olbermann concurs, saying, “I really do owe him a percentage of my salary.”
BULLIED OR NOT?
Another interesting moment that stood out to me was a GQ interview of Keith in 2013 where Keith talked about being bullied. https://www.gq.com/story/keith-olbermann-interview-espn-november-2013 I’ll read that exchange.
GQ: You’ve spoken in the past of being bullied in grammar school. Do you feel at a certain point you became the bully? That you crossed over?
Keith Olbermann: No. Because a bully is fighting out of a need to dominate. And is usually unwilling to take the consequences.
GQ: Was being bullied a formative moment?
Keith Olbermann: Well, here’s the background to it. I was a big kid for my age and well advanced intellectually, to the point where I was skipped in the first grade. When another kid did not operate at my level of response—”Steven? Hey, Steven? Steven?”—I’d hit him to get his attention. And my folks enrolled me in a judo class to work out my aggressions. So I was like a potential… Bully is too strong a term. It was frustration. I had potential over-aggressive problems.
So basically, Keith had apparently claimed to have been bullied in the past, but upon repeating the details of the bullying, it sounds more like Keith was bullying other kids. Here he only mentions his aggression towards other kids; he doesn’t even mention other people being mean to him.
That was just a really strange thing to reveal and I think it says a lot about Keith’s perceptions of the world. Was he bullied or was he the bully? Did he maybe just not mention the ways he was bullied? I don’t know and we probably can’t know. Maybe it was a combination of both. But it does seem like Keith is someone prone to being seen as the victim; at excusing his aggressive actions as justified retaliation for other people’s perceived harm or disrespect to him.
Another thing he said in that interview:
Keith: Television is a mental illness. Wanting to be on television is a mental illness. Wanting to be president of the United States, wanting to be an actor—these are degrees of the same mental illness. If you need to be approved of simultaneously by more people than are in this room now, there’s a problem. I don’t know what would happen if television—or fame—stopped tomorrow for all the people who are pursuing it, what they would do. I suspect the idea of the zombie apocalypse is based on that.
I’m gonna eat your flesh unless you applaud me! And that’s the predicate here of my own self-analysis. But you find yourself at various times in your life being fearful, because you don’t know how to function in some environment in which you’re not being applauded by a thousand people or more at once. So many times I’ve looked back with a kind of sympathetic disgust at my personal conduct till age 40.
SPORTS AND POLITICS
Another interesting moment that stood out was from Keith’s Charlie Rose interview in 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buv7_U6beDQ
Keith talked about his obsession with sports when he was a kid; he was extremely into memorizing baseball stats, and collected tons of baseball cards, and annoyed his family with his obsession with sports. Then Charlie gets him on the topic of how he sees his sports obsession relating to his political commentary work:
8:09 it’s a great it’s a great uh training ground in terms of determining cause and effect um you know a ball game ends and somebody won and somebody lost I was going to say that that there’s always a winner and a loser and you can’t you may be able to say at the end of a0 to 119 basketball loss that it was moral victory that you were able to do that well but you can’t can’t go and claim that you won the game and the reason that I think that almost everybody who goes from Sports into politics is I think it’s fair to say you just don’t go and cover politics after you cover Sports you cover it acerbically and doubtfully and dubiously because because there are people claiming that they won the game when they lost.
I think there’s a lot of clues here about what drives Keith so crazy about our political divides. I mean, I myself am very upset by various things around us.
I think Keith is someone who very much desires order and clean boundaries; we could see that in his obsession with baseball and sports stats; as he mentioned here, he likes the clean boundaries of winning and losing in sports games. The world of people and politics is obviously much more messy; people behave in team-based and emotional ways, and us being polarized leads people to behave in even more team-based and emotional ways. It leads to things like people not caring about, or even enthusiastically jumping on board the bandwagon of things like Trump’s promoting distrust of every election he’s been involved in, no matter how unreasonable that behavior is and no matter how damaging to the country it may be.
A lot of things about politics are irrational, just as many aspects of the world of people is irrational. And it’s easy to see how deranging that messy world might be for Keith. It’s easy to see how there are real defensible things that can drive him a bit crazy; I mean, I’m often quite angry and upset about assorted things in the political realm. There are plenty of real, maddening things happening. But I try to keep in mind that this is what humans do; they get entrenched in these toxic cycles of conflict where they act more and more aggressively; it’s kind of our thing, as people. We have to accept that this is standard for us, and see that at some level we’re getting angry at fundamental human dynamics. We must see that how we react to our divides can play a role in shifting our divides.
The things Keith is angry about can lead him down a rabbithole of not caring about his own conduct; of seeing anything biased or incendiary that he does as minor compared to the horrible behaviors he sees on the quote “other side.” He doesn’t see or doesnt seem to care that there are people on the “other side” filtering for grievances and reasons to be upset, too; who will look at Keith’s conduct and be equally maddened and outraged; who will use such conduct and rhetoric as a way to confirm “people on the left have lost their mind.”
ROSS DOUTHAT
I’ll end with a 2009 piece by Ross Douthat in The Atlantic (https://www.theatlantic.com/personal/archive/2009/03/rush-and-olbermann/56011/) Ross made the case for why it was a bad thing for these kinds of approaches to get mainstream political support, as it had with people like Rush Limbaugh among Republicans:
the point of calling Rush an entertainer isn’t to say that nobody should ever listen to him or care about what he has to say. The point is that by virtue of being an entertainer, and having the incentives of an entertainer, he’s a poor candidate to fill the role of spokesman (and ideological enforcer) for the conservative opposition – a role that he seems eager to take on, and that Barack Obama is very eager to see him occupy. I don’t think Limbaugh is a less serious voice for conservatism than Keith Olbermann is for liberalism. But that’s because I don’t think either of them should be taken all that seriously – because they’re media personalities whose primary loyalty is to their image and their audience, and whose primary purpose is to provoke and get attention. And I think it should go without saying that American liberalism would be in serious, serious trouble if someone like Olbermann were occupying the kind of role on the left-of-center that Limbaugh seems to be shouldering his way into at the moment.
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Thanks for watching.