By Steve BermanIt didn’t take long for a reporter to find Aaron Brink, the 48 year-old father of the shooter who killed five at Club Q in Colorado Springs. And the guy is totally nuts. He’s clearly on something, probably meth. But he’s a “conservative Republican” who’s glad his mass murderer son isn’t gay.
“I became a porno star in 2002,” is how he answers if he’s seen his son lately. He said the shooter’s mother told him his son committed suicide in 2016. I don’t blame her for the horrendous lie, to keep this guy far away. Brink has been featured on television before, on the show “Intervention” in 2009. There was no epilogue, as the show sometimes did to follow up.
This has to be one of the oddest interviews I’ve ever seen. A reporter is rationally trying to ask a crazy person to describe his crazy son.
What would attract this kind of nutcase to claiming the title of “conservative Republican?” I don’t know his politics, but I suspect, as a white male, who said “fisticuffs and then shake hands like a gentleman, that’s how it should be,” he has some weird sense of chivalry and behavior. Brinks did say that killing people is wrong, eyes darting all over the place and his head on a swivel, just before he got distracted by something to scream at off-camera.
The full quote is “I’m a Mormon. I’m a conservative Republican. And we don’t do gay.” But I guess to his version of his faith, porn is ok as long as it’s with women. I guess drugs are ok, because…I got nothing here.
Here’s where I’m going with this. There’s lots of crazies in the world. Drugs are freely available in all forms and quantities: meth, fentanyl, weed (which is not the weed Bill Clinton didn’t inhale; it’s 20 times stronger, bio-engineered for maximum yield), heroin. Drug-addicted people who started with poor mental health become full-fledge nutcases, and some of them become addicted to rage, or succumb to paranoia. Some of them find a way to get firearms because America has no effective way to bar them from it, and they end up killing a lot of innocent people.
As Peggy Noonan wrote in a 2016 column titled “Will the GOP Break Apart or Evolve?”
Someone once said of Franklin D. Roosevelt that he’s like the Staten Island Ferry, pulling all the garbage in his wake. FDR’s Democratic coalition did contain some garbage, from KKK-supporting Southern Democrats to New York communists. That was some wake! It was also 80 years ago.
Aaron Brink is just one of the many who are hauled along in MAGA’s wake. One question the reporter didn’t ask (at least on camera) that I’d find interesting is if this self-identified Mormon would support Mitt Romney over Donald Trump. I think this guy is about as authentic in his faith as the adherents of the Westboro Baptist Church (the ones who stalk military funerals with anti-gay signs) are to evangelical Christianity.
MAGA’s garbage wake is made up of white male Americans who fashion themselves faithful and God-fearing, but without the requirements of that faith. These include white supremacists, drug-addled crazies, paranoid sovereign citizens, free-staters, and a whole variety of conspiracists waiting for confirmation of their favorite tales. These are the people who think Trump’s document haul contains the secrets of 9/11, or Area 51, or the Chinese plan to use COVID-19 vaccines to control minds, or that the Apollo moon landings were faked, or that Jew-controlled space lasers are causing global warming.
They are not harmless, or even entertaining.
Though people like Ron DeSantis and Kari Lake mean well, they cover themselves with the same stench, pandering to the wake, in order to make points that resonate with real issues. School choice, reasonable curriculum controls, preserving the family, these are all valid, conservative positions. There are forces on the radical progressive train, many of whom have deep ties to educational institutions, teacher’s unions, and large corporate boards, who truly believe kids belong to the government, and families are not to have the liberty to raise them. But claiming that thousands of groomers lurk in every school, or that being gay, or “non-binary” disqualifies a teacher, and passing laws that give citizens power to raise those complaints in a legal sideshow, is not a good way to bring latinos and Christian minorities into the Republican fold.
Oh, it works—oh how it works! But it also gives plenty of cover, and a handful of crazy pills, to every Aaron Brink in America. It allows Democrats to—and they will—use an interview where a man reacts with more visible relief that his son isn’t gay (but the shooter’s lawyers claim he’s “non-binary”) than he shows grief that his son killed five people in a gay bar.
Democrats have their own brand of crazy, violence peddling. The Alexandria congressional baseball shooter tried to assassinate as many Republicans as possible. The man who walked into the Family Research Council with a pistol and a backpack full of ammunition and Chick-fil-A sandwiches wanted to do some perverted version of a Columbian necktie, stuffing the sandwiches in the mouths of his victims, because the FRC was identified as a hate group by a leftist think-tank.
Not every racist killer claims to be a “conservative Republican.” Many are just plain crazy, and their views don’t fit any political lens. But when politicians ensconce themselves in the stink of MAGA’s garbage wake to gain access to a certain audience that might be harder to reach using the high road, they are taking a dangerous shortcut.
Handing out crazy pills is no way to gain voters. The father of the Colorado Springs shooter is clearly nuts. But he is now the face of “conservative Republican.”