Let’s get this out of the way: Biden is old. He’s slow and halting in his speech, he sounds like an old man. I’d rather we had a younger candidate running, but he’ll get the job done.

His opponent, on the other hands, sounds like he’s damaged mentally. He has a fucked up brain, and it’s obvious that there’s something more going on than just an age-related slow-down. Here’s a diagnosis by Dr. Elizabeth Zoffman, a forensic psychiatrist and an Associate Clinical Professor of Forensic and General Psychiatry at the University of British Columbia.

• Changes in speech patterns with many fewer and simpler words (decline in vocabulary) with fewer adjectives and adverbs.
• A decline in cognitive focus on speech subjects with incomplete sentences and an inability to focus on a topic long enough to complete a sentence when not reading from a teleprompter.
• Difficulty pronouncing words, word substitution and nonsense words – known as paraphasia
• Tangential thinking where the topic switches mid-sentence to some unrelated topic.
• Frequent repetition of words and phrases as if his mind is stuck in a loop.
• Disinhibition and an inability to control verbal outbursts.
• Socially inappropriate behavior – mocking a man with muscular dystrophy, disrespecting fallen soldiers as losers.
• Lack of self-awareness in that he apparently cannot see how inappropriate his behavior has become and use his judgment to stop himself.
• Changes in movement and gait. His walk appears wide-based and he has developed a swing of his right leg. He appears glued to the floor when he “dances” for his audience. If caught on camera standing still, he appears unnaturally immobile.
• The changes in judgment and impulse control have uncovered and perhaps worsened underlying personality traits that others have characterized as narcissistic and antisocial. The changes have led some experts to suggest a diagnosis of “malignant narcissism.”

All of that is apparent. This isn’t just picking a biased doctor to invent a diagnosis — that’s all stuff we can see and hear with our own eyes and ears. His fanatical voters don’t care, the media doesn’t care, he plans to shamble into office like a rot-brained zombie.

I thought this was one of the worst fathers ever: remember the Canadian farmer who moved his whole family to Russia? Arend and Anneesa Feenstra, who dragged their ten kids to an uncertain future, are being told to leave because who knew, they were expected to learn the Russian language, and Arend didn’t have time. Why he didn’t have time is a mystery, since his wife, by his own admission, was doing all the childcare and housework and editing the YouTube videos that were their sole source of income.

That’s a deeply stupid dad who is letting his ideology destroy his whole family.

But then there’s a dad that’s even worse. Stewart Rhodes founded the Oath Keepers and is now serving an 18-year federal sentence for conspiring to overthrow the government. You might suspect he didn’t have the happiest home life. Now we know how bad it was: his son has come out and told all.

In a recent interview with the Associated Press, Adams revealed his abusive upbringing at the hands of Stewart Rhodes, and the new path that he seeks to chart.

He said living with Rhodes was a constant process of moving around and starting over, as the Yale-educated militant convinced his family the government was spying on them and the end of days was imminent.

“We lived in extreme isolation in one particular cultural bubble in increasingly paranoid and militant right-wing political spheres everywhere we moved in the country, until eventually we ended up in Montana,” Adams said.

When his mother divorced Rhodes in 2018, Adams was able to move out of the shadow he cast on their family. Rhodes severely undercut Adams’ and his seven siblings’ schooling and barred them from publicly talking about their home lives. Adams couldn’t complete a times table until he was 19 and has spent the last several years trying to catch up on his education—recently enrolling in several college courses.

Yikes. Dakota Adams has his revenge, though. He’s running for the Montana state house…as a Democrat!

“It served as a sobering wake-up call in terms of how much danger we are truly in and how the Republican Party enabled a president to become an active danger to this republic,” he said. “I was forced to reevaluate a lot of beliefs and face hard questions about what I really stood for.”

He has plans to sell the body armor and guns he once wore to protest the government alongside his father, and he had some strong thoughts on guns and gun culture.

“American gun culture needs to be rehabilitated from an egotistical and vanity-based, hyper-individualist ego trip culture to civil service and solemn responsibility to the community,” he said. He still opposes total bans on firearms—he believed they could be necessary for the self-defense of vulnerable groups.

Many of his direct policy concerns are about making Montana livable for middle- and lower-income people. Most of the voters in his area are strongly conservative, and Adams tries to avoid sweeping cultural and social issues. He would rather focus on the challenges directly facing Montana residents.

I’d vote for him.

It’s something I’ve always felt, so this is an interesting illustrative example. I’ve thought that the only way to cultivate empathetic, thoughtful, open-minded children is to give them an empathetic, thoughtful, open-minded upbringing. The authoritarian parents, like Rhodes and Feenstra not only make their kids’ lives a living hell, it drives them away from their ideology. I suspect some of the commenters here have similar stories, of being brought up in an oppressive environment and now rebounding towards a more progressive approach to life. That’s one of the strengths of the Left.