I can’t get over this terrible feeling that I need to talk to you on video

By David McElroy · June 27, 2018

Do you ever have a really horrible compulsion that won’t leave you alone?

I’ve had one of those for years now and I can’t make it go away. I also can’t figure out any way that it makes sense, so I hover in this in-between world where something inside me whispers, “You must do this,” and I respond back with a bewildered, “But what would that even mean?!”

Please indulge me here. I need to talk about this, but I don’t know what I want to say. I don’t have a point. I just feel the urgent need to talk with you about this.

I haven’t been interested in acting or any kind of public performance since I was a teen-ager. Back then, I acted in plays. I made speeches. (I won second place in a state speech contest and I’m still angry that I came in second.) Public performance was easy, but I haven’t sought such opportunities for decades.

For the last few years, though, I can’t shake the intense feeling that I need to be making videos to talk to the world — yet I haven’t the slightest clue about the purpose or content. Crazy, right?

I’ve always believed that nobody should communicate unless he had something clear to say first. I’ve always thought you should have a clear purpose — even need — before you write or speak. People who speak or write without having a specific reason seem to be people whose egos just like to have themselves heard.

But I find myself in the bizarre place of feeling that I need to be recording video — not acting, not selling someone else’s marketing message, not reading a bland script — that will speak directly to somebody out there who needs to hear what I have to say.

What is it that I envision?

Here’s all I can tell you. I see myself speaking my own thoughts directly to the listener, not from a lifeless script, but directly from my heart, about … something.

And that’s where this completely breaks down.

I feel as though I have something I need to say — something that someone needs to hear — and I need to deliver that message in a very direct way through videos on YouTube or a similar online platform. It’s not a personal desire to do this. It’s not an egotistical need to be seen. (You can probably tell that I really worry about about it being seen that way.) It’s an almost mystical compulsion to speak.

But everything about this terrifies me.

Here’s what it feels like. Let’s say God whispered in my ear, “I have something important for you to tell the world. I’ve gathered to masses to hear this message. Go on stage to the microphone.” And then let’s say I went to the microphone in front of the assembled millions or billions of people, just waiting to hear this important message in my ear that I’m supposed to repeat — when God whispers, “OK, you’re on your own now. Just wing it.”

I’m not like the Blues Brothers — “We’re on a mission from God” — but this compulsion feels strong enough sometimes that it has to be obeyed. Yet if I stood behind a microphone and looked into the camera right now, I have no clue what I’d talk about.

I told you up front that I don’t have a point here. I just need to talk about this, because I’m frustrated and have no idea how to deal with it. I want to either do whatever I need to do — or else kill this awful compulsion for good.

I have a camera. I have a professional microphone. I have good recording and editing equipment. I have lights and various other things I need. I have everything I need to make a video in the house right now.

Except one thing.

I don’t have a message. Or if I do, I haven’t been able to hear it clearly enough. My muse hasn’t talked to me loudly enough about it. Or maybe I’m afraid to hear. I don’t know.

I’d love to kill this idea and put it behind me. I don’t like the way I look on camera. I don’t like the way I sound on camera. I have no desire to embarrass myself by making some terrible thing which is never seen by more than a dozen people. I don’t want to do that much work for something that won’t find an audience. (I know people who’ve done this.)

But this compulsion won’t leave me alone. At times it’s an obsession.

Is there something I have to say? Is there something that you need to hear from me? I have no idea, but the contradictions of this terrible need are driving me crazy — because I’m a lost ball in high weeds right now.

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When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

For four years, Donald Trump’s supporters screamed that everything that went wrong was the fault of Joe Biden. They were sometimes right and they were sometimes delusional. (Anybody who knows me understands that I can’t stand Biden any more than I can stand Trump, just for different reasons.) But for two months, Trump has rampaged through U.S. political life — vandalizing pretty much everything in sight — and the vast majority of his supporters are silent at best. Many watch as he blows up the world economy and they make excuses for him. They’re in absolute denial, even about things that Trump is doing very intentionally. Anybody who understands economics and history knows that tariffs are a terrible idea from a pragmatic point of view. Anybody who values individual freedom knows that tariffs are massive taxes on individuals — and they’re a tool of political control over the ability of people to trade freely. Trump is the antithesis of everything which political conservatives stood for just a few years ago. It’s far past time for people who claim to be conservatives to reclaim the principles and values which they used to claim — and stop this mad man before he can accelerate the day when we experience economic and social collapse. Open your eyes to reality and reject this lying narcissist.

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