The Cryptkeeper

 

WW2 Flying Tigers P-40 showing Ace-level kills at “Threads” based on 

notifications of 50 to 100 Likes for various replies I’ve made to TDS ranters.

I’ve been in a down mood as we approach the end of 2025 and the completion of Trump’s first year in office since 2020. My annual End of Year post will describe my big picture view, but this post will fill in a significant part of that picture and can be used as a basis for endorsement or dismissal of my personal perspective.

The social network app called Threads has been reference here previously, after my first exploratory encounters with what I’ve termed the “submerged 10 percent of Trump haters” the real percentage is probably much higher than a tenth, but these are the noncelebrity Rosie O’Donnells and Robert De Niros who are so obsessed with Trump that they have to type it out loud at the top of their keyboard lungs on a daily basis.

After my first few brushes with them, I began to think that there’s something important going on here. Yes, the content is uniformly shrill, fact-free, and relentlessly repetitive. Trivial in terms of its content, but also frightening in the aggregate. Reading the stuff is like hearing the uniform buzzing of a swarm of flies preparing to feast on something dead when the wounds of some larger predator have ended the quarry’s life. Here’s a sample of the notifications I received in the ore-dawn hours the other morning. Much the same as always…

For a week or two, I read the more virulent posts and often replied to the character limit pointing out contradictions in their reasoning and holes in their evidence. I made jokes about their more over-the-top pronouncements. They didn’t like it and initially identified me a moron MAGA troll. Of course they failed to realize they were all trolling Trump for the purpose of intimidating MAGA morons, whom they outnumber at Threads.

But I didn’t go away. Something changed when I read a post by a female username declaring her determination to continue making fun of how funny looking MAGA morons are. I checked her profile and copied her posed little partial face photo. Then I replied with a photo of 20+ Antifa protester mugshots taken during the urban riots in the”Hands up” riots and wondered how many of her friends looked more like this than her profile photo. Then I asked if her pic was really of her or an avatar of what she wanted to look like. She was furious. Of course it was her, nothing like the disgusting, grotesque, crust creature in my own Instagram pics.

After that, all hell broke loose. I was quickly christened the Cryptkeeper and continuously ridiculed for my appearance and the endlessly repeated joke, Do I own or ever look in a mirror? 

I wasn’t trying to look like a buddy in what I posted there. ‘Cryptkeeper’ is okay with me.

The one they kept posting back at me was the third one, which I had taken on my iPad in the predawn of my 72nd birthday. This has become a custom for me as I chart the advancements of old age on my person. (The other two are also iPad pics, manipulated with image filters of effects, not actual corrections of my face.) I joked back at them, discovering how many of the pictorial critics offered either no pictures of themselves or cartoon avatars of animals and fantasy critters. One of the latter actually threatened me, declaring he knew he could find me on THE REGISTER and get all the info that might be needed. For what? Doxxing, Swatting, blackmail, home invasion? Told him I wasn’t blackmail bait and if anything happened to me physically, it would be good book promotion for me, more important to me than a death I’m not afraid of.

But they kept coming. I realized they had realized they weren’t winning in their political and polemic exchanges with me, so this new avenue of attack, intended to inflict mortal wounds on my vanity, was new life in their effort to drive the troll away. Make a monster of me to a sufficient degree that I would accept their perspective on me as a consensus thing and lose both confidence and power.

With me, coincidence (which I call ‘Serendicity’) always plays a part in my mental life. I happened to see a paranormal investigation show in which two accomplished investigators use a strategy of researching the histories and legends about the haunted place and the community it resides in. The episode that caught my attention as something other than background for sleeping to was about a house with a long reputation for being haunted and now therefore a museum and frequent subject of paranormal investigators with TV cameras and ghost hunters. The reason this show’s hosts had been called in was that ordinary haunting events like bumps and knocks and opening doors and blinking lights had begun to include physical attacks such as scratches, bruises, and pushes in the vicinity of  stairs. The museum needed paranormal investigators to help fund operations, but injuries to visitors could drive them out of business. The violent incidents were all attributed to an entity known as Zombie Boy, a shadow figure based on a local legend of murder and death of the murderer, a brain-damaged boy talked into the crime he committed. Now, the story had it, he was seeking revenge from the afterlife.

The hosts did their research and were able to confirm a mysterious murder but no one matching the description of Zombie Boy. They suspected Zombie Boy was a fabrication used to cover up a less picturesque perpetrator who probably got away with murder. The shrewder of the two hosts said she thought Zombie Boy might actually be a thought form instead of a real spirit. The current violence may have increased as a result of repetitions of the legend, believed by tourists and investigators, whose creation was indeed now assaulting them physically. She recommended an experiment. Compose a revised fictional version of the legend that made Zombie Boy a harmless victim of manipulation now wandering adrift and helpless in an afterlife he could not understand. What he responded to was kindness and friendly words.

They tried the experiment. They reported to museum employees, attending investigators, and tourists that they had uncovered the truth about Zombie Boy and a change in attitudes about him would eliminate the physical attacks. This worked. The violent incidents stopped and have not recurred. There are other harmless ghosts on the premises and they continue opening and closing doors, flashing lights, and making bumps in the night for tourists and ghost hunters.

Which got me to thinking. That was the real product of a social network like Threads. There is a monster named Donald Trump. He is not the man serving as President though. He is a thought form created by the deep irrational conviction that he exists by the people who need him to exist. He is a hater of blacks and women and homosexuals and TGs and foreigners and he is also a liar, a thief, a conman, a rapist, a killer, a pedophile, and a creature so vile he can only be dealt with by solitary confinement for life in prison or assassination. They keep this monster alive by endlessly repeating the same fact-free accusations, and even darker versions of Biden lawfare and the most counterfeit mass media propaganda. They’re not trying to persuade outsiders, only to reinforce each mother’s vision of the monster.  When challenged in any way by anyone, the interlopers are automatically consigned to the monster’s orc-like horde of ghouls and driven away. When someone persists in countering their creation, they must get the en masse monster treatment too.

Why? What purpose does this serve? Unfortunately, the evidence that does exist suggests that TDS is a function of unhappy people displaying common symptoms of mental illness — Paranoia, low self-esteem, abandonment issues of various kinds, and a history of failures in key parts of their upbringings and lives. 

I’m not writing this to psychoanalyze the Threads people. I’m suggesting that their success in creating a thoughtform monster believed in so uncritically by millions of American citizens is a fact we should not ignore or deny. 

This is the power still left to what remains of the Democrat Party, the only part that is identifiable and unified enough for ambitious politicians to appeal to as they seek to rise from the back benches to power. We can see it happening more and more all the time. Jasmine Crockett running for the Senate in Texas. AOC running for President. Kamala thinking she has a chance to run again. Mamdani elected Mayor of New York. Beleaguered, overtaxed, robbed and exploited by the policies of a dyslexic male model, (Californians are lining up to support, and pay for, the Presidential run of Gavin Newsom), the open defiance of federal law by governors of Illinois, Minnesota, Oregon, New York, and Massachusetts, and calls for open sedition by U.S. troops of the sitting President of the United States — all these are direct incitements to violence and the breakdown of civil order. Their backing by the uninformed masses is secured not by the validity of the policies advocated by the actors just named, but by the massively widespread belief in the thoughtform monster called Donald Trump.

We are headed for very scary times. Appeasement or toleration of rhetorical excesses will not succeed. They cannot be, must not be, censored, but confronted and opposed in every forum where they indulge the fantasies sad people concoct to avoid examining the weaknesses and failures they have projected onto their President and the nation.

There is no Zombie Boy. The TrumpMonster is not real, even if you’re convinced you’ve seen his face…

So sayeth the Cryptkeeper, who has just completed his 700th post at this website. 320,000 of you have visited here thus far. He thanks you for your attention to this vital matter.