#2548: Josh Bernstein

The fascinating thing about Josh Bernstein is his ability to take what most people would recognize as the most demented nonsense position on an issue and show that it is possibly to (presumably honestly) assert an even more ridiculous position. Bernstein is, apparently, always wrong about absolutely everything, and on anything where it is possible to have a reasonable disagreement, he consistently goes for an incoherently deranged further alternative. He is also evil.

 

But the basics: Josh Bernstein is the host of the Josh Bernstein Uncensored Show, a talk show that used to be on youtube until 2020, when he was thrown out after calling for those who disagree with him politically to be murdered. As a commentator, his work has appeared on Forbes, Breitbart, The Dove, The Atlantic, as well as OAN and numerous other wingnut fake news mills.

 

Trump, and Trump's enemies

The success formula for wingnut talk shows is to ramp it up and cram even more internally inconsistent negative characterizations of and accusations against the others into even less time than one’s competitors. Bernstein hit the formula – he is rather open about it – in the early days of Trump.

 

Concerning Trump’s predecessor, however, Obama was, according to Bernstein, “an arrogant, elitist, communist, Marxist, muslim scumbag” and an “illegal alien” as well as possibly a “closeted homosexual” who spent his eight years in office plotting to destroy America, because anyone who disagrees with Bernstein on politics is evil (= muslim = Marxist = homosexual = illegal alien) and is just out to destroy everything. In fact, Obama is an “admitted socialist Marxist communist”. Bernstein didn’t cite any source for the claim, but it felt right to Bernstein so it must be true. Obama is also a self-proclaimed Muslim – “I believe the president when he repeatedly tells me over and over and over again that he is a practitioner of the Islamic faith. He is not a Christian,” said Bernstein. Not content with eight years of presidency, Obama immediately afterwards embarked on a career as a “Saul Alinsky Jedi knight trainer” (take a moment to puzzle out who Bernstein seems to root for in Star Wars) who was personally responsible for mobilizing tens of thousands of activists to protest against President Trump. While Trump “makes you feel good about yourself and your country,” as Bernstein sees it, the “diabolical” Obama “has done nothing but divide and conquer in order to grow his political base,” something Trump, a consistently unifying force in American society, would never do.

 

Most importantly, Obama apparently left Trump with the Deep State, which seems mostly to consist of the demonic checks and balances the Constitution explicitly introduced to prevent abuse of power from the different branches of government (and which do, of course, stand in the way for the supreme strong ruler pseudo-fascists like Bernstein wet-dreamed Trump to be). According to Bernstein, however, the deep state is everywhere, and includes not only U.S. intelligence agencies, but also the media, every politician, higher education, and even “the sandwich shop owners”. Basically, the majority of Americans are involved in this very secret conspiracy against America and Americans.

 

To Bernstein, the deep state is a convenient catchall explanation of everything that could be inconvenient to his narratives. When Donald Trump jr. got some flak for meeting with a Russian who promised damaging information on Hillary Clinton, Bernstein promptly concluded that the attorney was “basically a plant” (“tight with the Clintons”) working on behalf of the “deep state” – the evidence for his conclusion consisting solely of it being the best fit for the narrative he wanted to push.

 

Ultimately, the Deep State goes all the way to Satan. “There are a lot of demons inside that White House and they are all circling around our president,” declared Bernstein.

 

Conspiracies everywhere

In 2018, Bernstein claimed to have uncovered irrefutable proof that George Soros was funding the migrant caravan, and anyone who doesn’t believe him can “go to hell.” He didn’t actually offer any proof. But he did follow up by saying that “if Hitler was around, [George Soros] would be his number one or number two henchman for sure.” Soros, of course, is Jewish. But then Bernstein, who is Jewish himself, has a complicated relationship with anti-Semitism – anti-Semitism isn’t all bad, apparently: “I hope and pray that there is still enough anti-Semitism out there in the United States to make sure that Bernie Sanders is never president,” said Bernstein in 2019.

 

Despite the fact that the hilariously idiotic wingnut Seth Rich conspiracy theory had been utterly debunked, Bernstein asserted that Hillary Clinton herself had “her famous hit man, John Podesta, whack this kid”. Podesta is, according to Bernstein,  “a serial murderer” and “probably responsible for Vince Foster; he’s certainly responsible for Antonin Scalia’s death”. In more detail (and here it’s worth quoting him at length):

 

“I believe that Podesta more than likely snuck up behind this kid in the middle of the night near his home when he was walking home and shot him in the back of the head. I could be wrong, but I doubt it because I have been right on almost everything that I have predicted so far, and I don’t do fake news. You can get fake news other places; you ain’t going to get fake news on the Josh Bernstein show.”

 

Yes, his sole piece of evidence for his insane speculation is the assertion that he “doesn’t do fake news” (which, of course, is false); so since he’s not wrong, he must be right. It’s a pretty nice illustration of the workings of the mind of Josh Bernstein. He has also elsewhere declared that fact-checkers are “full of shit”, and that if you believe them, “you are a fucking moron”; instead of fact-checkers, “you should trust me and my reputation because my reputation is 100 percent solid.”

 

In 2021, Bernstein suggested that the deaths at the Astroworld music festival were part of a “Satanic sacrifice”, and in 2017, he suggested that the person to blame for the Las Vegas shootings was the shooter’s girlfriend’s ex-husband, who may never even have met the shooter, because the ex-husband’s social media pages are “littered with anti-Trump and pro-leftist progressive garbage.” That makes him a potential murderer (he “fit that profile, absolutely fit that profile” – it’s unclear what profile Bernstein is referring to) who may have radicalized his wife who then radicalized the shooter, and he should therefore “be monitored for hate crimes”. We cannot quite discern what hate crimes the guy is guilty of – presumably disagreeing with Bernstein on politics – but we note that Bernstein thinks people with hateful views should be monitored by the government. … though on the other hand, he once called on the federal government to investigate Facebook for violating the Fourth Amendment by supposedly asking personal questions in a lighthearted, entirely voluntary feature – apparently asking him about personal issues is a violation of the Constitutional protection against “unreasonable searches and seizures”. “I think that’s a question that needs to be asked,” stated Bernstein. It isn’t.

 

(Bernstein doesn’t like tech companies or social media, and in 2019, he called on Trump to use the military to arrest the heads of Google, Twitter and Facebook and to “shut down Silicon Valley” because he wrongly imagines that refusing to host extremist hate speech and conspiracy drivel is somehow in violation of the First Amendment.)

 

People who need to be murdered

In 2017, Bernstein published a long list of elected officials and government employees whom he believed should be executed for treason because they allegedly (i.e. in Bernstein’s paranoid-fuelled fever dreams) contemplated trying to prevent Trump from being inaugurated, including:

 

-       former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, based on an unsubstantiated conspiracy article claiming that Clapper considered challenging Trump’s presidency in court.

-       Barack Obama

-       Hillary Clinton. In 2019, Bernstein repeated his call for Hillary Clinton to face the guillotine, without offering any discernible rationale.

-       James Comey

-       Robert Mueller

-       Loretta Lynch, Sens. Mark Warner, Ben Cardin, Bob Corker, and various other government officials.

 

In 2017, he called for federal contractor Reality Leigh Winner to be executed for allegedly leaking a classified memo detailing “a months-long Russian intelligence cyber effort against elements of the U.S. election and voting infrastructure” to The Intercept because the information could be inconvenient to Trump. He wanted Trump himself to call for the execution, because killing people shows strength and Bernstein likes displays of strength. Meanwhile, Peter Strzok should be “executed at half time during the next Super Bowl” for having political views Bernstein disagrees with while simultaneously having a government job. He doesn’t like Krysten Sinema either, but seems to be satisfied with having “her citizenship revoked.”

 

On the other hand, Joe Biden and all “these bastards” should “hang by the neck until it cracks,” said Bernstein, warning that if they aren’t executed by the state, the American people will take matters into their own hands. As a threat, it is pretty nonsensical, though it elegantly displays the kind of incoherent, murderous rage that is Bernstein’s trademark. Dr. Anthony Fauci “deserves to be sodomized every single day in a prison cell for the rest of his life” (Bernstein has threatened Fauci with violence on numerous occasions.) And Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer should burn “in Hell for even being alive”.

 

Muslims, of course, need to be “eradicated” “pretty much from everywhere” because Muslims “just cannot deal and cope with being in a civilized society.” The statement, of course, simultaneously asserts that Bernstein is unable to cope with being in a civilized society, but he didn’t connect those dots.

 

And California legislators “should be held down against their will and injected with HIV.” Meanwhile, every Republican who “betrayed” Trump by failing to help him overturn the election should get a “flesh eating disease … because they deserve to suffer in pain for the rest of their lives.”

 

Of course, his wish to murder those who disagree with him, combined with other obvious cognitive deficiencies, leads Bernstein to assume that others want to murder those they disagree with on political issues, too. So, when he praised Trump’s DACA decision, he followed up with a call for deporting all immigrants since failing to reduce immigration will eventually lead to the elimination of the Republican Party and the execution of conservatives. Democrats, as Bernstein views them, are essentially “just like Adolf Hitler and Mussolini” and “would probably start killing people at some point that disagreed with their positions.” In 2021, he urged truck drivers all over the US to refuse to deliver food and water to “anywhere where there are tons of registered Democrats” in an effort to literally starve those who voted for President Joe Biden until the entire Biden administration resigns, because of issues with how healthy democracies work.

 

Bernstein’s position, though, is actually pretty instructive, on a general level. Like many wingnuts, Bernstein doesn’t only want his political opponents to fail to achieve their goals: he wants them to suffer for disagreeing with him. He is certainly not alone in that kind of attitude in the US at present.

 

Other politics, and God

Given that it would be hard to do away with democracy altogether, Bernstein’s official position is that the voting age should be raised to at least 25 and that all voters should be required to show proof of income. Poor people don’t have interests, at least not interests that count.

 

In 2017, Bernstein posted a video where he suggested that God is opposed to the removal of Confederate monuments and is divinely intervening to prevent them from being taken down. Later, angry that some efforts to remove statues of slave owners were nonetheless successful, Bernstein declared that Democrats “love slavery so much that if it was legal today, every single conservative, every single Republican would have a chain around their neck and they’d be locked in a cage.” The Democrats, as Bernstein sees things, “are not a legitimate party” but “a terrorist organization” that is no different than ISIS, Al Qaeda, Boko Haram, and the Nazis: “These people are purebred evil, satanic communists.”

 

In 2018, Bernstein urged Arizona to appoint wingnut criminal Joe Arpaio to fill the U.S. Senate seat left vacant by the death of John McCain. The same year, he declared that if Congress would just enact “The Josh Bernstein Secure Schools Act Of 2018”, then America will “never hear of another mass shooting at a school ever again.” We haven’t dared to look at the proposal. (For the record, Bernstein thinks that the FBI is paying parents to have their kids carry out school shootings so the government can confiscate all the guns and force everyone to get vaccinated: “You gotta think, folks,” said Bernstein, because he sure as damn won’t.)

 

He has also declared that it should be illegal for liberal “scum” from blue states to move to red states if they are going to be “changing the dynamics and voting patterns” of a conservative state. “They’re bringing their disgusting, demonic filth with them,” said Bernstein.

 

In 2022, he asserted that all those responsible for “stealing” the 2020 election are responsible for the crisis in Ukraine, and he hopes they all “burn in hell for eternity.”

 

He also urged Trump to lead a convoy of truckers to shut down the Super Bowl and demand that President Biden, who is “a demented old pedophile fool” and “probably a descendant of Satan” and “a disgusting Satanic demon walking amongst us”, resign. Somehow, we doubt that such an effort would have panned out the way Bernstein would have hoped. (He also called for 30 million Americans to surround the White House and demand the same; that was after his prayers that the military would “turn on 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. and get rid of, by force if necessary, this fraudulent administration” – the request for a coup apparently “makes me a patriot” – went unanswered.) Of course, Bernstein thinks “Trump won [the 2020 election] a landslide. It was 410 electoral votes to 128, if you want to know exactly the numbers. He absolutely crushed it” because if you just ignore the facts then anything can be true (Bernstein vowed to never accept the results, no matter what the facts might have been). In 2021, he also claimed that Larry Elder won the California recall election (he didn’t), calling on conservatives to launch a canvassing operation to uncover supposed election fraud. Bernstein also demanded a forensic audit of the 2021 Virginia gubernatorial election; though Glenn Youngkin won, Bernstein wanted an audit to prove that Youngkin won in a “landslide” by at least “20 or 30 points.” In fact, according to Bernstein any GOP loss “was because of voter fraud. 100 percent.” You could really just do away with voting, an unnecessary middleman, altogether.

 

Zeh others

According to Bernstein, “Oprah Winfrey is a pro-black, militant leftist who hates white people.” We have found no suggestion of evidence for the claim, except that Oprah is Black.

 

Black Democrats in Congress, meanwhile, “are basically the equivalent of slave owners” (the reasoning is unclear; we suspect much hinges on “basically”) and – based on no indication of evidence whatsoever – corrupt.

 

According to himself, he very much respects women.

 

On drawing distinctions

Bernstein has said that stores catering to transgender children are “no different than ISIS”. It’s probably fortunate for everyone but ISIS that Bernstein was never deployed in any kind of attempt to combat ISIS.

 

Covid

Bernstein, deciding as usual to assume the position of wrong on the facts for political reasons, has repeatedly urged his viewers to resist COVID vaccination “at all costs” (so, presumably including death). That would include taking COVID tests, too, since the “nose rape” PCR COVID-19 tests are ostensibly being used to secretly deliver vaccines to those who otherwise refuse to take them.

 

He has also been a vocal opponent of mask mandates and any other reasonable mandates during the COVID-19 pandemic, and in 2021, asserting against all evidence and reason that COVID-19 was a Chinese “bio terrorism weapon,” he demanded that all Chinese scientists be thrown out of the United States: “We should be rounding up these chink bastards and getting ’em the hell out of the country,” said Bernstein.

 

In September 2021, Bernstein stated that he had gotten COVID-19 and said he was very angry with news outlets that had reported on that. After using Ivermectin and vitamin cocktails, he recovered, just like most people do without using nonsense remedies. He promptly credited, because politics, Ivermectin for having had such a light version of the disease with “literally have zero flu-like symptoms”. Not only did he not get any Covid symptoms, he even apparently tested negative for Covid! Yay the power of Ivermectin.

 

There’s a good Josh Bernstein resource here.

 

Diagnosis: One of the most rabidly insane and furious little snowflakes in the wingnut media circus. He is simultaneously intensely paranoid and deeply sensitive, on the one hand, and wants to murder, well, more or less anyone who fails to conform to his political opinions, on the other. A telling mirror of parts of American society at the moment.