"The media climate now, in both news and entertainment, is too often of a goading, insinuating resentment, a grinding, agitating antipathy."

Writes Peggy Noonan in "Rage Is All the Rage, and It’s Dangerous/A generation of media figures are cratering under the historical pressure of Donald Trump" (WSJ).

A comic posed with a gruesome bloody facsimile of President Trump's head... In a tearful news conference [Kathy Griffin] said of the president, "He broke me." She was roundly mocked for this. Oh, the big bad president's supporters were mean to you after you held up his bloody effigy. But she was exactly right. He did break her. He robbed her of her sense of restraint and limits, of her judgment. He broke her, but not in the way she thinks, and he is breaking more than her.

We have been seeing a generation of media figures cratering under the historical pressure of Donald Trump. He really is powerful. They're losing their heads. Now would be a good time to regain them. They have been making the whole political scene lower, grubbier. They are showing the young what otherwise estimable adults do under pressure, which is lose their equilibrium, their knowledge of themselves as public figures, as therefore examples -- tone setters. They're paid a lot of money and have famous faces and get the best seat, and the big thing they're supposed to do in return is not be a slob. Not make it worse....

Of course, this kind of lecturing is not going to work, but I found the florid prose interesting, especially the metaphor of dirtiness: These things are low and grubby, and people are slobs. She sounds snobby: The good people, the tone setters, are not showing the little people the right way to act.

And then you get lowly slobs like Hodgkinson idiotically acting on the grubby ideas he's been hearing from the elite. But it would be "fatuous," Noonan instructs us, to think that anyone but the shooter is responsible for the shooting.