How does this happen?

So Friday I’m far up in the mountains when I get a call from a CNN producer, who is thinking about doing a segment on Saturday morning regarding whether Sonia Sotomayor should retire. We kick it around for a few minutes, and then schedule it. Because of primitive technological conditions associated with a Colorado Rocky Mountain high, I end up doing the thing on my cellphone, with the help of my tech savvy wife, which works surprisingly well.

You can watch it here if you’re curious, although I don’t say anything I haven’t already said in a couple of LGM posts (It is good that people are beginning to talk about this).

I got several outraged emails in the wake of the segment, containing sentiments along the lines expressed in this one:

I think you are a fucking idiot to suggest Sotomeyer retire. She ‘s YOUNGER than Clarence Thomas and Alito and only a year older than Justice Roberts. Where is your recommendation about the THREE males that are REPUBLICANS, you chauvinist pig?

What I find interesting about this is that the person is politically engaged enough to know not only the names, but the ages and political affiliations of various SCOTUS justices, which probably puts the correspondent is something like the 99.5th percentile of knowledge regarding these matters for the general populace. Plus they’re watching a CNN news show on Saturday morning. So this is kind of the opposite of my beloved Ariana Grande Theory of Politics. But it’s not quite the opposite, because on an analytical level this person obviously doesn’t know anything at all about politics, even though they are very deeply engaged with the subject.

Maybe we can call this phenomenon the Elon Musk Theory of Politics.