More celebrity loons, and we suppose it comes as no shock to many that Steven Frederic Seagal struggles with reason, fact and comprehension. Seagal has been a lot of things, from martial artist, musician and aspiring politician to apologist for dictators, but is perhaps best known for a ridiculously overblown ego and intense paranoia. He has also claimed to be CIA black ops, a psychic, a “healer” and the reincarnation of a Buddhist God or holy man (which is presumably a step on the only way to justify his earlier claim to have put “hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of hours into my weapons training”).
A fierce critic of Obama’s supposedly authoritarian governing style (he should have been impeached, e.g. over Benghazi, as Seagal sees it), Seagal is instead a fan of Vladimir Putin because Putin as a statesman “simply gets shit done when necessary”. Apparently, Seagal considers Putin “one of the great world leaders” and a “brother”, and has taken it on himself to be some sort of PR agent for Russia, including defending Russia’s actions toward the Ukraine; Seagal has even played a concert at a Russian nationalist bike show in Crimea in celebration of the annexation; in 2017 he was also banned from Ukraine for five years for being a national security threat. Putin has reciprocated the bromance, and Seagal is currently a Putin-appointed special envoy to the US, ostensibly with the task of improving relations between the countries. It is impossible to imagine that this might have been Putin's true intention.
A possible contender for “world record in bizarreness”, Seagal’s own reality show was, in 2008, invited to Phoenix by sheriff Joe Arpaio to film a season and partake in police work. The apex of the season was probably when Seagal arrived at the scene of an alleged cockfighting ring driving a tank through the suspect’s gate; 115 roosters and a pet puppy were apparently killed in the process; Seagal summed up the operation by claiming that animal cruelty was one of his pet peeves. (That said, America’s most pressing problem, which Seagal learned while working with Arapaio, is its open borders.) In 2014 Seagal also considered running for governor of Arizona. Here is an interesting take on the similarities between Steven Seagal and Donald Trump, in case you thought he would have been guaranteed to lose.
A staunch defender of gun rights, Seagal has argued that the mass shootings that have occurred in the US are false flag operations with the intent to create unbearable restrictions for gun owners. He has also proposed that the solution to mass shootings is to have armed guards at every single school.
Honorable mention also to Seagal’s woo-based energy drink, the Lightning Bolt energy drink, “the only all natural 100% juice energy drink on the market”, which allows the consumer to “partake of the true Asian Experience”.
Diagnosis: A silly celebrity loon. But remember: so was Donald Trump.