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Why Herman Cain Tweeted Out A Bunch Of ‘Twin Peaks’ Screenshots

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Thomas Phippen
July 19, 2017 4:49 PM ET

Radio host and former Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain’s Twitter feed was filled with images from this year’s revival of the 1990s TV show “Twin Peaks.”

Cain’s website has used multiple stills grabbed from the 2017 Showtime series, created by David Lynch and Mark Frost, for articles on HermanCain.com on Monday as a joke between two writers who are fans of the show.

The idea to use images from the surrealist crime drama occurred to Herman Cain contributor Robert Laurie after he noticed that MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” host Joe Scarborough had a hairstyle similar to the main character in Lynch’s 1997 movie “Eraserhead.”

“For fun, I used a picture of Jack Nance side by side with Scarborough as a joke that I thought only I would really get,” Laurie told The Daily Caller News Foundation.

Laurie and fellow HermanCain.com contributor Dan Calabrese are “both obsessive Twin Peaks fans, and every Monday we trade theories about the show while we work,” Laurie said.

Twin Peaks ran for two seasons in 1990 and 1991 on ABC, but got a second life as a miniseries this year on Showtime. “We really just thought it would be funny to spend Monday using pics from the new season — especially if they made as little sense as possible,” Laurie said.

The images may be somewhat topical for those familiar with the show. The first article tweeted from Cain’s account to use a Twin Peaks image was about Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell’s move to delay “ObamaCare repeal vote indefinitely while McCain recovers from surgery.”

The tweet, sent at 7:20 a.m., features an image from Twin Peaks depicting two characters in a place called the Black Lodge, a surreal, somewhat purgatorial alternate reality where the show’s protagonist, FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper (played by Kyle McLachlan), has been trapped for decades.

A few hours and a few non-Twin Peaks tweets later, Cain’s account tweeted another image from the show, and the use of surrealist David Lynch images became a pattern.

“The only one I really made ‘correspond’ in any way was the picture of David Duchovny as FBI Chief of Staff Denise Bryson. It ran with a quick piece about Caitlyn Jenner possibly having her eye on Diane Feinstein’s Senate seat and seemed too perfect,” Laurie said.

Laurie was “genuinely surprised that it seems to have garnered so much attention. We live in a world where we could soon see The Rock, Kid Rock, and Caitlyn Jenner all running for office — and possibly succeeding — so Twin Peaks is not nearly the most surreal thing on our radar.”

The Daily Caller News Foundation reached out to Showtime about the surfeit of Twin Peaks content on Cain’s website, but did not receive comment in time for publication.

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