Tag: Fuck You MAGA

J.D. Vance Discourse Is The Dumbest Discourse


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

So, this Saturday’s evening Twitter has seen the Usual Suspects of Blue Check Liberalism atwitter over this dumb, obvious troll by newly minted Trump sycophant J..D. Vance.

Vance is not stupid. In fact, as I understand it, he’s quite smart and quite well educated. But he’s on the MAGA grift gravy train now, so he feels obligated to troll liberals at every opportunity.

If you give the above tweet any thought, you obviously see the ” ” around it — it’s mean to convey the vibe of that one cool Assistant Youth Pastor who turns his chair around and sits facing you to tell you how Jesus would have been MAGA if he lived today.

But the dynamic of the over wrought, over heated Twitter environment is such that a tweet like Vance’s can easily — EASILY — be misconstrued. And, of course, Vance knows that. The whole thing is a trap to “own” the “humorless” libs. It also doubles as an in-kind contribution to his Ohio Senate campaign because a lot of high profile Blue Check liberals quote tweet it in an effort to dunk on him.

He (and the entire MAGA bullshit echo chamber) knows this, and so they lay traps for liberals like this all the time. And liberals fall for these traps every single fucking time. In fact, it’s so bad, someone needs to teach “How not to fall for a MAGA troll” master class for such individuals to spare us a lot of grief.

Anyway. Do better Blue Check Liberals.

The New Right Is Driving Me To Drink


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Apparently, the Confederate statue controversy is near and dear to MAGA thought leader Jesse Kelly’s heart. So, let’s look at his hot take on this lovely issue.

Mr. Kelly gets off on the monument thing because it’s his “in” to a huge swath of Southern white America who barely keeps up with the news. Once he gets their attention by ranting about taking down “history” then he can give them a permission structure for voting for the fascists that he obviously hopes will one day run the United States.

The only way I can spend this much brain power on something so stupid is to be drunk.

But let’s take Mr. Kelly’s bad faith arguments at face value. Apparently, he loves American history so much that he thinks anyone who wants to tear down monuments to traitors are “terrorists.” While I’m glad Mr. Kelly loves American history as much as I do, maybe he would notice that the long arc of (American) history bends towards justice.

It’s very curious that Mr. Kelly takes such pains to defend statues of people who took up arms against the Federal government in an effort to protect human bondage. What gives, bruh?

Anyway. The point is — it’s people like Mr. Kelly who set the boundaries of rhetoric within the Right wing echo chamber. He stakes out a really bonkers, extremist hot take, then it filters down, and is watered down via OAN, NewsMax and FOX News to normal people who should know better but don’t because of negative polarization.

We’re all very fucked. And I’m drunk.

Fast Times In The Upside Down


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I may have to pour myself some more rye to write this one. Think of this as a very long subtweet of MAGA “thought leader” Jesse Kelly. Oh boy. This is going to be tough not write and grow more and more angry as I do it.

But, here’s the tweete, as the kids say.

I have to take a deep breath on this one. First off, it’s interesting that people like Mr. Kelly seem to vacillate between claiming Trump can’t possibly be racist because Lincoln was a Republican and saying shit like the above. Which is it, Mr. Kelly? Do you claim Lincoln or do you not?

“Saint Abe” is a personal hero of mine and I have read a lot about him. Now, I write this post knowing damn well that Mr. Kelly, however cogent he may be, operates exclusively on a bad faith basis. Everything he says — or tweets — is horse shit and he knows it, but the allure of the MAGA (or New Right) grift is way too powerful.

You come for Lincoln, you come for me.

Anyway, the attack on Lincoln on the part of Mr. Kelly is part of an over all attack on the modern world. Apparently, the New Right feels they can score the most points by eliminating Lincoln as someone to admire and to give a reach around to good old boys who believe in the Lost Cause and think flying the Confederate Battle Flag is “heritage not hate.”

This comes from an overarching need to control what any historical discussion is about. Every moment we’re fighting over stupid shit like Lincoln’s public, off handed mulling of sending freed slaves to Libera is a moment we’re not talking about the how conservatives supported slavery.

Also, the teaching of history that I got was a lot more complex than, apparently, what Mr. Kelly got. History is complicated and messy and if you want to “keep things simple” then, well, I don’t know what to do with you. I wasn’t taught that Lee was “Hitler II.” I was taught that he loved Virginia so much that he was willing to fight for the Confederates. It goes without saying, of course, that he saw slavery, “the peculiar institution,” as central to the civil war.

I guess what Mr. Kelly is TRYING to do, is, first, dismiss the entire civil war as anything one can bring into a debate. That way, he doesn’t have to use his obviously limited knowledge of that extremely complex macro historical event. It’s his way of waving his hand and saying yadda, yadda, yadda, Lincoln was a racist, fuck you, lib.

Also, I think he’s pandering to his audience. I suspect his sweet spot is a very conservative engineer type who has a very simplistic political world view and doesn’t talk to liberals very often. As such, they listen to Mr. Kelly for validation. By conflating and simplifying the Civil War, Mr. Kelly is able to negate it as an issue and make his audience feel smug that THEY know something about “Saint Abe” that the majority of dumb liberals don’t know.

It’s amusing to me that something as basic as “slavery bad, Lincoln good” is seen as problematic for people such as Mr. Kelly. It’s kind of dark, but luz.

Writing these posts is so cathartic.

‘This Is The New Right’


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Let’s crack open the rye and take a little journey into the Upside Down of the Right wing Twitter echo chamber. I’ve found a feed that is gist for a lot of posts and I’m going to cherry pick the best tweets and write a response to them at length.

Here’s our first one.

There’s a lot to unpack here. The interesting thing about Jesse Kelly is at least he’s cogent in his status as a fascist thought leader. I have to give him that. And, from my personal experience, a lot of bedrock conservatives with a permission structure to vote MAGA use watered down versions of his talking points without even realizing it.

But let’s focus on the, “…You cannot use my values against me….Nothing you say holds any meaning to me.”

What does that even mean? It appears as though the Mr. Kelly is going the nullification route. He’s saying that by definition, if because you’re not a fascist like him, he won’t listen to you, no matter what you say. No point you make which shows him to be a big old hypocrite matters because you’re saying it. This is a great way to pretty much make pin his entire argument on recursive thinking.

If, as a member of the “New Right” he can never be proven to be a hypocrite because he’s not going to listen to anything you say in the first place because he doesn’t agree with you then, lulz, that’s pretty fucking scary. It’s a very dehumanizing stance to take and would be at home in Nazi Germany. I mean, wouldn’t a Nazi say the same thing to a Jewish intellectual? Yep!

In fact, that’s why addressing people like Mr. Kelly in a calm, logical fashion only leads to heart break –you can’t mention Nazis, you can’t mention racism, you can’t mention systemic racism, you can’t mention Hitler and you can’t mention their jaw dropping hypocrisy. If you do, THEY get mad and either yell at you, or smugly say “this is the New Right.”

So why am I doing all this writing about all this bullshit? I don’t know, Mr. Kelly is actually cogent, as I mentioned, and I can’t get all I want to say off my chest in a tweet.

The MAGA Pink Elephant In The Room


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

One of the most aggravating things about Twitter these days is how fucking oblivious Blue Check Liberals are to how dire things are politically in the United States.

They still, to this day, spend way too much energy trying to parse out the non-existent logic of MAGA. Instead of saying, “Oh my God, the United States may buckle soon because of the rise of fascism,” they chuckle and giggle at this or that ostensibly stupid thing that a MAGA “thought leader” has tweeted.

All of this is, of course, a complete waste of time. Instead of writing snarky tweets about how bonkers MAGA is, they need to start coming up with ways for the average person to prepare for either autocracy or civil war. It would make me feel a lot better if there was a practical guide to surviving America’s coming political apocalypse that I could read.

As it stands, all I got is, I dunno…get a passport? Be sure to live in a part of the country that fits your politics? Otherwise, I got nothing. Because it’s clear to me that we’ve zoomed past the point of no return: by 2025, the United States is either going to be an autocracy or we’re going to have a civil war. No other options.

Or, if you press me, I will tell you I can’t predict the future and something REALLY BIG would have to divert us from that particular existential choice. Even then, it might just punt the problem down the road. It would have to be HUGE, like First Contact or something, for us to avoid our existential fate altogether.

What I want is a reboot of how we frame MAGA. Instead of seeing it as something to laugh at, we need to see it as the existential threat that it is. Those fuckers are out for blood as the January 6th insurrection proves. And, what’s worse, they’re creating this entire Lost Cause mythology around the event for their echo chamber to pivot to whenever they talk to people like me.

What’s worse, the echo chambers of the center-Left and center-Right no longer overlap at all. It used to be, in, say, 2016 that you might find yourself in a heated discussion on Twitter with some MAGA cocksucker. Now, I rant all I want to on Twitter and very, very rarely hear a peep from a MAGA person. This is not good because apparently both sides have completely give up trying to debate people who disagree with them. And if they do, they do it exclusively in the context of trolling.

We’re just not taking MAGA’s intentions seriously enough. Instead of ridiculing them, or foolishly trying to change their minds, we need to gird our loins for the very serious transformation in the United States that MAGA is going to force — be it autocracy or civil war.

The Bolts Are Popping Off The United States At An Alarming Rate


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

There seems to be two types of people at the moment — those who see that the United States is careening towards a dark and unknown future, and those who don’t. The thing about the modern Republican Party is the most surreal, extreme position of the ultra Far Right is now their baseline position.

And all of this happening in the broad daylight.

Ultimately, what may happen is we’ll become an autocracy and most of the country won’t notice or care. They won’t care until, of course, it becomes personal and then they’ll care A LOT. But for the most part, America will become a nation of Good Germans who know to keep their heads down, “play by the rules” and just be happy they don’t risk being “canceled” in any way ever again.

It’s loudmouth people like me who have had the luxury of being able to be very vocal kooks because I live in a free country who will suffer. The autocracy is not an abstract for me — in very real, concrete terms, I know I may die at the hand of a ICE agent if the United States becomes a traditional autocracy. That sucks. At least for me.

Another thing is, all the policies that MAGA Republicans so desperately want to enact to “make America great again” are almost universally politically destabilizing. They want an America where only the poors pay taxes. The States already suffer from severe income inequality — just wait until we turn into a first world version of Brazil.

This is where we have to be honest with ourselves. If we are, then we will realize that there’s a decent chance that there will, in fact, be a civil war of some sort in the United States at some point in the next, say, decade. WMD will be used and we’re going to bomb the wealthiest, most powerful nation in the world into the stone age by our own fucking hands.

If this does happen — it may not, we may just peacefully become an autocracy — then WW3 will happen too and billions will die around the globe. Our only hope is after the dust clears the “good guys” will have won and a new international system will be established. Hopefully, it won’t be too late for us to do something about global climate change and humanity will, at last, start to the think collectively on a global scale.

Who am I kidding. That will never happen. We’re doomed.

Minority MAGA Republican Rule (Or A Civil War) Is Now Inevitable


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Traditional American liberal democracy is beyond saving. All the pieces are in place for an autocrat to be elected by hook or by crook in 2024. Since form follows function, within a few years there will be a Constitutional Convention, the media will be purged, the existing ICE infrastructure will be weaponized and I will be pushed out a window.

Or we have a civil war.

We’re way pass the point of no return. The Republican Party has been completely consumed by the fascist MAGA faction to the point that we are left with no wiggle room. If the Republican Party at any point in the future has it within their power to negate a Democrat win, they will. This is now a law of political physics. An absolute.

And if that doesn’t happen, we have some sort of civil war and use WMD against our fellow Americans. Again, that’s the only option. I just don’t know when we’re presented with that particular choice.

Of course, the argument can be made that if MAGA belly flops in 2022 off-year elections then maybe, maybe they might not have absolute control of the Republican Party. But if you give that any thought, you realize there are two major problems with this wishful thinking. One, lulz. Two, even if Trump himself is seen as the loser he obviously is, there are a half dozen would-be autocrats waiting in the wings to do exactly the same thing he did only without him — Trumpism without Trump.

America is “about to go through some things” as they say. We’re fucked. On a macro political history level, we’re totally, utterly fucked. This is the end. I don’t have any easy answers as to what you can do to prepare. If I did, I’d be working for VOX or New York Magazine.

But we’re in for a very bumpy few years with no obvious endgame between the two existential choices of autocracy or civil war.

We Have Got To Talk About Sen. Marsha Blackburn


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn has go to be one of the most dangerous Senators. Apparently, she was some sort of “image consultant” before becoming a Senator and it shows — she definitely manages her own image as a MAGA diehard ding-dong.

She’s of interest to me because she’s one of numerous elected MAGA officials that I believe would actually take the final step of leaving the Federal government to be the basis of some sort of Trumplandia government. Because, really, isn’t that where this is all heading? That’s the final step in this tragic political melodrama.

If Red States start to leave the Union, Sen. Blackburn and others are going to form a rump US government somewhere like Mobile. Though, given how a race war will have likely erupted in the South by that point, where exactly would they meet? Trump’s place in Florida? Appomattox in Virginia? Somewhere in the Mountain area?

Anyway, Sen. Blackburn definitely seems about as politically craven as they come. And, really, the scary part of all of this is it’s not like she’s an outlier. A huge swath of the elected Republican Party has — at least relative to me — fucking lost their minds.

They no longer believe in America’s traditional liberal democracy and (apparently) want to turn the United States into something akin to the autocratic managed democracy found in Russia. (Ugh.) And, really, at the moment, I don’t see anything stopping them.

I will, in fact, be flabbergasted if we go the other (even more painful direction) and have a civil war of some sort so at least the dying embers of democracy have at least a fighting chance of renewal.

Regardless, we have to accept that the United States is careening towards an extremely unstable era in its history.

Let’s Unpack J.D. Vance’s Fears of ‘Cancel Culture’


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Oh boy. There’s a lot to unpack with this Axios profile of J.D. Vance’s Senate campaign in Ohio. Here’s the part that sticks out for me:

Vance told me in a phone interview from Cincinnati that so-called cancel culture was a big part of conservatives’ conversations as he worked Fourth of July parades over the holiday weekend.

“People are terrified that if they speak their minds about what’s going on in the country, they’re going to lose their job,” he said. “‘If I say that I voted for Trump on Facebook, somebody’s going to try to get me fired.”

This abstract fear is something I hear a lot from my conservative relatives. Because MAGA has no policies that are popular outside their own bullshit echo chamber, they latch on to the vague unease that a lot of people feel about “cancel culture” (whatever the fuck that is.)

To me, the crazy thing about all of this everyone benefits by having a liberal democracy that has an ebb and flow to it. But that’s now how MAGA cocksuckers see things — they want to take power and never let go because they fear the browning of America, or women with economic and sexual agency, the list goes on.

So that abstract conservative fear that their life will be ruined for just being conservative is what MAGA has hung its entire political future on. MAGA talking points have now completely consumed the conservative to the point that my conservative-but-not-MAGA relatives pretty much echo all the major MAGA complaints without even realizing it.

One thing that I struggle with is — how real is, in practical terms, “cancel culture.” I have one conservative relative who can tick off half a dozen concrete examples of conservatives being canceled, and, yet, I also think his abstract fears of cancel culture are extremely recursive. In my center-Left experience, there are very few examples of honest-to-God average conservatives who have had their lives ruined “just for being conservative.”

The problem, of course, the divide between MAGA and everyone else has grown so enormous that we can’t even agree on what is acceptable public behavior. I mean, is it ok for a police official to donate $20 to the defense fund of a 17-year-old serial murder because they supported his political agenda? (The crybaby defense that it was “leaked” doesn’t hold much water since Republicans seem to get off on using leaked e-mails for political gain.)

The real problem is a massive difference in perception. Or, put another way, the media narrative of Trumplandia is so dramatically different from the media narrative of everyone else that it’s like talking to someone from a political Upside Down. Or, even more specifically, negative polarization is now so absolute that MAGA’s political foundations are now 100% recursive and abstract.

What Is The MAGA Endgame?


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

A lot of macro political trends are careening towards coming to a head around January 2025 when Congress is set to certify the vote of the next presidential election. That I have to worry this much about what happen at that point is pretty deep because it indicates that we’ve reached the point where each Federal election is existential.

Our future.

If Republicans gain power again, that’s all she wrote — we’re well on our way to becoming an autocratic managed democracy like Russia.

But I struggle to understand what, in concrete terms, MAGA wants. Whenever I talk to my conservative relatives, they give me a lot of abstract fears and that’s it. They want to end Cancel Culture. They want a secure border. They don’t want children to experience the horrors of Critical Race Theory. But what does any of that actually mean?

Republicans are such fucking fascists now that we have to stop hoping this or that thing is going to save us. No one is going to save us. We have to save ourselves. Republicans, on an existential, institutional basis no longer believe in democracy and want the very thing I fear — autocracy.

They want minority political rule and an end to the natural ebb and flow of a liberal democracy. They want a one party state where THEY are “just left alone” but dem dar libtards are sent to Trump branded ICE re-education camps or push out a window.

I also still struggle to understand what, exactly, is fucking with our politics. Is it just race? Is that it? Or is it also the sense among bed rock conservatives that since about 2012 America’s society has been changing at an alarming rate and their poor little conservative brains can’t process it? Whatever it is, the disconnect between the center-Left echo chamber and the center-Right echo chamber is pushing us to the brink.

The United States is now two nations — Red, rural America and Blue urban America — who hate and misunderstand each other. The Republican Party is now an anti-democratic fascists party that will stop at nothing to transform the country into a white Christian ethno state.

And so, again, it seems as though at some point between now and January 2025 we’re going to face the existential choice of autocracy or civil war. If we choose autocracy, what will happen is people like me will scream at the top of our lungs that we’re no longer a democracy, while Republicans will snicker that we’re “a constitutional republic.”

The conservatives in my family will either freak out whenever I mention that we’re now an autocracy or they’ll simply shrug and say so what, what does that even mean. They will say this, of course, until ICE comes after ME and then they will want me to shut up.

Which I will not do.

So, lulz, who knows.