Grand Troll Party

That's all they are and all they have. It's a drag.

I have talked before about how conservatism in America now is just about being an asshole — no policies, no philosophy, certainly no morality, just being a prick and a scumbag and expecting to get your ass kissed for it. But as clear as this is, I’m still always a little jarred when they find fresh opportunities to prove it.

I talked at length in July about the stunts Texas governor Greg Abbott has been pulling, sending busloads of immigrants to blue cities like New York, Chicago, and Washington and then crowing when the mayors of those towns cry foul and ask for financial aid from volunteer groups and the federal government to handle the sudden influx.

Abbott portrays these complaints as liberal hypocrisy, because when ambushed with sudden large deliveries of immigrants, rather than the steady influx these cities constantly absorb, the mayors are forced by political necessity to identify and criticize the sources of the influx. From the Texas Tribune:

“This just shows the hypocrisy of these liberal leaders up in the northeast who think, ‘That border crisis created by Joe Biden, that’s fine as long as Texas has to deal with it,’” Abbott told the host, Sean Hannity. “But as soon as they have to deal with the real consequences of Biden’s border-caused crisis, they are up in arms.”

Abbott is pretending not to know that New York City is already packed with immigrants from all over the world — more immigrants per square mile, undoubtedly, than Texas has — and that these immigrants are literally the backbone of the city, because his trolling doesn’t land if you have that basic level of awareness — and he can count on his rubes not having it.

The latest stunt is Abbott’s co-bag Florida Governor DeSantis picking up immigrants from Texas and flying them to Martha’s Vineyard. (I assume they had a big basket labeled LIBTARD CITY’S and dropped slips of paper into it marked “Aspen,” “Burkly,” “Place where Harverd is,” etc. and then pulled the MARTHAS VINYERD one out.) They also sent some immigrants to the Vice President’s residence in D.C. as a sort of asshole lagniappe.

The folks in the Vineyard, bless them, let their visitors know they were, at last, among friends:

Just after 5 pm Wednesday, outside Martha’s Vineyard Community Services, Dukes County Sheriff Robert Ogden gathered the refugees and spoke to them.

“We’re going to take care of you,” Ogden said and his words were translated to the gathered crowd. “Get all your personal belongings together and then we’ll move. Does everyone have their personal belongings? We’re going to start moving you that way.”

And Massachusetts House Rep William Keating let the rest of the country know what his constituents thought of DeSantis’ stunt:

“History does not look kindly on leaders who treat human beings like cargo, loading them up and sending them a thousand miles away without telling them their destination,” Keating said in a statement late Wednesday night. “Still, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis made that choice today... Instead of trying to help them, he chose to charter a private jet and send them to a rural island community late in the day and without warning so they wouldn't have the resources at the ready to support them."

“But the people of Martha’s Vineyard, its vibrant immigrant community, and the Commonwealth as a whole are already calling Governor DeSantis’ bluff and rising to meet the challenge because that's what Americans do — we help those in need.”

Among normal people, it’s getting around that DeSantis’ goons lied the immigrants onto the planes — a common tactic, one would assume, though it’s something to have testimony (for obvious reasons, embattled immigrants tend to be close with information like this). And people are noticing the parallels between this act and the “reverse Freedom Rides” with which old-time racists trolled the civil rights movement in the 1960s.

But you can’t tweak the conscience of someone who doesn’t have one.

Conservatives don’t enjoy these gimmicks because they make any real point about immigration, as Abbott claimed. Sending these cities hundreds of immigrants at a time is basically like telling someone “hey I hear you like water” and then dumping a hundred gallons of it on their head.

No, they enjoy it because it hurts people they hate, which is what they live for. Here’s eminent rightwing Twitter clown “Catturd” (809,000 followers) on the subject:

Yes, it’s the ancient “liberals don’t want to live with non-white people” shtick. If you wonder how they can still believe it — especially after years of screaming about CRT and about how liberals are “anti-white” — the answer is, they don’t believe it; they just like saying it because it gets the other people who are just like them to… I was going to say “laugh,” but I doubt they even respond to these pseudo-jokes with actual laughter anymore; I imagine they just make the barking-seal noise that audiences used to make at the old Morton Downey Jr. show.

(Morton Downey Jr.! He made Joe Pyne look like James Burnham. Who knew Downey would turn out to be so perfect an avatar of modern conservatism?)

In the classier precincts of Commentary — a formerly respected conservative magazine — Noah Rothman chortles that “the migrants themselves don’t seem especially put out by the offer of free transportation to and accommodation within America’s major urban centers,” and that “liberals’ discomfort over this is a consequence of their own policy preferences.”

In other words, Rothman echoes the sentiments of Catturd, but in complex sentences for a more upscale audience of assholes.

It was a net plus overall when Biden finally gave up on pretending that liberals and conservatives want the same things, mainly because it cut to the chase — we no longer had to pretend that the cruel bad-faith bullshit that is the entirety of conservative discourse is something to take seriously; we can just point to it and go “see”? But one drawback is that, every day, we are forced to confront the sad, unvarnished truth that a substantial minority of our fellow citizens are just no goddamn good.