Hardcore no more

(or at least not as much)

December is half-done, so I’m in valedictory mode. Eventually we’ll get to some year-end stuff, but today I'll talk about one small change to my approach here at Roy Edroso Breaks It Down for 2020.

You can expect to see much less of the This is Hardcore series. I’ve unsubscribed from a lot of the rightwing hate mail services that I had been mining for it, mainly because I just couldn’t stand looking at them in my inbox anymore. I mean, even a proctologist gets sick of assholes after a while.

It might be different if the content of these emails changed appreciable from month to month or year to year. But while sometimes they do at least acknowledge major changes in the temporal world, their basic pitches — fear, hate, tribal loyalty, vengeance etc. — remain the same.

Take impeachment; those emailers don’t talk about it much, certainly not as much as the more mainstream rightwing sources. Occasionally something will show up on the subject — for example, this one from the Fear and Blood eletter, directing to something called The Informed American: “LIBERAL Law Professor Breaks Ranks And Speaks The TRUTH About Impeachment! (VIDEO).” The “LIBERAL Law Professor” is Jonathan Turley, Republican witness at the impeachment hearings, whose recent writings for The Hill include a Get Hunter Biden column, “Democrats are running out of stunts to pull from impeachment playbook,” “Yes, Trump has authority to declare national emergency for border wall,” etc.

In other words, it’s classic “Even The Liberal” shtick in which a non-liberal is portrayed as a liberal so conservatives can rejoice at his alleged conversion to conservatism — but done without even the rudimentary attention to craft that mainstream conservatives bring to such exercises. Author “dan” comes up with the kind of now-customary huh-what lede suggestive of brain damage or the mental fatigue that comes from having to churn out enough of these copy-blocks to earn enough for a cup of coffee:

There is always a right way and a wrong way when it comes to doing things.

For example, if you are going to move from house to house, you need to be well prepared so that you don’t have to spend forever on moving day just getting boxes out of your house.

Also, when you are cooking, there is usually only one right way to cook a particular item. Any other way will be a disaster. Democratic lawmakers have been so hellbent on impeaching Trump that they haven’t even stopped to check if they have all the tools. They don’t.

“Usually only one right way to cook a particular item”? Assuming he exists, this guy’s editor is the laziest motherfucker around.

But you get the idea: They don’t change, they don’t grow, they don’t do anything really except incompetently recycle ancient reactionary tropes for readers they clearly think are too dumb or senile to notice. So what’s the point in paying attention to them?

You may ask, reasonably: How’s that different from what the credentialed conservative columnists do? What still pay attention to them? Good question! So far my coping mechanism is to say that the Brookses, Douthats, McArdles, and Drehers of the world have a lot more influence on a much wider and slightly less senile audience than do the This Is Hardcore scribblers. Maybe that’s a distinction without a difference, as MAGA-fied Republicans increasingly cleave to a hermetic alternative reality; maybe I have merely ascended to a rudimentary level of enlightenment, and when or if I advance further I will stop writing about these jerkoffs entirely.

But this will have to do for now. And in any case, some time we have to talk about “Trump Women Daily.”