Do I look like I'm negotiating?
Time to jam it up their ass
Veteran readers of Roy Edroso Breaks It Down — experts call them long-haulers! —may remember the “This is Hardcore” features I’d occasionally publish, in which I reproduced some of the nuttier items appearing in the sort of email newsletters your senile rightwing relatives might get. I semi-retired that feature at the end of 2019 because I was getting sick of it:
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.
I returned to Hardcore a time or two in election season, though, covering the brethren’s ferocious spinning of the bad election news for Trump. Readers of those features could have been forgiven for thinking, jeez, who in their right mind could believe Trump is actually cruising to victory?
Well, as we found out after the election, it was believed not only by dotards but also by Qball MAGA crackpots who were younger and healthier and more likely to replicate their ravings outside the Hardcore sites and even to act on their conviction — whether feigned or sincere — that Trump had the election in the bag, that Biden and the Media and the Swamp and the Pedophiles and Soros and the Lizard People stole it from him, and that they had to take it back.
Though my usual purview is more mainstream conservatives, over the past few years I’ve also been forced to pay some mind to the fringe types and to notice their evolving place in the conservative movement at large. In “Anita’s Way,” for example, I showed the through-line from Anita Bryant’s 1970s campaign associating homosexuality with pedophilia — a rightwing talking point for decades — to the QAnon followers, whose outlandish pedophile-conspiracy claims were at that time being thoughtlessly mainstreamed by some normal media outlets. (They even used the same “Save Our Children” message as Bryant.) I said then:
Why [are mainstream media] so shy about reporting the obvious truth about a fringe group’s involvement in these [“Save The Children”] protests? Maybe because the news orgs didn’t want to seem “liberal biased” — against the nice people defending children, or against QAnon, which after all is entitled to the same View From Nowhere respect as any other powerful conservative interest group.
In a way, QAnon and other rightwing nut groups were getting normalized with me, too — because under Trump the conservative mainstream and the fringe were drawing closer together, much in the manner of a terrorist clasping a terrified hostage to his bosom.
As I have reported mostly at alicublog, many regular-order conservatives went out of their way to accommodate the fringe’s slowness to accept Biden’s victory after November 3; “There are plenty of anecdotal reports of things that look fishy,” said Byron York of the Washington Examiner in a “Where Things Stand” column on November 5, “but it is up to Trump to present some evidence of irregularities.” A week later York was bidding his nutcase friends join him in at least provisionally acknowledging Trump’s defeat with the consolation prize of blaming the usual conservative bugbears: “a media establishment, an entertainment industry, academia, the government’s permanent bureaucracy, and a massive special counsel investigation all trying to bring Trump down every single moment of his presidency.”
That didn’t placate the frothers, though, and on November 19 — more than a week after the civilized world had accepted the election results — even Karl Rove was forced to mince words around the MAGA Mob: “Now Mr. Giuliani and Ms. [Sidney] Powell have an obligation to go to court and prove [their allegations]... they better come up with proof and go to court, because these are serious allegations... Mayor Giuliani may be right that people who signed those affidavits don’t want their names exposed...” On November 23, National Review’s Andrew McCarthy also tried to let them down easy: “Michigan Certification of Biden Win Is a Step Toward the End — But It’s Not the End,” he promised. “...Nothing is truly set in stone until December 8, the safe-harbor date under federal law — and some, including the president’s lawyers (see here, p.15, n.13), have argued that even that date may be extendable to December 14...”
Perhaps after listening to voicemails from enraged lunatics, the normal conservatives took on a pleading hear-me-out tone. “There is concern that [Giuliani’s and Powell’s] sensational theories of election fraud are hurting the president’s cause rather than helping it,” reasoned York. RedState bade them work within the system, toward reform: “the bigger problem we have as a nation is that we are acquiescing to voting processes that are not capable of being verified and tested in a meaningful fashion...”
None of these people, nor many other conservatives, had the nerve to just tell the MAGA mob, Fuck off, you people are nuts.
Were they scared then that they might try a coup? More likely they were just scared the nuts would ruin the Republican Party with their antics.
And they were right: Among the MAGA Mob on Parler there came cries to murder judges and to secede; when Giuliani and Powell let them down they invented new fantasies like the “Pence Card” that would win it for them at the last moment.
And it wasn’t only the punters who were raving, but also elected officials who, it turned out, were also nuts: The Texas GOP screamed for secession, and some other state GOP legislators made up their own rotisserie-league electors and tried to substitute them for the ones that actually won.
I saw the sort of people who would gather on the Mall January 6 at DC rallies on November 14 and December 12, at which they masklessly gathered (“as their response to the COVID pandemic shows, they would even expose themselves to a fatal illness if after killing them it might eventually get around to killing you”) to scream that Trump had won and that they would not accept any other result. The dream of electoral reversal and revenge from which their high-class conservative friends sought to talk them down had finally crashed to earth, and them with it, and their only alternative became a new fantasy of overthrow:
The day before the attempted coup I sized the situation up thus:
...they will continue pointing their guns at democracy and repeatedly pulling the trigger, and we’re supposed to laugh off every misfire as if it weren’t a threat, rather than disarm the perp and jam the gun up his ass — as it becomes clearer every day we should do.
Well, it looks like that time has come. Impeachment should be only the beginning.
I don’t think any conservative pundit stood a chance with the “let them down easy” approach as long as their God King continued to scream about the election being stolen. We even saw Fox lose viewers when it tried this approach, the nuts just moved to OANN and Newsmax because those outlets were telling them what they wanted to hear.
And the important thing is I doubt most of the nuts REALLY believe Trump won, although if you stick a microphone in their faces that’s what they’ll tell you. They just think the herrenvolk votes should be the only ones that count – literally and figuratively.
Thailand's Prime Minister came to power in a very old-fashioned, check-all-the-boxes coup (tanks on the street, previous PM exiled and her cabinet members told their services were no longer required, martial law imposed, etc.) and for the next year or so all the TV stations had to play a literal "Unity!" song every night at 6 PM.
It was in Thai, obviously, but my wife translated it for me and it was just about what you'd expect, which meant you'd contemplate suicide if you had to listen to it every night. Generally she just muted the TV when it came on, but occasionally she just left it on and ignored it. When she did, I found myself singing (to the tune of The Happy Wanderer),
UniTEE,
UniTAH,
UniTEE,
UniTAHAHAHAHAHAHA
UniTEE
UniTAH
My - tanks - are - in - the - street.
...until she had to tell me she didn't want to hear it one more time, and I saw that she was not fucking kidding.
So anyway, you can see how this isn't a message which really resonates with me.