It’s quite impressive how quickly the Trump crowd pivoted from gleefully saying “Fuck your feelings” to empty calls for unity.
I’m all for unity, healing, and reconciliation, but not without a few non-negotiable steps first. As David Frum put it in his recent piece in The Atlantic, The Conservative Cult of Victimhood:
There is no redemption without repentance. There is no repentance without accountability. There is no accountability without consequences.
When I see calls for consequences from progressives and the mealy-mouthed, cap-in-hand calls for unity from the MAGA crew, it looks like this:
The problem is that the repentance has been performative so far, and it appears to be in the service of avoiding accountability or consequences. If any of you have ever had a bully in school (or hey, even at work), you know what that’s like. If you’ve ever had an abusive significant other or spouse, you know what that’s like:
Here’s the text of the main tweet from A. R. Moxon:
Republicans appear to be finished with the “trying to kill us while blackout drunk” phase of their abuse cycle and into the “crying at us to unlock the door while asking us why we’re being such a bitch about this” part of their abuse cycle.
And here’s the text of the reply from Halldór Auðar Svansson:
It’s interesting how abusers always behave in such predictable ways that it can be modeled accurately. Now we are at the “I’m sorry that things got so out of hand, now we need to heal but that requires you to shut up about what I did” part.
Also worth considering: Some of their biggest voices don’t believe in unity, or that it’s possible. Case in point: Dennis Prager, big Trump supporter and guy behind PragerU, who wrote the think piece Calls For American Unity Are Either Dishonest Or Naive in Investor’s Business Daily back at the start of the first Trump campaign.
So before we can have reconciliation and healing, we need to make sure that the right people face the consequences of their actions and make the appropriate restitutions. Otherwise, we’ll face the same crisis, and the next time, it might be carried out by more competent people.
There will come a time for reconciliation, but that time hasn’t yet come, and the apologies seem far from sincere. Let’s not answer those “calls for unity” just yet.
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Last night’s dinner
We were too hungry to photograph the end result, but we cooked it in macadamia nut oil, dried lemon peel, truffle salt, lemongrass and pepper. It turned out quite well.
This note-perfect parody of Conan the Barbarian pokes fun at the Jacob Angeli Chansley, who’s better known as the “MAGA Viking” from the Wednesday’s terrorist attack on the Capitol Building in Washington, DC.
One thing that you should know about Chansley: He’s a QAnon conspiracy theorist, a failed actor, and “failed to launch” — that is, he’s 33 years old, unemployed, and lives with his mother.
In short, he’s a pretty good MAGA mascot.
Since the issue of the First Amendment to the Constitution to the United States of America is going to be a hot topic in light of Donald Trump getting ban-hammered by Twitter, then a lot of social media sites and even Shopify, I thought I’d share this quick little guide to how it works:
In case you were wondering, here’s the full text of the First Amendment:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
If you need a longer lesson that doesn’t read like a boring civics text, there’s always this classic from the webcomic XKCD:
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Headline of the day
You just know that they wanted to go with “shithole country” rather than “banana republic”.
