Conservatives Want To Be Middle-School Bullies And Have Us Kiss Their Asses Back
But that only really works in middle school.
When I was in middle school (and most of elementary school), there was one sure way to know one was at the top of the popularity food chain — and that was the ability to bully people without the social consequence of people not wanting to be around you. If you could say horrible things to people and have them still be desperate to be your friend, you’d know you had a certain amount of social power.
Things aren’t really like that anymore — in adult life or, I think, even in middle schools. But there are still people who crave that power. They are called “Republicans.”
Donald Trump, in his capacity as President of the United States, said this about Charlie Kirk last night:
“For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now.
“My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it, as well as those who go after our judges, law-enforcement officials, and everyone else who brings order to our country.”
It’s an absolutely horrific statement, tantamount to declaring war on half of the country. If you want to talk about dangerous rhetoric, it’s a hell of a lot more dangerous than calling Charlie Kirk a Nazi or a fascist or a bigot or any other entirely accurate descriptor. Given that people on the Right are out here calling for a civil war now, it’s the kind of rhetoric that could get people killed.
When Trump and other Republicans talk about our rhetoric, they are talking about our responses to actual things that Kirk said and others say and do. Things that are nearly always incredibly insulting to one group or another. If they didn’t say insulting things, if they didn’t call for the oppression of various groups, they would not be called bigots or racists or misogynists or what have you.
More specifically, no one would call Kirk a Nazi if he hadn’t been out here saying Nazi shit.
“Jewish communities have been pushing the exact kind of hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them,” he once said. “The philosophical foundation of anti-whiteness has been largely financed by Jewish donors in the country.”
He also once claimed that Jewish people control everything, specifying that it’s “not just the colleges; it’s the nonprofits, it’s the movies, it’s Hollywood, it’s all of it.”
That, to be clear, is some Nazi shit. That is not “Oh gosh, we have a difference of opinion on what color the drapes ought to be!” or “We support different sports teams.” That is Nazi shit. In fact, it was such obvious Nazi shit, that even Republicans acknowledged it was Nazi shit.
What the Right desires most of all is social power. They want to control the schools, they want to control the media, they want to control the culture and they have no problem admitting it. They say it straight out, without batting an eyelash. They’d lose their absolute shit if anyone on our side ever said something like that. Charlie Kirk, clearly, was very angry about the Jewish people he imagined were doing that. But they have no problem openly saying it themselves. Hell, the evangelicals even have that whole “Seven Mountains” deal where they are openly planning to dominate the world.
The biggest thing they want, though, the thing they have been clamoring for all these years, is that middle school bully power. When they used to cry about not being “allowed” to say certain things, what they really meant was “I can’t use a racial slur or accuse Jewish people of controlling the world or say women ought to stay home and have babies or that trans people are mentally ill mass shooters without someone thinking I’m a horrible person because of it.” They were always free to say those things, they just were not able to say them without criticism.
Not only is the cruelty the point, the tolerance of cruelty is the end goal.
Social power, to them, means “I can insult you to your face and you tell me I’m a wonderful person whom you just disagree with on some things that don’t really matter in the long run or actually hurt anybody.” And, to be fair, this is what a lot of center-left folks do. They love to go high, they love to be the bigger person, they love to not acknowledge the truly horrific things that someone like Kirk has said.
LIKE SO:
Does the Right ever give them credit for this? It does not. Because that is just how they believe things should be. Gavin Newsom and Ezra Klein should talk about how wonderful Charlie Kirk was, and various right-wing pundits should go around saying terrible things about Gavin Newsom and Ezra Klein and claim they were responsible for his death for even being on the side of those who publicly refuted his views, but everyone should pretend the latter isn’t happening. For civility!
We always say it’s only the Left that is expected to be “civil,” but it’s not actually civility they are after. They want domination. They want to spit in your face and tell you it is raining and for you to go “Oh gee, you’re so helpful! And handsome!”
That is the game they are playing. We don’t really think of things like social power in that way, because it doesn’t appeal to us. Hierarchy is not our jam. We’re not sitting around creating groups like TPUSA that are specifically designed to infiltrate colleges, harass professors and get them fired, and and turn students to the Right. We don’t want a Joe Rogan of the Left. We just want people to be better, kinder human beings and we want a non-zero-sum world, where everybody can have nice things.
But now is not the time to retreat, it’s the time to fight back. There is a difference between insulting people and reacting to an insult. We do the latter, they do the former, so it is not our rhetoric that is the problem. We do not need to let them say whatever they want without consequence, because there is no end to how far they will go.
How do we even know what prompted the shooter? To my knowledge they have not been identified. A whole lot of reactions, particularly on the right, about “rhetoric that got our special boy killed” without knowing really what motivated the murder. All the hypocrisy aside, baseless speculation does nothing but fuel a narrative that might very well be inaccurate.
Robyn is on fire today! (hopefully not literally)