Thom Tillis Doesn't Want To Declare War On Us, So That's Nice

One snickerdoodle for Thom Tillis, coming right up.

Sep 17, 2025

Last week, the president, half the people in the Trump administration, elected Republicans, nearly all conservative pundits, and certainly a majority of users of the site formerly known as Twitter declared war on the Left. They’ve been talking about rounding up all of the trans people and interning them, declaring the Democratic Party to be a domestic terrorist organization, and all kinds of other normal things like that.

This is why we must — though we disagree with him on most things — give some credit to North Carolina Republican Senator Thom Tillis for calling out his own side and suggesting that this rhetoric is a little bit horrifying.

“Within 24 hours of Mr. Kirk's shooting we had the guy that does the podcast for the War Room and another guy who's denied the Sandy Hook shootings say ‘we're at war,’” Tillis said during Kash Patel’s Senate Judiciary hearing on Tuesday. “How on earth are we de-escalating the situation? And with the tensions as high as they were last week, with going out and saying ‘we're at war’ — I'm not asking you to respond to this question I'm just saying that there are people out here on our side of the aisle that still need to look in the mirror.”

Granted, right before that, he gave a little intro noting the existence of T-shirts that say ACAB or “Fuck the Police” on Pinterest (which he seems to think is an online store) and failed to mention the popularity of “Free Helicopter Rides” T-shirts on the Right, but he at least does seem to be aware of the fact that things are not entirely one-sided.

To his credit, Tillis was also on this last week.

“What I was really disgusted by yesterday is a couple of talking heads that sees this as an opportunity to say we’re at war so that they could get some of our conservative followers lathered up over this,” Tillis told National Journal’s Nancy Vu on Thursday. “It seems like a cheap, disgusting, awful way to pretend like you’re a leader of a conservative movement. And there were two in particular that I found particularly disgusting.”

He didn’t say who those were, but it’s nice that he acknowledged the fact that they happened. Of course, he already announced his retirement from politics after Trump went after him for voting against his Big Beautiful Bill, so he doesn’t have much to lose.

As mentioned, Don Bacon from Nebraska has also pushed back on the rhetoric, accusing Trump of dwelling on anger and noting that two Minnesota Democrats were just recently assassinated as well.

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I hate to give out cookies for hitting the lowest possible bar of human decency, but given the fact that pretty much every prominent Republican is calling for something very different, Tillis and Bacon can have a few snickerdoodles. It’s a really scary time and anything that lowers the temperature, any sign that anyone might not think this is entirely okay, is vastly fucking appreciated.

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