I'm getting a running start here by repurposing some of my prose from five years ago, because that story has now taken a hilarious twist, so if some of this sounds familiar, bear with me.
As some of you may remember, once upon a time, back in my Twitter day, I got myself suspended for life (without appeal) for referring to a wingnut who stepped to me on Twitter as "trash".
Really. That's all it took, which is wild considering the level of
paint-peeling invective, disinformation, violent rhetoric and subornation of
outright treason that went on unmentioned and unpunished, especially among the Bluechecks, in the Twitter sewer
every hour of every day. And, as you may have noticed, has only gotten exponentially worse.
(Note: I was later unbanned for life because I waited a year, appealed again, and apparently this time there was a different team of caffeinated thralls staffing Elmo's server room who couldn't figure out why I'd been banned in the first place.)
Anyway, at the time one of my most dogged internet minders who delighted at my expulsion was this goof. He was a recent Never Trumper convert from the GOP (pay particular attention because it comes up later) who took great umbrage at the fact that I
wasn't lining up to kiss the Lincoln Lads' collective asses. This was
not an uncommon sentiment among many savvy Liberals at the time -- savvy Liberals who directed tons of "Shut up! Sit down! The enemy of my enemy is my supervisor and
so forth" shit my way back when I was just about the only voice out there trying
to sound the alarm.
So I just found out Mr. Electrico has been permanently suspended from
Twitter.
Probably due to his insufferable, downright hateful
Never Trumper Derangement Syndrome.
Well shortly thereafter Lincoln Lad co-founder and fake internet tough-guy, Rick Wilson,
decided it was time to seize the spotlight so he saddled up his Twitter
account say some objectively ridiculous shit (no, he wasn't banned for life --
this is not that story, and I don't think that )
And it put me in minded of Mr. Carter and his umbrage and I wondered, somewhat
idly, if time and tide had tempered his foolishness.
So I asked a friend
of mine with an active Twitter account to check in on him and, well...
And in 2021 that was the rest of the story.But no longer. Because you'll never guess where 2021 anti-Trump GOP convert and Lincoln Lad fan boy finds himself in 2026.He is account has been fully restored to Twitter and now -- as a dog returns to its vomit -- he is a full-on, America First, MAGA goon, who co-hosts an adorable little show on Rumble every Sunday night and everything. And as of this writing, this his pinned Tweet on TwitterX:
By the way, in case you are unfamiliar, that word he is using to describe Don Lemon? "Frociaggine"? That's a highly derogatory term for homosexual. A final accent piece which really pulls Mr. Carter's persona together, don't you think? Does any of this surprise me?Of course not. And by now it shouldn't surprise you either.
Because I listen to various major Never Trump podcasts so you don't have to, I can
reliably report back to you that almost all of them -- free or paywalled --
feature in each episode what I would call the Quarter-Hour of Chagrin.
After spending a fair chunk of time being outraged by the fascist who runs
their former party, then switching back and forth at whiplashing speed yelling
at Democrats for not shouting enough or shouting too much... or shutting the
government down or not shutting the government down ... or too much baking
soda, then not enough baking soda (I swear, it's like having picture hanging
instructions barked at you by a metamorphopsia sufferer who's also drunk) then comes the Quarter-Hour of Chagrin.
In case you are unfamiliar, the Quarter-Hour of Chagrin always centers around
one of the tiny number of Republican elected official out at the perimeter of
the GOP who Never Trumpers thought, when nut-cuttin' time finally came, would
take at least a tiny step forward and show a little of those steely
Conservative principles which Never Trumpers always thought were there.
When, after yet another "Surely this time..." moment has passed
and Republicans have behaved like, y'know, Republicans, and you hear
Never Trumper's saying things like...
What the hell is wrong with Susan Collins? Or
Lisa Murkowski has betrayed... Or
I had such hopes for Bill Cassidy...
...congratulations! You've arrived just in time for the Quarter-Hour of
Chagrin!
And the chagrin is palpable, and yet it's repeated over and over again, every
day and always with the same tone of "You mean there's no Santa Claus?!?"
disbelief. Because deep down they simply refuse to believe that
they could have been this spectacularly wrong about the cause to which the
devoted most of their adults lives.
And these last 10 years (although some of us would peg it at the last +30
years)? If they have proven anything far beyond the need to pile up even
one more piece evidence, it's this. This is not and never has been some
passing fever that will break if we all keep calm and go right on treating
these fuckers with civility. There is no national epiphany at hand. No
sudden burst of collective conscience where we all agree that this was evil
and we should stop pretending otherwise.
Yes, the MAGA mob may disperse once they're out of power, but not to go on
some contemplative nature hike where they learn important lessons about life
and compassion. Instead they'll do what they did after the Bush regime
collapsed: scatter like roaches, rebrand, then rely on a complicit legacy
media to tell everyone that the danger has passed and we can get back to
"politics as usual" while the MAGA scum regroup.
Because by now their rage and racism and paranoia are not affects: these are
the traits that define them. These are the building blocks of their
spiritual DNA and at this late date we can no more expect them (or the
puppeteers/influencers who spin them up and given them scapegoats) to change
than we could expect a wood tick to become a golden retriever. There
will be no Damascene moments down the dark road they are traveling.
On the other hand, very slowly and through layers of habit and denial, Old Man
Epiphany appears to be chipping and chiseling his way into the Never Trumper
bubble with the bad news that, yep, it's the whole fucking party, from top to
bottom.
You still hear loose talk about how Trump, "hostile takeover" of the party, or
how he "hijacked" the party, which is nonsense. Yes, I'm sure the
handful of party elites for whom the Never Trumpers worked felt like it
was a hostile takeover when the party base chucked them out in favor of the
guy who talked like they talked and hated who they hated, but all Trump ever
did was speak to the base in the Limbaugh language they understood, instead of
disdainfully holding that Hate Radio hate speech at arm's length and act like
they were better than all that.
And as for "hijacking ", as I've written on this blog many times, it's not a
hijacking when they hand you the keys and beg you to drive. Three times.
However, the Never Trumpers seem to have given up their ridiculous, Trump 1.0
fantasy of returning to a shattered Republican party as the "We told you so"
caucus after Trump crashed and burned. That somehow, the staff of the
defunct Weekly Standard and a few of their fellow travelers would show up like
Charles II to restore the Neocon monarchy and lead the grateful, shamefaced
mob back into peonage under the same people that gave them Bush and Cheney
twice, and tried to force-feed them Romney and Jeb.
They seem to have finally gotten it through their heads that things have
changed. Forever.
But however clearly they begin to see how wrong they were about their party
and their movement and their former friends and colleagues, the distance
between that and forcing their mouths to say the words "The Left was right
about the Right all along" is incalculable. Or at least something to be
measured in light years. Because continuing to roll their eyes at the
excesses of the Left -- even when those excesses amount to nothing more than
the usual media "nutpicking" -- remains the floatation device that keeps them
viable.
After all, within the legacy media, admitting out loud that, in effect, you
never had any idea what was really going on inside the party you worked for
your entire adult life is considered merely a venial sin. Minor, but
forgivable, since the overall media party line continues to be that nobody
could have seen this coming.
But then to say out loud that the dirty hippies who they built their careers
mocking and shitting on had it right all along? Are you insane? That, my friends, would be the most sure-fire way to A) make yourself as big a legacy
media pariah as the dirty hippies are because the media does not want to hear
that shit, and B) lose your profitable podcasting gigs, newspaper columns,
book contracts and round-the-clock appearances on MSNOW as the media-anointed
Leaders of the Resistance.
No, they've chosen the safest available path: indignant about the fascists who run their former party, then carping at Democrats for being too tall, but also not tall enough, and too vanilla, but also problematically not vanilla enough.
But they will continue to co-parent the Both Sides Do It monster they spawned.
From The Atlantic (with emphasis added):
The Atlantic hires David Brooks as a staff writer New home for
his writing, and to launch a video podcast
The Atlantic is announcing that David Brooks, who for years has
contributed memorable Atlantic cover stories and essays on political and
societal issues, is joining the magazine as a staff writer beginning next
month. The Atlantic will be the home for all of David’s writing, and he
will also host a new weekly video podcast that will launch later this
spring. David worked as an opinion columnist at The New York Times for 22
years.
In a note to staff, The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey
Goldberg, writes: “David’s work––his columns, his stories for us, and his
many books––have made him known and acclaimed around the world. He
is, among other things, America’s best pop sociologist, someone with a
reporter’s curiosity and a writer’s grace.
He is an unparalleled diagnostician of the faults and weaknesses of
governments, institutions, and social structures, as our readers know from such stories as...
Yadda, Yadda, Yadda.
I, for one, cannot wait for the avalanche of saccharine legacy media
encomiums.
It's rumored that David Broder himself will rise from the grave to give a
toast at Brook's farewell gala.
Then there's this:
Never doubt that there is a Club kids.
And never doubt that none of us will ever be members.
There has been a Trump-shaped hole in the Republican soul for as long as I can
remember. And, more importantly, this vicious darkness at the
center of the party has been plainly evident all along to anyone whose job
didn't rely on pretending it wasn't there.
Party elites tried to fill that with Bushes and Romneys and McCains, but what
the meatheads have always wanted was Rush Limbaugh with the nuclear
codes.
Trump's rise was an extended "Yes, and..." exercise between him and the
Republican base. Regurgitating back to them the lexicon of bigotry,
grievance, rage and paranoia in which they had already been soaking for decades. A vocabulary of arrogant ignorance and hate which the Republican
party absolutely relied on to win elections, but were always careful to keep
at arm's length for the sake of the sensibilities of the Sunday Shows and the
New York Times editorial board.
Fire 'em up for elections and stuff 'em back into the basement
after.
But Trump was willing to close the distance between candidate and the language
of Hate Radio to zero. He loudly amplified the bits that brought the
meatheads to their feet, and quietly dialed down the bits that weren't
crowd-pleasers. In this way he acoustically measured the size and shape
of the Republican soul, and won their fealty by feeding them a steady diet of
whatever they most wanted to hear.
Which is why, once the GOP turned to Gingrich-style slash-and-burn politics
and Limbaugh-style speech
and no one objected strongly enough to smash that poisoned chalice and
run its practitioners out of the party, the road to a monster like Trump was made straight. And now that the
base has finally, finally gotten a pure, uncut taste of what it's wanted all
along, injected every day directly into the pleasure center of their brains,
there is no coming back from this.
And once Trump is gone, that Trump-shaped hole in the Republican soul will
remain. Except that's not quite right. By now that Trump-shaped
hole has become the entire party, and once Trump is no more, once the base
weeps and rages and rampages over it, inventing one wild conspiracy
after another about how their Dear Leader was stolen from them by the Deep
State and the Radical Commie Left and, I dunno, Greenland, they will emerge
furiously dope-sick for someone -- anyone -- who promised to feed their
addiction.
And in 2021 that was the rest of the story.But no longer. Because you'll never guess where 2021 anti-Trump GOP convert and Lincoln Lad fan boy finds himself in 2026.He is account has been fully restored to Twitter and now -- as a dog returns to its vomit -- he is a full-on, America First, MAGA goon, who co-hosts an adorable little show on Rumble every Sunday night and everything. And as of this writing, this his pinned Tweet on TwitterX:
