Every time I go back to visit my family in Missouri, I feel an unsettling amount of guilt in my bones when I return to California. Every part of me wishes I hadn’t created this permanent fracture between us, separated by miles of mountains, plains, highways, and stars. It’s an inner-conflict I will probably never quite shake. Still, I know they are happy for me. I know they are proud of the woman I’ve become. I just miss them.
“I hate graveyards and old pawn shops
For they always bring me tears
I can’t forgive the way they rob me
Of my childhood souvenirs
Memories that can’t be boughten
Can’t be won at carnivals for free
Well, it took me years to get those souvenirs
And I don’t know how they slipped away from me”
-John Prine
A 19-year-old college student quietly turns down a job interview, stupidly telling the company it's because he doesn't want to work for a Jew.
Within two days:
-- The billionaire founder of one of the world's most powerful corporations (Palantir) demands that the company release his the student's to the world. The company instantly complies.
-- National media trumpet the incident and spread the student's name and face all over the place.
-- A senior Trump DOJ official repeatedly urges the public to notify him if that student is ever hired anywhere in the future, promising to use his office to keep the student permanently unemployable.
Adults with large, influential platforms -- pundits, media types, even elected officials -- right here on X routinely say things as bad as, and often much worse than, pretty much every other group you can think of without facing a single consequence let alone a completely unhinged coordinated campaign of very powerful people to run their lives forever:
Our room for the coming days in Houston. I don’t even know what to say about this. This is just unreal. No words.
Huge huge thank you to JJ Watt for giving me and my friends the opportunity to stay at a place like this🙏🙏🙏
@Empty_America Shagbark is one of the coolest and most interesting people on Twitter. He’s a man in the arena. Any RWer hating on him is so clearly retarded
Once you realize that the only demographics capable of renewing the American heartland consist of immigrants and liberals, the entire "alt-right" or "MAGA" thing begins to seem like a complete dead end.
Because rhetoric about "taking America back" is cheap. And those espousing it either have the vigor and vitality required to literally, actually take the heart and soul of deepest America back and to give it new life -- or they do not.
And if they do not, their rhetoric and ideals are dead on arrival.
A meaningful movement in the direction they want to go requires a caste of exceedingly fertile and adventurous foot-soldiers or it doesn't work. Not everybody can be "taking back institutions in the metropole" or whatever (not that they're particularly good at that either). Not everybody can LARP as a country club Gordon Gecko type, or be a RW podcaster, or whatever.
People need to raise their hands and say "hell yeah I'll go to Ottumwa and make it excellent, I can do that, let's try it." They need to do this in all states, including blue states, or it doesn't work.
The entire digital right wing is worthless unless it can overcome this abject lack of energy, adventure, spirit, or can-do attitude. If it cannot, it's entirely stupid and worthless -- and by what I can tell, that's just about what all that kind of talk really is at bottom.
@kitten_beloved One could easily imagine an alternative timeline where Dems are opposed to mail in ballots over claims of sexism, justified by allegations of abusive husbands doubling their votes by controlling their wife’s ballot
@ZoomerHistorian The thing with this quote is glib dismissal of real concern, but honestly I just legitimately don’t believe Sikhs are being attacked, let alone every day, in Britain
@ScottMGreer Reagan admin received the Mandate of Heaven to destroy the post 60s globohomo regime and didn’t do it because they were blind to the stakes, still fundamental believers in the triumphant blank slate liberalism
@RealDianeYap@xwanyex It’s good to tank the fertility of people who can’t handle the idea that a child may throw a tantrum. It’s ok if we selectively allow the fertility of some groups to be tanked more than others
Go big or go home. What a stud. These are the shoulders of giants we stand upon. He could have whined and claimed he was "disenfranchised" but no he signs the Declaration of Independence with his home address. The equivalent of Cortes burning his ships, the wealthiest man in America personally declares war against the Crown for Liberty. These are men worth honoring and remembering.