Pretty close to every day, I get a feeling in my stomach like I want to purge myself of a poison, and it’s all thanks to our president. One way or the other, we must be rid of this man.
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
Conor has fed these flames himself, though, so fuck him, too. Even the points he’s making in this article are bad because he tries to contrast it with call-out culture, when in reality the same people bitching about said culture are the same people who threaten Omar. Conor and his ilk would never recognize it as such, while pretending that the people who threaten Omar are the same as those in left call-out culture. Young Conor and his libertarian ilk can go fuck themselves.
I take great quarrel with this theme which is prominent throughout the column BooMan links here:
“Civic conversation in America is dysfunctional in part because we have so many such outrage exhibitionists. These folks strip inartfully phrased remarks of context, ignoring the speaker’s intentions and imputing the least charitable possible meaning. This sets them up to display umbrage with the ostentation of a peacock.”
FUCK THIS DEADLY BOTH SIDERISM.
First, if Conor Friedersdorf thinks that appealing to consistency and decrying hypocrisy is going to persuade conservatives to refrain from attacking Congressmember Omar and other progressives in these fashions, he is one willfully blind guy. Today’s conservative movement is incapable of feeling shame or responding positively to appeals against hypocrisy. Willful blindness is a very bad trait for a journalist to possess.
Second, Conor’s use of the bizarre and incendiary phrase “”social-justice warrior” cry-bullying” in the very first paragraph of his column is quite the tell. Let’s get this straight: in the American culture, a Muslim, even a Muslim who is a member of Congress, is incapable of truly bullying Conor Friedersdorf and those who hold his place in our culture. Bullying is done by those who have been granted power. Bullying is done to the less powerful.
To further illustrate seabe’s point about Friedersdorf, here is Conor just last month elevating the voice of a white supremacist and helping him attempt to whitewash his white supremacy. It’s a sordid act of journalism which seeks to afflict the afflicted and empower the powerful.
We must all be determined to defeat not just Trump, but this political and cultural movement as well. These people will remain among us, and people like Conor will probably retain journalistic sinecures, but I will be reassured when writers like Friedersdorf are more widely reviled than they are now.
What did you do when American fascism threatened to harm your neighbors and the world? People will have to account for what they did, everything they did. We should all strive to move through this, day by day, in ways which will allow others to look at us with respect a few years from now.
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/04/i-gathered-stories-of-people-transformed-by-fox-news.html?utm
source=fb&fbclid=IwAR3xbWQAWYS8fysr3s13D-V7zg67-WnGYkyYre-brsYwm0NraHXuWu6R3M
If I did the Twitter, I would extract and post the following from Dolt and Rump’s WWOR interview in midday on 11 Sept 2001, in answer to the question “What’s happened down there”:
“I mean, 40 Wall St. actually was the second tallest building in downtown Manhattan . . . and now it’s the tallest.”
I’d also observe that the statement is a lie (of course it’s a fµ¢king lie); 70 Pine St. was several stories taller.
But more to the point of the post: getting rid of the orange homunculus (and I am counting the days) is an absolutely essential step, but only one. The real problem is the Repugnican Party. How many of its luminaries have spoken out against this latest outrage committed by their dear leader? The thing is, all they have to offer is hate and fear, and lies, nothing else, and they know that they will go extinct without them. By now, they are fully committed. It is, in short, a fascist party working desperately against the clock to stage its Reichstag fire. When it happens, forty percent of the population will swallow it; will a greater number see through it and punish them?
And if so, will the country’s electoral mechanisms be intact enough in 2020 to withstand the Repugnicans’ efforts to pervert it, doubtless with the assistance of foreign actors?