Keep Calm and F***ing Stop This S***

Everybody needs to stop submitting their American election spec script to social media and function in reality before it's too late--and it is NOT too late

Well, that was quite the little weekend, wasn’t it?

I was steaming fucking mad before the weekend. I’m just radioactively disgusted now.

With America? With gun violence? With “the tone of political rhetoric”? With the media? With Republicans? With Democrats? With 2024 holistically?

I mean, yes, but no more than usual. Because literally nothing has actually fucking changed since Saturday night.

No, I’m disgusted with us. My own alleged side. Everyone from ostensibly lefty commentators to that famously “liberal” media to regular everyday Jo and Joanna Six-Facts who aren’t particularly involved beyond being normal enough to remain not-fascists.

Goddammit, Us, what are we doing? What are we doing to ourselves? Why are we like this?

All I saw and heard Saturday night was total abject certainty that the election was over now and Trump had already won. No point in even trying anymore, right, fellow lefties? Just accept it, babe. It’s hopeless. It’s basically already happened so might as well buy a red fucking hat. Look how handsome and powerful he looks totally genuinely jumping up in ecstasy and screaming at his followers to fight for him. Daddy is SUCH a Big Daddy! Just give up, it’s only your rights, no big whoop.

And all that weeping and moaning and rending of garments was from US. The right was absolutely delighted. All the ghouls came out to smile their crocodile grins at us and gloat. They couldn’t even keep up the pretense of a vaguely normal solemn-shock-and-dignified-perserverance reaction between Tweets. The millisecond it happened the right was giggling with joy, high-fiving each other, laying out their best Gilead Commander cosplay, and counting every unhatched domesticated bird they could conjure up in their beetle-infested imaginations. Hardly any of their “thought leaders” seemed half as concerned for Trump or horrified at the shooting as positively turgid about taking this out on Democrats for the rest of time and using it every way they could to stomp half this country’s face into the mud. The night their candidate was shot, the Republican Party was just out there saying “we are going to use this to hurt everyone” AND WE JUST INSTANTLY GAVE UP AND SAID YES YOU’RE RIGHT IT IS INEVITABLE.

It fucking is

And this after weeks of the most appalling display from the media, who fully ignored or actively buried every horrifying Trump story, pretended Project 2025 didn’t exist, and said precisely nothing whatsoever about Trump’s own trashslime debate performance in their rush to drool and pant heavily (while trying to look like they weren’t disturbingly excited) over the absolutely fishfuck insane idea of ditching an incumbent candidate four months before an election because the President had half a bad debate. Every single person with even the most vaguely magical connection to politics just out there submitting their old West Wing spec scripts to social media like one of them was gonna get picked up by the big bosses at Reality Studios with, apparently, a fucking sea nymph’s idea of how the system actually works.

At the slightest excuse, we just vigorously chuck ourselves off a Victorian cliff clutching our pearls in despair and sighing to the wind that nothing could be done instead of, I don’t fucking know, not behaving like a caricature of wishy-washy weak liberals who can’t even back their own guy for five seconds in the face of an oncoming freight train of globally catastrophic dystopia.

Sometimes I hate us so much. We are so willing to believe the worst and beat each other down and so unwilling to put any of that energy into…well…anything else.

And yeah, okay, I had my moment of oh fuck who cursed us, too. But past the first twenty minutes, at no point did I think this was nearly as sure a thing as the media, who fucking bolted to release their barely-concealed ceiling-net of red balloons and confetti and rev up the celebration party bus, insisted.

First of all, if the last eight years have taught us anything, it should have taught us that Trump is Asimov’s fucking Mule and it is impossible to predict what happens next in any given circumstance involving his gaseous horrormouthed presence. The idea that what has held true historically is somehow fixing to start holding true for Trump is a pretty weird conclusion to belly-flop into. Four months is forever in terms of news cycles. Every story from four months ago is gone from the headlines now, even Gaza. If this happened in October, maybe. But we’re busy packing our bags for an all-expenses paid trip to failure in July?

Second, assassination attempts make people sympathetic when the target was sympathetic before, or behaves in a way that inspires sympathy afterward. Screeching GO FUCK YOURSELVES WE’VE ALREADY WON AND WE CANNOT WAIT TO CRUSH YOU ALL approximately thirty seconds after the shutter snapped on that thrice-damned photo I’m already sick to death of seeing plastered everywhere doesn’t exactly red rover new and/or remotely normal voters to the side.

It’s a real humdinger of a conundrum to bank on sympathy and shock from the voting population when you’ve taken such care to frame sympathy/empathy as weak bullshit, and snapped angrily at the nation to get over it and stop giving even the most hesitant of shits about victims after every single shooting for decades on end. Not to mention joyfully engaged in so much unprecedented, comic-book evil chaotic clown-car-of-goblins-with-the-rickets nonsense that the concept of being shocked by current events just seems like a fun nostalgia I Heart the 90s trip.

They keep telling us to stop caring about other people. You can’t do that so hard for so long and then kick back and expect the caring to flow in the way it would for a normal candidate who never let a pandemic rip through states on purpose because not enough people there voted for him, actively killing many of our family members for their own benefit—and profit. Who shrugged and told everyone to suck shit if they actually cared when children were mown down by assault rifle fire—and insisted that that reaction was the Correct American Way to Do and Think Things.

Y’all said we were stupid asshole-babies for caring about shootings approximately 900,000 times this year. Just because you love him so much you think he’s the special exception to every single rule doesn’t mean anyone outside your play group does, and those are the voters everyone needs, so don’t be surprised if they…you know…

Truly amazing that this is the clearest shot I could find

Plus, four months is plenty of time for some follower of the new President Pennywise in his blood-red tie to make an attempt on Biden, and for the right to show no sympathy whatsoever while laughing their asses off as they have anytime any lukewarm Democrat—or you know, children in a schoolroom—has suffered in any way.

The most callous comments I saw in the immediate aftermath were variations on “too bad the shooter missed.” And sure, that’s unkind. Not as unkind as literally anything that’s escaped a Republican’s midden-mouth concerning anyone not a Republican in the last… *checks notes* ever, but unkind.

It’s also very wrong. The first thing I said to my nieces was thank god he’s not dead. Thank god it’s only his ear. Because that’s the nightmare scenario. That’s the martyring. Then, if the violence isn’t completely unhinged, Nikki Haley (probably but who knows, it seems unlikely they’d go with something they disdain as much normal protocol to elevate a woman of color) ascends and very likely does win against Biden as Trump becomes deified and people do that ugly little trick where they pretend someone was good just because they died. And really and truly, we are lucky beyond belief that bullet only grazed his ear. If he’s still wearing that bandage in four months he’ll look like a ridiculous crybaby—the one thing the right 100% is but can’t stand to be seen as. If he’d been hit in a place with a longer recovery time that kept him in the hospital not being a jackass 24/7 so people could worry about him, or put his arm in a sling or his leg in a brace, if it had been an injury you could see, then yeah, that sympathy might kick in, because he’d seem in need of protection.

But, thirdly, he’s not a martyr. Because he’s still here. And he’s fine. Overclocked dickassery fully charged up and raring to be a total fucking psychopath at the RNC. So nothing has changed whatsoever. Looking “strong” might feel good to him and to them in the moment, but takes away a big part of the motive force of sympathy—to protect someone vulnerable. Trump isn’t vulnerable. He couldn’t even pretend to look hurt. He was THRILLED. He jumped right up with an active shooter on site to get his photo op, a very normal response from a normal human person. And he’s tossed the tried-and-true response to this sort of thing into a volcano because he doesn’t have any idea what human people with human feelings are like, so it never occurs to him to appeal to that. Come on, none of us had to read that Trump didn’t call the widow of his own supporter who actually died, or the injured (but Biden did). Did anyone, even the most devout and worshipful cultist, ever think he would? Why would he start now?

I had to go looking on purpose to even find out the name of the professional first responder who died. (It’s Corey Comperatore, by the way.) That is such a massive PR blunder I can hardly believe the party that couldn’t stop braying SAY HER NAME when Laken Riley was killed could possibly make it. That guy’s name and face should be everywhere. His wife should be speaking at the RNC right now. That guy is the martyr. That’s the one who lost something for their wretched “cause,” the person we can all sympathize with at least a little because he’s fucking dead. They should be howling SAY HIS NAME and Trump should be praying with the family and bringing them to his house, paying off their debt or mortgage or setting up a fund for his kids or something. But our Tangerine Trujillo, and his folk, are physiologically incapable of doing that, even if it benefits them. Because that would take a tiny part of the terrible light of collective attention away from the guy who thinks he’s Captain America now, and make someone else the face of it all.

They’re so hard for their revenge they can’t even play the PR right. No press conference, golfing immediately, no talk with the widow, no pretending to abhor violence. They can’t play the victim because they can’t stand to be seen as vulnerable even if it would help them. They simply have to smirk behind their hands so their base knows they’re super amazing and strong and cool and awesome and alpha.

Then there’s the fact that I have a hard time believing anyone who wasn’t voting for Trump is thinking oh no the guy who keeps saying he's gonna start blasting as soon as he's in office got minimally grazed by a bullet and is totally okay and golfing right now. Better change my vote and embrace fascism! Now, I bet it’s all rather more shocking when media is so laser-focused on the dream they had one time about reporting on a contested convention and absolutely burning Joe Biden at the stake that they just barely bother telling anyone the bloviating bully said he's considering murdering a new group of people today. But nobody, no matter how uninvolved in politics, just has no idea that Trump likes hurting people. That’s sort of his whole brand.

And all this was before it came out that the shooter was one of Trump’s own beautiful beloved darlings, a disaffected white 20-something gun-stroking manchild whose reasons have no reason because reason is not part of the Republican platform at any level. And my god, are they disappointed. They were so excited for it to be one of us. Oh, fingers crossed it’s a trans person! Maybe even a black trans person! A party can dream, right? But no, the guy who got people to just ignore reality wholesale, embrace profound madness and eschatological violence, who encouraged their hate and their growing distance from anything resembling normal behavior, who openly and in public hopes for a Civil War on his own behalf every day…got a minor injury from a lone wolf functionally indistinguishable Kyle Rittenhouse, who they call a hero.

I don’t think that’s a narrative that’s going to move a lot of swing votes, if such magical things actually exist.

Look, Doom Patrol. The election is four months away. Four months before COVID we were all Christmas shopping crammed in together merrily breathing each others’ snot and literally never washing our hands like that was just totally fine. Because it was.

Four months is far more than enough time for the right to completely pile-driver themselves into the mat, eat their own teeth on this topic, and alienate everyone who hasn’t lovingly worn the “Q” off the Q buttons on their keyboards yet.

They’re already doing it. They literally can’t help themselves. They were immediately crowing victory, they’re crowing now, sneering and smirking and laughing at everyone who isn’t in their club of Demographics Who Are Semi-Safe Until We Run Out of Others to Brutalize. Trump announced J.D. Vance, a white authoritarian fuckbeard with the world’s most kickable face, who does nothing to bring in undecided voters, but really must believe you gotta stick it out in violent marriages because he’s prancing down the aisle toward the same one the GOP can’t quit. The RNC is in full scream-sweating fangs-out fall-in-line-maggots swing and no one seems to be upset or shaken, they’re all celebrating like it’s Mardi Gras on Cocaine Planet—so why should anyone feel bad for them? They look super-stoked! No one likes Now I’m REALLY Gonna Get Ya as a campaign slogan. It’s incredibly off-putting, and they couldn’t WAIT to rub everyone’s noses in the reeking shit they’ll make of our future.

But the thing is, we, who are busy not shooting people over here on the center-to-left, seemingly can’t even hold it together for 48 hours to give these mule-headed Pleasure Island cast-offs a chance to fuck it up for themselves, as they have every single easy lay-up political opportunity that’s ever landed in their laps, because their pure need to be toxic hate-barfing sadistic regular plain old shitty-uncle assholes right now always, well, trumps their plans to be toxic hate-barfing sadistic uncontested rulers of all mankind. They get ahead of themselves. They blow their wad too early. They post their plans online and storm the capitol before they have the numbers and assume they’ve got it in the bag when the bag hasn’t even been opened yet.

What is wrong with us? Are we just nihilistic and semi-suicidal as a culture now? Is that even possible? Fuck it, McDonalds’s is too expensive so why not let it all burn this is a sensible thought that I should have and share enthusiastically. Wishing for everyone and everything I know and love to suffer endlessly because reform and compromise take too long for not enough of what I specially know is perfectly correct isn’t something I should seek therapy about at all.

We don’t even seem to be able to try solidarity or optimism or even…criticism of anyone but each other. The bile the left holds for conservatives is a cup of sweet tea next to what we have for other members of our own coalition.

We’re in this masochistic abusive relationship with the right where they’ve groomed us and ground us down and told us we were worthless so thoroughly we flinch whenever they take a breath and just fall utterly apart when they get mad. The media, who hasn’t been on our side since mostly always, says our guy is too old? Yes, masters, he is too old, all is lost. Social media says our guy is somehow personally and solely responsible for the oldest continuous conflict in human history despite doing more than any President ever has to reign it in? Yes, masters, revolting nickname accepted, all is lost. Republicans stand by their man no matter how many times he rambles on about sharks or airports during the American Revolution, but Biden stutters like he always has, and we join right in with the media telling him to fuck off in to the sun despite there being no one whatsoever anyone can agree on to take his place and everyone knowing full and goddamned well that this clown-tantrum country will not vote for a woman of color, not even over a fascist who promises to eat our faces on Inauguration Day, even if they won’t admit it out loud.

Is some of this bots and astroturfing? Oh, far more of it than we’ll know until it’s too late, I’d bet. But a lot of it is just traumatized fucking people using social media as therapy to purge their anxiety and terror without realizing all that outpouring of individual despair creates a collective zeitgeist of surrender and hopeless misery—which motivates no one to vote or organize or believe in anything but an inevitably dark future.

We have to stop this. We have to stop giving up in advance. We have to stop accepting the blame for conservative’s sins and responsibility for their extremism. The problem is not that we call the right fascists the problem is the right is full of fascists.

The problem isn’t that Joe Biden is old, it’s that the media doesn’t want Biden and is providing cover for a monster to sink regular boring old democracy that isn’t fun to heroically report on. And pretending, like everyone else, that things will just go on as normal if Trump wins and they’re just kidding about all the horrors they’re looking into the camera with a smile and announcing “We are very much not kidding and are tickled pink about doing this as soon as possible.”

I don’t really care if you hate Joe Biden or think he’s old and Trump (who is 78) looked cool in a photo he clearly had an actor’s instinct to pose for. It’s not a joke, and it’s not impossible for it to happen here. If America falls to fascism fleeing the country will not help. Fascism must have prey to survive and grow. This nation has the greatest military in the history of the world and is embedded in every aspect of the global economy. Do the math. Everyone will lose everything. White rural resentful men, too. If you think your precious 401K survives Project 2025, you need to read it again.

All hope is NOT lost.

What we choose to do and say now will determine the future in November. I am begging you all to pull it together and stop backbiting and self-sabotaging, stop using social media as a hallucinogen, stop demanding the impossible and dismissing the possible from our own side while celebrating the tiniest decency the other side occasionally fakes. I don’t care if Biden isn’t left enough or perfect enough or young enough or magical superhero unicorn enough. Another Trump term is the end of progressive policy in this country. Another Biden term isn’t. So suck it the fuck up, don’t give them the narrative they’re insisting we MUST follow (because we must always follow) and vote for Biden’s team and Biden’s SCOTUS if you can’t get behind what Biden himself has accomplished because the media hates him like fire so we don’t all lose our rights before they get around to killing us. And if the rhetoric of Republican party can get one of their goodest boys to come within a head-turn of murdering their own adored leader, that is not hyperbole.

If they beat us and the darkest timeline comes to pass, it better not fucking be because we refused to fight back.