No thank you, troll, I won’t respond directly to your unhinged comment
April 13, 2024
I can sense you now, clutching your smartphone in a Gollum-like grip, waiting for the notification prompt to tell you that someone took the bait and responded to the insulting and nonsensical non-sequitur you posted in a comment thread…and now it’s your time to pounce!
The original comment that set you off, the one you felt honor-bound to beat down, probably wasn’t even directed at you…it probably just indicated support of a liberal policy with which you disagree. Or perhaps the comment offended you because it was mocking rather than sufficiently worshipful of your clown god, the serially bankrupt failson who pretended to be an astute businessman on reality TV and who is now aspiring to overthrow the U.S. Constitution and make himself dictator for life. You apparently interpreted this benign liberal comment as an invitation to flex your self-declared moral superiority by launching violent accusations of “bAbY mURdEr!!!” “pEdoPHile!!!” “gROooooMeR!” or some other unhinged right-wing tangent similarly untethered from reality.
Let’s assume you went with your usual go-to, “bAbY mURdEr!!!” Every person who isn’t actively shunning objective reality realizes that nearly all abortions take place during the very early stages of pregnancy (80% at or before 9 weeks, 93% at or before 13 weeks), when the embryonic cluster of cells is about the size of a small blueberry. (Although, with draconian abortion bans being enacted across numerous red states, abortions are likely to be a little later in pregnancy as desperate women need to take time to make plans to flee across the country to receive basic healthcare. But these procedures still take place well prior to fetal viability.)
Presumably, on some level you do realize that rare late-stage abortions are tragic, heartbreaking situations in which the fetus is not viable and continuing the pregnancy will harm the health and possibly the life of the mother. Yet you still attack women’s right to reproductive healthcare based on the most repugnant, outrageous and false description of abortion that you can conjure up—that the vast majority of abortions are performed when flaky women who are 8 or 9 months into healthy pregnancies suddenly decide “on a whim” to have those viable pregnancies terminated—and find legitimate doctors who agree to perform those procedures. You continue to vomit out this outrageous lie, even though the percentage of cases in which this gruesome scenario takes place is zero. Literally, zero.
By engaging directly with your breathtakingly vile and breathtakingly wrong accusation against women and liberals as if you were actually trying to make a good-faith point, I would be giving your smear more legitimacy than it deserves, wouldn’t I? So, no…I think I’ll just drop this long open-letter-type essay into the comment thread instead to provide a general response to your bizarre—yet simultaneously boring and predictable—right-wing comment. Hopefully you’re not too much of a snowflake, and you can get through the cognitive dissonance to read through to the end.
I may not know you personally, but I know your type. Since you’re the kind of person who sneers “bAbY mURdEr!!!” in response to any liberal comment, then at least one of these three things is true about you:
You know that most women (and men who genuinely love and respect women) are rightly outraged at your demand that women should have their reproductive autonomy and ability to make their own healthcare and family planning decisions taken away. You know that your goal to send women back to a time when they were legally, socially, and financially dependent upon men is understandably unpopular. You know that blastocysts, embryos, and early-stage fetuses aren’t very sympathetic for obvious reasons (because they’re not actually babies), so instead of using the correct, scientific terms to describe your opposition to abortion rights, you cynically describe a situation that literally never happens and invoke the image of a cherubic, healthy, 8 lb baby as the “victim” of abortion. If this is you, Geobbels would be proud.
You are someone who is gullible enough to let cynical politicians exploit something good in you—a love of babies—to whip you into such a frenzy about fictional baby slaughter that you don’t notice that the people feeding you this lie are trying to distract you from the fact that they’re not doing anything at all to actually make your life better. If this is you, bless your heart. But, maybe try to not be so gullible? Seriously.
You have a visceral fear and loathing of women. That’s the psychological profile that most fits a person who believes—or desperately wants to believe—the disgusting and obviously false baby-killing lie. You must truly despise women if you think that, if left to their own devices beyond the total control of paunchy white-haired men, women will wantonly murder actual infants “on a whim.” You’re probably the kind of misogynist who posts comments like “sLuT sHOulD kEEp HeR LEgS cLOsEd!” on posts discussing abortion. If this is you, well, there’s really no way to respond other than, go f*ck yourself.
So what would be the point of me trying engage directly with your comment? If you’re a Gen-X’er like me, or in the adjacent Boomer or Millennial generations, you’ve been participating in or at least witnessing pointless online political arguments like this since approximately 2008. Aren’t you sick and tired of it? I know I am. We all know how it goes, don’t we? Probably something along the lines of this:
You: Oh, but I guess you’re fine with mURdeRInG BabIEs! And you just want to make sOdOMY part of the KINDERGARDEN curriculum!
Me: Um, neither of those things is a real thing, but anyway, I’m just going to ignore you and move on and get back to the original topic. Be well.
You: How can you defend sluts who are mUrDERiNg bABieS!!! They should kEEp ThEIr lEgS ClOSeD!!!!
Me: Okay, you want to play that game? Well then, I guess to you, “pro-life” means having a weird fetus fetish while getting off on the tears of parents whose six-year-olds are butchered beyond recognition in their classrooms by military-caliber weapons of mass slaughter?
You: (Scraping the bowels of the Xitterverse to find QAnon/pizzagate conspiracy accusations to fling at me) Why do you support the global elite’s pedophile sex trafficking ring?
Me: (According to Godwin's Law, online conversations inevitably devolve to invoke Hitler/Nazis, so in this case, I’ll go first.) That’s literally insane. But I guess it’s to be expected from someone whose alt-right ideology attacks and vilifies the same groups the Nazis did…socialists, gays, liberals, foreigners, academics, intellectuals…
You: (In what you must think is a “Gotcha” comment) Maybe you should’ve studied harder in history class. The Nazis were the “National Socialist German Workers’ Party!” It has “Socialist” in its name. So who’s the Nazi now??
Me: Sorry, but I don’t think wanting everyone in the country to have access to decent healthcare is more Hitler-esque than saying that immigrants and gays are sub-human and should be eradicated.
And on…
And on…
And on…
Eventually, you’ll “win,” if you consider the person who posts the last word as the winner. Because I’ll give up, sooner rather than later. I have a job and a life, and I really don’t want to spend hours of my day being aggravated by someone I barely know or don’t know at all in a pointless argument that we both know will never change anyone’s mind. We’ve seen how this goes for about 16 years at this point, right?
And what incentive do I have to waste time arguing with a person who has already decided to ignore objective reality in order to worship the guy from the Apprentice? I feel sorry for you, really. It must be mentally exhausting to be part of the right-wing MAGA cult. The cognitive dissonance must make you nuts when you have to mentally twist yourself into a pretzel every day to disregard objective reality in your worship of a cartoonishly corrupt megalomaniac who has spent his whole life conning and cheating people just like you.
It must take a lot of effort to convince yourself that a notorious con man who built upon his obscene inherited wealth by scamming working-class people, cheating charities, cheating taxes, bullying smaller businesses in the courts, and using multiple bankruptcies to get out of paying smaller businesses—and whose singular accomplishment while in the White House was a tax cut for the mega-wealthy which added more than a trillion dollars to our national debt—is the salt-of-the-earth working-man’s hero. (And it must take an equal effort to simultaneously convince yourself that people like Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren, who were born into working-class families and have spent their careers trying to make the quality of life better for regular people through higher wages, stronger unions, better educational opportunities, and consumer protections are the out-of-touch “elites.”)
It must be exhausting to try to convince yourself that a mollycoddled blowhard braggart who shits on a golden toilet, and who promotes hatred, violence, and xenophobic exclusion, is the “Chosen One” of Christianity, a religion based on the teachings of a Middle Eastern Jew whose mission was one of love, tolerance, helping the poor, welcoming the stranger, and who said that no sooner can a rich man enter heaven than a camel pass through the eye of a needle. You must put yourself through grueling mental contortions when you try to convince yourself that a man who attempted to thwart the will of the voters and install himself as dictator (despite losing the popular vote by nearly six million) by goading a mob of domestic terrorist militias and insurrectionists to attack the capitol building, beating police officers (killing one) in the process, is somehow a champion of the constitution.
I guess in a way I can understand why you’re so quick to fly into rabid attack mode when anyone online challenges the fragile false reality you’ve mentally constructed for yourself.
But do you really get anything of this online harassment? Even though you seem to have unlimited time to monitor comment threads, I assume that you also have a job and a family and a life. It’s really a shame that social media brings out the worst in us. Even though I probably don’t know you well if at all, I’m going to assume that your parents raised you to have manners. You wouldn’t act like this in real life. If a friend/acquaintance of yours had posted that she was going to host an in-person postcard-writing get-together at her house to help get out the vote for Biden/Harris, you wouldn’t invite yourself in, accuse everyone there of murdering babies and raping children, spit in the hors d’oeuvres, and then pat yourself on the back for clearing out the party early, thinking that in doing so you somehow “proved” that Trump is the more reasonable candidate. But online? You apparently not only think that kind of bullying is acceptable, but you seem to believe that it’s your sworn duty and obligation.
If it weren’t so harmful to democracy, your blind loyalty in the face of objective reality would be almost admirable…almost sweet, really. It’s a shame that this loyalty is so misplaced in a malignant narcissist who, despite living an ostentatiously opulent lifestyle, would have no qualms about having his goons hurl you in front of an oncoming speeding bus if he thought that he would get an extra five bucks in his pocket out of it.
But let’s put the online bullying shoe on the other foot for a moment. What if I had done the same thing to you? What if I saw you post something on a comment thread, maybe something to the effect of “Joe Biden is old and senile. Har de har har!” (Despite the fact that Biden is only about three years older than Trump, doesn’t have Trump’s family history of dementia, and for fun chooses to go on long bike rides instead of having his fat ass hauled around on a golf cart. But I digress…) So, what if, in response to your fairly innocuous comment, which was not directed at me, I started attacking you with different accusations:
Me: “What kind of monster are you that you WANT pregnant women to suffer and bleed out on hospital floors due to complications from non-viable pregnancies?
Or
Me: “Must be nice to think it’s perfectly fine for six-year-old children to be slaughtered in their classrooms beyond all recognition. I guess you’ve bought stock in companies that make tiny coffins?”
Let’s disregard for a moment the fact that the accusations I’ve levied against you are actual, predictable, and inevitable results of Republican policies, while your accusation against me—that liberals want to “murder” healthy, viable, fully-formed children—is obviously completely false. Regardless, do my comments above really lead to any kind of real political understanding/discourse?
The toxic environment of social media is really a shame, because you and I probably actually have a lot in common. Even if we don’t agree politically, we still should be able to rationally discuss and debate different issues. I would love to get back to a time when there were more traditional liberals and conservatives who could discuss and debate issues on their merits. (“Conservative” is a dead word politically now. MAGA killed the word. There’s nothing conservative about trying to overthrow nearly 250 years of democracy and install an autocratic right-wing dictator. Sounds pretty radical to me.) If you ever decide to break free of the MAGA cult, maybe we could have an actual conversation. Breaking free of your cult wouldn’t mean you’d have to agree with liberal policies. Really. You could still believe in lowering taxes for the rich while gutting Social Security and Medicare even if you stopped worshiping an arrogant porn-star-shagging lifelong publicity whore as your lord and savior.
A healthy democracy should feature a healthy give-and-take of different opinions and ideas. For example, in terms of immigration, we both agree that there shouldn’t be “open borders.” (No matter how many times you sneer that Democrats want open borders, it’s simply not true. But you keep repeating this lie, because you seem to believe that in contrast with “open borders,” your bigotry will come across as common sense.) We both agree that immigrants should come “through the front door” rather than illegally. But while I believe that the door should be open enough to process applicants quickly and efficiently, you believe that the door should be padlocked shut and the key thrown to the bottom of the Mariana Trench.
I think that we can and should welcome all asylum-seekers who pass a background check and whom we can accommodate without over-saturating the job market. I don’t have a specific number, but I know that red states now are so desperate for workers that they’re rolling back child labor laws so that wealthy businessmen can exploit native-born poor children like they did in the 19th century. So I think we definitely have room, and granting asylum could be a win/win for immigrants and business owners.
Your preferred policy, on the other hand, is “nO bROwn PeOplE!!! BrOWn pEoPLe bAD! bRown pEOple sUB-hUmaN!!! rApISts! cRimiNAls!!!!!” I have to admit that you’re not coming across as very reasonable here, but theoretically, if you were less racist and more able to have a serious conversation, we should be able to compromise and meet somewhere in the middle.
In a healthy, sane democracy, we’d be able to discuss the economy like adults too. As a liberal, I’d like the country to have an economic policy similar to the one we had back when America was “great,” in the days of the Republican Eisenhower administration when the ultra-rich were fairly taxed, unions were strong, monopolies were better restricted, and the country was able to build and sustain a healthy middle class by investing in infrastructure and education. But that type of demand-side economy is considered “communist” by right-wing Republicans now, right? Or, maybe, you think it wasn’t “communist” in the 1950s when the middle-class prosperity benefitted white Christian men exclusively, but it would be communist NOW because of woke liberals like myself who think that this prosperity should apply to everyone regardless of race or gender or religion or sexual orientation.
But I realize I’m not a renowned economist (as, I suspect, neither are you). If we, and the politicians who represent us, could work together, maybe we could get to a place somewhere in the middle, an economy in which there’s enough money for government to invest in people and services, and there’s still enough private capital flowing to spur innovation and business and research without taking too many yachts and private jets and spaceships away from the wealth-depraved oligarchs you so admire.
Can you imagine what the government could do if we all focused on our similarities and shared interests instead of our differences? What about veterans? Whenever a disadvantaged group that the right-wing vilifies seems to be on the brink of catching some kind of break, the right-wing meme machine goes into overdrive lamenting the fate of the poor veterans (who are otherwise conveniently forgotten), as if whatever benefit going to these other groups would come directly from veterans’ pockets. But you’re smart enough to know that’s not true, right? (Even though you probably cynically post those memes yourself.) You know that denying opportunities or resources to some needy groups does not inherently provide any benefit to veterans, just like you know that veterans don’t inherently benefit when a weirdo cult leader from the realty TV world creepily dry-humps the American flag on stage at public events.
So if you have an actual idea to help veterans, bring it! As a liberal, I respect veterans too and think they should get to live with dignity and security for their service and sacrifices. What if, instead of you accusing me of bAbY MUrDeR all the time, we worked together to actually make veterans’ lives better to thank them for their service to this country? But we can’t come to that point and collaborate on anything good if you vilify all liberals, apparently fearing that the very existence of people who aren’t exactly like you in this country is an existential threat to you and your family.
So I think I’ll end here, on this somewhat positive note. If you made it this far, I’m impressed. Congratulations! You’ve proven that you’re not a snowflake and that you can get through the cognitive dissonance of momentarily stepping outside of your right-wing bubble! Despite my snark (which you DID ask for, right?), I hope that we can someday have a respectful conversation if society can ever get past the social-media-fueled polarization that makes bitter online enemies of people who all just want the same opportunities for happiness and security for themselves and their families.
Peace.
