Thread by @N7IRL

It's tempting to go through 2014 and 2016-2018 Twitter and find the overlap among people who dismissed an actual Nazi-front harassment campaign as "mean words online" and those who shame the left for not being nicer to conservatives.

All this right-wing, culture-war bullshit is literally connected by a handful of right-wing billionaires and GG was, per Bannon, a large part of establishing angry mobs and botnets as a serious conservative political strategy.

But the problem is mean jokes about Ivanka.

And it seems like a lot of the same voices currently decrying "liberal smugness" and crying censorship when someone side-eyes Bari Weiss were the same people who kept telling the targets of GG/Rabid Puppies/Incels/Actual fucking Nazis that they were making a big deal about WORDS.

Meanwhile, the public face of the GOP is a likely-incestuous, bloated orange hatemonger whose political strategy consists entirely of "get more praise" and who will cause endless suffering because that's what the people whose praise he wants expect.

And they're running actual admitted pedophiles, rapists, and domestic abusers for public office, because that's what "fuck political correctness" always meant and when they warned us about liverals doing these things it was always projection.

Conservatives are willing to shrug off that Trump's incompetence regarding the response to Maria has meant more American deaths from one incident than we saw with 9/11, an event that Trump claims others celebrated while being on record as saying it meant his tower was now tallest

We're supposed to endlessly feel bad about saying mean words about people who can support calling for the execution of women who've had abortions.

And ignore that the right chose a POTUS who has LITERALLY CALLED FOR VIOLENCE AGAINST HIS OPPONENTS.

Meanwhile, whenever the government has shifted left we got policies, flawed and broken as they may have been, designed to help everyone regardless of political affiliation.

When it shifts right elected leaders literally use legislation to punish their left-leaning opponents.

A rightward shift means people across the spectrum lose a basic safety net, and any guarantee of any response to major disasters, because right-wing politicians want to punish lefties and PoC and don't care who gets hurt.

We have never had a situation in US politics in which the mainstream political left saying mean things about conservatives has had a deleterious effect, as ready as they are to find offense even in things that don't remotely target them.

Meanwhile, conservatives have never missed a chance to cause pain, even while being polite and courteous and smiling as they prepare to make more people suffer.

When they said shit about undocumented immigrants, that was always going to lead to actual fucking internment camps.

This is not a "They're not nice, why should we be!?"

This is a "GET A FUCKING SENSE OF SCALE AND IMPACT, MOTHERFUCKERS."

We're not here because lefties weren't polite enough to conservatives. That's literally their propaganda.

We're here because conservatism is inhumane.

There's no extent to which a rational adult can come to the conclusion that we got Trump because otherwise good people saw Dems supporting reprodutive rights/LGBT rights/responsible gun policy and made a LOGICAL decision that this meant Dems think they're superior.

Instead of trying to twist logic into pretzels to justify how Trump supporters can still be good people, how about we take note that these are the people whose response to "safely lock up your guns" is to threaten war on anyone left of Reagan.

These are people whose motivation for voting for people and policies that will ultimately hurt them is that they will hurt specific others first.

Ignore the bullshit, nobody who voted Trump was ever going to vote for anyone or anything even remotely socialist.

I'm not going to take the stance that words don't matter.

But context also matters, and the context here is the left will snark on and insult the right and then turn around and help them anyway, and the right will smile graciously as they sharpen the knives meant for our throats

I don't need to be nicer to anyone who'd look at a man calling himself a pedophile and incel running for office and not be horrified.

That man is not running for office because Jon Stewart wasn't nice to Tucker Carlson.

The right isn't looking for nice.

They want OBEDIENT, and SUBSERVIENT.

The entire gripe about "political correctness" is that they actually receive any opposition to what they say, ever.

Instead of being publicly applauded for shitting their pants.

Hell, we've spent decades pretending that conservative intellectualism is a thing that exists as anything more than a veneer of civility loosely draped over a need to rationalise a cruel and barbaric history.

Which inevitably has culminated in conservative intellectualism being so cheap a label it applies to professional pants-shitters like Kevin Williamson, Ben Shapiro, and Charlie Kirk.

(The latter of whom at least comes prepared with Depends).

Intellect doesn't mean much when you're crediting it to folks whose inane babble only sounds erudite in comparison with our toddler-level tangerine-in-chief.

These are not brilliant thinkers, they're repositories for long-refuted conservative pablum.

I'm just fucking tired of watching the right actively working to dismantle everything and simultaneously having every nitwit with a grudge because someone once accused them of racism rush to explain why this is only happening because the word "racist" exists.