In a sense, this column articulates the other side of the pitch frequently made about what the promise of a Biden presidency would bring: the idea that Biden represented a recovery of the boringly normal.
Biden got injured trying to grab his dog's tail. Trump was out there, the way many journalists saw it, reanimating the Hilterian project.
Like, *of course* a certain measure of the "thrill" is going to evaporate along with Trump's stranglehold on the office.
But to talk wistfully about that, to talk about it as a kind of *loss*, is to publicly prioritize your own sense of adventure above what Biden's victory has meant, and will mean, for the country.
It's an egregiously parochial take.
“The thrill of seeing JARED KUSH in the Oval asking for a quick two trillion subsidy to fix his quantum hoverboard. God, I miss it.”
—Anonymous Journalist in Biden’s press room
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I'm in favor of Trump's impeachment for lots of reasons.
One is that as we continue to be plagued by political movements that defiantly resist tethering themselves to reality, one thing we can no longer allow is for politicians to enable them without meaningful accountability.
Obviously legal accountability, like the kind Smartmatic and Dominion have pursued, provides a massive disincentive to engaging in defamatory nuttery.
But bad actors will learn from this. They'll smarten up. They'll steer clear of invoking specific companies in the future.
We need accountability that disinclines politicians from doing things like fomenting insurrectionist fantasies.
Mollie Hemingway is a genuinely despicable person. Never forget how utterly vile this crowd showed themselves to be.
To suggest that applying political accountability to a literal assault on our democracy is some sort of masturbatory lib fantasy is the kind of trash take that could only come from a person with a genuinely broken brain.
Stop wanking to this obvious political theater attempting to <checks notes> hold accountable the person who got five human beings killed and hundreds badly hurt.
The author is being criticized for writing a paean to a virtue that he himself, as a shaper of NR's editorial vision, is manifestly not offering in his own pages.
But it is possible that this criticism rests on an assumption, an assumption that may or may not be correct: that the way entities like NR have decided to operate is a function of how they think the media *as a whole* should operate.
“As I understand the science, masks should have taken our COVID death count to like three or four 100 year olds dead, total. The fact that we have half a million dead instead means they don’t work. Change my mind.”
One of the reasons Crowder’s “Change my mind” challenge is a sham is he would have to literally have a different brain, he would have to be a different person, for his mind to be changeable in the first place.
Now that I've written this piece, which includes a rousing call for those of us #onhere to be far more measured in the way we substantively criticize, I want to show the other side of the coin. The side that suggests we won't actually be able to do this.
One of my greatest concerns, for the ongoing viability of social media to function as a genuine platform for discussion, is that it may be too late to turn away from discourse catastrophism. Sometimes I fear there may be no remedy for it.
It's of course possible that I'm being too pessimistic. Couldn't we just learn to be more careful about the way we frame things? Couldn't we enter into a mutual pact of cross-partisan charitable engagement?