Thread by @auronburner

The tide has turned. The pendulum is swinging back, and it is swinging HARD. Some of the manifestations of this (Elon twitter) are good, others (Roe v Wade) are horrible. But it's happening, the culture war has moved to a new phase, and SJWs: WE FUCKING WARNED YOU! 🧵

Seriously! All of us on the dissident/more libertarian left, moderates, centrists...we warned and warned and warned for a decade that the woke, illiberal cultural left would push so far they would generate a terrible backlash, and you didn't listen at all!

10 years of acting so damn certain you could just steamroll everybody else and those salad days would go on forever! "The right side of history", like some biblical prophecy that your final victory was ordained. You were in a position of strength, so why negotiate at all?!

Well guess what? The bill came due! Just like the rest of us always told you it would! You can pretend you're not scared, and hide in fantasies of a revolution in the streets or of killing the filibuster, packing the court, and so forth, or you can come back to reality.

Because none of that's gonna happen. You don't have the votes. Joe Manchin's pro-life ass is not gonna change his mind. And if you think throwing every norm in US politics out the window like that would help Dems in the midterms, you're delusional.

You played a politics of existential threat, of telling broad groups of people that their time was over, that they were "deplorables" and so forth who had no place in your new era, and you made them scared enough that they would side with ANYONE who promised protection from YOU.

It's too late to gaslight about whether you were doing that. It's too late for "but we never said..." and smug language games, because what you're claiming you never did is what the median voter saw you doing, and they're voting on that basis.

Your choices now are to double down like you always do and continue the same belligerence until you drag the entire left down with you and make us all irrelevant for a generation, or you can compromise and work with us smelly heretics to try to blunt the pendulum swing.

If not now, when? After the midterms are a disaster? After Trump gets back in with a filibuster-proof majority? Because then it'll be too late. Give someone else a chance to try a different approach to achieving progress. At this point, WHAT DO YOU HAVE TO LOSE?!

I mean hey, I'm a white guy. I'll be fine...for a while. Until President MTG has the CIA come haul me off and force me to do crossfit until I give up the keys to the climate change laser satellite. So y'all go ahead and take your sweet time, it's only the country imploding.