Last week, Tucker Carlson broadcast his show from Hungary, complete with giving Viktor Orban an interview that all but ended with Tucker giving the Hungarian dictator a blowjob live on TV.
But what caught my attention was this picture of Tucker standing by the fence, which looks not so much like the border of a country, but like...Maximum Security. (Note: This is the Serbian border, Serbia being pretty much the other right-wing shitbird country in the region, but not right-wing enough, apparently.) Former Republican that I am...I just don't see the attraction here and I'm not going to apologize for that in any way, shape, or form.
These people...be they Orban's followers in Hungary or Tucker's worshipers in the United States...seem to think that by looking out their window and seeing a big goddamn barbed wire fence, by giving up their own freedom and rights...or wish-casting after the same in the case of Americans...that they're somehow harming somebody else more than themselves.
I'll note, and I say this as a former conservative, that I can't fit my head far enough up my own ass to see these people's point of view and that's all there is to it.
I'm serious, on everything from COVID-19 response to fiscal policies to immigration and social beliefs, these fucking people are destroying themselves...on the off chance that doing so might somehow something something Gapacho "Own The Libs" or whatever.
Whatever they think they're doing it doesn't seem to be working very well.
I quite frankly don't understand the logic of destroying one's own life and self, giving up one's own identity for whatever's on Fox News tonight and surrendering one's freedoms and rights to the will of the mob...on the off chance that it might hurt somebody else's feelings. Correct me if I'm wrong but, on the face of it, this seems downright fucking stupid.
The basic idea, as I've been saying since 2015, is that these people would be fine with a dictator, so long as they thought he was "their" guy. They'd likewise be fine with being slaves if they could be induced to think that they were a better class of slave than some of the other slaves. As someone else put it, the cruelty is the point.
And that goes hand in hand with relative status. There's a vocal minority of Americans who would be perfectly fine with living in a cardboard box underneath a freeway overpass, roasting a pigeon on a coat hanger, so long as the Black people or gay people or whatever in the next box over didn't have a coat hanger, or had a smaller box or something. Certainly at this point, within American conservatism the people who think this way are in the majority, if perhaps just barely, but that said they're the ones driving that bus to a great extent because others just won't stand up and do anything about it.
I can remember when cowardice, or incuriosity, or just plain stupidity were not regarded as virtues even by conservatives. Likewise I can remember when racism and sexism were things that were not practiced openly, and I'm so old that I can remember when talking a bunch of anti-American shit around a bunch of conservatives might get you beat up, or for that matter when if doctors or experts said something, conservatives listened like everybody else did.
And that's the thing, isn't it? The stories people tell themselves to justify their own egos, to buff up their own mental image of themselves, are literally killing us as (mostly) conservatives refuse to get vaccinated, effectively creating a second Pandemic a year and a half after the first one, with the specter of more still to come. They seem to think that a big enough pile of bodies will jam up the works for all the rest of us, and that causing this is somehow both an end in and of itself and a worthy purpose for their lives.
These fucking people are turning themselves into biological-weapon Kamikazes for...what, again? Because Marjorie Taylor Greene and Tucker Carlson said so? To "Own The Libs?" (Again, whatever that means) or for some stupid idea of "Freedom" and THIS stems directly from the shit people said during the fight over the Affordable Care Act. People started considering it "freedom" to die in the street of a preventable illness because a Black President got the government to offer private health insurance at cheaper rates and make it harder for insurance companies to refuse to serve people. So, again, a lot of this bullshit comes down to racism.
Wait a minute, doesn't having better or more options for health insurance make people more free?
Isn't it kind of hard to enjoy or exercise one's freedoms when one has died of a preventable medical condition?
And how did we as a people become such idiots that this kind of crap became viewed as anything other than the murderous crank bullshit that it is?
Conservatives have become nothing more, at this point, than the exact kind of murderous political cadres existing only to kill people for some vague notion of "Purity" that so disgusted the more pragmatic Republicans of my youth, they're the Brownshirts, the Red Guards, and the people in Soweto who would put tires filled with burning petrol around someone's neck for offenses real or imagined...and like that last group, their victims by now are overwhelmingly their own people, as much as they like to fantasize to the contrary.
I'm serious, the vast majority of anti-Vax nuts are white folks, and certainly at least a majority of them are conservatives, or at least conservative-adjacent (and ya know, I do not really draw a big distinction between certain far-left people and the far-right anymore, because while the rationalizations might be different, the results are very, very fucking similar.
Whether it's political, racial, or what have you, certain fucking people's desire for purity...and for a world that shouts their alleged conclusions right back in their face...is killing a hell of a lot of us, and making life difficult for the vaccinated majority of us
And I'm tired of it.
You want to destroy yourself, die of disease or go live in a prison...or a country that looks like one...fine. YOU go and do that. You do not have the right to force your idiotic conclusions or life choices on even one other human being on the face of the Earth (or to force us to clean up your mess, really) because you saw some idiotic meme on the internet or had one implanted in your stunted consciousness as a child and I am goddamned tired of you trying.
Fuck you.
And that's all I have to say about that.
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