by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
I talk to my Traditionalist relatives and when they’re not talking about their extreme abstract fears of being personally “canceled” by the woke cancel culture mob just for being conservative — they believe that that very same woke cancel culture mob is trying to turn everyone gay.
In fact, I have to spend 10 minutes wading through their homophobic talking points distilled from Fox News and various rabidly conservative podcasts before we can even talk about the issues of the day. Relative to Traditionalists, the “homosexual agenda” has grow so absolutely powerful that no one can escape its maw.
Traditionalists think everyone who isn’t a Traditionalists is either gay or about to become gay or is “grooming” little tykes to become gay in the not so distant future.
I guess what it all boils down to is the center-Left has a branding problem. A serious one. MAGA has successfully painted their opposition as either “groomers’ or a “woke cancel culture mob” to the people who would otherwise serve as a firebreak against fascists: Traditionalists. When Traditionalists become Good Germans, your nation has a serious fucking problem on its hands.
But that’s where we are.
As I’ve written before, it definitely seems as though Americans have collectively just given up. We’re slouching towards either autocracy or civil war. We’re in a post-accountability era and, as such, that’s post truth. If you’re post truth, you’re pre-fascist. And only because officially becoming an autocratic state would bump up against American self-perception in a big way to I still have any doubts about us becoming an autocracy.
Otherwise, all systems are go for us to become a Hungary – Turkey style autocracy and maybe even drift towards being a Russian clone on a political basis. The center-Left is so weak, so focused on identity politics driven by the latest outraged tweet that we’re all just fucked. Some of it is out of the center-Left’s hands because of macro trends, and some of it is unforced errors.
Anyway. Good luck, I guess?
