Soft-Skulled Crabs

 I've had a moment to think over what happened January 6, and even though Trump had been conditioning the Tea Party types out there to prepare for civil war with his rhetoric for some time, and I think I have a pretty good grasp as how otherwise comfortable normies turn into soft-skulled crabs, I'm still pretty bowled over by the number of folks who participated in the melee who took extensive selfies and video of their activity. 

I mean, I get it, Trump's soldiers of convenience are folks like the Proud Boys (the alt-right fight club whose first rule seems to be "Never stop talking about being in a fight club.") But check out the toasty pumpkin spice Karen flashing a peace sign in front of broken glass at the capitol, whose battle cry included "Y'all know who to hire for your realtor. Jenna Ryan for your realtor." 

She thought this was great for her branding? Every single grinning picture ("Felt cute, might insurrect later") is a damning picture of how comfortable people have been with what I've been thinking of as Nazi-adjacency--the phenomenon of seeing someone's swastika tattoos or downstairs weapons stockpile or what have you and going, "Welp--not a deal-breaker." The way Trump's racism and Nazi-adjacency weren't a deal-breaker for voters, being snuggled up to these cats doesn't seem to be a deal-breaker in these folks' lives. Seeing III%-er gear doesn't bug them. And they scream like banshees if anyone suggests there is something "deplorable" about it. 

I mean, take the Klan Poobah over here--

before this yabbo had to explain that he was answering his president's call to be exactly this kind of wanker, this dumbass boychild who needs Whole Foods or his tummy gets a hurty could surely have picked something better than fake Aryan white supremacist bullshit for him to get his Iron John manly bonding on with--but that was what he went with. 

The conservative free speech argument regarding de-platforming people for TOS violations (like terroristic threats!) has been treated with a touch of seriousness that never has been comfortable to me, in a "Methinks you doth protest too much" kind of way. Even attempts to address white supremacist and rightwing extremist domestic terror is met with country-club pearl clutching or minimization. "Sniff! The so-called 'tolerant left!'"--because "some people" think things like abortion-clinic bombing and mass-shootings are actually, um, bad. Or because "some people" are concerned that eliminationist rhetoric will get turned to eliminationist actions.

That group of "some people" should be called "our society". There needs to be a reckoning not only with the way Republican party operatives involved themselves in these events, but with the way right-wing media has siloed the information-feed of their listeners, viewers and readers, and sent some of them down a cattle-chute to mayhem or madness. Maybe when conservative groups think they are "owning the libs" by inviting extremists to share their spaces, they aren't being edgy, but playing themselves and telling us more about them then they even knew. (And what about all the dark money that keeps the alt-right going?)

I don't know how to play "Can't we all just get along?" when real estate Karen and the Qanon Quinoa Kid out there are seriously claiming the holes in their heads and the right wing outhouses built over them are reason enough for the president to pardon them, and they have a point, because they really were led to believe they were exactly where the president said they should be. They shouldn't be pardoned because they should have known better, but they aren't wrong about what they were told.