These Are Not The Guys

Democrat Leadership Are Absurdly, Hopelessly Unfit For This Moment. Get Em Outta Here.

They say that if you are falling from an airplane with no parachute, you’re supposed to go limp. The idea being that if you’re body is at peak looseness (???), your joints and stuff will be less brittle when eventually you go flat-mode on the field or road that is your unhappy landing. And what else are you going to do? You have no tools at your disposal to stop this (flapping your arms will only make you look extremely foolish to onlookers in your final moments), so you might as well try the only thing you can. The reality is that this probably won’t work, and you’re gonna die. The people who brought parachutes and flying squirrel suits and gigantic umbrellas might make it, but you will not. (This is a metaphor for something I’ll get to in a minute, btw). You’re hamburger meat on the pavement. Bye bye.

No reason to sugarcoat it, the last week has been pretty rough. We all knew that the arrival of Trump 2.0 was going to be an unpleasant experience, but I don’t think anyone was particularly prepared for the tsunami of bullshit that rained down on us like some kind of doomscrolling version of the eruption at Pompeii. We’re all frozen in our own kind of rictus, watching in stricken horror as headlines like “Trump blames plane crashes on women” and “Secretary Breakfast Beers threatens war with country that doesn’t exist” flash at an unbelievable pace before our eyes. And it’s easy to feel helpless - seemingly every possible powerful person, business, and institution is bending the knee to our elderly wet emperor, and the people who are supposed to be opposing this new nightmarish reality - the elected “opposition party” - appear to mostly be going limp, like they are trying to survive a great fall. And much like with the parachute-less jumper, they aren’t even a little bit prepared. They aren’t ever going to be prepared. They are the wrong guys - and they’re going to get us all pancaked.

The Posting Skills Are At All Time Lows

One thing that has been brought into sharp relief with the past election is that more than ever, posting is upstream of reality. It didn’t matter that the Haitian immigrants weren’t eating cats and ducks, it didn’t matter that the customers at Trump’s McDonald’s were plants, nothing in our past conception of objective reality mattered. The right-wing controlled the narrative online for the most part, and for the most part that’s what our conversation revolved around offline too. The New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, etc have never been more irrelevant - and are likely to get even less so as they lose their press room spots to outlets like OAN, Breitbart, and Sex Predator Monthly. They may be cringe, they may be weird as shit, but the right undeniably has the upper hand in the social world right now, and is well-placed to hold onto that spot for the foreseeable future (hello future CEO of TikTok and Marco Rubio booster Larry Ellison).

What’s genuinely unfortunate is that the supposed counterbalance to these forces - the Democrat party, mostly suck at posting. A lot of this can be attributed to their hilariously advanced age - Pelosi and Schumer have a collective 179 years between the two of them - and that’s certainly a component. But the party seems genuinely allergic to anyone who is not rigidly in lockstep with “the program”, and that makes for a really shitty poster. Cory Booker - a “please elect Democrats” button that was cursed by an evil wizard to live life as an eternally 48 year old man - is not that old by congressional standards, and he is one of the worst posters alive. Naturally, the Democrats made him the head of the party’s social outreach. AOC is one of the few elected Dems who actually has a natural talent for posting, so of course she is shunted off to her own business - denied leadership roles and paraded out during campaign season to futilely pander for youth votes. From Chris Murphy to Adam Schiff, the most visible Dem leaders mostly post like groveling little babies, decrying how unfair Trump is being or bafflingly trying to outflank him to the right on issues like immigration or the military. These guys are getting absolutely bulldozed online, and they aren’t going to get any better. As we’ve seen with Elon Musk - you cannot learn how to be a good poster. More than musical ability or academic talent, it is an innate skill that cannot be learned through repetition or instruction. The greats can get better, but the never-had’s will always be lacking. The Democrats have no juice online, and with this team on the field, they never will.

Fucking DO Something

Throughout the last campaign season, we were told endlessly that Donald Trump represented an unprecedented fascist threat to our country. And as we have seen over the past two weeks, he certainly does! So I can imagine it’s pretty confusing to most left-of-center Americans to see the main response to this onslaught of reactionary and illegal shit to be “we need to keep our heads down and talk about inflation” or “we can work together to reduce government waste”. Are you fucking kidding me? I am long past expecting anything else from these people, but it’s somehow still a little but unbelievable to watch how truly ineffectual and cowed these guys are. You told us this dude is Hitler, and now you want to work together on his programs? You want to “avoid distractions”? Man, fuck you.

There are so, so many tools that Democrats have at their disposal to fight against Trump’s insane agenda. They could be holding press conferences with the elderly people who are losing their meals on wheels. They could be flooding the feed with stories of soldiers who are losing their mental healthcare. They could be flying to Somalia to bring aid to the orphans who are about to lose access to federal support. They could be holding endless filibusters where they read the phonebook or every Tumblr poetry post since 2009 on the floor of the Senate to stop any more dumbshit Fox News freaks from being confirmed to the cabinet. They could be highlighting how the (actually pretty unpopular) richest man in the world is dragging his ketamine-shriveled nuts all over every institution in the country. They aren’t doing any of this though - and they won’t! Because if they could, they already would have. It’s not their way. The way you work your way up in the Democrat Party is simply by Not Rocking The Boat. The guests at Biden’s farewell party were the most slovenly-bootlicking hacks to ever enter a convention floor, and their posts were just as boring as you might imagine. Jaime Harrison (outgoing DNC chair) is perhaps the worst at his job that anyone has ever been at any job in history - he is a bumbling, incompetent loser who nevertheless raised money from the right people, shook the right hands, and most importantly, held his tongue at the right moments. That is who the Democrats elevate, not someone who rises to the occasion and breaks tradition.

As Maya Angelou Says

I have never pretended to be a big “poetry guy”, but I’m told that one of Maya Angelou’s most famous aphorisms is “when people show you who they are, believe them”. Actually, I was told this quote perhaps dozens of times by Democrat leaders. So when all these leaders, from Schumer to Jeffries to Booker to Pelosi, show us how prepared they are to deal with this new era, let’s believe them. They are not the guys we need right now, and they never will be. First of all - we’re dealing with an “old dog, new tricks” situation. But more than that, we are dealing with a group of people who are either unwilling or unable to do what is necessary, which at the end of day is more than worthless. Not only does it actually do nothing to resist (sorry) Trump in any meaningful way, they bogart their positions from people who might actually be able to make a difference. They have no vision for a future of our nation that can compel people to believe in them, and it shows! If it feels like we are in freefall right now, it’s because we are.

America is barely a democracy anymore, but we are still a society where you can yell and smash and make a scene big enough for people to take notice. The game has changed (immensely), and we can spend our time lamenting the loss of whatever version of politics or news or whatever used to exist, or we can start forging a plan to tackle the new landscape that lays before us. The forces we are up against do not care about the rules elected Democrats care about, and they have made that so goddamn clear a baby could see it. So let’s clear out this collection of born losers and bring in some people with the capabilities to actually move the needle. Let’s bring in some True Posters, some people with an understanding of the new order of things, some leaders with some fucking balls. Otherwise, the only option we are left with is to just go limp and hope for the best.