If the Lysol Thing Won’t Awaken Moderate Conservatives, Nothing Will

With no pushback from thinking conservatives on Trump’s “inject yourself with disenfectant” bon mot, the unreal has truly become real.

Apologies to my social media friends who labor in the Trump camp, but I can‘t pretend that losing you as Facebook Friends because I recently made a joke about culling the dummies from society with the help of disinfectant is any sort of bummer to me. Here it is: If anyone can convince me that at least 1,000 people won’t die after injecting themselves with Lysol because they believe that all of Trump’s crazy, off-the-cuff advice comes directly from God, I’ll literally mail you the $100 in swag movie passes we have laying around here.
Go.

I don’t enjoy bumming out my conservative friends. But at this point, yeah, the online jokes I make about Trump may be a little rough. They’re intended to mock the hilariously ignorant subset of Republicans who seem more like doomsday cultists than the kind, intelligent, amazingly generous working class people that have been an essential part of my life ever since I became seriously involved in the music business. That sort of life, now part of my past, involved having to deal with and take seriously every type of citizen, not just educated suburbanite doomers who gave up on humanistically workable capitalism — and America — the day Reagan was elected, not that that’s an entirely stupid worldview.

But by now, we’ve all been exposed to recent stories about wingnut militia members bringing guns to rallies, demanding that stores and restaurants open prematurely, before there’s a cure for the coronavirus. Like it or not, conservatives, those guys have been egged on by Trump and his Fox News mafia directly. Admittedly, anyone with a brain knows that the mainstream liberal media has blown reports of that quite tiny, largely Koch-sponsored insurgency way out of proportion, but come on, man, that stuff scares the normies. No one should support it out of hand, no matter how much you like a few Trump policies. Not saying it could ever happen, but do you really want a house-to-house, Syria-style civil war, just to prove some nebulous point about the “freedom” to hit the mall and spread a plague? No. You don’t.

In a normal world, I’d expect my conservative friends to have certain limits to their support of Trump. But there’s been no limit, no sanity, just blinders. I’m truly amazed that anyone can still support him, especially my usually intelligent conservative buddies here in the Boston area. He’s contributed nothing of substance toward solving the virus crisis other than playing the xenophobia card by “closing the borders,” way too late, in fact, for it to have any noticeable effect at all. Other than that, any rational person can see that he’s been an obstacle, a willing tool of the increasingly despised ruling class, not a comfort or help to regular people. The hydroxychloroquine debacle was particularly disgusting, revealing him as a modern snake oil salesman, a doomsday charlatan, the very last sort of person anyone would want to see turning the main gears of politics while an alien plague is testing the world.

It’s been said a million times in a million thinkpieces, but this time, conservatives need to start being real for once and call Trump out on this mindlessly dangerous, blatantly self-serving suggestion, which will only kill the most intellectually vulnerable, the innocent, hookworm-ridden dregs of the third world within our own borders. I know, trolling and owning the libs seems really cool, and yeah, it can be fun. But this Lysol stuff is beyond stressing out the normies. It’s going to kill people in your own camp, and meanwhile, more than ever, it’s further encouraging that splinter of deeply disturbed people who literally have the politics and sensibilities of Charles Manson.

Those guys are out there. Stop being idiotic, conservatives. You should be focusing on your core political principle — fiscal conservatism, being a voice of temperance against overdoses of domestic “do-gooder-ism” and international charity — not falling for every ideological peer-pressure trap set out by the way-too-rich assholes who run this hopeless, corporate-run dump of a country. On the whole, social media will continue to be a sucky place for you until you understand that your support for Trump makes basically everyone see you as easily manipulated chumps, an expendable force of fascist brownshirts who gladly, blindly protect the very greed-monsters who are screwing you over.

Do me a favor and stop being that.

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If you want to be fully, genuinely prepared for the political troll/bot invasion of Election 2020, buy my book. There’s a little technical stuff in there, but you’ll survive it, I promise.