Thanksgiving Guide For Leftists: Trump-Voting NPCs Have Run Out of Excuses (So Don’t Bother)
After Donald “Bugsy Knuckles” Trump won the 2016 election owing to Hillary Clinton’s (not completely inexcusable, let’s be real) overconfidence, we “leftists” — meaning everyone who’s not anti-humanitarian, which describes probably 70% of us — melted down completely, questioning not just our political beliefs but our core social values as well. We ranted and raved in our social media spaces, adopting permanently angry Twitter personas that really weren’t much more sophisticated or nuanced than the ridiculous screen names we adopted for our joke-filled MySpace pages (I’m sure you’re curious: back then, owing to my desire to appear edgy, my MySpace handle was “OJ’s Bloody Glove,” referring of course to People’s Exhibit no. 164-A in the 1995 OJ Simpson double-murder trial. Yeah, we were weird, but harmless, and it was fun).
The broad left — a chunky, meaty pottage mostly comprising idly panicked progressives who read Chris Hedges’ books because Noam Chomsky’s too eggheady, socialists who pore over Engels the way Jehovah’s Witnesses mainline the New Testament, and latte-gulping liberals who read 1,000-page establishment-pundit-written biographies of Barack Obama (it’s really time for Harvard researchers to biopsy and study the brains of those people, isn’t it?) — began to splinter, and the splinters splintered further.
So much to sort through and process! we thought. We racked our brains, trying to understand those freakin’ MAGAs. We took different approaches to the catastrophe.
Some of us tried to sympathize with the poor creatures. After all, we’d mocked them for their “lack of education” and “voting against their own best interests” (which is actually a tradition as American as apple pie, one that’s been around since the guys in wigs at the Second Continental Congress trolled us into accepting a “system of checks and balances” that always ensures that our rich elites eventually get what they want). We’d been so mean to them, never stopping to consider “their valid concerns,” like “abortion is wrong because motherhood is sacred (whether or not one can afford to give a child a non-horrible life)” and “hands off our guns, because we country folk hunt wild game with those things in order to feed our families” (I can pretty much guarantee you I wouldn’t need a bump-stock-equipped Bushmaster to vanquish a possum that just ate an entire bowl of cheap cat food). They got us back, big-time, and we deserved it!
Some of us went even further: Maybe the MAGAs are actually right! We started a new journey, one that went so far left that our ideology began to “horseshoe.” We became disciples of guys like Glenn Greenwald, because after all, he’d sure been right about that Edward Snowden stuff (never mind that his “rightward-ish-adjacent-whatever” turn only happened after MSNBC stopped inviting him to appear on their establishmentarian, CIA-managed talk shows. I mean, if Rachel Maddow reinstalled him as a regular fixture on her mindless corporate-financed teevee show, would he go back to lobbing microwaved insults at Trump? You tell me). Or we went with Greenwald’s fellow leftist-turncoat Matt Taibbi‘s flow, joining him in condemning “the mainstream’s assault on fReE sPeEcH” (never mind that Taibbi went in that direction only after he’d been unexpectedly #MeTooed for some braggartly, misogynistic, jock-brained bullshit he’d written when he was old enough to know better, and also never mind that conflating “free speech” with “hate speech” isn’t always wrong, especially when the accused is indeed engaging in, you know, hate speech).
This Trump win (which he earned mostly because Americans were as sick of being subjected to the live-streamed, Biden-abetted massacre in Palestine as they were of watching Trump’s mortally terrifying bungling of the initial COVID-19 outbreak) is different though. The broad left has neither the time nor patience to relive a four-year Groundhog Day. As one, we must realize that there’s no point in trying to talk sense into the MAGAs. So don’t. Seriously. And don’t try to “see their point of view.” In fact, don’t even be around them at all if possible, because they’re going to be a thousand times more obtuse than ever this year. We have to fully grasp the fact that sociopolitically, MAGAs are what the kids like to call “NPCs” (non-playing characters in video games, like the clipboard-carrying lab technicians in Blake Stone: Aliens Of Gold who’re calmly/stupidly walking around when you’re trying to plasma-blast the mutant monsters they helped create).
What I’m saying is that the MAGAs’ opinions don’t matter and they never did. So this year, instead of sitting there like you are now, dreading that inevitable Thanksgiving Day moment when your Uncle Dave gives you shit for whatever, just go to the phone right now to call the soiree’s host and tell them that you have a work thing or an illness thing or an alien-abduction thing. Beg off and start arranging a Thanksgiving visit with some normal, non-NPC friends, or commit to cooking a turkey or tofurkey for you and your beloved(s). Why put yourself through it? I sure wouldn’t.
Yesterday, while driving through Derry, NH, I saw a small convoy of Trumpies in their pickups, big huge MAGA flags ruffling in the breeze, and I realized that some of those guys are going to terrorize one or more of their family members on Turkey Day. “Maybe it’s time,” one of them will say to some poor parent’s teenage trans child, “to go back to being Christopher instead of Christina, haw haw, pass the buttah.”
Fuck those people. Figure it out, leftists and liberals, there’s no one to save us from those fundamentally bad people and the leaders they blindly elected but ourselves. The MAGAs never “withdrew” from politics, they were never involved or versed in politics in the first place.
And liberals, stop making excuses for your Democratic Party favorites (you literally haven’t learned anything by now?). It’s official, the Democrats are dead by their own imperialist hand, and even if they weren’t, trust me, they’d be very busy shipping more and more of your high-pay/low-work jobs overseas or helping corporations to fund AI programs to handle them. You’d better get with the class struggle toot-sweet, because you’re about to become an endangered species, just like the “dumb unskilled laborers” who just gave you Trump: The Empire Strikes Back.
Let’s fucking go already. Let’s start withdrawing our labor and emotions from all this divisive nonsense and start building a shadow civilization through prefigurative politics; let Trump rule over the idiocracy and drain them all dry. Solidarity now or get out of the goddam way.
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My second book, My Year In The Online Left, came out on June 10. Meantime, if you want to be fully, genuinely informed about the political troll/bot invasion of Election 2016, 2020, and Elections-Yet-To-Come, buy my previous book. There’s the tiniest bit of technical stuff in there, but you’ll get it, I promise. My Twitter is @esaeger, my Mastodon is @esaeger@universeodon.com (I’m never there), my BlueSky is @esaeger.bsky.social (ditto) and my cursed Facebook is eric.saeger.9 (I do visit it daily).
