Scott Alexander does his usual thing, and it’s glorious to behold. It’s like finding a genuine oasis after a week spent crawling through a social media desert.
It’s funny — for eight years now, I have remembered this Daily Show clip where a McCain supporter tells John Oliver that if Obama is elected, he’s going to “put on his turban” and “we’re all gonna be shot!” For all these years, that represented the gold standard of partisan political insanity to me. I thought of that woman on several occasions during that time, wondering if and when she ever realized how ridiculous she sounded. The other day, however, the Lady of the House was showing me some of the screeds being posted by her Facebook friends, and I swear, no exaggeration, I saw an ostensibly-educated professional woman from one of the bluest cities in the nation — no ignorant, uninformed backwoods yokel here — worrying about whether she would be capable of throwing a punch or outrunning pursuers (Trumpist brownshirts, I presume), and even pondering whether these extreme circumstances meant she should consider buying a gun. From there, she seriously, no exaggeration, started musing about being willing to hide minorities and LGBT in her house (again, Trumpist stromtroopers are apparently going to be conducting house-to-house searches for enemies of the state when they’re not chasing random progressives down the suburban streets), as if she’s in the French Resistance.
In an idiocracy, political discourse vacillates between the hashtag and the swastika.