This Thanksgiving, Reach Out To Your MAGA Relatives...And Slap Their Hand Away
After 260,000 Covid deaths, White Nationalism and kidnapping children? No thanks.
(GUSTAVO BASSO/NURPHOTO VIA GETTY IMAGES)
by Justin Rosario
Reconciliation is a wonderful word. After not speaking to my father for the better part of two decades, I reached out to him because I decided that my kids should know their grandfather. It was not an easy decision but it was the right one.
My father, however, did not vote for Donald Trump. On the other hand, my Mother-in-Law and her husband did.
There will be no reconciliation there. As unrepentant Trump voters, they are dead to me for the rest of their life. That earth has been scorched and salted. When their grandchildren are old enough to make their own decisions, I will explain to them exactly what kind of people their grandparents were and that will be their legacy.
This will almost certainly come as a surprise since they seem to labor under the impression that I stopped speaking to them in 2016 because Hillary lost an election. Now that Trump has lost, all is well, right? 70 million Trump voters appear to think the same thing since they are now asking us to understand their pain over also losing an election (that they haven’t conceded yet and may never admit they really lost).
Nah.
This Thanksgiving, when your Trump-voting friends and family demand civility and reconciliation, remind them and everyone in earshot that they just spent four years wallowing in the worst kind of depravity and they can go straight to hell.
Never Forget
Put aside the ongoing seditious attempt by Trump and the GOP to negate the results of the election which should end with most of them in handcuffs. That alone is a badge of shame Trump voters will carry forever. Open and direct assault on democracy is now a core principle of the Republican Party and they’re just fine with that.
Instead, look at the horrors of Trump’s four years in office and how his supporters behaved.
Trump created a literal secret police force to deploy against protesters. These goons drove around in unmarked vehicles and scooped people off the street, a terror tactic beloved by authoritarian regimes all over the world. Don’t believe me? Ask Secretary of Defense Mike Pompeo.
Trump’s secret police were untrackable, wearing no identification. This meant when they deliberately escalated the violence in Portland, there was no way to know who they were or hold them accountable for their crimes. Law enforcement in America is already bad. This was a whole new level of dangerous and your Trump voting friends and family were 100% on board with it.Jared Kushner, an allegedly Harved educated person, made the decision to deliberately let Covid run rampant in blue states. I originally thought that the Trump regime did nothing because they knew it was too complex for them to handle and they would rather do nothing than be seen to fail. This was so much worse.
Kushner’s brilliant plan was to let Covid ravage blue states because it would make Democrats look bad for the November election. Mind you, this was several months ago. The utter inhumanity of allowing potentially millions of people die for political benefit is the stuff of bad script writing and deserves a trial at the Hague followed by a lethal injection. But the sheer stupidity of everyone involved in this scheme is mind boggling.
Anyone who has ever seen one of the unending pageant of thrillers about an infectious disease knows that viruses spread. A decent high school education will also inform you of this fact. Viruses do not accommodate your political plans. They do not respect borders. They find new hosts and reproduce. For Jared to think that Covid would not reach red states over the course of seven months when it reached every corner of the globe in less than four suggests that Donald Trump is not the only person whose fancy degree was paid for by daddy.
Meanwhile, not one of your Trump-voting family or friends spoke out against this plan to let blue states die.Back in 2017, Trump’s regime started torturing children by tearing them away from their parents for weeks on end. They placed the children in conditions we would not put dogs in. Underfed, dirty, crowded, unsupervised. We won’t know how many of the children were abused or sexually assaulted until Biden’s people come in and investigate Trump’s Kiddie Concentration Camps but even one is too many. The number is almost certainly in the hundreds, if not thousands.
We now know that this policy was not the work of just Stephen Miller, Trump’s Minister of White Nationalism. There was a vote in 2018 among a dozen of Trump’s senior advisors to make this official policy. They signed off on this sick plan to hurt children to send a message for migrants to stay away. This didn’t just “happen”. It was planned, in detail.
I have yet to come across a single Trump voter who turned away from Trump over the torture of children. They fully endorsed physically and psychologically damaging children in the name of keeping America white.Kyle Rittenhouse used an illegal gun to murder two people after he traveled to another state explicitly to look for trouble. After months of Trump whipping up hysteria against Black Lives Matter protests, one of Trump’s cult members took it upon themselves to kill in his name.
Rittenhouse is now a hero to the right wing. Your Trump-voting friends and family were thrilled that those BLM “thugs” finally got what they deserved. Because killing us is always justified and, in fact, a growing preference on the right.That’s why there wasn’t much in the way of outrage from your Trump-voting friends and family when two different white nationalists shot up two different synagogues, one in Pennsylvania and one in California. Your Trump voting family and friends just shrugged.
They usually won’t say it out loud, but the Republican Party has gone all in on antisemitism so who cares if a bunch of Jews get killed?
And, yes, your Trump voting friends and family goddamn well do know about the antisemitism. They know that when they scream their lust for Trump’s hate, they’re standing with Nazis and the KKK and the Proud Boys. They hear the open hatred of Jews. The more educated ones know they’re being fed a repackaged version of the Blood Libel with QAnon. Antisemitism and white nationalism are now mainstream Republican values.
They know. They do not care.
There’s so much more. The corruption, the incompetence, the cruelty. All of it embraced and beloved by your Trump-loving family and friends because it made libs cry. When they reach their hand out, it’s covered in blood and filth that can never be washed away.
Never Forgive
These atrocities cannot be forgiven and asking us to is a moral abomination. An old meme from 2016 is making the rounds again and it is, just like last time, being torn to shreds. You remember our good friends Bob and Sally, right?
They have some back-up this year:
Vox.com listed more but you get the idea. We all just need to get along with each other! Let’s forgive and forget! Look forward, not behind!
How about we not do that, though? Even if we choose to “look ahead”, this sums up why that doesn’t really work:
Sure! We can all be friends and find some middle ground! But where, exactly, is the middle ground between “I would like to live my life the way cisgender white men do” and “Please fucking die because I hate the way you were born”?
As a Jew, should I settle for allowing the KKK to only kill half of my kids?
Should Black people settle for the police beating and murdering them only half as often?
Should the LGBT community be happy with only half of the hate crimes committed against them by right wing terrorists?
Just for fun, try suggesting a compromise like that to Bob’s buddies and I promise you, they will still scream “tyranny!!!” at the top of their lungs. Remember, these are the same people who have spent the last several years loudly losing their minds over the words “Black Lives Matter” and football players kneeling. And then they started murdering us at an accelerated rate because Trump told them white nationalism was good and proper.
I, for one, will not be forgiving a single goddamn MAGA. Because of them, I had to explain to my daughter when she was just seven years old that there were people who wanted to kill her for being a Jew. Yes, Black parents have to have a much harsher version of this conversation with their kids, but I’m not asking them to forgive the people who make that necessary so why in the world would I consider doing it? MAGAs chose to enable white nationalism, knowing the violence that it brings.
Some people have it in their hearts to forgive but I am not one of those people. I will never forgive and, in all honesty, neither should you. MAGAs don’t get to walk away from who they are when they’re “winning”.
The Mask Is Off
When Republicans have power, they drop all pretense of being decent people. They turn their hate into policy and glory in the pain and suffering they inflict on the people they hate. Each time they get the chance to do it, they get orders of magnitude worse.
But when Republican voters lose an election after having run amok, they suddenly develop amnesia and demand that the rest of us do as well. It can never be repeated enough that the party of “personal responsibility” avoids it like a vampire avoids holy water.
That cannot and will not be allowed to happen this time. Trump himself will make sure we don’t disappear him down the Republican memory hole but even as he maintains his grip on the party (or tries to), there will be a full court press to rewrite history. Biden pandemic. Biden recession. Biden ISIS and Taliban resurgence. Biden let Iran build nukes. Everything Trump is rushing to break right now will be blamed on Biden including everything Trump has set fire to over the last four years.
But this only happens if we allow it. They can only claim the moral high ground if we let them erase the last four years.
I have been taking every opportunity to remind MAGAs that they spent those four years getting a perverse thrill over the torture of children. I tell them over and over again that they are not good people and that they embraced white nationalism and fascism when they thought they were “winning”. Reminding Trump supporters of what they supported is like spraying weeds with herbicide: It keeps them from strangling the discourse with their bullshit.
When they tell us to stop blaming Trump sometime in early 2021 (my bet is on March), my response will be “Kiss my ass. Over 400,000 people are dead because of him and we still haven’t found all of the families of the kids he kidnapped.”
Continuing to treat Trump supporters like pariahs is not just about punishing them, although having them experience consequences for the first time in their miserable lives is important. It’s also about not letting the rest of the country forget what they did. America is afflicted with a painfully short memory span and Republicans count on that. By constantly reminding everyone in earshot that Trump’s cult marched in the street screaming for the blood of children and Jews and women and Blacks and Muslims and and and, we keep the past from being whitewashed.
The mask is off and your Trumper family and friends showed us the white nationalist fascist underneath. It’s up to us to make sure the mask stays off and everyone continues to see them for what they are.
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“I, for one, will not be forgiving a single goddamn MAGA”
I gave a neighbor I haven’t run into much, but on the few occasions I have over the last decade he seemed OK. Then there was a minor neighborhood misunderstanding that I tried to help resolve and the vehemence with he and his wife lashed out (even as I was agreeing with them that they had a legit complaint) was amazing.
Can’t say that I was at all surprised when a trump 2020 sign showed up prominently displayed in their front yard followed a week or two later by a trump flag on a tall pole.
Haven’t happened to run into either since. Which is fine; who needs the grief. But I kinda want to. Just to slap them down the moment they turn the conversation towards anything remotely “forgive and forget”-ish.
Because there isn’t a chance in hell that I will do either.
I suppose I should feel bad about this, but I don’t. This is exactly how I feel about these people. As a group, they are absolutely and unrecoverably despicable. There is no possible excuse for them.