Right-wingers and the total lack of self-awareness
The crying on the right gets stupider and stupider by the day
Right-wingers, conservatives, and others in the Trump orbit are so mad that liberals and others on the American left want nothing to do with them, they’re even crying about them leaving the website formerly known as Twitter.
User data is hard to come by as the website does not regularly report user data, but apparently, it is not lost on the owner of the website—Donald Trump acolyte, now policy adviser Elon Musk:
But right-wing politics and conservatism in general is a political and social philosophy. Left-wing politics and liberalism in general is a political and moral philosophy. It is why right-leaners see this as a matter of a social debate, and why left-leaners see this as a debate over morals.
The American right operates under the guise that for the past 60 years, they have had to capitulate to the American left because of various social movements that challenged the right’s views on social hierarchy and social hegemony. The right has fought this tooth and nail, combating everything from gay marriage and a woman’s right to bodily sovereignty, to guaranteed-issue (“universal”) healthcare and the welfare state. The right has even resorted to turning anything that helps progress human society and the human individual into a financial and/or natural law offense, even to the point of resorting to implementing public policies that canvas an entire spectrum of violations of individual rights (reproductive freedom, freedom from religion, burdens on ballot access, freedom of speech) to straight up violations of human rights under the guise of protecting society (laws targeting LGBTQ communities).
Then, when taking into consideration the communication ecosystem of the right, right-leaning commentators, sympathizers, and provocateurs have peddled and entertained just about anything that would help their fight including manufacturing controversy over ethnicity to discredit liberal Black political figures (The Obamas, Kamala Harris); sanitizing bad policy by gaslighting the public on obviously curtailed rights (looking at you, Bryan Hughes); attacking higher education and educational attainment in general; using the LGBTQ community as a punching bag; crying about how addressing issues of injustice and inhumanity is ruining their perceived right to unencumbered selfishness in their worldview and overall privilege (see: all that bitching about “wokeness”); and incessantly whining that left-leaners do not wish to hear, see, or engage with their toxicity.
And, they wonder why those of us left-leaners want nothing to do with them.
But that screenshot above says a lot, even if Musk was quote-tweeting with facetiousness. Right-leaners are mostly offended by the fact that they are being held accountable for their views and behavior by the one thing that they hate the most: being disowned, discarded, and disregarded. Even though the vast majority of us on the left believe in the principle of having a sense of responsibility towards each other in society, that does not mean we abdicate our freedom on who to and who not to associate with.
As human beings, we are entitled to certain inalienable rights. Those rights include not having to endure toxicity and not having to engage with people who do not share our values.
What’s more galling, perhaps above all else, is the fact that right-leaners are collectively unwilling to acknowledge the toxicity of their views, let alone their behavior—mostly because of entitlement. While political extremists and diehards across the political spectrum are not above using abusive language, it is far more common and more open on the right than it is on the left. Right-leaners are insistent that left-leaners listen to their perspectives ad nauseam, because they felt they had to listen to the left.
(Even though they didn’t have to; after all, they made social networks such as Parler, TruthSocial, and Rumble as an attempt to separate from the left under the guise of “freedom of speech”—all of which failed to gain the significant traction they hoped for.)
In other words, right-leaners are finding more ways to call themselves victims of some sort of left-wing conspiracy. They feel unwanted—as they should. We literally do not want them. Not for engagement. Not for debate. And for some, not even in our lives.
Some left-leaning and anti-Trump individuals, such as Dean Phillips, are calling for the left not to leave right-wing-dominated spaces such as X:
Believe me, those of us on the left understand how the other half of the country feels. We’ve seen it over, over, over, and over again. We’ve heard it over, over, over, and over again. Hell, we’ve been listening for the past half-century. The words may be different, but the rhetoric is the same. There’s no good faith engagement to have. Right-leaners believe that their views aren’t as bad as they think because they lack the self-awareness to realize how some of their views and ideas undermine the human experience and conveniently ignore the collateral damage that would be felt by other human beings.
And, once again, it should be no surprise why any of us on the left want little to do with anyone on the right.