We Can't Have 'Unity' With People Who Want Us Gone
We Live In Reality, Not Fiction
President Joe Biden embraced some decent sentiment in his address to the nation following the attempted attack against Donald Trump. Biden: “You know, the political rhetoric in this country has gotten very heated. It’s time to cool it down. And we all have a responsibility to do that.”
Biden also said, “While we may disagree, we are not enemies. We’re neighbors. We’re friends, coworkers, citizens. And, most importantly, we are fellow Americans. And we must stand together.”
As president this is the right message for him to embrace in a moment of national crisis and he shouldn’t — and didn’t — use the incident for crass opportunism and political advantage.
But as a practical matter, we shouldn’t delude ourselves for a single nanosecond that this will be the path America follows. The right has made this bed for us and we all have to lie in it.
The Republican Party in 2024 and the conservative movement behind it is a force in favor of straight, white, affluent, male dominance. Everyone who does not fit that narrow vision of the world is to be subjugated to the will of their supposed betters. Look no further than the leader of this movement from 2015-present, Trump. Trump is an unqualified bigot who doesn’t have the temperament or managerial know-how to run half of a hot dog stand, but to the right his straight white maleness makes him far more qualified than anyone who has brown skin and/or is a woman.
The right doesn’t just hold on to this pecking order of white male superiority as a private political belief, whispered about in “quiet rooms” as Mitt Romney (a straight white male who also led the party while railing against brown people) once put it. No, the right seeks to instill its perceived notions of superiority in American law and policy. The Supreme Court it installed stripped away a woman’s right to choose an abortion and undermined the affirmative action measures meant to give historically deprived populations (mostly Black) a shot at education. The right insists on legislating against the rights of transgender of Americans to be their true selves, it seeks to undo the right of LGBTQ Americans to do basic things like enjoy happy marriages. They even want to strip women of the right to seek contraception. They want to close of access to America for people seeking refuge from tyranny, and they want to rip apart immigrant families who have been here for eons, making the country better through their social and financial contributions.
The only “unity” one can have with people who see and control the world this way is by submitting to them, by bowing before them and letting them run rampant over us all.
These are people who have actively cheered on police abuse of Black and brown Americans, even when that abuse has been escalated to murder caught on video and seen around the world.
None of us who are in these targeted groups or who have any sense of humanity as someone outside those groups can possibly simply put notions of fairness, justice, and rights aside for mythical “unity.”
I do not believe in political violence, I do not condone it, I want nothing to do with it. I don’t want any political physical harm to come to Trump because the last thing I want is for that wretch of a person to become a martyr. Trump and people like him should quietly expire of natural causes as they see the world turning away from their hateful ideology and mean spirited public attitudes.
But we can’t have unity with him and his backers in any way because I believe in human rights and dignity — for myself, for people who look like me, and for others, no matter their gender or orientation or race or ability — who have a right to freedom. Fascism and authoritarianism and bigotry must always be confronted and rebelled and ideally this repulsion should occur in peace, at the ballot box.
We cannot seek unity with a force that sees us as subhuman and undeserving. There isn’t a middle ground that can accommodate these two diametrically opposed positions on how things in America and the world needs to be.
I would love for the temperature to be turned down in American politics, but for that to happen the hateful forces must peacefully be defeated and vanquished so those of us who embrace freedom, but maybe have different approaches within that framework, are the only ones with any power.
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— Oliver
Follow me, Oliver Willis, on Threads @owillis1977
Exclusive Kal-El Photo
We hung out with some friends this weekend and Kal was mostly a good boy, but he did take an angry run at a cat, who could have easily kicked his butt if we let things play out. This is the ferocious hunter dog the next morning.
When a Republican says they want “peace,” they mean “You shut up.” When they say they want “unity,” they mean “You shut up and do what we say.”
This is the party that says they’re in a second American Revolution, whose Sun God was directly asked whether there’d be violence if he lost and replied “We’ll see.” I’m happy to “turn down the rhetoric in this country,” but since the only tenet of Republicanism is “You inferior beings can’t tell me to do anything I don’t want to do,” I’m not the one to turn to on this.
Yeah the Unity thing is not working at all. The response from the maga to the shooting has been terrible! What on earth? Unhinged and right back to the same worthless dangerous rhetoric, but times ten. I'm not unifying with Putin, Bannon, or any maga lunatic. Nope.