President Joe Biden has been in office for dozens of hours now, ish, and according to the people who supported an attempt to nullify the last presidential election, is already being terribly divisive and very, very rude.
They would like us to know that Joe Biden's speech was divisive, because it called out white supremacists and racists and liars and whoa, talk about rude. They would like us to know that Joe Biden firing the incompetent toadies who have failed catastrophically in responding to the deadly pandemic, the nation's economic crisis, or anything else is divisive, because if this nation is ever going to heal from its current traumas the new administration should clearly keep all of Trump's malevolent and sometimes-criminal conservative D-listers in their current posts rather than divisively have the new president choose new appointees. And it's all very insincere and nonsensical and is most aggressively being shouted by traitors and allies of traitors, so they can all go pound sand, the end.
If you want to see the game being played in its least subtle form, you can flip to Fox News, the network that knifed subtlety in a dark alley years ago and hid the body under Tucker Carlson's floorboards. The network has very particular ideas on what "unity" should consist of, if Biden is truly to make good on his promise to unify the nation, and has been tuning its all-meltdown, all-the-time coverage into warning their viewers that Biden's "unity" message is in reality something very sinister.
Among the network's white nationalism-promoting hoax-peddling traitors, hosts who for two months helped fan the flames of what would become a violent coup attempt with known-fraudulent claims that the election was "stolen" from Trump, the most pressing issue of the day is demanding that those with blood on their hands face no consequences whatsoever—not even scorn.
The same message was promoted by Republican lawmakers themselves. Sen. Rand Paul, who has never been anything more than a fundraising letter in a suit, is absolutely certain that when Joe Biden called for a defeat of "political extremism," "white supremacy," and "domestic terrorism," he was talking about defeating Republicans, and Paul was equally certain that when Biden condemned "lies told for power and profit" he was calling Republicans out for those things.
There is no reason to argue with Sen. Rand Paul. If Biden condemns white supremacy and "lies told for power" and Paul sees it as an attack on Republicanism itself, then Paul is right. Similarly, when fading Republican strategist Karl Rove claims to be "offended" by Biden's denunciation of racism, he is mostly likely speaking the truth. Republicanism is absolutely the party of white supremacy, racism, and lies told for profit. They did not have to be, but chose it. The entire Donald Trump presidency consisted of lies told for profit, and the Pauls and the Roves and the McConnells and the Grahams and Cruzes and Hawleys zip-tied themselves to every one, so long as they could lick up whatever scraps of power those lies brought them.
Even the one, repeat one Republican who was willing to allow, one year ago, that a sitting president should not necessarily be able to commit crimes for personal profit while in the White House is still reading from the same script. He is terrible at it. Absolutely pathetic.
That may go down as the dumbest thing said by a United States senator during the entire month of January, easily beating even the month's collection of Ted Cruz declarations.
Rep. Kevin McCarthy, who helped shepherd an act of democracy-nullifying sedition through the House and who remained supportive of the attempted coup even after like-minded allies murdered a law enforcement officer in an attempt to assassinate the vice president, the House speaker, and other Trump opponents, made the threat more broadly. McCarthy went on Fox News to declare that Biden's new executive orders, from a new mask mandate on federal property to rejoining the Paris climate agreement, were "dividing." Biden "won't be able to unite this nation" if he keeps doing things that are objectionable to McCarthy's band of fellow seditionists, he mewled.
The attempted fascist coup led by Fox News and Republican lawmakers remains ongoing. It has been defeated only in that one assassination attempt was thwarted, primarily by luck, even though the entire federal response to the violence proved to be incompetent, if not itself seditious. The focus now, by those who insisted for two months that the Republican should be reappointed as the nation's leader based on nonsensical lies and hoaxes, is on demanding immunity for those who participated in the attempt to sabotage our democracy.
Some have abandoned, for now, their election hoaxes—but none are admitting they were hoaxes. They are only clamming up after their lies resulted in bloodshed inside the U.S. Capitol itself, in individual attempts to save their own power, careers, and television appearances. There is zero evidence, not a stitch, that they will not return to those same hoaxes the moment they believe consequences have passed them by. The fascist premise remains: Non-Republican rule is illegitimate and invalid, and if a non-Republican wins election the proper response is to strip them of power. It is being played out yet again in state legislatures as we speak. The same white nationalist demands are being made by McCarthy and others.
The purpose of these "unity" demands are to evade consequences, every single one, so that the most prolific enablers of anti-democratic attacks can continue to mount those same attacks without repercussion. But nobody should want "unity" with seditionists. Or with liars. Or with racists. Or with white nationalists. All of those people should face widespread public scorn, everywhere they go, forever.
The American fascist version of "unity" demands purges of immigrants, the isolation of LGBT Americans, the widespread curbing of American civil rights, and the nullification of political opposition through fraud or by force. It is a "unity" that demands the nation abide by all their own bigotries, and harm all those Americans who they believe need harming.
It will not happen. And "unity" now demands consequences for those who would go so far as to endanger democracy itself, either through fraud or by force, in their attempts to pursue those things.