In his final show of 2020, a certain late-night comedian/pundit who shall henceforth remain nameless declared:
You have to wear everything [that] anyone on your side does. Republicans are the party of “Don’t wear masks,” kids in cages, “Lock Her Up”, and Democrats are the party of every hypersensitive social-justice-warrior woke bullshit story in the news.
The second clause of the second sentence quoted above was the constant and recurring theme of this particular comedian/pundit’s program throughout 2019 and 2020. Democrats — i.e., the national Democratic Party, its officials, elected officeholders, and candidates — are to blame, are responsible, and should be punished at the ballot box, for “every” anecdotal example of what he (and many of his frequent guests) would call “hypersensitive social-justice-warrior woke bullshit” that makes “the news.”
Leaving aside the first clause of the second sentence, a throwaway line that has the incidental benefit of being correct (i.e., identifying three things that actual Republicans and the GOP itself have actually done, said, or advocated), one rarely hears — certainly not on this comedian/pundit’s show — that the Republican Party “has to wear” the racism, homophobia, religious quackery or gun-buggery of the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Westboro Baptist Church, “Straight Pride Parade,” or anyone else who thinks that voting Republican is the only way to keep all those pesky, annoying PC liberals and Jews and Blacks and Illegals® and Queers and Womenfolk in their place. Only Democrats are to blame, and only Democrats should be punished electorally, for the more annoying rhetorical excesses of their Party’s perceived voters/supporters/fans.
The fact that Democrats won the House in 2018, the Presidency in 2020, and the Senate in 2021, does not seem to have diminished the Conventional Wisdom™ that Democrats Will Never Win If They Don’t Try to “Understand” Trump Supporters. Once Joe Biden takes office on January 20, and Democrats have full (if tenuous) control of the federal government, look for a whole new series of rural diner safaris in The New York Times and elsewhere, breathlessly chasing the most important “news” story in America for at least the next year: How Trump Supporters Feel About All This.
But, I digress; we’ve all been over this ground before.
This unnamed comedian/pundit returns to his show next Friday. For the first time in the history of that show’s run, I won’t be watching. And the reason I won’t be watching is because I can anticipate what the show’s theme will be: Let’s Both Sides® the Shit out of what happened at the Capitol on January 6. If it weren’t for all that “hypersensitive social-justice-warrior woke bullshit” that somehow won the last national election by 7 million votes, the sturmabteilung wouldn’t have felt so ignored, oppressed, and condescended-to by Biden, Harris, Pelosi, AOC, et al. that they just had to blitz the Reichstag in a vain effort to keep their beloved Führer in power.
I hope he proves me wrong. I hope he follows his own Rule and declares, rightly, that the Republican Party “has to wear” this:
Which is not to say I’ll start watching again if he does.