Sometime in the early 1990’s I got up one morning, purchased a giant Diet Mountain Dew, tanked up my Plymouth Reliant K, and road-tripped in three swift legs at top speed (65mph) to Bloomington, Indiana.
In Bloomington, I enjoyed excellent Tibetan food, some intense Mario Kart racing, and visiting with my college buddy and his charming Wiccan roommate. Unfortunately, I got a later start for the next leg of my journey, to New Orleans, which, for some reason (I attribute this to using the smaller Rand McNally Interstate map at the front of the book) charted a madly ambitious run through Nashville, TN, Birmingham and Mobile, Alabama, through Biloxi, Mississippi, and, finally New Orleans.
Somewhere between Birmingham and Mobile, however, I became convinced that the night traffic ahead of me was all going uphill (...it wasn’t...) which perplexed me because I knew that I was headed from the hills of Appalachia down towards the Gulf of Mexico. I understood this as a warning sign that I was dangerously fatigued. So, somewhere outside Biloxi I clicked on some late-night AM talk radio to keep awake.
The host had one of those calm, radio voices, and the topic at hand was how to handle repeat criminal offenders. The first caller had a simple solution. Cut off their hands. The host calmly dissected whether he was being trolled or not, and, par for the course, decided to silence the call. Cutting off a criminal’s hands, the host remarked, wasn’t any kind of real solution.
The second caller sounded like they hadn’t heard the first caller, but their solution was the exact same one. Again, the host tried to ascertain if he was being trolled, and eventually hung up the call. “Hey, folks, anybody have a proposal that we could actually pass into law?”
At that point, a third caller, who sounded like he’d been waiting to talk for hours paused briefly, and asked, “Am I on?” and when he was given the green light gave his prescription. “Yeah, I think we should cut off their hands.”
::
It’s true, if not also grotesque.
But the particular topic above is not why I shared this story.
They were all trolls.
Trolling is a key tactic of the right. Sometimes they are joking. Sometimes they are dead serious. (In those serious and joking cases, I guess, you “muse” that you are appointing yourself Acting President of Venezuela.)
We’ve all seen the pattern, from the shock comments of right wingers like Pat Buchanan or David Duke to the latest outrages from Elon Musk and Donald Trump, the “troll,” the brazen falsehood, the outrageous insinuation, the lie, the joke, the gaslighting, the outright racism, sexism, and homophobia, is stock in trade.
Obama’s Birth Certificate was a troll.
“They are eating the cats and dogs” was a troll.
Releasing the Epstein Files was, and is, a troll.
The tactic has a key underlying goal: to throw off all serious or earnest discussion of any topic at hand. To draw attention and momentum to oneself by expressing an utter contempt for reason, and, in the process, for anyone else.
No proposal is worthy of consideration and debate when the answer is always the same: those with power should continue to enjoy a monopoly of power.
The laws should always and only apply to your political enemies and not to yourself.
(Hence the draconian punishments.)
I get what I want, and you get what I decide to give you.
That kind of authoritarian rule book is not what the majority of Americans voted for, or what’s in our Constitution; but that’s the nation we are currently living in.
The pattern is clear.
The right wing has a map for the country, and all the roads on that map lead to an authoritarian monopoly on power. There’s no need to debate anything. There’s no need to have a serious conversation. You are either with the program, or enforcing the program, or you’re an inconvenient obstacle to the power grab.
Everything else is a not so funny joke.
::
I made it safely to New Orleans. I drank an Abita at Jean Laffitte’s at 3am. I danced to Rebirth Brass Band. I took in a gay nightclub, heard Nicholas Payton play Kaldi’s coffee shop, and visited with a voodoo merchant across from Louis Armstrong Park. I also ate the largest shrimp PoBoy of my life.
In sum, I celebrated the diversity and culture of Louisiana that’s not typically reflected via AM talk radio callers.
But, here’s the thing:
Don’t get fooled by the trolls.
Our job is to be bold and clear and stand up for our values, even when there’s room for debate, or there’s someone mocking us for being sincere. (The power and force of our ideas, and our sincerity in expressing them, is often precisely why they are mocking us.)
We expressed the founding idea for our nation with a simple and clear truth, that all men are created equal.
Our government is not acting like that today. Many would say it never has.
But those of us who are patriots and who are working to perfect our union; we have bold proposals and ideas, and we will not apologize for engaging that conversation.
We want justice.
We are looking for people to join us.
In the process, don’t feed the trolls.
