I saw something on social media that resonated with me in more ways than one. It referenced how America finally appeared to be ready to end an abusive relationship. It can’t happen soon enough because it’s been too long, and far too many folks look the other way at harassment and bullying on social media by MAGA members intent on intimidation.
Yes, most of us figured out at some point that engaging with them on their “issues” is a wasted effort. But not calling them out on their bullying, boorish, brutish, obnoxious harassment has been a mistake of monumental proportions. They’ve only gotten more emboldened, more entitled in the fraying fabric of their own hapless hubris.
For nine years these toxic cult members have raged, blaming everyone else for what they don’t like about their own lives. The truth is, they likely hate themselves but will apparently never be self-aware enough to recognize it.
I say “apparently,” because now that the MAGA cult world is imploding, they are at the height of their rage, and their blame. Everything is the fault of those awful liberals! How dare they post anything bad about their cult leader on their own Facebook pages!
Evidently the First Amendment— and everything else they don’t understand, misconstrue, or flat out lie about the Constitution—applies to them, and them alone. Bitter, angry, white Americans who think the world owes them everything and their own supposed friends shouldn’t be allowed to say anything not to their liking or they will berate and bully them for it.
They are relentless. They have no shame. They have no fucking clue how ridiculous and pathetic they truly are. And, no, I will not feel sorry for them or coddle them because their nasty hateful world is crumbling around them. They can take responsibility for their own crap.
This insidious attempted intimidation, especially this bullying of women by men who are their so-called friends, is what I find most abhorrent. But, sadly, the women are just as duplicitous in their harassment. I should know.
Prior to the 2016 election, I was bullied and vilified on Facebook by people I once called friend. One older white southern California male, a former work colleague and lawyer, saw himself as privileged and entitled enough to say, on my Facebook page, “How can you be so stupid?” in reference to my support of Hillary Clinton and not the guy he’d thrown his full blathering bloviating self behind. The appalling thing is he likely still does not have the grace or the wherewithal to recognize the irony of his own misogynist attack on me.
Then there’s the high school dropout who sought to belittle me and mansplain the Constitution in response to my Facebook posts. Amazingly, a Marine wife and definitely now an ex-friend who had never met this guy and never went to law school or any college herself decided to tell me, on Facebook, how I should listen to him because he knows what he’s talking about.
What he was talking about was verbatim talking points from disgusting Alex Jones of InfoWars. The dude was in his forties, living in his parents’ basement, unemployed and angry and stockpiling guns and I am not kidding. He literally saw himself as superior to me simply because he was a white male. And he definitely didn’t like it that I chose not to embrace his blatant racism.
Very much like another, even worse, abusive relationship that I was in, and almost didn’t physically or emotionally survive. The things I heard, and the hell I went through, are too graphic to reiterate herein. To be harassed for not being a proud racist was something I had never thought I would face in this life, and it still renders me physically sick to think about it.
We’ve all probably had friends—and relatives—we’ve severed ties with along the way, no longer willing to suffer the endless and abhorrent abuse of their toxic crap freely spewed on Facebook with absolutely no self-awareness and no clue that they aren’t entitled to tell women what to think, what to post, and who to vote for.
These people are so lost that they are claiming we are the ones who hate, simply because we don’t support their racist vitriol, and their racist cult leader. They have decided to tell us that we can’t hate him, that we can’t object to him, and that we aren’t entitled to a voice, while they call themselves “Christians” and “patriots.”
In my upcoming novel, Aliens Watch, I address this issue of old friends who turned into the vilest of enemies. And now I’m once again standing up to bullies on Facebook too, because after nine years, it’s about time all of us did. Staying silent in the face of abuse is simply contributing to the abuse, as far as I’m concerned.
Also, it’s almost comical how MAGA folks are now saying its liberals who need to back off and stop the hate. Suddenly they don’t want to talk personalities, but claim to want to address issues, or policies. Except the only policies the Republican Party has is hate, and selfishness, and ludicrous performance patriotism that is anything but. Including their atrocious attacks on military veterans.
They want us to not enjoy the joy we are now feeling; they demand we stop reveling in it by posting on Facebook our enthusiasm for our candidates, and our outrage at a convicted felon, a man found libel for rape, a man who has spewed the most vile hate for nine years. They want us to look the other way, or endure with silence, their outright idiocy. To use a classic Marine Corps expression: How’s it feel to want, MAGA bullies?