Take My Life, Please: The Media's Will They/Won't They Love Affair with American Fascism Prepares For Its Terrible Wedding Night (Patreon)

(Cross-posted from Substack 24 hours later so no one misses anything if they hate a platform)

If you were thinking of joining the ranks of those who like to comment suggesting I write these pieces with less swearing, or indeed type without one elbow on the capslock key, this would not be the essay to try me on.

Because I am fucking STEAMING. And it’s BEEN A MINUTE.

I just…I can’t…fucking BEING ALIVE RIGHT NOW is like watching every pet you ever had get kicked, all at the same time, every day, first thing in the morning, with a recap and reprise in the evening, and also the pets are being kicked into a vat of acid and everyone is just like WHY ARE YOU SO UPSET THERE’S NO ACID YOU’RE ALWAYS GOING ON ABOUT ACID IT’S SO BORING YOU’RE SO UPTIGHT WHY ARE YOU TRYING TO CANCEL ACID VATS (it’s not acid though) but like, those precious baby kittens we all raised by hand are being dissolved in SOMETHING, aren’t they, EMILY?

But then it’s all backpedalling and WELL BOTH SIDES ARE EQUALLY RESPONSIBLE FOR THE ACID PROBLEM (it’s not acid or a problem) LIKE FOR EXAMPLE ONE SIDE BUILT THE ACID VATS (still not acid) AND GLEEFULLY FILLED THEM WITH NOT-ACID AND ROUNDED UP EVERYONE’S FUCKING DAMN TURTLES AND SET UP A COMBO CONVEYOR BELT/OLYMPIC DIVING BOARD VAT-ACCESS SYSTEM FOR MORE EFFICIENT PARAKEET ACIDIFICATION (what even is acid I’m just asking questions) WHILE GIVING PRESS CONFERENCES ABOUT HOW MUCH THEY JUST TOTALLY FUCKING LOVE WATCHING BABY CHINCHILLA EYEBALLS BOIL (my body, my acid) AND WILL LITERALLY NEVER STOP BECAUSE IT’S ALL THEY EVER WANTED IN LIFE (they’re being sarcastic when they talk about the acid vats can’t you take a joke) AND THE OTHER SIDE COULDN’T STOP THEM WITHOUT DISMANTLING THE ENTIRE SYSTEM (what’s so wrong with dismantling the system wait lemme check if my UberEats is here) LEAVING A VACUUM IN WHICH THAT ONE SPECIFIC HAMSTER-SHUCKING SIDE (oh so now I guess acid-vats aren’t “woke” enough for you?) HAS ALREADY ANNOUNCED THEY ARE SUPER READY TO MOVE ON TO PEOPLE AND HAVE A LIST OF NAMES READY AND A SWEET NEW CYBERVAT DESIGN (ha ha but that guy is slightly older than the guy who likes hanging out near the vat so he can strangle your ferrets personally before they DELIQUESCE INTO BURNSOUP so you have to vote for acid boom destroyed with vat-facts and acid-logic!)

…and it’s like GARY. Your dog is DEAD. They’ve got your cats on the DIVING BOARD and they are LAUGHING about how funny it’s going to be when their fluffy tails EVAPORATE into POISON SMOKE that, IT TURNS OUT, will contribute meaningfully to THE DEATH OF THE ONLY ROCK SHRIEKING THROUGH AN INFINITE ICYHOT UNFEELING VOID ON WHICH WE CAN LIVE and each and every one of them agrees THAT’S A VALUE-ADD.

GARY. Your dog is DEAD.

And then, if you should be so masochistic as to turn on any kind of media, just about every talking head simpers and giggles behind their hands and whispers yeah I mean it’s obviously acid (or maybe fucking magical rainbow fairy puke that had the power to send you home all along! Who the fuck knows? We believe in all kinds of shit now!) but hey what’s up you watching that’s cool like and subscribe anyway the only solution to the acid problem is total civil war and/or violent revolution (probably both, we should be so lucky RIGHT PATRIOTS/COMRADES?) after either of which I will definitely get to keep doing this podcast/stream/show/FUCKING ANYTHING I HAVE COME TO ENJOY IN LIFE I can’t see any reason I, an Obviously Amazing Specially Smart Person, would be affected in the smallest way! Please pay no attention to the man who passed the bipartisan What If We Just Didn’t Dissolve Everyone’s Pets In Acid Act he’s old and boring and to get that passed he had to let the iguana-interferers claim all those industrial double-lined rapid-sealing megavats as a business expense so he’s just as bad. Let’s elect the ACID FUCKING ELEMENTAL WHOSE HUNGER FOR SOULS HAS NO END ha ha I’ll get so many more subscribers if he gets in though so win/win am I right lol in conclusion buy my Official Fairy Puke Energy Drink at the sponsored link below to defeat capitalism/the deep state!

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Hey, so, funny story, remember that one time in 2016 when everybody kept smirking about how terrible both sides equally were and it really wasn’t important who won? (As long as it’s not that lady! What a bitch, eh, fellow enlightened philosophers?) And then one side got elected and everything went to hell specifically because literal hell is what one side wants and has never been shy about wanting, like not even for a second, on Sunday, right after a big meal but before a nap?

And that one side, you know, the one that’s ALWAYS FLAPPING THEIR FACE-PITS about how much they FUCKING HATE EVERYONE ALL THE TIME banned an entire religion from the country? Then weirdly enough, that same specific side showed they actually could do legislation if they felt like it, but they only felt like it for the two weeks it took to lower their own taxes because fuck you that’s why? And then we lost our whole gavel-fucking judiciary system to that same side and everyone’s family members who were even a little bit sympathetic toward that one specific side lost their complete sweaty minds because still just the one side started mouth-sharting that the entire concept of there being an objective truth of any sort was opt-in at best but kind of totally cringe when we have these hot fresh alternative facts ABOUT 15 DEMONIC SECONDS after winning? And then oh I don’t know, a million people died of a plague while the President, plus his IMMEDIATE FAMILY MEMBERS, stole all the protective equipment to sell for profit? Then one side moved on to stealing all the taxpayer money to “loan" and then “for”give to their Monopoly-Man-devouring friends so they all could shelter-in-place in Scrooge McDuck’s blood-drenched swimming pool and actually fought the other side with unheardof passion just to kill any oversight on those funds?

And the whole time, the whole time, every second of every day, on every screen, in every feed, with every swipe of every finger, we had to hear about this fucking side’s feelings (which were always a fun instant cocoa mix of hate, fear, resentment, and deception— because these malevolent toads managed to make lying so central to their identity I’m pretty sure it now qualifies as an emotion) and understand and coddle and let them legislate their feelings while they straight-up dilophosaurused every time that other side no one interviews in diners suggested they felt they might have a right to exist. And this fucking guy that singular side worships with literal golden idols took up all our time like real life was suddenly a cliche movie where every radio is tuned to All About The Protagonist News (Suck It, the Weather) only it was OUR ACTUAL LIVES and Asimov’s FUCKING MULE just started gobbling up all the reality that wasn’t him like the devil’s own infinite Pac-Man level.

And then one side, just that one side, because it’s always that one side, tried to violently overthrow the government and we all watched helplessly on TV at home while the side that said they so totally omg anime-heart-eyes love cops AND the flag BEAT A COP TO DEATH WITH AN AMERICAN FLAG and then a MINOTAUR took a SHIT and wiped it all over THE SENATE WALL?

And that’s the HIGHLY ABRIDGED version?

OMG like, YOU GUYS. Wasn’t that SO MUCH FUN?

No? Was it not fun for you? Fear and death and violence and almost losing what health care we have? Half the population losing bodily autonomy? Constant hypocrisy and lies and sadism as, again, just the one side, licked their chops anticipating everyone but them suffering while they got to watch and laugh and hopefully, I MEAN HEY, FINGERS CROSSED, get a few punches in themselves like a real big kid bully? Checking the news every morning like a fucking meteor report, bracing for impact because THERE WASN’T ANY SUCH THING AS A METEOR-FREE DAY ANYMORE?

Because the media was having the time of their screaming dancing confetti-farting balloon-orgasming goddamned lives.

And they miss it so fucking bad they can taste the past quivering deliciously on their lips once more. Oh, it’s so close. It’s right there. All they have to do is reach out for it. They miss they way we made them feel during those years so profoundly, so desperately, so primally that they’re going to sell this country to a horde of heavy-breathing wish.com fascists for about five bucks and just the whisper of the chance of taking one more ride on that Splash Mountain of whitewater dopamine.

No? Was it not fun for you? Because the media was having the time of their screaming dancing confetti-farting balloon-orgasming goddamned lives.

Every single day I watch our media work their asses to the bone to make a dictatorship sound, not just okay, not just no big deal, but kind of funny and quirky and cheeky. You know, not like the other dictators, a cool dictator. He says the darnedest things! Not lame and boring and dumb like stability and steady, thoughtful progress and recovery, GOD that sucks. A flirty joking whizbang authoritarian annihilation of everything any of us have ever known. A manic pixie dream dictatorship where, somehow, you get to feel alive and awesome and like you’re really part of something but actually it’s just a chaotic weekend and then you can go back to your life on Monday and still have 2-day shipping and pub trivia nights and BOGO deals on podcasting mics and a 401K and electrical power and an intact societal foundation.

And I’m not just talking about the “mainstream media,” inasmuch as that word means anything at all anymore. Honestly, while television news still matters, that battle’s lost already. Every one of the major news networks barring MSNBC are now owned by MAGA ding-dongs and I guess it just turns out no one really cares. The greatest lie the devil ever told was the liberal control of all media, so we’ve spent 40 years scrambling to “balance” that hulking Kronkite-beast of conservative, establishment-supporting monocultural thought with as many more conservative voices as we could staple together into an oncoming fascist coup d’etat. And the saddest part is, apparently none of that long-term planning and slow incremental creep was really necessary, because as soon as that one pesky rascally side said “Hey, sorry, terribly busy, would you all mind if we just dispensed with the bells and whistles and were just plain evil? You DON’T? You’re KIND OF INTO IT? Fantastic. We should have done this YEARS ago!”

No, no, it’s the whole fucking DIY mediasphere whose rough hour came at last with Trump’s reign of flaming daily garbage-meteors. The reaction shows, the livetweeting, the podcasts, the streams, the analysis podcast-streams reacting to the slightly more popular reaction podcast-streams. And that rough hour isn’t even their fault, the total neck-snap of the idea of truth itself meant all of us became volunteer journalists, manning non-consensual news desks on social media as we all literally fucking feared for our lives, rights, and safety. But some of us made waaaaay more money and got waaaaay more famous doing it than others.

2016 and on is on the media more than anyone, which is no great unique observation for being true. They gave Trump billions in free advertising before the election, made their nut on being ineffectually outraged during his administration, and now they’re very, very sad because there’s no confetti in their pants at all these days, only sad trombones.

So they’re steering us right back into the Willy Wonka No-Reason Nightmare Tunnel, not by accident, not by chance, but entirely on purpose, because they liked it in there.

And as giddy as the ratings and the money and the fame were, that’s not even why they loved it so. Believe it or not, there are motivations in the human heart other than unalloyed greed.

No, they loved it because not only did the nightly news ratings shoot up, not only did scrolling Twitter like a monkey with an unsupervised disappointing orgasm button become a required part of the workday, not only did podcasts and streams and sooper sekrit insider Twitter accounts and TikTok interpretive dances about the emoluments clause and eleven-hour YouTube videos explaining how we got here (and that somehow it’s all Frozen’s fault) profitably cover all the land like an alpine meadow of wild flowering bullshit, but they could do and have all those things while we fawned over them. While we looked on them with hope and longing and need. While we begged for their every word and half-congealed guesses at Constitutional law that they found on a Snapple lid.

Champions of the resistance. Defenders of democracy. Noble, self-sacrificing, powerfully brave paladins of truth.

Oh, weren’t they just.

And they were so noble, weren’t they? So badass, so courageous, so edgy and dangerous. Suddenly journalists and politicos and policy wonks and statistical nerds were fucking cool. Not hipster cool, either, they’d always been that. Spy movie cool. The Jason Bourne of breathless speculation on Trump’s next brain-loogey. The Ethan Hunt of never ever saying the word lie but really, really sounding like you super bravely totally did say it. What a time. 2 Fast & 2 Furious 2 Factcheck, Baybee.

Yeah, people made money. But it wasn’t that, not really. It was getting to feel like an action movie star because you had a byline and could just about remember the Bush administration almost. Well, the second one, anyway. It was a bunch of people who mostly got ignored or dismissed suddenly feeling wanted, seen, and needed. Desperately needed. Not just by the people who ignored or dismissed them, but by history.

Did I mention we’d spent the whole century before 2016 telling everyone who could paste two words together to make a feeling that only STEM mattered, only STEM had any value as a field of study, and anyone who did anything but STEM were wastes of flesh, money, oxygen, and the flickering, mysterious spark of ever-escaping life that animated them? And at the same time we spent the about 20 years before that going all in on “ironic detachment” and “fluent in sarcasm” until every word out of the mouth of anyone even tangentially cool meant the exact opposite of the actual words they were using? HM WHAT COULD THE INEVITABLE RESULT OF THAT POSSIBLY BE?

<figure></figure><figure>Could it be…a generation and a half having a real struggletime with basic history, critical thinking, analysis, recognizing rhetorical fuckery, and the goddamned concept of objective reality? And also a subset of that generation who wasn’t any good at STEM but were good at all that other stuff and desperately hungered for some kind of validation?</figure><figure>
</figure><figure>Holy shit, you can’t buy or sell that feeling. It’s like a cocktail of Daddy’s approval, middle school popularity, seeing a marble bust made of yourself in a museum dedicated to True Heroes of Planet Earth, and walking away from an explosion in daytime sunglasses.</figure><figure>They’ve tried to keep their spirits up since, but it’s just not the same. Biden actually does accomplish things sometimes, even with a Congress that looks like the rooftop at the end of Ghostbusters, and there’s just no choice between “not even mentioning it” and “screaming about how bad Democrats are all the time while also not mentioning it” that’s gonna get them that sweet fix of the way things used to be.</figure><figure></figure>

They won by 10 points making an 18 point swing in that district from the last election.

So now it’s 2024, and everywhere you look or listen it’s the zombie fucking reanimated corpse of 2016 shambling down the road gurgling boooooooth siiiiiiiiiiides out of its rotten pustulant moldering fucking evil dead mouth.

They’re steering us right back into the Willy Wonka No-Reason Nightmare Tunnel, not by accident, not by chance, but entirely on purpose, because they liked it in there.

IT’S NOT BOTH SIDES OKAY? IT’S JUST THE ONE SIDE! THE SAME SIDE IT ALWAYS IS, THE WEIRD CONSERVATIVE FUNDAMENTALIST OPPRESSIVE SUPREMACIST SEX-HATING WEALTH-HOARDING SCIENCE-DENYING CONFORMIST SIDE! THE ONLY SIDE THAT WAKES UP EVERY DAY AND THINKS “FASCISM? SOUNDS NUTRITIOUS AND DELICIOUS! OH, MOTHER, MAYBE TODAY’S THE DAY WE GET TO PUT OUR NEIGHBORS IN THE ACID VATS!”

THROUGHOUT ALL OF RECORDED HISTORY, IN EVERY NATION-STATE, IN EVERY ERA, NO MATTER WHAT THEY CALL THEMSELVES, IT IS LITERALLY ALWAYS THOSE GUYS THAT FUCK UP LIFE FOR EVERYONE ELSE.

Oh, you don’t like the Democrats? I’m super fucking sorry that sounds really hard. I mean, it’s crazy, the Democratic tent is so big right now all it says on the front is Everyone Who Isn’t a Total Fucking Nazi Goblin and whatever your politics from center-right to actual socialism there’s at least one Democrat who’s on your page, plus the Republican on the ballot hates everything you want and will also set you on fire for the price of nothing, but sure, you don’t like Democrats. Biden is old. He’s fine, and has pretty skillfully navigated situations so complicated Trump would cry cartoon baby tears while helplessly shitting himself after the first briefing he didn’t pay attention to, but Biden’s old. Neat. Oh, has he made some mistakes? Got cockblocked by SCOTUS and the House? Flubbed some words with that lifelong stutter it’s apparently not ableist to make fun of? Not moved fast enough for your taste? Not behaved like a king? Governed within the system we all said should matter for four years? Not just vomited out every State Department strategy the second someone told him he was a good boy and worked behind the scenes, you know, where statecraft is supposed to happen? Did he not immediately revoke all funding from a foreign power so that he could have no leverage at all over them but you could feel right about a geopolitical tire fire you knew nothing about six months ago?

Ohhh the Dems are just so bad at messaging they should get better at that and then we’d be willing to maybe vote (but probably not). You know why Democrats aren’t great with messaging? Other than the completely obvious facts that people who aren’t reactionary phlegmbags don’t want everyone to have the same lockstep opinion? Because every time a Democrat dares to open their mouth this country starts screeching at them, rips their face off, eats it, slaps their SKINLESS BLEEDING SKULL and hisses that the face was undercooked and the Democrat in question should fucking kill themselves. And every time a Republican speaks THEY HAVE AN ENTIRE CAPTIVE MEDIA EMPIRE TO PUSH THEIR PITHY LITTLE MEMES INTO EVERY LIVING ROOM AND THE ONES THAT IT CAN’T REACH RUSSIA WILL GET FOR THEM ON THE BACK END.

Why do you think everyone, everyone, in this wide nation who every single day can’t agree on whether or not we all have toenails smoothly agrees that the worst thing to be is a l i b e r a l, the dirtiest, nastiest word in the English language. And no one really questions how or why they know that, they’ve just always known it, like they know the sun is yellow or Johnny Cash is cool, and therefore they all know they aren’t one because they’re not dirty or nasty. It took decades of beating that memetic drum on TV and radio before Republicans were able to cancel a word right out of anyone being willing to call themselves something that just is not a negative unless you define it in your own special brutally-specific way that you don’t feel the need to educate others about. Most people are liberals! They want things to get better and more equal and easier, just not so fast and with so little consideration that it fucks everything irrecoverably in the ear on the way there. They want to change the system to be fairer to everyone, they just want to vet the plan first! And everyone agrees THAT’S THE WORST THING TO BE.

Wow, you’re right, media personalities! Both sides are the same. A few mumblemouth moments are the same as the writhing Lovecraftian nightlava that dribbles out of Trump’s face-oubliette every time some adoring Fox fluffer asks him what his favorite color is. Wanting to enact change gradually so that suffering is limited is exactly the same as the Republican plan for society, which is Oops! All Acid Vats. Not doing every single thing on every individual lefty Christmas list (none of which agree on even so much as which color ink to write them in) because he’s not a king is exactly the same as acting like a king and crushing anyone who looks or acts even a little different than Jim-Bob the Friendly Local Violent White Supremacist, Rape Enthusiast, and Real American Man’s Man underfoot.

The thing is, the Democrats are IT. I’m sorry it’s a two-party system, but you can’t fix that without a Constitutional Convention to deal with the whole “House decides any election without a majority winner” thing. And you don’t want that, even if you think you do, because there aren’t enough blue legislatures to stop the wolves rewriting it so eating us is legal. A Constitutional Convention pops the hood on the whole thing. It opens Pandora’s Bait and Tackle Box and there’s nothing but worms in there. Also the worms think women are property.

You have to play the ground as it lies. You cannot just pretend you’ll participate if only the system were perfect. Reality, not visions of sugar plums.

And the reality is: Dems are all that stands between us and a regime so grotesque and dark all I can do to explain how bad it would be is to point out that all the countries you know of that have fallen into authoritarianism, no matter the flavor, were poor as fuck when it happened and not the sole superpower on the planet with ungodly cultural, financial, military, and political influence everywhere. It’s either blue or it’s black, white, and red. The only reason anyone not completely swiss-cheese-brained thinks this is a hard choice is that the media can’t stop shrieking that Democrats are terrible and Biden is old so hey maybe unimaginable death and horror instead? Oh, almost everyone with real media voice or influence is willing to say that the conservative future is scary, but then they all blush and lower their eyes, cross themselves, whisper both sides in Latin, and intimate that it’s scary in that good way, like a roller coaster, when you don’t really think you’re actually going to fall hundreds of feet into a pond full of angry geese, rancid orange pop, and one wacky crocodile who scamped his way past the security fence maybe. Like fascism is just a day at the spooky carnival we all get to go home from when we’re tired.

All so that somehow, someway, the atomized, collectivized media landscape can slink back into that beautiful moment where they were making tons of money AND everyone thought they were big damn heroes.

For proof of concept, see everything Elon Musk does and says, because it’s all to get that specific strange addictive emotional fever dream of the 2010s back.

I’m so fucking sick and tired of having to pay the Both Sides ferryman every time I open my mouth by ritually intoning Democrats Also Bad just to be allowed to follow that up with: but hey maybe the fascist over there in the corner furiously masturbating over a map of Europe with all the country names crossed out and Russia scribbled over them in crayon with a heart dotting the i and the R stupidly flipped backwards and real talk none of us are sure whether he knows the backwards R says “ya” or genuinely thinks that’s how you make an R in Europe but either way just maybe that guy and his friends shouldn’t be in charge of a superpower oh sorry I meant Democrats Are Evil we have to teach them a lesson by dying in the fucking cursed Gilead/Purge Night mashup!

Democrats are a normal fucking political party. Full of more or less normal people, for politician standards of normal. That means some of them are corrupt assholes, some of them are quite astute public servants with robust morals, and most of them are just these guys, you know? Somewhere in between. Dealing with the reality of politics and what it takes to get anything done, which is always and forever compromise, a word that’s no fun at all to chant at a protest. Democrats, for the most part, are doing their best. To represent a fractious electorate, sometimes in districts and states that are not actually secret socialist Care Bears just waiting to vote to abolish private property. And they’re doing it with an opposing party that’s given up all pretense at actually governing anything at all. Sure, hold them accountable, but if you’re gonna both sides this bad boy, you might want to start with holding the other side accountable for anything, because a couple of them still have grandma’s fucking covid-inflected blood on their lips and they’re looking hungry.

Democrats are not fascists. They’re just bureaucrats and idealists and cynics and saints and sinners like the rest of us. Sometimes they’re dumb and short-sighted, sometimes they’re terrifyingly clever and visionary, mostly they’re in the middle. They are not hellbent on twisting billions of lives to their will and enacting violence on those who do not comply. They are not like the side that rolls around in that blooddream like a dog in a carcass it found in the woods.

You’d never know any of that from how entirely the media refuses to give a Dem credit for anything, yet how eager they are to break out the alliterative nicknames and serious business verbiage if there’s even a chance of blaming a Dem for something. Yet Republicans are just treated as forces of nature, something to be witnessed, worked around, survived, maybe, but never held to any kind of expectation or punished for rank fucking evil or even called liars when they lie. Trump says he’ll be a “Day One Dictator” and on to the next news item with a giggle and a shrug. He says he’ll let Russia do “whatever the hell it wants” to any European country who “doesn’t pay” and when Biden has the gall to say CHRIST ON AN ACTIVE SENIOR LIFESTYLE BIKE THAT’S SO FUCKED UP all the news cycle can say is ooooooh a Republican operative said he don’t remember everything too good GET HIM HE’S OLD! He should step aside! For whom? Oh, we don’t have a suggestion, we hate any Democrat who rises in prominence so it doesn’t really matter oh by the way can we interest you in a Nikki Haley? She’s got all the charisma of Hillary, the exact same evil goals as Trump, and the PR skills of a dead gopher (the gopher is also a racist) buuuuut she hasn’t eaten pudding with her fingers on camera yet so I don’t know, we just like her, you can’t explain attraction, there’s just something so cool and fun about her we can’t possibly call her shrill or unlikeable or remember all the egregious burning cross dumpster things she says.

I swear to god, this country has such severe and pervasive Daddy issues, every time a Republican raises one eyebrow and suggests they might have ONE decent human feeling instead of being a tottering soggy layercake of several thousand sadistic impulses icing-mortared with narcissism and hypocrisy, everyone falls all over themselves to joyfully anoint them A Good One and tell the no one who didn’t ask how they could actually vote for that Republican candidate despite that candidate not agreeing with them on any issue. But any Democrat who isn’t the lab-created hybrid of Mr. Rogers, Captain America, OG Tom Cruise, and Bernie Sanders for some reason, with the name recognition of Oprah Winfrey, but also not too smart, not too ambitious, not too female or brown, not too old but not too young, and never ever makes one mistake but not in like, a calculated focus-group way, man…this nation will swallow its own tongue before it admits that magical candidate is even mildly adequate and keep on looking for a reason to vote for someone else.

Apparently America may just give in to fascism because it was too much fun not to. Too much attention. Too much thrill.

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And it isn’t going to stop. It never has, but it isn’t going to, too. Not this year or next.

Well…not entirely true.

If Biden wins this year, it’ll go on and on. If Trump wins, it will stop, because people will not be allowed to stream profitable dissent or speak against the Glorious Golden God in any way. By constantly claiming both sides are the same and harping on Biden’s age without for one second acknowledging his accomplishments (and giving Trump worshipful credit for reading words someone else wrote, or have we forgotten CNN’s dreamy sigh of “tonight Trump became America’s President” as though any network would ever say that kind of sycophantic shit about Biden no matter what he did).

I need the media to get goddamned selfish. Be better assholes. Come on, you weirdos, preserve your profit margins and your ability to keep getting paid to blather poorly-supported opinions! It will not actually kill you to say something other than both sides, to call a lie a lie even when a Republican did it, to not pretend six kids on TikTok saying dumb just-got-here kid shit is an official statement from the Democratic Party, to learn the basic math that 80 is not very much more than 77.5, to not make out uncomfortably with every conservative who isn’t actively gnawing the head off a bald eagle right in front of you because he heard the eagle might be gay, and also the one actively gnawing the head off a bald eagle right in front of you because he heard the eagle might be gay. It will not kill any of us to allow that the non-fascist side might have some great points about not being an authoritarian hellhole with a USD worth approximately some hair pulled off a dog brush. I know you won’t stand up for us, but I expect you to stand up for yourselves. You know, the industry Donald Trump very specifically wants to control and punish.

But you know what does kill? Both directly and indirectly? On purpose but also for fun? You know what’s SUPER HYPED to get to killing? THE FUCKING ACID VATS THE ACID VAT PARTY IS PRETENDING AREN’T WAITING UNDER THAT SUSPICIOUSLY ACID VAT-SHAPED TARP IN FLORIDA.

Don’t worry, though. Joe Rogan says acid gets you totally alpha-ripped and The Daily Show did a 20-minute think piece on a dream one of their producers had about Democratic alkaline vats so…it I guess it really doesn’t matter who wins, does it?