Where Everybody Knows Your Name…

I have a Facebook friend who is undoubtedly the single most radically right-leaning of my 2000+ friends. I visit his page quite often, actively engaging with his radical right-leaning friends. It’s been a sometimes positive but much more often very negative experience. And it’s led me to a thesis. He is incredibly boisterous, opinionated and active with his posts. Within minutes of describing the latest shooting, stabbing or bombing, he’ll ask “guess what religion he is?” and then revel in the responses (other than mine and a few other interlopers). I’ve begun to wonder, if he wants to be heard, why doesn’t he ever do what I do almost every day, and come to a page like mine, where he can engage the opposition for real? He doesn’t come because he’s afraid. It’s so easy for him to get up on his soapbox and spew his noxious bile, when everyone around him literally wants to swallow his his putrid stream, lick their lips and beg for more. He’s a little fish in a tiny ocean, the nasty guy who curses and jabs his finger at you from behind the saftey of his much bigger henchman. His minstrels then egg him on, distending his ego and fueling the vicious cycle. He does seem informed enough to know that for Trump to win, he would have to just eke it out, given the state of the electoral map. So why isn’t he using his voice to try, for instance, to convince disillusioned Bernie voters, Jill Steiners or the truly undecided to come over to the dark side? It’s because his jocularity is pure political masturbation, and not any legitimate attempt to convert one new Trump vote. He is safe preaching to his deluded choir. Deep down, he knows he cannot argue his position rationally. His sweet spot — hatred, racism and xenophobia, play out perfectly in front of his fuming, twisted minions.

Part of me really wants him to read this, and have the balls to respond to it on my Facebook page. But I assume he won’t. Even if he does, it will be a watered-down version of the poison he so confidently doles out in the cheerful safety of the little hovel where everybody knows his name. And at the end of the day, that’s really what I want. For him to remain anonymous, happily doling out his poison to to an audience that is already infected.

He’s nothing more than a parody of an enormous orange parody — a timid soul who criticizes from the sidelines, shooting off his big mouth, and wildly gesticulating with his surprisingly small hands.