Welcome to Paste politics’ weekly installment of the worst of Twitter. This week, we’ve got bad tweets from a liberal grifter, a conservative grifter and both a Democratic and Republican politician. It’s a regular ‘ol bipartisan jamboree. Uncle Joe would be so proud!
Brian Krassenstein
If you are a liberal who is constantly crapping on the South and acting as if all our problems stem from it, understand that you are the worst kind of liberal (also the worst kinds of liberals? Grifters.)
Why is anyone acting surprised that Alabama, the state where it’s legal to marry your first cousin, has outlawed 13-year-old rape victims from getting abortions?
Can Alabama just secede already and stop embarrassing us all?
— Brian Krassenstein (@krassenstein) May 16, 2019
New York state has the most segregated schools in the country. I have lived in both Boston and Atlanta and it is no contest which city is more openly racist (hint: not the one in the south). Yes, the ex-confederacy and the bankrupt Lost Cause ideology are specific to the South, and have done untold damage to this country in the name of white supremacy, but that ideology arrived on our shores long before there was a South to secede. Hell, the Republican candidate for Senate in Virginia in 2018 was a declared Neo-Confederate who grew up in Minnesota. Hitler was writing about all of America in Mein Kampf when he praised our racist laws. We are all part of this mess, and we are not going to get out of it by simply blaming all racist and sexist laws on a region where most black Americans live (if you’re the type to say “just let the south secede,” ponder what happens to all those nonwhite people in the GOP dystopia you are damning them to).
Matt Walsh
Speaking of GOP dystopias…holy crap. Matt Walsh of the conservative infotainment site, The Daily Wire, becomes our first two-time entrant into bad tweets of the week with…just…wow…
If a 12 year old is raped by her father and the father takes her to get an abortion, the evidence of the crime will be destroyed and he will go on molesting his victim for years. If however the child is born, his crime will be discovered and she will be rescued from the abuse. https://t.co/emV8tJifWE
— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) May 15, 2019
Abortion is a wildly complicated issue in this country, and the wave of bills designed to dismantle Roe v. Wade being introduced across the nation in states like Alabama and Ohio are the result of a nearly 50-year conservative project to reverse the famed Supreme Court decision. While the country is evenly split on the topic of declaring ourselves to be pro-life or pro-choice, when it comes to the specifics of abortion, people are much more malleable. Half the country wants abortion legal only under certain circumstances, 29% want it legal under any circumstances, and 18% want it illegal in all circumstances. Not even a quarter of the population in any state wants a complete abortion ban, and yet, people like Matt Walsh control all legislation in the GOP (and people like Captain Krassendouche over there smear an entire region with a minority’s viewpoint). This is why the Bidenist notion of “bipartisanship” is so radically naive. How do you compromise with such a black and white GOP agenda like this that doesn’t even represent their own constituents, let alone Democratic ones?
Ted Cruz
That last one was pretty heavy so we’ll pivot to a much more lighter tone with a universally-detestable man of whom Lindsey Graham once hilariously said “If you killed Ted Cruz on the floor of the Senate, and the trial was in the Senate, nobody would convict you.”
This is one of the saddest tweets I’ve ever seen.
Hey @jack how come Twitter’s “moment” quotes all the snarky leftists making fun of my comments, but doesn’t include my tweets in response explaining the real point that NATIONS like China have already developed & tested weapons to destroy satellites? https://t.co/dwkM5ndXj3
— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) May 16, 2019
Conservatives spent my entire childhood in the 1990s berating the media and charging them with bias, so it should be no surprise that they are playing the same game with the media titans of our age. The difference is that Senator Ted Cruz yelling at Very Serious ABC/NBC/CBS news anchor carries a gravitas that tagging an overgrown child with a part-time CEO job on a platform called “Twitter” simply does not. With any hope, the optics of complaining to the Jack Dorseys and Mark Zuckerbergs of the world about censorship will reveal this playbook to be the farce it always was.
John Ekdahl
Everyone with Twitter brain poisoning knows Esoteric Jeff of the election night analysis firm, Decision Desk HQ at this point (they do good work and have partnered with outlets like BuzzFeed in the past). Esoteric Jeff is good for about one piping conservative hot take a week that lights irony Twitter on fire for a few hours. But his compatriot at Decision Desk HQ, co-founder John Ekdahl, came out throwing absolute gas with this (ironic?) conservative hot take from the 1500s, quoting Jack Nicholson in As Good As it Gets.
When asked how he wrote women so well, a great philosopher once said, “I think of a man, and I take away reason and accountability.” https://t.co/RIwBcchNz5
— John Ekdahl (@JohnEkdahl) May 11, 2019
If Ekdahl and his kind didn’t have a penchant for admiring flawed strong men characters in every movie, I’d give him the benefit of the doubt that this was a tongue-in-cheek tweet. Instead, because he has been denounced by some fellow conservatives for going off the deep end, the odds tilt towards this being a literal interpretation of a quote intended to make the character look like a garbage person.
Seth Moulton
Matt Walsh’s tweet is objectively worse than probably any tweet ever posted in these columns, but he’s an internet nobody (and I say that as a proud internet nobody), and the relative power of these posters must be taken into account when assessing the gravity of their crimes against posting. Our worst tweet of the week comes from a Democratic candidate for president who acknowledged how bad this tweet was by deleting it minutes after he put it up.
What we are learning in the early stages of this Democratic primary is that there is a generational war coming on the left. The 2016 primary was distorted by the fact that there were only two candidates, and the false “Bernie Bro” narrative took root on the left (thanks to heavy investment in it from major Democratic Party infrastructure like MSNBC). Now, it’s clear as day what is happening: older people are breaking for Joe Biden, and younger people are split among everyone. Bernie took 43% of the vote in 2016, and is hovering just below 20% in most polls right now, proving that this rebuke to the last generation of Democratic politics is not rooted in some so-called “cult following” (if you’re curious, Seth Moulton is currently polling behind “I don’t know” and isn’t even in the RCP top 16).
Millennials and Gen Z are far more liberal than Gen X and Boomers, and it is becoming increasingly apparent through our politics. Moulton was clearly angling for the McCarthyite-Poisoned Boomer vote by claiming that socialists can’t be Americans, but he posted it on a platform dominated by millennials, and rightfully got ratioed into oblivion—purging it from his feed shortly after pushing this Trumpian nonsense out into the world. This deletion means that even Seth Moulton must admit that he posted a tweet worthy of being our worst of the political week.
Jacob Weindling is a staff writer for Paste politics. Follow him on Twitter at @Jakeweindling.