Prominent Conservative Blogger Calls for Secession, and the Column Is as Bad as You’d Imagine

Erick Erickson founded RedState.com—one of the original far-right blogs—and now writes for something called The Resurgent. On its Twitter page, he classifies it as “Erick Erickson’s online home for Resurgent conservatives and people of faith involved in the day to day struggles of life and politics.” Not many pay much attention to this website, save for yesterday, when Erickson fired up the piping hot take machine, and fired a metric ton of catnip into the center of the internet titled “Let’s Consider Secession.”

Because we are internet people here at Paste, it is our social responsibility to EVISCERATE this hot take line by line, so let’s get to it (Erickson’s column has a grey background, my comments have a white background).

This past week has made me realize the situation in this country is unlikely to get better. We have 320 million people who hate each other and the left shows no signs of toning down rhetoric after last week’s mass assassination attempt. If anything, too many of them regret there were no deaths.

Starting off by lamenting the state of political discourse in this country by asserting that your political opponents were rooting for mass murder. This is actually one of the more reasonable portions of the column.

At the same time, the left would have us believe that there is more violence on the right where history itself shows that is not true. From Nazism to Communism to progressivism itself, there has been more butchery from leftwing ideologies throughout human history than from the right — and yes despite popular historic revisionism, Nazism is from the left and had an American progressive fan club that included Margaret Sanger, patron saint of killing kids.

In Erickson’s retelling of history, the fascist Nazis invading the communist Russians in 1941 was really just one big hug, because samesies! Also, Erickson has repeatedly called it “liberal fascism,” and if fascism was inherently liberal, wouldn’t you—yannow—not have to call it liberal?

@JonahNRO I feel like you need to re-issue Liberal Fascism with this rush for a strong man to save.

— Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) March 1, 2016

The Second Coming of American Liberal Fascism? http://t.co/Sa55pOtK via @ewerickson

— Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) April 25, 2012

Great stuff.

On college campuses, conservatives are chased away by mobs and the left excuses it. After all, they say, the right deserved it. Steve Scalise deserved it. The Christian bigot needs to bake the cake, but the performer who does not want to perform for President Trump is a saint.

Member when this column started out lamenting how the left should tone down our rhetoric? Oooh! I member!

There is only a one way street and the crowd that demands tolerance only wants tolerance for themselves. All others must be silenced.

The political left is becoming the American ISIS.

“Folks, I’m getting real sick of us all using politics to dehumanize each other, and we need to find a way to stop it. Except for liberals, who are all genocidal maniacs hellbent on beheading your children in front of you. Fuck them.”

But let’s not excuse the right.

You know it can’t be a seriously bad column without some “both sides-ing” involved.

Increasingly, there are those on the right who think they have to behave exactly as the left to give them a dose of their own medicine. They will storm the stage and disrupt the play. They will form an angry mob to chase away liberals. It is only a matter of time before some nut on the right decides to seek vengeance for Republican congressmen.

Erickson’s worldview: the left wants to murder babies and Congressmen while the right simply wants to protest Shakespeare. Hmmm…who could ever be the real baddies here? (The fact that right-wing extremists are responsible for the majority of domestic terrorism in this country since 9/11 apparently was not factored in to Erickson’s equation.)

The situation is getting out of hand and neither side wants to rein it in.

At least now he’s being honest about his role in dehumanizing his political opponents.

Those who do suggest we calm things down are hounded for their own transgressions because neither side shows grace.

Does Erick Erickson know that Erick Erickson is subtweeting the thing that Erick Erickson just wrote? Maybe I’m being too hard on Erickson and all of this—his name included—is simply just an immersive project in metamodernism.

Because someone did something bad once, he cannot be listened to now. And because someone says something another disagrees with politically, that statement is proof positive of hypocrisy, instead of differences of opinion.

You just called the American left “ISIS” and nine sentences later, you’re lamenting how people who disagree politically view each other as hypocrites. I’m seriously concerned about Erickson’s short-term memory right now.

Both the left and parts of the right are now all using the Alinsky playbook, which itself was dedicated to Satan. It’s all going according to his plan as we slip and slide toward armageddon.

It’s honestly is starting to feel like he intentionally wrote this so everyone on the internet could rip it to shreds. How else do you explain each successive sentence contradicting the previous one?

Federalism should be the answer. Those who want gay marriage and kid killing should be allowed to do it in their state and those who want to live in state that does not allow gay marriage or the murder of children should be allowed to. The founders wanted us to solve those moral issues at the state level and allow each state its own values and ways. That is how it should work. That would be the cure for what ails us.

“You see folks, if the relationships between our state governments resembled Europe more than the United States, everything would be better.” — Modern conservatism

But let’s not kid ourselves. If Texas decided to end abortion on demand and prohibit gay marriage, three-quarters of the Fortune 500, the NCAA, and every professional sports league would boycott the state. It is not enough that each state should be able to set its own values, even here the left demands adherence to its beliefs and punishment for the beliefs of others. So there is no escape from the culture war. There is no escape from the politicization of everything.

Fortune 500 companies and the NCAA—notorious socialist outlets who spend every day telling us why they shouldn’t pay their workers fair market value. What the hell is happening?

There is no escape from an escalation of violence in politics. The minority now gets to exert its will over the majority and every vice gets declared a civil right we must all worship and subsidize.

Fun facts: our current president lost by 2.5 million votes, the Democrats won 10 million more votes than Republicans did in the still GOP-majority Senate, and House Republicans received 49% of total votes cast despite winning 55% of available seats, so please Erick, tell me more about how the liberal minority is imposing its will over the conservative majority.

In our present atmosphere there is no escape from the American ISIS that is the political left. Evil preaches tolerance until it is dominant and then it seeks to silence good. Evil is now dominant — but the partisan line is blurred.

If you’re going to call us extremists, at least come up with a better hit than saying “ISIS” over and over again, you unoriginal grievance-fueled marshmallow.

The only escape is dissolution. We should part ways if we cannot have federalism. We should start talking about secession. If both sides have decided that every hill is a hill to die on and control of Washington means reward for their friends and punishment of their enemies, we need to end Washington. The way to do that is end the union.

“We should secede from ISIS.” Definitely no violent incitement in that sentiment Erick. Totally peaceful. But please, don’t let your overt hypocrisy keep you from lecturing me about how I want Steve Scalise’s head on a pike.

I am no longer an optimist about the future of this country. This past week has shown there is no incentive for the better angels of ourselves to rise. Both sides are out for blood.

This is the most honest thing he’s written so far.

The only way to calm the situation is for us to part ways. Frankly, and historically, the only thing at this point that is going to save us from ourselves is either breaking apart our union or a major war not of our choosing that forces us to unite. I suspect the latter is coming, but we should start talking about the former if we are not going to live and let live within the rubric of federalism.

So to recap: Erick Erickson opened his column by lamenting how the left has not toned down our rhetoric, and then called us ISIS—twice. He then wrote that war is inevitable, and a secession is the only solvent to our situation. Which, if he did a cursory Google search of America, the last time that war seemed inevitable and we had states secede, that ended in…you’ll never guess…war. If you set out to reveal yourself to be a clueless hypocrite, this is the column you would write. If this was a trolling exercise in metamodernism, congratulations Erick Erickson, it is a masterpiece.

Jacob Weindling is a staff writer for Paste politics. Follow him on Twitter at @Jakeweindling.