What the actual (and I mean it) Fuck? - Trumpers in line at MSG

From the line outside the MAGA Nazi rally.

Crowd in Manhattan wearing red baseball caps walking towards Madison Square Garden

One of my fabulous early subscribers forwarded me an article in The Nation, titled “My Long, Strange Trip to Madison Square Garden to Meet the Trumpies¹”, and I have some questions…

First, I want to thanks Katha Pollitt for taking one for the team, and attempting to get into the MSG venue. Alas, amongst the sea of Red Hats, the arena filled up, and she and her husband failed to score a seat.

But the discussions she had with a smattering of Trumpies are some gob smacking incidents.

First up:

The first person I talked with was a Black woman holding an enormous American flag over which she’d draped a white embroidered tallit, a Jewish prayer shawl. Her three most important issues were immigration, compulsory vaccination, and “boys in the girls’ bathroom.” She claimed that her 11-year-old daughter had been told in school how to wear rolled-up socks next to her vagina to simulate male genitalia. She was fervently anti-abortion, even though her then-boyfriend had urged her to end her pregnancy.

Ok, I really want to call bullshit on the “her 11 year old daughter had been told how to wear rolled-up socks next to her vagina to simulate male genitalia”.

Seriously, that has me scratching my head. I just don’t even know what the fuck to say to that.

Simulate how? Penetration? “Soaking²”? I have questions.

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Then there was this gem:

The next was a Colombian American woman who said she was 82 and had been in the United States since she was 2. Her English was not great, especially considering that she would have grown up and gone to school here, but what she told me was clear: Under Trump, her transportation business was doing great—gas was cheap, taxes were low—but now, thanks in part to “that stupid Obamacare,” it was struggling. I asked her how she felt about Trump’s many insults to Latin American immigrants. Like everyone I interviewed, she just didn’t take in anything that contradicted her view: “Trump loves the Spanish people!”

Hmm, been in the country since she was two, so 80 years and yet her English was “not great”. Yeah, that tracks.

But I really am curious how “that stupid Obamacare” is impacting her transportation business.

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Then there’s this gem:

Standing nearby was an old white man from Cape May, New Jersey, who described himself as a builder. He told me that the flooding in North Carolina was the fault of Doug Emhoff, Kamala Harris’s husband. Two weeks before the floods, Emhoff had bought permits for lithium mines in the state, but people had refused to sell their houses so the mines could be built. Then came the floods, which destroyed the houses—now the property could be bought up for next to nothing. A bit too convenient, those floods, eh?

Uhm, sure, Doug Emhoff, one of them was behind the catastrophic flooding in western North Carolina because he has permits (uh, they would be leases) for lithium mines, and the floods were scheduled to get hope off the land so that he could start strip mining the lithium. Sounds like this builder needs some lithium for his untreated mental health issues. Or, he should share where he buys his drugs, because that is some good shit he’s smoking.

Like Katha, I share her bewilderment:

I came away bewildered from my afternoon with the Trumpies. We talk a lot about people who live in a blue bubble, and that is fair—a lot of us do. But these (mostly) friendly ordinary people live in a bubble too—of TikTok videos, far-right YouTubers, and websites like, um, The Daily Caller. They are deeply alienated from standard sources of information. For them, that something is reported in The New York Times or The Washington Postis all the more reason to find it suspicious. It’s a paranoid vision, in which the vice president’s husband controls the weather (well, he isJewish) and the government is going to come into your apartment and take your stove. And yet they seemed perfectly normal—well, maybe not the woman who thought God talked to her in dreams. Some of my friends thought I would be risking violence by mixing with the crowd—but people did not seem put off when I said I was for Harris and was just there out of curiosity.

I just got nothing

1. non-gift link, but it is worth reading this for the WTF action alone

2. Search for mormon and soaking and you will get some just bizarre knowledge that you will probably wish you didn’t know about

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