the headline we all need right now

Via The Daily Beast:

Trumpists, Here Are Your Terms of Surrender. Also, Fuck You.

I can hardly even describe how much this is the headline I needed right now.

Quoting Wil Wheaton first, because he's right:

Rick Wilson is not a good person. He helped pave the road that sara palin, trump, josh hawley, ted cruz, and the most odious of right wing lunatics walked down to get into government.

I applaud his come-to-jesus moment so long ago, and I applaud the Lincoln Project for everything it did and will do to excise this cancer from our lives, and holy crap to I love it when he takes the people he indirectly enabled to the woodshed.

And now, some excerpts.

---

Trumpists, Here Are Your Terms of Surrender. Also, Fuck You.

There’s no repairing the damage he’s done until you confess to the normalization and rationalizations that let him bring us to the edge of a conspiracy-driven insurrection.

by Rick Wilson, Editor-at-Large - Jan. 19, 2021

Donald Trump is a war leader who failed. Before he was the leader of a failed insurrection, he was a man who’d stoked the violent and unstable tendencies of his most fanatic supporters into a hot flame that came dangerously close to incinerating the Republic.

It’s time for Donald Trump and his allies to surrender unconditionally, permanently, and without another goddamn word about a “stolen” election.

...

This brings me to today’s Republican Party, its alleged leaders, and all of you who are still standing with Trump as the least popular departing president in American history continues fighting his lost war.

Whether you know it or not, you’ve lost. On Nov. 3 and again when your allies assaulted cops, killing one, on Jan. 6. America’s reaction wasn’t “Fuck YEAH, Trump 2020!” It was horror. Think of the furious response as the Doolittle Raid: an unmistakable signal that America is done with your Trumpian shit.

Since you lost, you’ve done your damndest to ensure Donald Trump gains a second term through lies, conspiratorial agitprop, clownish legal chest-beating (with a 1-60 record so far), and an all-out effort to disenfranchise tens of millions of African American voters. Your new Jim Crow movement to tell Black voters they still don’t count is going swimmingly. And by “swimmingly” I mean it’s a fucking disaster. You lost two Senate seats in Georgia. GEORGIA.

...

There will be no negotiation with the vandals, murderers, Karens and Qarens, Q-hadi wanna-be terrorists, swag-bellied revolutionaries in their too-tight LBVs and helmets, fanatic dead-enders and oddly-clad randos who stormed the Capitol after Trump and his allies poured gasoline and lit the match.

"Respect"

Yes, I went off on Twitter again. It was a little sloppy so this is a tiny bit revised. Says the same thing, though.

---

[VIDEO excerpt of Donald Trump's departing address. TRUMP: "The world respects us again. Please. Don't. Lose. That. Respect."]

As he says this, the Toronto Globe and Mail is literally running editorials saying Canada may need to intervene in US politics to prop up democracy as a counter to Russian (and etc.) meddling in favour of Trumpist fascism.

No, really. Go read it. The editorialist is wrong about this not being a 'real' insurrection in that they absolutely meant it; he just discounts it as too disorganised and inadequately supported by the military.

Still real though.

I'll have to split this across tweets:

"The U.S., for the foreseeable future, will be the battleground for democracy. If Canada wants democracy to survive, it will have to be an active participant. Obviously, our virtues and our self-interest coincide on this point: ...

...An autocratic U.S. is a massive threat. How do we manipulate its electoral process and its government to serve the interests of global democracy? If we are too squeamish and too conventional to engage, the enemies of democracy, currently rampaging, will go unopposed."

I realised later that a lot of you won't play the clip, because FUCK Trump, right? But here's what he said:

"The world respects us again. Please. Don't. Lose. That. Respect."

As CANADA tries to figure out how to intervene and save democracy in the US.

_Canada._

"Respect."

Just imagine what _other_ countries are trying to figure out.

Quietly.

_Not_ in public.

"Respect."

Christ.