cringe is our brand

and our brand is out of hand

it seems like just yesterday i was opining that “cringe is kamala’s brand.” oh, wait, that WAS yesterday…

and then, literally that evening, in response to elon musk doing an interview of “the donald” on twitter, they prove me right.

wow. just wow.

this is from a fundraising campaign they launched in response.

see all the same themes?

based is bullying. cringe is safety. they are “unhinged and hateful.” you need us to defend you. goodness, has no one ever googled “shadow projection”?

i suspect they really believe this, that they are the good guys and anyone who disagrees with them is evil. they really truly do see people being able to speak freely as existential threat. it’s their number one priority. not the economy, not borders, and certainly not rights:

it’s deciding who gets to speak and what they are allowed to say.

big talk from team “russian laptop” and “you won’t get covid if you get the jab.”

someone is drunk on her own press clippings.

oh, and “not beholden.” LOLZ, sure, pull my other paw it plays the theme song from “the price is right.” if you guys were a nascar, the logos would be too plentiful to leave any actual paint showing.

it’s all projection of their own bad desires, bad actions, personal afflictions to the point where the best way to tell what they plan to do is to see what they accuse others of. it’s the insuppressible tell of those inhabiting the venn intersect of “massively dogmatic” and “hopelessly un-self-aware.” mix with a soupçon (or a gallon) of “cluster B trait” and you get psychic nitroglycerine.

all your bad traits are denied to yourself and projected onto others. your entire self conception is outwardly weaponized falsity. and you literally don’t know it.

one need not even have goebells to urge you to “always accuse the other side of that which you are guilty.” it turns out that this is just a base need for these venn vexed villains as they seek to avoid realizing what awful people they are. and letting you talk reminds them. so kammy whammy has lot of company. people really, truly hate the idea of 2 high profile people talking outside the cringe radius of their collapsing longhouse.

this was sent by an EC commissioner to threaten the muskrat and his newly freer twitter (though it would be nice if you stopped throttling the living hell out of substack, elon. hint. hint.)

the actual european commission found this so threatening that they felt a need to brace X about the DSA and the dangers of “wrongspeak” in podcasts and live streaming. curious they seem not to mind when the BBC or CNN or pravda on the hudson /DBA NYT do it.

that’s cringe as collectivist policy. self-censor or we’ll censor you.

this is ugly stuff and poorly veiled.

of course, in something of a stand up and cheer moment, musk was having none of it and say what you will about the guy, but he understands social media in a way the cringe cadets clearly cannot.

this was one for the ages. perfect message, on point, based as all getout, and full points for perfect use of les grossman meme.

seriously: i laughed, i cried, it was better than “cats.”

it got 35 million views and 339k likes.

thierry got ratioed (more comments than likes) and has pending community note drafts.

and the redheaded libertarian, off the top rope, rekt him with this absolute heartshot of a comment.

her comment got 5X the likes the EC commissioner did.

do you see now why they hate this? why it infuriates them? why it terrifies them?

they cannot control the message or the signal here and people are rapidly realizing just how marginal these preening popinjays really are.

they cannot win if they cannot censor, because you have to be in the agora or you’re irrelevant, but cringe is dead there. “based is back and you’re gonna be in trouble, hey nah, hey nah…”

cringe will always wind up routed because at its core, it’s lies and reality denial. it’s the insistence that no one be allowed to say true things and no amount of trying call it safety or empathy changes this. it’s still all bullshit. they will tell you it’s you who is full of such bovine excrement, but that’s just cringe looking for control and projecting again.

and this is easy to mock and flip.

kamala is a woman who won zero votes for presidential candidate in the primary and was installed by party boss acclimation in a closed convention claiming to “champion democracy” and screeching from her unearned bully-pulpit about how you need her to save you from bullies who would dare to demand free speech and a “right to offend you.”

but it HAS to work like that.

this is one of the great PWNS in TV interview history.

it’s amazing watching this simple fact dawn on the interlocutor. she’s clearly just never thought about this before. then it clicks. and once you see it, it stays seen.

this is exactly why the cringe collective is so desperate to stop “speech we can’t reach.”

because once you see it, it stays seen.

and more and more people keep seeing more and more things that they cannot unsee.

every conversation, collaboration, confrontation just gathers power around the ideas of “what if people were just honest and tolerant and engaged with one another instead of the endless walking on razorshard eggshells of cancel culture for fear of offending the perpetually offended?”

and life is better there.

free speech, free thought, free people.

you have it or you don’t.

it’s really that binary.

it’s really that simple.

and so are the battle lines.

“shall free speech be a foundational and inalienable human right?”

choose wisely.