Dead Democrats Vote – My Twitter War With The Right
This is going to be an extremely long post, but it ends with a really cool graphic at the end! See how much of it you can get through! Once you get bored skip to the 10th paragraph. That’s about where I get to the point.
On Tuesday the news of Shirley Temple broke on Twitter. My timeline quickly filled with RIP Shirley Temple Tweets. Every time a celebrity dies everyone on Twitter has the need to post something mourning the death of whoever. The bulk of Shirley Temple’s acting career happened during the depression and while I am sure at some point in all of our lives we had to watch a grainy video of a small child singing I doubt it had any real impact on all of my friends Tweeting about how tragic the death of an 85 year old woman (who most people probably didn’t even know was still alive) is. In a particularly antagonistic an grumpy mood I tweeted the following:
Twenty years from now most of the Republican Party will be dead. Shirley Temple was just another old conservative who now can’t vote.
— Nate Igor Smith (@drivenbyboredom) February 11, 2014
That Tweet was then picked up by a site called Twichy in an article about people talking shit about Shirley Temple for being a conservative. That article was then picked up by sites like Free Republic and Independent Journal Review and for the last three days I have had all sorts of amazing hate Tweets sent to me from conservatives all over the world wide web.
Now to start with, I don’t have a real problem with Shirley Temple. She seems like a nice enough person. She did a lot of good with breast cancer and Multiple Sclerosis awareness and has been praised for her work as the ambassador to Ghana. Plus the Melvins loved her. But, she was also very active in the Republican party in California and a lifelong conservative. The truth is I don’t care one way or another about Shirley Temple. She lived a long life and her death isn’t at all tragic. So why did I even comment at all?
So the point of my Tweet was a) to piss people off b) to remind my liberal friends of her conservative leanings and c) to make a “joke” about how the GOP is out of touch and hopefully dying off. At least I hope the social right is dying off. I don’t agree with purely fiscal republicans but I also don’t wish ill on them. I just tend to think they are greedy and selfish, not morally repugnant like I do anyone who wants to restrict other peoples civil rights.
So yeah, I don’t regret the Tweet but it’s pretty hard to defend too. I was really just trying to piss people off and boy did I ever!
What seemed like mere minutes after I posted the Tweet my timeline went crazy. Just Tweet after Tweet from republicans wishing horrible things to happen to me. It was great. I was having a fantastic time replying to them and Retweeting them and screen capping them. I have even gained a bunch of followers since I started. I need to start trolling the right more often.
I seriously got hundreds of the Tweets including several since I started writing this article. They really are a great collection of evidence that the majority of the Republican party is every bit as uneducated, hate filled and insane as I believe. That’s not to say that I am not hate filled, clearly I am, or that my grammar or spelling is excellent, clearly it is not, but at least I can differentiate between socialism and communism and I probably would spell check before I call someone a moron. One woman called me ignorant in the same Tweet where she thought fascism was synonymous with a dictatorship. I always find it a bit ironic when super right wing nationalists call people fascists. Another person called me stupid in the same tweet where she used “your” to mean “you’re” and “to” instead of “too”. Another person called me a bully after she sent me five Tweets attacking me. It was mind blowing.
My favorite argument that came up over and over again was that Republicans won’t die out because they reproduce but Democrats don’t because we have abortions and get gay married. This is conceptually amazing because this argument is stating that you are born Republican while at the same time attacking gay people. I am sure these same people would argue that gay people is a choice even though they think you are born Republican. Besides don’t they remember all the Obama loving welfare moms that are having babies so they can get more money from the government? Jeez.
Anyway, all of it is hilarious but let’s get to the point of this insanely long article. BY FAR he #1 response to my Tweet was something along the lines of “Now that Shirley Temple is dead she can vote Democratic”. I got over 100 of these Tweets with the EXACT same joke. It was amazing. This idea of dead Democrats voting is so burned into the brains of Fox News watching, Drudge Report reading conservatives that more than 50% of them made the exact same joke and thought they were being clever!
The idea of dead Democrats voting is a strange one. A lot of it stems from some actual voter fraud that happened in the 1960 presidential election where several people were arrested in Chicago. Chicago was notorious for suspected voter fraud and a lot of people think Kennedy stole the election from Nixon even though there is absolutely no proof that this happened.
Since then there are occasional stories about voter fraud that get blown out of proportion by the right wing media. The main arguments are as followed. Democrats generally dislike strict voter ID laws because the only places these laws tend to be enforced is in poor, non-white areas. Democrats view the laws as racist voter suppression. The Republican argument is that Democrats don’t like these laws because we want to commit voter fraud, let felons vote, etc. I would argue that their argument is also racist, but really my view doesn’t really matter. People are just going to disagree on this stuff.
The fact is that voter fraud is not really a big issue. It just is made into a big issue by people that are upset that they lost an election. It happens on both sides. Democrats argue voter suppression, Republicans argue voter fraud, whatever.
But the reason the dead voter thing is such a big right wing talking point stems from some out of context information that is used by biased media to make people think that dead Democrats are voting in droves. The fact is that there are a LOT of dead people that are still registered to vote. This is because voter records tend to be a mess. Many state voter registration is still done on paper and it’s inefficient and expensive to maintain. Here’s a pretty good article if you want to read more.
So here’s what happens. A left leaning or closely contested state comes out and says they have X amount of dead voters. Then a right wing blog or news program reports this. At the same time they mention voter ID laws and perhaps they even mention a case where a dead person actually voted! All of a sudden two unrelated facts combined with a shred of anecdotal information becomes a misleading argument that DEAD DEMOCRATS ARE VOTING!
Here is the perfect example. A guy makes a video of him going to a bunch of polling places and receiving ballots for dead people. His argument should be that not requiring an ID to vote is a terrible system. Fair point. But instead the argument becomes because Democrats don’t want new voter ID laws and that there are dead people on the voter rolls that means Democrats are casting votes for dead people. This a logical fallacy but that has become fact to brainwashed Republicans who aren’t paying attention.
The final point to this tragically long post is that over 100 people made the exact same joke about dead democrats voting to me and I find it hilarious. I took most (not all) of the responses and made it into a lovely graphic just showing how brainwashed Republicans are. Click to see it full size!
By the way, please direct all your hate mail to @drivenbyboredom on Twitter so that I can RT it! Thanks guys!
I came back here to look at Brooke’s ass again, but now you’ve got me reading some political blog. That’s pretty clever marketing! Well played, sir.
To point you toward some interesting material about the history of brainwashing and its power… Have you ever watched that series about the Borgias on Showtime? Checked out their odd portrayal anywhere else in pop culture? I’m thinking of the Assassin’s Creed games in particular here. Well, I just finished a book by G.J. Meyer called “The Borgias: The Hidden History”, which does a pretty thorough examination of what is and isn’t in the historical record regarding this infamous family. To be honest, it’s ridiculous.
But it’s ridiculous because of the levels of exaggeration and outright fabrication which were used in creating the Borgia myth. Essentially, every legitimate available record points to the fact that Rodrigo Borgia was an outstanding member of the Catholic Church who dutifully served four popes before becoming caught in the shitstorm that was his own papacy; that Lucrezia was a charming and devout lady, never prone to debauchery and certainly not incest; and that Cesare secured his holdings in Italy by actually being fair to his subjects, in contrast to the kind of oppression that was normal in the day,and that he was a rough man but not as murderous by half as anyone else of that period.
But guess what? Pope Alexander died, then Pius III held his post for all of about five minutes before he kicked the bucket, and then Julius II took over. And Julius had actually been Alexander VI’s (Rodrigo Borgia’s) archenemy for almost the entire second half of his life, cuz he was mad that he had lost the earlier election to the guy. So this entire fantastical portrayal we have of the Borgias was generated from political propaganda written by their enemies (of which they had many) and then allowed to flourish by grumpy old Julius on account of his lifelong vendetta.
And now this shit is history, mang–the myth made real. Cuz, a long time ago, people who’d never even met the Borgias thought it sounded like an awesome story and so they told their kids, who told their kids… and here we are. All because of vicious propaganda. I’m afraid there’s nothing new under the sun.
Brainwashing doesn’t happen just because Republicans are fruity (although I’ll still grant you that point). It happens because people more generally are weak, and lazy, and looking for the easy answers. Plenty of folks aren’t even able to process the volume of information necessary to make informed political decisions; plenty more, when faced with the task at hand and comparing the outcome of being politically active vs. running on autopilot, simply do a cost/benefit analysis and make the rational decision that it’s easier to delegate all that thinking to someone else than to cut 4 hours out of the work week and do it on their own.
Personally, I always get a good laugh at people who suggest that there be some kind of an aptitude test in order to qualify to vote. How far does that go? How many of us really understand a single school of thought in the realm of economics, at least enough to publicly defend it or refute it? How many of us can name any prominent political affiliations in Afghanistan, let alone suggest how to–or even whether or not to–attempt to navigate them? I consider myself pretty well-versed in history and foreign policy, but I’d only count myself qualified to make a sound decision on maybe two regions in the entire world. It’s a lot of information and, at some point, we all choose to some extent or another to trust in others to gather and process that information. Who are those people, and what do they want? I think that’s where the problem starts.
But this need to let other people think for us is, unfortunately, kinda natural. As I was talking about earlier, part of it’s an unfortunate side effect of us not all being geniuses with unlimited time in our days. But the even more unfortunate part is, it’s FUN. If you hadn’t already noticed from the Dead Democrats gag or the rise of memes on the Interweb, sharing common lingo and ideas is a great way to create solidarity and a sense of community–defining “them” is a great way of defining “us” and reinforcing that idea for members of an ingroup. And, in an era when the Republican Party in the US is so divided that they can’t even agree on a single rebuttal to the State of the Union address, I suppose that must make them feel loved. Cuz even Republicans want to feel loved–although it has to be hetero and probably in the missionary position, with clearly defined gender roles, and it can’t result in any more Latino offspring.
And you’re right to point out that people aren’t born Republican, because political conservatism comes and goes in cycles… At the beginning of the Roman Republic, they were actually struggling with a very Bill O’Reilly-esque “culture war” against what they thought was an erosion of more traditional family values. But they got everyone into line, and the whole thing probably peaked around the time of Augustus, and then… Well, then all of a sudden they had orgies everywhere and foreign cultures shredding their way of life. You might be the modern equivalent of that backlash. Not that I’m objecting.
So, since you were kind enough to wrap things up with a quick TLDR, it seems right to do the same here.
TLDR: This shit’s been happening forever, boss. And it’s not gonna end anytime soon. And I wish we could pretend that it’s an exclusively Republican affliction… buuut it’s not.
P.S. “Anecdotal”, not “antidotal”… Otherwise, your little piece was pretty solid.
Thanks for catching that. Clearly I didn’t spell anecdotal right and then I spell checked it to the wrong thing. I actually am a horrible speller but at least I try and spell check stuff where I am calling people morons.
Thanks for the insanely long response to my insanely long article. I did read the whole thing. We are all doomed.
It’s cool, bro. I was an English major for 3 months, I got yer back.
And yeah, we’re all pretty fucked. I mean, I could be out there trying to change the world or some BS, and I’m staring at girls’ butts on the Internet in between reading the news and checking out cat pictures. If you’re not part of the solution… But hey, I got tired of other people’s problems ages ago. I’ve basically taken up the violin and given up on everything else in life.
We should probably slow down here before this goes too far, though, or my nihilism is just going to ruin your day.
On a side note, I see that your archrivals also like to vote twice… Shawn, Kenneth Abbott and Kurt Andrews each appeared twice in your Dead Democrats collage.
Trying to exaggerate the issue, eh? But I’d totally expect that from a communist, Nazi, Muslim-loving queer such as yourself.
The problem was I was screen capping my phone and some times people doubled up. I caught a couple, but I guess I didn’t get all of them. I have received several more since this post so I could replace them, but I probably won’t…
It’s not worth covering up now. Your blatant attempt to distort facts and tarnish the GOP’s spotless image has already been revealed.
HOW DARE YOU, SIR?!