Primarily, Twitter was a place for like-minded people to come together and talk about shared interests. It wasn’t necessarily political unless you wanted it to be. I came for Astros talk, Houston sports in general, and a little politics on the side. I am not a right wing person. I have many of those in my life. There are some I love very dearly. One of the great things about life and about Twitter is that I had the power to control my exposure to those ideas.

Musk removed that power. He set up the app to switch us from our own feed to something he called “For you.” Ostensibly, the idea seemed to be to share other ideas and profiles that they thought you would be interested in. That concept seems fair enough. I enjoy reading new perspectives and finding new friends. That is clearly not what “For You” became. It became a way to project right wing hate and trolling behavior. This is not an indictment of right-wing beliefs or people. Remember, some of them are my friends and family. I have no desire to censor ideas or remove people’s platform to project those ideas unless they are promoting violence or promoting insurrection or revolution. In many instances, those are the same thing.

My only desire was to limit my own exposure to those ideas. I want the power to choose what I watch, read, and listen to. I don’t want my television randomly changing the channel to Fox News or Newsmax because it is obeying an algorithm called ‘For You.” I may not be the smartest man on the planet, but I think I am reasonably intelligent enough to choose what I want to read, watch, and listen to.

Instead, I get one woman that calls herself a terrorism survivor but somehow a lover of everything Trump. She posts pictures of him wearing camo, colonial gear, or worker clothes and asking us why we don’t appreciate everything he has sacrificed for us. Maybe it is because he is nowhere remotely close to any of those things. I see other profiles that continue to harp on the obvious election fraud in 2020.

So, the development of Twitter afforded me a few unappealing options. I could keep my profile and simply not go. However, that would leave even just a few people hanging. I could go and engage with those bozos, but again that would grow their brand and accomplish what they are out to do. I could simply read and not respond and seethe about it if even for one minute, or I could pull the plug.

My joy comes first. There is so much going on in our lives that I don’t want to waste one minute doing something that doesn’t make me or the people in my life happier. Good people will sacrifice their happiness for others. Great people will sacrifice so much more than that. Contemptible people purposefully go out of their way to suck joy out of life. I don’t want to silence them. I just don’t want to hear it if I don’t want to.

This one’s been brewing for a while, but finally rose to the top of my list to talk about.  Remember early in the fall when “Let’s Go Brandon!” started circulating through conservatives, signs and bumper stickers started popping up, and the meme starting appearing everywhere?  I even saw a baseball cap worn at Game One of the World Series by an otherwise respectable young business man with the slogan emblazoned on it.

What’s the orgin of this meme?  Well, Brandon is actually a real person, Brandon Brown. He’s the perfect American story – started racing go-carts when he was 8 years old, and over the past 20 years worked his way all the way up to driving in NASCAR stock car races.  But he’s not some fancy schmanzy high paid driver sponsored by Mountain Dew.  He has his own car, funded by himself and his father with minor sponsors.  He started running out of money this year, and as a final appeal for sponsors, he posted an ad on social media saying “put your name on my rear”, and that landed him two sponsors with enough money to keep racing.  With that extra money, he raced at Talladega and brought home the victory.  In the excitement of the win, he didn’t notice the event that threatens to wreck everything he’s earned.

In the live post race interview on the track broadcast on national television, some assholes in the stands started chanting, “Fuck Joe Biden!” over and over.  As the chant grew, the interviewer tried to make light of the chant, saying the crowd was chanting, “Let’s Go Brandon!” and a meme was born.  Like everything else that occurs in the right wing echo machine, the meme took on a life of its own, even being repeated on the US House floor, and by governor Ron DeSantis who rebranded the Biden administration as the “Brandon administration.”

Ha ha.  It’s super funny to use someone else’s name as a swear word, right?  Brown at first thought it was funny right up to the point where sponsors started backing away from him, not wanting to get embroiled in partisanship, especially when the name of the sponsored person is being used in a phrase substituting his name in an expletive that implied the word “fuck”.  Right wingers often ignore the fact that the fully HALF of all Americans who disagree with them also spend money.  Sponsors of television shows, sports teams, and yes, NASCAR sell their goods to everyone, not just radical partisans who believe that their political opponents must be denigrated and even eliminated from the public stage.  That belief is called eliminationist, and is exactly what bred the violent insurrection that actually attempted to murder those who disagreed with their leader and overthrow the US government.  Most responsible companies don’t want to be associated with that kind of hatred because it’s bad for business.  Brown is even trying to get ahead of this issue by changing the meme from “Let’s Go Brandon!” to “Let’s Go America!” in an attempt to walk the fine line between not pissing off the NASCAR base and not losing sponsors.  It’s not easy, and most likely impossible.

The “Let’s Go Brandon!” meme perfectly encapsulates a key feature of the right wing noise machine – they repeat these kinds of memes so much that it develops callouses in the users’ psyches to the point that hateful and violent rhetoric it is no longer shocking to them.  Why do  I say that?  I say that because it’s true.  Think about it – at the beginning of the pandemic that’s now killed almost 1 million Americans, Dan Patrick actually said that old people needed to die for the sake of the economy. Instead of being excoriated for such eliminationist rhetoric,  Far right Americans AGREED, screaming, “Right! The economy is more important than old people!”  Tucker Carlson feeds a continuous stream of this radical hate speech every night on national television.  Hate speech is now embedded in the DNA of the right wing and drives the public policy they espouse.

People repeating this hate speech don’t give a flying shit about the consequences of that hate speech, but the damage is real and gets people hurt and even killed.  Brandon Brown is the innocent victim as this massive meme threatens to destroy his sponsorship chances  and career just so they can say “Fuck Joe Biden!” in public and get away with it.  The real tragedy here is not that this kind of behavior is a flaw of conservatism today, it’s a feature.