America, That Bad Little Girl
Keep your kinks to yourself: At a Turning Point USA rally for Donald Trump this week, former Fox News anchor—and now, independent media mogul—Tucker Carlson got mighty poetic:
“If you allow people to get away with things that are completely over the top and outrageous…and you do nothing about it…you’re going to get more of it,” he began, analogizing the Trump-America relationship to that of a father and his misbehaving children.
“There has to be a point at which Dad comes home,” he continued. “Yeah, that’s right. Dad comes home, and he’s pissed. Dad is pissed. He’s not vengeful. He loves his children, disobedient as they may be. He loves them because they’re his children.”
“Get to your room right now, and think about what you did! And when Dad gets home, you know what he says? ‘You’ve been a bad girl. You’ve been a bad little girl, and you’re getting a vigorous spanking right now. And no, it’s not gonna hurt me more than it hurts you. No, it’s not. I’m not gonna lie. It’s gonna hurt you a lot more than it hurts me. And you earned this. You’re getting a vigorous spanking because you’ve been a bad girl. And it has to be this way.'”
This strange, kinky soliloquy on the right reminded me of this terrible graphic—not the first of its kind, and representative of a whole genre—on the left:
Come on, we all know there’s only one VP candidate you would be excited to see at the family gathering — and he’s the one who will actually protect IVF, abortion access, or LGBTQ+ rights.
Voters know who is fighting for them and who is just creeping them out. pic.twitter.com/viWahTwtIk
— Planned Parenthood Action (@PPact) October 1, 2024
America’s not some naughty little girl, J.D. Vance isn’t a creepy uncle, Tim Walz isn’t a lovable Carhartt dad, Kamala’s not mother (or a “baddie“), and Donald Trump isn’t daddy, the disciplinarian. America’s still the freest, richest, most prosperous place on Earth, not because of politicians who try to convince us they’re parental figures but despite them.
There are a bunch of narratives that have emerged from this election cycle—educational polarization widening, second-/third-/fourth-generation Latinos moving rightward, the oddness of both Georgia and Arizona becoming just a tad bluer—but one under-discussed narrative is the degree to which the younger generation (and apparently Tucker Carlson, too!) grafts familial roles and relationships onto politicians and their supporters. It started as just a silly little meme—Gen Z calls people mother as a sort of term of approval, in the same way that they’ve recast brat‘s meaning—but it says something about the level at which we’re operating: We wrongly understand politics as deeply personal (which raises the temperature); interpret authority as something to be assented or submitted to, not checked; think in terms of oversimplified memes, not foundational principles.
Speaking of kids: “I have a toddler and over the past three years my family has spent over $120,000 on childcare…How can families like ours, or those with fewer resources and more kids, sustain the rising costs of raising children today?” asked one man in a NewsNation town hall with Republican vice presidential contender J.D. Vance.
“Sometimes these issues are a little bit harder for working moms than working dads,” offered Vance—admitting gender differences that are sometimes a little triggering for progressives—before launching into his real answer: “I think we have to give young women and young men more options to actually build the kind of childcare that works for them.
Article from Reason.com
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