Elon Musk let me back on Twitter

After an almost four-year lifetime suspension, Elon Musk let me back on Twitter, with a new account, @PeterMVanBuren. I could again read the “takes” of people smart enough to have a Blue Check (I do not) including those whose points of view I usually don’t share. Here is what I’ve learned.

Progressives are insane. They have lost their minds. They are certain every event which they do not personally support is the End of Times.

I started back on Twitter the week after Justice Alito’s draft opinion overthrowing Roe was leaked, and right away was blasted by Blue Anon stuff like “The Supreme Court is a Tool of Tyrants” and “Time for Canada to Offer Gender Asylum to American Women.” But at least those tweets began their lives in the actual media, where editors wiped away some of the spittle. Tip to Elon: never mind banning people on Twitter, shut down MSDNC, et al. We’ll be fine without their hemophilia of journalism.

But when I write the collective “we,” I must exclude the once-sentient Lawrence Tribe (@tribelaw) who could not be more sure of himself if he saw the code behind the Matrix. He tweeted: “Three-fifths of the Supreme Court justices who joined that Alito abomination were nominated by a serial abuser of women, Donald Trump, who lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by 2.9 million votes and were confirmed by Senators representing a minority of the US population.”

Tribe speaks for his generation, which at least on Twitter has a longing for Hillary that could only be creepier if they started posting Photoshopped images of her in a Princess Leia bikini. Many Twitter celebrities recycle memes along the lines of “What if she’d won?” with some clever image of Mrs. Clinton smirking that “I told you so” look that so endeared her to non-deplorable people.

There was no tweet that said outright that President Hillary would have raised Ruth Bader Ginsberg from the dead and reappointed her to the court, but it was implied. David Weissman (@davidmweissman) felt the need to write, “Since the Clintons are trending, I will say that after learning the truth about Hillary Clinton and seeing how right she was about everything, I stood with her. Even a few years later, I continue standing with the Clinton family.” Mollie Katzen (@MollieKatzen): “Imagine where we’d be now had more people listened to Anita Hill, Hillary Clinton, and Christine Blasey Ford.”

To be honest, I had to look up that last name. Ford was the woman who testified that a clothed Brett Kavanaugh had lain on top of her in 1982 and then went all Handmaid’s Tale on the Supreme Court because she could just tell. As you read these tweets, patterns like that emerge. If a handy glossary existed for conservatives, it would include sketch bios of Ford, RBG, and that woman artist with the unibrow, and entries for popular vote, Electoral College (why it sucks) and fan fiction about a 45-member Supreme Court. Some topics, like Michael Cohen, need their own glossary for terms like fixer, Fredo, and consigliere.

Things only got worse, much worse, when I went deeper into the personal Twitter accounts of the Blue Checks (the term sounds like a Dr. Who villainous force). What these people really seem to think is that America is almost cooked and done. They imagine we just barely survived the Trump years without putting Beelzebub on our coins and now face the likely prospect of Candidate Trump returning to the White House with the anticipation of a colonoscopy done by a doctor nicknamed “knuckles.” Look:

Heidi Przybyla (@HeidiNBC): “Are we up to democracy? … I worry we are entering the darkest period.”

Malcolm Nance (@MalcolmNance): “WARNING: 62 days before 1/6 I warned that Trump would start a political/paramilitary insurgency to seize American democracy. It has begun.”

Rob Reiner (@robreiner): “The reason Republican lawmakers are refusing to cooperate with the Jan. 6 Committee couldn’t be more obvious. They were part of the Seditious Conspiracy to violently overthrow the Government. Period.”

Progressives seem to have their own vocabulary, things like ending an emphatic tweet with Period. End of Matter. Full stop. They like to say they are standing with someone or something a lot. The only historical events they know are Munich, the Reichstag fire, and Weimer.

Tweetmeister Reiner later managed to get three issues into one tweet (economy of prose is prized on Twitter and when shouting on a street corner wearing only a shower curtain) by saying, “There is only one way to save a woman’s right to choose, our Democracy, and our Planet. Vote for Democrats.” He also wrote, “You cannot reason with a Trump supporter. They believe a Lying Criminal who doesn’t give a flying f*** about them was sent to them by God. Don’t try to reason. Just Vote. Vote like our Democracy depends on it. Because it does. It couldn’t be more simple. A vote for Republicans is a vote to destroy Democracy.”

But how will Trump pull this off? His last coup resulted in exactly nothing happening except him breaking up with Mike Pence right before prom. Twitter knows:

Ruth Ben-Ghiat (@ruthbenghiat): “I’ve been warning Americans for months the GOP is replenishing its political ranks with criminals who have the skill set and character to support autocratic rule. Fascists in Italy and Germany brought thugs and murderers into party and state bureaucracy.”

Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1): “Republicans in Michigan have replaced election officials who certified Joe Biden’s win.”

Anyway, you heard it here first, says Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan): “If (when?) Trump steals or tries to steal the 2024 election, don’t say we weren’t given plenty of advance warning that it was coming.”

Spending time on Twitter convinces you that journalism today is basically cramped somewhere between bad opinion making and simple propaganda. It fails the basic test of being interesting. That should finish it off as a profession in a couple of years, and we can all watch it slide into the sea on Twitter.

Except then out of nowhere came a moment of clarity from none other than CNN’s master journo Jim Acosta (@Acosta), who for no reason whatsoever felt the need to write, “Ran into an Afghan refugee in the elevator today. He was delivering groceries. Didn’t know which buttons to push so I helped. Must have been new. As he got off the elevator, he thanked me and said ‘I am Afghan.’ I said good luck and welcome to America. He smiled. He’s on his way.”

So there’s that. Bill Kristol tweeting for blood in what he hopes is the Google dialect of Ukrainian was a close second.

Four years without Twitter was a long time. I am glad I am back and feel smarter already. I look forward to sniffing some old airplane glue and joining right in.