Troll-y Problem

 The early days of the second Trump administration are as muddled as they are fast moving, and much of the reporting is being done by people who have strong feelings about the matter and thus a tendency to run with what's "too good to check" even if they're not consciously shading the truth.

That said, there are a few things which are clear and are in keeping with what we've known about the inner Trump set for quite some time. And one of those is that a number of notable characters on the Trump train are attached to a very online sort of argumentation.

The approach is: If they accuse us of being horrible in some particular way, we'll troll them by making jokes about whatever it is they accuse us of.

The problem is, this means that when the left invariably calls everyone on the right a racist, this type of discourse results in folks on the right tossing around racist terms or symbols to be "ironic" and make fun of the left

Or as we saw this week, after the left beclowned itself by insisting that they'd caught Elon Musk making a Nazi salute when giving a speech, Steve Bannon decided to intentionally throw a half hearted Nazi salute while giving a speech at CPAC just to show...  what exactly?

The thing is, throwing Nazi salutes or posting racist memes is just plain wrong. It doesn't matter if the point is to be "ironic" or mock the other side. It's something you shouldn't be doing regardless of the reason.

I understand how we got here.

For one thing, when the GOP nominated centrist Republicans like George W Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney, the left called all of them Nazis and racists.

For another, the left used its cultural power to play stupid games where it declared things offensive simply in order to go after conservatives. For instance, when Justice Amy Coney Barrett used the term "sexual preference" to refer to...  groups that define themselves by what sort of person they are sexually attracted to, not only did the media (which had happily used the term in the past) suddenly announce it was offensive, but several dictionary websites re-wrote their definitions of the phrase in real time to define it as pejorative.

And finally, there is the problem that for decades the elite class of the GOP has been significantly to the left of the base, particularly on cultural issues.  So when it came to things ranging from abortion and gay marriage to trans issues, in a lot of cases the professional Republicans who would actually work in congressional offices and the White House actually agreed with the left rather than the right.  And so when the GOP got in power, they never really did much to roll back social liberalism.

And then along came Donald Trump, who has all the rhetorical courtesy of a Sherman Tank, and unlike previous GOP nominees, he won.

Nothing empowers like victory, and so the people who had been pursuing the "let's be loud jerks to rub the left's nose in how wrong they are" approach looked like they were right.

I am not expert on what is politically expedient or popular, but I do know this: being a loud jerk is not a virtue, whether on the right or the left.  Doing things that are wrong isn't somehow better because you're making a point in the process, or owning the other side, or showing them how it feels to be on the receiving end.

I am very grateful that this administration has done basic sane things like acknowledged that there are only two genders and that boys should not be competing on girls sports teams.  But I would feel even more enthusiastic if this work was being done without all the bozo behavior that's come with it. After all, we want people to understand that our views are right, not that they're some form of madness imposed by bozos.