These chuds were parading around a noose and chanting "Murder the Media" - by which they mean him and his colleagues! - and he's so deep in his bubble of privilege and security he feels the need to dole out humanizing anecdotes

Like it makes any goddamn difference to them https://twitter.com/willcarless/status/1347035772424237058

I actually mean it when I say people have a duty to push back on the relentless humanizing of the right wing

That's the whole asymmetry here - they *start off more humanized*

The definition of being right wing is being the kind of person people reflexively think of as authentic

Normal, decent folk

Salt of the earth

Everyday old-fashioned red-blooded Americans

People with a picture postcard version of how the country should look in their heads, based on what they think is the country's history since its founding, and hate to see it change

You can't imagine someone passing anecdotes to try and show a human side to a foreign terrorist

The Nigerian "underwear bomber" from 2009 was much more of a farce that was much less likely to hurt anyone than this

No one told cute stories about his childhood

I think the media does this kind of thing on a deep unconscious level

Even if they know people on Twitter will drag them for it

It *feels wrong* to define some blonde Christian white woman by her crime, to just say "Welp a terrorist rushed the Secret Service and got shot"

It *feels* to them like going out of their way to "dehumanize" the subject, it feels like cruelty, even when it's just reporting the news the way it's reported normally about other people

They feel like they *have to* find some "humanizing" detail "for the sake of your own soul"

They aren't even aware of the discrepancy

When they just report "Two Black gangsters were killed in a gunfight" or "Six suspected Iraqi militants were killed in a drone strike" or whatever

That's normal, that's just giving the facts

That realization "That could be my son, that could be my daughter" never kicks in because, well, it couldn't

It's perfectly natural

It's also infuriating and it will destroy us

This isn't even a real story! She put his bags on her tray table! Just before she tried to open the door for an angry mob to seize control of the election proceedings!

Wow, I guess the other person on the plane who didn't help their seatmate with their bags because they didn't want to catch COVID, but also didn't participate in a fascist coup, is about as good a person as her

If I really want a gold star I've got to help people with their bags AND not try to rush the door to a secure area of the Capitol

This is the thing about people going "Oh, how ironic, you're dehumanizing Nazis the way Nazis dehumanize their victims"

It's an "irony" that goes back to Sartre's "Anti-Semite and Jew"

When their whole power, their whole advantage, is being the person who naturally belongs in society as it's presently constituted, and you're in the position of always being the outsider who's there on sufferance

You cannot win the game of humanization

It does not matter what they do or what you do, the reasonable people in the middle will find a way to humanize them and dehumanize you

There'll always be some cute story about the people putting up the gallows and how nice and polite they were to the people they wanted to hang

You have to deal with Nazis *based on what they do* - in this case violently storm the Capitol building and try to steal the election

If you don't keep your gaze laser focused on that you can see the conversation drifting around in real time to humanizing them again

That crazy-pills feeling of people talking about togetherness and reconciliation *directly in the aftermath of a coup*

Deciding to just go ahead and move forward with a Congress that *went ahead and seated the elected officials who openly supported sedition*