All right I need to not spend my Saturday being Mad Online, but I have a couple of short threads to get off my chest. One is about this rhetoric -- ubiquitous on Fox right now -- that Trump voters just want to be "heard."

I don't have the stomach to look up the clips, but just check out basically any Hannity segment from the last few days. This rhetoric is used on the right frequently. It was used about the armed rioters who invaded the Michigan state capitol. It was used in Oregon ...

... when lawmakers fled the state rather than allowing a climate bill to pass, and then armed militia mobs descended on the capitol & intimidated lawmakers into ending the legislative session.

Like many rhetorical tropes on the right, if you just interpret it literally, it makes no f'ing sense. Who has been more heard over the last 4 years than Trump voters? They have fewer votes but the got the presidency & with it their champion dominating every single news cycle.

Every other story in the mainstream media is a soft-focus profile of some Trump voter in a diner somewhere. The largest cable "news" station in the country, along with a sprawling media network, is devoted to propagandizing on their behalf. "Heard"? You can't escape them!

They said this when Obamacare passed too -- waah, waah, it was "shoved down our throats," we weren't "heard"! -- even after months & months & months, hearing after hearing, of negotiating with them.

They said it in Oregon too, about the climate bill -- a bill that had been floating around for years, voted on multiple times, debated to death, delayed & delayed while the white rural minority was "heard" again & again.

So WTF do they mean? Well, you probably know where this is going. It means, "we didn't get our way." It's got nothing to do with being heard. It's that they think they are the Real Americans, so they are supposed to get their way. If they don't, "it's not fair."

This is what *all* procedural complaints on the right amount to: we're supposed to win. We're supposed to get our way. We didn't. Ergo, it's unfair. Ergo, we weren't "heard." There's no other coherent way to interpret it.

They were heard. They lost. Now they're throwing tantrums because they don't like losing & they don't like democracy when they're outnumbered. Any political or media figure who takes the whining seriously should be embarrassed. </fin>

One more thing for thethread: if being "heard" means political representation, then white people from rural & exurban areas are far MORE heard than the liberals they hate. On a per-capita basis, they're disproportionately represented in gov't. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/1/30/20997046/constitution-electoral-college-senate-popular-vote-trump