THREAD: There's one thing I still can't get over - and probably won't ever get over - about the last four plus years.

Starting in late 2016, we were told, endlessly, about how Trump voters represented a forgotten subset of America, the tried & true manufacturing class, the misbegotten working men and women, the lonely janitor. We were forced to eat from this trough for four years.

I knew - as many of you knew - that this was just a cover, a band-aid for loss, a pathetic symphony of sympathy for ourselves and our country, having watched it get flushed down the shitter. "It was our fault," we said. Our fault,

for creating this mess, this country, this economy. We heard it in the Democratic primaries -- Bernie Sanders, a man I admire and trust, used this as a reasonable line of judgement against his competitors, who he staked as blind to the forgotten man in this country.

The conflation of "Trump voter" with "forgotten man" is one of the great mistakes of our generation, & something many of us declared from day one, and even before, of Trump. We did not forecast the Insurrection but we also did not refute the fantasy of angry, dumb, gun nuts.

For four years we have been shouting about these people, and we have been declared classists and cruel and clueless to the realities of America. Yes, America is a stratified and broken place, full of greed and hate, innate to it's core. But it's also full of human beings, who

make their own decisions. And their decisions *matter*. Their decisions are not without consequence. Yes, America could be a more just place. It could pay people real wages. But those things do not prevent the rise of THIS. Anyone telling you otherwise is

either lazy, out of touch or in on the con. You don't watch hundreds of thousands of white men storm the capitol and think, "you know what, the issue here is jobs," or "the issue here is disrespect." The issue, ladies and gentlemen, is what it has always been:

We are a nation comprised almost entirely of fungible idiots.