It is neither shocking nor even mildly surprising that the cranky "Me? Apologize? Fuck you. What about Abbie Hoffman?" attitude that ol' Tom Nichols keeps in his everyday carry kit (from August 3, 2025)...
... hasn't abated in the slightest over the years:
You will get no such contrition, because I think your party had plenty of matches and lighter fluid and is not free of responsibility here.— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) July 14, 2019
BTW, the reason you're getting the bare-bones text of this vintage Nichols' "Fuck you, hippies" Tweet is that Tom appears to have scrubbed his archives of such embarrassments. And so they no longer exist... except in their plain-text form on this here blog :-)
For example:
I’d say that the dumpster fire that is the modern Democratic party help create a decade of losses that made Trump seem plausible, but okay.— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) February 13, 2019
And
I wish people on the left were *nearly* as introspective as Max is being, because mark my words, leftist friends: Trump saved you from yourselves. His emergence headed off some serious intra-left fights that you're still going to have. And you're not going to enjoy them. /4— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) October 13, 2018
Trying to mau-mau the Never Trumpers, or the apostates like Max, because we won't repudiate every single thought we ever had is the kind of Stalinism that helped keep people like me (I won't speak for Max) in place for longer than we should have been. /9— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) October 13, 2018
And
And when the crackup of the left comes - as it will - I look forward to the shake-out when good-hearted liberals realize that they, too, are sharing a bus with some cranks, traitors, conspiracy nuts, wanna-be totalitarians, and other creeps they ignored because of Trump. /10x— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) October 13, 2018
I could go on, but the point is fairly made. As I wrote back in 2018:
Tom Nichols Shall Leave No Logical Fallacy Unflung
In which Tom Nichols -- a professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval War College -- somehow did not notice that his Republican Party had devolved into a shambolic racist treason factory literally right in front of him until it was 25 years too late and then gets mad at us Stalinist Libtards for not greeting him as a Liberator.
...Ad Hominem/Tu Quoque, Straw Man, False Dilemma, Slippery Slope, Causal Fallacy.
The Old Professor has 'em all, kids, so remember, Never Turn Your Back on a Never Trumper.
It is neither shocking nor even mildly surprising that virtually all Never Trumpers lie incessantly about the past, or go waaay the hell out of their way to avoid talking about it at all (except to gripe about Robert Bork, or light a votive candle at the shrine of Saint Reagan), or, like ol' Tom, go ballistic when the past is inflicted upon them. After all, their whole deal is that they are smarter and savvier that all of us dirty hippies combined. That their political advice and insights are ne plu ultra ... which is ludicrous on its face considering that none of these people were capable or seeing what was happening right in front them, in their own political party, until it was 25 years too late.
Which is why, in a different context, I wouldn't give the tiniest damn that these people want to live in bubble where they believe nothing before 2016 exists, that liberals are the absurd caricatures they have conjured out of some childhood trauma involving seeing "Hair", and that they're the smartest kids in the classroom.
I know lots of people with lots of delusions, most of which involve Chicago sports teams. Doesn't bother me at all.
On the other hand, it bothers me a great deal that these people have now colonized the legacy media. It bothers me a great deal their omnipresence there comes at the cost of actual Liberal voices who have actually been right all along. And it bothers me quite a bit that they have been able to leverage their huge, free media presence into building their own Never Trump media enterprises, where actual Liberal voices who have actually been right all along are also unwelcome.
If you live out here in flyover country, and you ask your Democratic friends who they watch, who they listen to or who they read to get the skinny on politics, I guarantee you they've never heard of this blog or the Professional Left podcast. Never heard of Digby or Nicole Sandler or emptywheel or Tengrain or The Bradcast, or Charlie Pierce or Thom Hartmann. Never heard of Bob Cesca or John Fuglsang or Hal Sparks. They might have hear of Stephanie Miller and some of her guests, but I wouldn't bet on it since they're not syndicated out here among the cornfields.
Who is syndicated out here among the cornfields? Glenn Beck, Mark Levin, Sean Hannity, Chris Plante, Larry Kudlow, Brian Kilmeade, Jeanine Pirro and, of course, Jesus.
So, if average Democrats (and, just for fun, let's throw in "independents" and "Centrists") are oblivious to our rag-tag team of Liberal talkers and writers who have been on this beat and dead-on accurate for decades, which writers and talkers do you suppose they could pick out of a lineup?
Odds are they'll know the faces and voices delivered to them from cable news and "respectable" publications. They'll know Nicole Wallace and Joe Scarborough. They'll know Tim Miller and Sarah Longwell. They'll know David Brooks.
They'll know all the usual suspects.
And as you may have noticed, all those usual suspects are selling the same center-right, "Democrats must become Republican-lite" eyewash as our democracy's only path to salvation.
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