finished this yesterday

So let's talk about this from a systems standpoint. What, exactly, is the rabid right? What are their touchstones? What do they rally around? What is their common language? Around what have they assembled their nationalism?

I would argue that they had assembled their nationalism around some inchoate form of modern culture does not represent us, Trump does. As long as Trump was in office, their nationalism was organized around My country is led by my President and anything my president disagrees with, I disagree with.

But now? Now they're arrayed around modern culture stole my President's destiny. Or, if you prefer, modern culture stole MY destiny. And the thing I think you keep missing is that yeah, Trump can try that shit again, but then he's basically arguing "well, the process was completely rigged before but this time will be different" and asking all his followers to accept said-same.

All the "election reform" and "election monitoring" and nonsense Team Trump has been ramming through is reactionary, not pro-active. Yeah it'll help Republicans win in the future, no doubt, but if Trump plays into it, he'll be acknowledging the system as legitimate and playing it eight years older, without Russian backing, as a known quantity whose previous record can be used against him. He ceases to be a maverick who can say whatever the fuck he wants, who can appeal to Julian Assange to leak John Podesta's emails and experience no blowback. You're talking about a will-be-78-year-old man that the "deep state" now knows everything about, seriously mounting a challenge in order to get a job he didn't really want in the first place?

And, most importantly, what the fuck does any of that have to do with Twitter? The "imagined community" of the Right right now is entirely grievance-based. They don't even have a wall to build, they just wanna snark and burn books, man. Does where they burn books really matter? No one here has even attempted a cogent argument about this. What we've learned is that they have no tolerance for dissent or criticism and that given their 'druthers, they'll retreat to silos where they can howl at each other. Either they turn Twitter into a howling silo, in which case everyone else goes somewhere else, or they don't. Either way, "was once not a howling silo" won't have any more credibility a year from now than it does now.