You Don't Hate Political Influencers Enough Either

A new phrase that has become popular on the right is "You don't hate journalists enough," coined by Auron MacIntyre. It is used in response to flagrant media bias or just plain refusal to cover certain topics, the most recent example in the past few days being the lack of coverage on the seven "people" who committed unspeakable acts on a pair of toddlers in Texas, which our own Kevin Downey Jr. wrote about.

And as you may surmise from the headline, online political influencers should be equally hated, or at least disliked.

Of course, for some of the most famous or popular, it is a job, and much like professional wrestling, influencers have to put on a persona to get people to pay attention to them.

But with politics comes the problem of trying to persuade people to actually do more than consume your content, such as vote for your candidate or donate to your cause. And when differing factions come into contact, boy does it get nasty.

If you have read my content on the Republican primary, you know the online wars between the pro-Trump accounts and the pro-DeSantis accounts are what I am more annoyed by than anything else.

Banter, criticism, mockery, and insults are part and parcel of politics — that I do not deny. Influencers say outrageous things precisely because they get attention and get people like me to talk about it.

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This brings us to this little gem of a post where DeSantis is giving a speech in Iowa when a heckler repeatedly tries to ask how much money he took from executives of some kind.

DeSantis replied, "You are interrupting, and you're being rude. Everyone else is listening and you're butting in. I don't care [about your question]. I know you have an agenda."

Someone calling themselves Randy the Savage said this somehow proves that "Homelander DeSantis hates the public. He hates Iowa. He knows he's cooked."

What a vivid imagination there, Randy.

If Trump did this to a heckler, everybody would be laughing and saying that Trump sure showed them (granted, his response would probably be much funnier).

But because it's DeSantis, he must hate Iowa and the public because he refuses to entertain an obvious heckler. Is his campaign cooked? Probably, unless he somehow pulls off a major upset.

Of course, DeSantis's online cheerleaders haven't been much better, with their unofficial leader Christina Pushaw joking that Trump should hire a woman who defrauded a Holocaust survivor in a campaign finance position over the summer, while others have been strangely fixated on the legal persecution of Trump, all but expressing support for a conviction that we all know is blatantly political.

It is futile to wish that future primaries will be less nasty because it wouldn't be politics if it wasn't. The digital age just makes it more tedious, and people seem to treat their intrusive thoughts about politics like honored guests, or at least pretend they do.

And that is precisely why online influencers, no matter what faction they belong to, shouldn't be treated as somehow better than journalists just because they supposedly speak more "authentically" than someone writing for an official publication.

This primary can't be over soon enough.