Happy Birthday Melania

The Conservative Caucus sent mail to my house this week.

One of the disadvantages of being a renter is that you end up with piles and piles of mail
addressed to tenants long since moved on. Send all the requests to the post office you want, they will continue to send it anyway. Of course, it’s never anything one might actually like to receive–birthday money, mystery checks made out for large amounts, treasure maps, letters from a time travelling future version of yourself. It’s mostly credit card offers and late payment notices sent by lenders unaware of the futility of their plea to give away money or take it back. Thus, the envelopes cooperate with almost empty wine bottles to create capitalistic papier-mache in the bottom of my recycling bin.

Every once in a great while, however, an interesting piece slips by the “send all the shitty
mail to my house” sorter at the post office, and I get something that provides a snapshot of one of the lives lived here before mine.

Obviously, I DON’T open it, because that would be illegal, and apparently postal inspectors are quite scary. Unless, of course, it’s addressed to “John Doe or Current Resident,” or I fail to notice the addressee, and open something by mistake.

So anyway, I opened the letter from the Conservative Caucus with giddy joy–fascinated, but not entirely surprised, that my home used to be occupied by not just a conservative, but a donating conservative. What exciting treasure of lunacy awaited me within?! And a treasure indeed it was.

Highly sycophantic, but that’s not unexpected from anything spawned by the
MAGAverse, and therefore not particularly noteworthy either, other than for a laugh at the
thought of Melania receiving thousands of birthday cards bitching and moaning about the radical left and pledging undying loyalty to her loser husband. I prefer “Happy Birthday Melania! Hope you spend it with a very special Canadian! winkwink” Maybe that’s why I write for fun instead of for a living. She probably won’t read the cards anyway, so I suppose it doesn’t really matter.

What made my Conservative Caucus mental health package worth discussing was the
addition of two other items: a letter, and a survey.

The letter was roughly what one might expect considering the contents of the birthday
card. Fill out the card, complete the survey, send us money–preferably 50 bucks. One item of note in the letter, aside from the frequent mentions of Melania being called a prostitute by The Daily Mail, was a list of The Conservative Caucus’ notable accomplishments:

It’s debatable that we did win the Cold War, considering notorious alcoholic Pete
Hegseth, acting in his capacity as SECDEF, ordered CYBERCOM to halt operations against
Russia last week. That and the whole “Russia might have interfered in our elections” thing. Also the Ukraine thing… but Cold War aside, the rest of it. Socialist agenda? Deep State Coup? I should explain why those are ridiculous statements, but I’m not going to, because that’s not what I want to write about. Republican nonsense rhetoric has been discussed to death. We all know it’s a collection of focus-group derived buzz words designed to rile up stupid people. What I would like to write about, thank you for asking, is the aforementioned survey.

At first glance, I couldn’t help but think that this was not a survey. I’ve taken a
survey. You’ve probably taken a survey. A survey asks questions that generate information that is useful to the survey-carrier-outer. “Do you think Melania isn’t in magazines because liberals?” and, “How do you think Barron Trump felt when the mean media called his mommy a prostitute?” are not questions that generate useful information for anyone. Whining about how much everyone loves Michelle Obama provides no significant strategic insight. So what is the point? More propaganda, mailed directly to constituents’ homes in case they missed it on Facebook?

I thought so, until I read questions six and seven. Questions one through five paint the media as irresponsible, partisan, and duplicitous–preying on pre-existing conservative distrust. Question six and seven are the money questions. They can provide information that is actually useful to the caucus. Do you think the media should report on minors, and would you support a law saying they can’t? They test conservative appetite for protecting children… at the cost of perhaps a teeny-tiny, itty-bitty infringement on free speech. If that is problematic for you, please reference the list of media wrong-doings in questions one through five.

I’m no absolutist. I know there are already infringements on free speech. This infringement, at surface level, is not particularly problematic. Children should probably not be exploited by the media. Think about it too long however, and my drive to be a contrarian outmatches my drive to be reasonable; it’s easy to make a slippery slope argument. As many point out, the slippery slope is a logical fallacy: one thing does not necessarily lead to the next, worse thing, culminating in the final, worst thing. Perhaps we should make an exception to that rule for anything tied to conservatism, but I’m not prepared to make that argument here. It’s easy though, to consider, “who might we be prevented from speaking about next?”

Will legislation censoring media in a small, unobjectionable manner come to fruition? Will
it lead to the next, worse thing? Is the survey actually indicative of policy plans, or is it just more propaganda? Undetermined as yet, though we will find out one way or another, sooner or later. Perhaps I’m reading too much into two questions buried in a pile of someone else’s mail, but my Conservative Caucus mental health package at the very least provided an insight into the conservative machine. The machine of MAGA, and the mind of conservatives like my asynchronous roommate.

The machine fills the homes of conservatives with mindless misinformation and trite what-aboutisms, impugning the integrity of the media and the morality of the “radical left.” My
asynchronous roommate becomes consumed by outrage. The machine demands loyalty to
conservatism, loyalty to the agenda, and loyalty to the Trumps, greatest of all families, who have delivered our nation from evil. My asynchronous roommate gladly pledges. The machine asks the governed that one minor concession be made. Just one more–for Melania, and poor Barron. What is left for my asynchronous roommate, but to say, “yes, please.”