These People Are Never Happy
And I don't think they ever will be.
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Yesterday should have been a once-in-a-lifetime miracle for the Republican Party and American conservatives, the kind of event that would render any film or television screenplay vulnerable to fair accusations of jumping the shark.
One of their own, a good Catholic boy from the Midwest who had grown into a good Catholic man, reportedly a consistent voter in Republican primaries, a committed social conservative, anti-LGBTQ, anti-choice, literally an altar boy and the youngest of three brothers—who would tease him as a kid about being “too holy” and joke he’d be pope someday—the product of a good Catholic family, raised in the greatest country on earth, had become the 267th Bishop of Rome.
Did I mention he’s a baseball fan? “Not the Cubs,” his brother felt the understandable need to emphasize to a New York Times reporter yesterday. He’s always been a White Sox guy, which is quite fitting for a priest. A true advocate for the downtrodden.
Did I mention he has Black ancestry? His maternal grandparents are of Creole lineage, from a Catholic neighborhood in New Orleans’ 7th Ward, both listed as Black Americans in various Census records. Surely, this has to be some kind of opening for potent conservative outreach to Black American Catholics.
All that was missing was the revelation he’s an Eagle Scout, which, in fairness, might also turn out to be true and we just don’t know about it yet because the new pope is apparently known by his colleagues for his humility.
An American pope in our lifetime and he’s an American conservative and he’s from the Heartland and he’s a Republican primary voter and he’s likable and he’s got a storybook biography.
None of it was enough. None of it.
The whole package—delivered like manna from Heaven—was rejected outright by rightwing personalities in the hours after the announcement from St. Peter’s Square.
They didn’t wait a week. They didn’t wait a day. They immediately attacked.
Trump muse Laura Loomer slammed him as a “WOKE MARXIST POPE” (yes, in all caps). Mike Cernovich deemed him an “open borders globalist.” Alt-right personality Joey Mannarino called him a “liberal piece of shit” and claimed he’s worse than Pope Francis.
I was especially impressed with Megyn Kelly speed-running cognitive dissonance in her own reaction: shifting from tweets of joy over the announcement to incredulity in mere minutes. Literally fewer than five minutes. Read her tweets, bottom-to-top:
Sean Davis, CEO and co-founder of rightwing outlet The Federalist, went on his own little rant:
I told colleagues this morning that I was worried the Catholic cardinals would select a left-wing, Western European pope to use the Roman Catholic Church to counter the rise of national populism in general, and Trump in particular, and to bolster globalist forces against those who believe the purpose of a country is to safeguard its own people. The new pope was born in America, not Western Europe, so I was wrong on that score, but I fear I wasn’t wrong about the rest.
Globalist. Marxist. Left-wing. Woke. Liberal. Piece-of-shit.
And why?
Because he follows Christ's teachings on migrants and refugees. So, they're irate.
Their guy is in the Oval Office literally ordering ICE to terrorize migrants, detaining and shipping off innocent people to foreign prisons, defying the Supreme Court’s order to return Kilmar Abrego Garcia from El Salvador, violently suppressing free speech in service to their hateful ideology, and they’re furious that an American social conservative was just elected pope but is insufficiently hateful toward migrants.
They’ve gotten just about everything they want, and it’s not enough. It’s never enough.
These people are never happy. They crave outrage. They demand purity. They’re apoplectic that the first American pope actually reads his Bible.
It’s astonishing to me that I—a progressive trans woman—can do the (very hard) work of recognizing nuance and offering grace for profound disagreement in theology with the new pope, understanding both he and I are inherently imperfect Christians, but the rightwing can’t do that, yet they whine about “cancel culture.”
Y’all, they are literally trying to cancel the first American pope because he didn’t skip the parts where Christ talks about loving both thy neighbor and thy stranger in a strange land.
They’ve now won the lottery a few times over in the past year, and they’re utterly furious that the new leader of 1.4 billion Catholics worldwide—an American conservative who will be in charge for the next few decades—agrees with them on just about everything except for immigration.
It has to be exhausting to be so intentionally hateful and perpetually enraged like this.
Pray for them. They need way more help from God than the White Sox ever will.
The predictable right-wing snowflakes reveal that they are NOT followers of Jesus without saying so. ‘By their fruits you will know them.’ The right wing is morally rotten to the core and their reactions to Leo XIV prove it.
Absolutely this: "It has to be exhausting to be so intentionally hateful and perpetually enraged like this." I still ask myself every single day: Why does MAGA base their voting on "owning the libs"? What did the "libs" ever do to them? Brought us the five-day workweek, paid vacation, OSHA, Medicare, Social Security, road safety, food safety, air/water safety and so much more. WHY so much hatred from MAGA against the libs? And why are they still mad, even after their cult leader has been elected? When will they ever be happy? I think you're right - they never will be.