Or, you know, they're Satanic baby-killers killing babies for Satan because they did not want to criminalize abortion. Same game, same fantasy, same desperate attempt to pretend you're not the bad guy by bearing the worst-imaginable false witness against your neighbors.

LBJ and Goldwater chose sides and their parties realigned accordingly and the white right couldn't bear knowing they'd chosen the objectively, obviously, extremely wrong side. So they rallied with a new game: Democrats are evil because they bake Christian children into their unleavened bread.

This is the game of make-pretend that the white right has played along with ever since the Civil Rights Movement. Less than 20 years after fully realizing they were, objectively and in fact, the Bad Guys, they regrouped and rebounded by pretending to redefine progressives as Satanic baby-killers.

Vance's blood-libel attack on Native Americans is his way of inviting his fellow white supremacists to participate in a game in which they all agree to pretend that they're the good guys in this story, and in every story, because the other side is always Satanic baby-killers.

Here, the anxiety comes from being the bad guys in the whole "First Thanksgiving" story and the history of genocidal slaughter and endless broken treaties. What's worse than killers, thieves, and serial oath-breakers?

Baby-killers. That makes them worse than us and that makes us "good." Yay us.

Thankfully it was invented at the University of Florida and not at Florida State. Seminade likely wouldn’t have caught on.

Hey, Charlie Brown, fer chrissakes, if you wanna know the truth of it, I don't have a husband, and he don't play the trombone

I absolutely, totally, completely understand that it does not work this way. Yet I also consistently fear and suspect and act as though it works this way.

I mean, like, “good news” in the sense that a “Town rallies to aid tornado victims” story is good news. The rallying is good. The tornado, obviously, was very bad.

And also too like “good news” as in gospel.

sometimes your enemy’s enemy is just some asshole