Four years ago, Elysha and I spent election night in Brooklyn as part of Slate’s Election Night Celebration. I shared a stage alongside the likes of Samantha Bee and Mike Pesca, telling a story about running for class president in college.
Halfway through the story, election returns began to shift in favor of the self-described serial sex offender and reality TV host. I watched as the eyes of my audience shifted from the stage to their phones, absorbing the latest news from Michigan and Wisconsin with universal horror. I nearly stopped telling my story midway through, realizing that my tale of presidential pursuit was no longer relevant nor amusing.
It was a terrible night for the majority of Americans who had not voted for an incompetent racist.
The beginning of a terrible four years for our country.
Elysha and I drove home that night along the Merritt Parkway, listening to music, trying to enjoy one more night in an America where a pathological liar and traitor was not the future President.
Tonight I’ll be retuning to the stage for another election-themed storytelling show. This time the show is virtual, and the story will be very different. Tonight I’ll be telling the story of getting blocked on Twitter in 2017 by the thin-skinned snowflake who currently occupies the White House and later joining the Knight Foundation’s lawsuit against him.
That lawsuit ultimately went to the Supreme Court, where we won.
One month after the Supreme Court rendered its decision. Trump was forced to unblock me. I’ve been tweeting at him ever since.
That is what I will be telling tonight.
I have yet to repeat the story of running for president in college. It’s a good story, filled with humor and heart, but somehow it also feels like bad luck.
If you’d like to attend the show, details are below.
More importantly, be sure to vote if you have not already.
It’s important.
Alongside the racists and grifters who support a man who separates families and cages small children on the border, there are also misinformed fools who have been convinced by the media, their families, or their friends that America is better off with this failed businessman at the helm.
These are people who believe that the know-nothing in the White House knows something. They have been frightened by lies about socialism, defunding the police, and tax increases.
These are folks who have been fooled into believing that the pandemic is not as bad as it seems. Not as deadly as it appears. Or not real at all. They callously ignore the 230,000 dead Americans. The tens of thousands currently hospitalized. The untold number who will live with the longterm effects of COVID-19 for the rest of their lives. They pretend that Woodward’s recordings of Trump discussing how the virus is airborne and at least five times as deadly as the worst flus back in February are irrelevant.
These are people capable of believing that if they can’t see it with their own eyes, it might not be true.
These are people so filled by greed that the prospect of paying more in taxes supersedes the cruelties enacted upon Black and brown people, members of the LGBTQ community, and Americans in need of relief after natural disasters.
Supposedly good people who have chosen the side of greed, avarice, self-enrichment, delusion.
Vote like your country depends upon it because it does.
