

Sometime in or around 2007, a friend’s ex-boyfriend, whom I was not particularly close with but had no animosity toward, invited me to join a Facebook group founded by “fiscal conservatives” and libertarians that advocated “sending a tea bag to Washington” in order to hold politicians accountable for… something that sounded completely normal, it’s hard to remember the initial platform. I was very young and much less jaded at the time, so I clicked “join” just to be nice. That’s how, many years after I’d forgotten about that dumb Facebook invite, I was horrified to realize I was a member of some weird proto-Tea Party, at least in long-forgotten Facebook groups. Since then, I have been wary of clicking “join” when Republicans and Republican sympathizers ask me to be in groups with them, even if those groups start out with superficially shared aims, such as removing Donald Trump from office. Because even if the first ask sounds reasonable, the next one usually involves Ted Cruz or Sarah Palin.
So that is why even if today’s New York Times op-ed written by conservatives George T. Conway III, Steve Schmidt, John Weaver, and Rick Wilson, members of a group calling themselves the “Lincoln Project,” asks “broadly conservative (or classically liberal)” politicians to impeach Donald Trump and fight his reelection, I remain wary of this newfound interest in protecting America from the “scourge of Trumpism” in the name of preserving the union. Especially when that call comes wrapped in Civil War references, since it was faux patriotism revisionist history that created the Tea Party and ultimately a post-truth America in the first place.