Somehow, this story seems related to the previous post.
Paul Gosar (R-AZ) tweeted out an altered anime video that attacks illegal immigrants (not that there’s anything wrong with that) and shows someone with two swords attacking a giant Joe Bden head. The video in his tweet used clips from popular Japanese anime “Attack on Titan,” and opens with Gosar’s name under Japanese text, which reads “attack of immigrants” (if you can read Japanese) before it continues to show real clips of Gosar and Border Patrol agents spliced alongside scenes from the anime show’s opening credits.
Several news outlets say the video shows Gosar killing killing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. If it does, I missed it, but then I could barely stand watching the thing. If that’s really in the video, I’d say it’s unprofessional, uncivil and unethical. All of it is inexcusable, though.
What’s the matter with this guy? Is he 12? This isn’t the kind of video a member of Congress should be having made, or put on social media. It’s an embarrassment to Congress, his party, his state, and his country. By what bizarre concept of public service and the House ethics rules could anyone conclude that such an assaultive, offensive, infantile piece of agitprop belongs in the public square?
If the rumored 2022 “red wave” doesn’t accomplish anything better than to put more jerks like Gosar in the House, it’s not worth the effort.
Ethics Alarms 
This is the downstream impact of “clapback culture”, where instead of having earnest opinions you can just react to everything you don’t like with snark. It’s infected everything from corporate Twitter accounts (see Wendy’s) to Congress (AOC). I see it as the middle stage between the ironic detachment that was so popular about ten years ago, to the finger-wagging officiousness we have today.
Also, clapback is a dumb word.
I had that conversation with a lawyer junior to me answered my justified criticism of an action he had taken with snark. I told him that the real world is not a sitcom, and you don’t win things just by having a snappy comeback. In fact, in the real world a snappy comeback can get you in a whole lot of trouble, like your superior writing you up for discipline. I didn’t need to explain to him what I meant.
It’s a dumb video, but to be fair, I think it was a sad attempt to show him fighting against the likes of AOC and the President to defend the borders. I definitely don’t think it’s as bad as the left seems to make it out to be.
It does concern me that Twitter labels it thusly:
“This Tweet violated the Twitter Rules about hateful conduct. However, Twitter has determined that it may be in the public’s interest for the Tweet to remain accessible. “
Translation: We would have banned this guy before last Tuesday but our new strategy is to selectively curate the tweets of people we hate so that the dumbest stay up in the hopes that it will affect how many votes the Republicans get in 2022.
I think people elect people like this to congress due to the assumption that politicians who reflect the anger we feel back at us have the intention of doing something about the things we are angry about. In most cases this assumption is completely erroneous. Politicians, by and large, do not care about the people they represent. They do not care about the issues affecting the people they represent. They care about money and power, and getting elected so they have access to money and power.
Eventually people notice that the elected person doesn’t care, so the elected people start pretending to care. Doing what the people they represent wants might cut into their money and power motivated bottom lines, though, so actual changes are not on the table. So what to do? Tweet angry nonsense!
Tweeting out angry nonsense rhetoric is just a virtueless virtue signal to keep the angry people a politician represents thinking they care about the issues the people want them to. The angrier the people get, the angrier the rhetoric gets. Nothing ever gets done about the things people are angry about, so they just get even angrier. So the rhetoric gets even angrier, in an endless feedback loop. It also seems to get more nonsensical in an endless feedback loop. I guess they are banking on anger making people stupid.