Today I’d like to write about a tweet from a Republican United States congressman, Clay Higgins of Louisiana. The tweet, posted on February 27th, 2022, reads as follows: “You millennial leftists who never lived one day under nuclear threat can now reflect upon your woke sky. You made quite a non-binary fuss to save the world from intercontinental ballistic tweets.”
Now, I don’t have a Twitter account any more, but I saw this tweet as a screenshot on some other sites. I was immediately intrigued by it because I couldn’t quite understand what it was saying. I kind of understand the words being used, but it doesn’t seem to make sense. I’m not sure what, if any, the point of these two sentences actually is. There’s just kind of a vibe that millennials are bad. But let’s try to make sense of it.
So, he starts off with “You millennial leftists,” and that’s me! That’s what I am! Of course, Republicans use the word ‘leftist’ all the time just because it’s very spooky, but a lot of the time they’re just talking about liberals, who are not leftists. He’s probably just lumping everyone together, as people do. I’ve also heard the term ‘millennial’ being used in a derogatory tone for basically my entire life. Not derogatory like a slur, but just said with disdain, in an obviously negative tone. It’s only during the last couple of years that the reverse has happened, with ‘boomer’ being commonly said in a derogatory tone.
I’m not really a fan of either because I don’t think it’s all that funny, to be honest. Kinda lazy. It’s just like, I’ve heard so many times people just kinda be like ‘Oh! Millennials sure do stuff…’ and that’s like the whole joke. The word is just said, and if you already don’t like millennials, it’s funny to you.
Anyway, he’s addressing millennial leftists, and he’s claiming that we’ve never lived under a nuclear threat. That’s at least an interesting claim. What counts as a nuclear threat? Since 1949, there have been at least two nations with functioning nuclear weapons. Have we been all living under a nuclear threat since then? Since there has been a possibility of nuclear war since then? That is my opinion. Every single day of the last 70ish years, there could have been a nuclear strike, and every single day we haven’t had it yet.
But maybe that’s too lenient of a definition. That doesn’t constitute a nuclear threat. In order for a period to be considered a nuclear threat, a threshold of probability has to be crossed. And nuclear war isn’t just gonna happen out of nowhere on any random day. There would have to be an escalation of tensions, wars, etc. before it went nuclear. My response to that is: is that a law of the universe?
And what is the threshold, then? One event that we can all agree upon as being a nuclear threat was the Cuban Missile Crisis, which occurred in 1962, when Clay Higgins was one year old. I can just imagine a really old guy talking shit on Higgins for not being self-aware during a real nuclear threat. That’s why Higgins is such a piece of shit, because he wasn’t a big boy when WWIII was closest to happening.
This has to be the purpose and meaning of the tweet, that I’m somehow a piece of shit for not having lived under a sufficient nuclear threat for Higgins’ liking. Like, how the fuck am I supposed to control that? Isn’t it good to not live under nuclear threat? Isn’t that one of the minor successes of the conclusion of the Cuban Missile Crisis? That people could breathe a bit more easily moving forward?
And he says that millennial leftists “can now reflect upon your woke sky.” I really don’t understand what he’s trying to communicate here. What is a woke sky? Woke is another one of those words that Republicans just throw around. They’re just like, “AAghh! There is something woke happening here! That’s bad! Someone’s committing a woke act against me!” Again, if you already hate “wokeness,” or whatever you believe to be “woke,” then when you see the word being used in a derogatory way, you’ll be like “Hell yeah!” even if nothing is being said.
It seems like Higgins is trying to form a “you reap what you sow” type of statement. Like, you millennials sure fucked around by not living under a direct nuclear threat, and now you’re paying the price. The price is that you have to reflect upon a woke sky, which is a real, legitimate thing. I’d be curious to hear him expand on the meaning of “woke sky.” In what way is the sky woke?
His second sentence is even less coherent. “You made quite a non-binary fuss,” what could that possibly mean? Making a fuss in a non-binary way? Or the fuss itself is non-binary? I guess he’s trying to make some vague point about gender. Millennials [I think] are more generally more accepting of different gender identities and expressions and things like that than older people, like Higgins. So he thinks that everything we do is about gender? I’m confused about this. I know a couple non-binary people, and sometimes they make a fuss about something, like their job. That has nothing to do with being non-binary. It’s not a “non-binary fuss.” If, let’s say, Millennial leftists were against a Russian invasion of Ukraine, and we wanted it to not turn into a nuclear war, would that have anything to do with people being non-binary? Conversely, does the Russian invasion of Ukraine have anything whatsoever to do with non-binary people getting more recognition and acceptance? As if Putin was sitting there like, “Man, I’d really like to invade Ukraine, but U.S. millennials are just too binary for me to do that. Oh wait, they made a non-binary fuss? Time to invade Ukraine and threaten nuclear war!”
Now, Higgins’ tweet did not mention Russia or Ukraine specifically, but it was tweeted while Russia was invading, and while Putin was posturing about his nuclear arsenal, the greatest in the world [I think]. So it’s hard to believe that his tweet, which references nuclear threats, has nothing to do with the current war.
Okay, so what is the non-binary fuss even about, according to Higgins? To prevent “intercontinental ballistic tweets,” a surreal combination of words. Another reference to nuclear war, it seems, as intercontinental ballistic missiles [ICBM’s] would potentially be used to deliver nuclear weapons to their targets over long distances. That’s part of what makes the potential nuclear war so scary, is that these things travel very far, very fast. But he’s not talking about missiles. He’s talking about ballistic tweets, which, again, are real. Woke skies, non-binary fusses, and ballistic tweets are all real things.
Anyway, I suppose this is some attempt at referencing conservatives who have been banned from twitter, most prominently Donald Trump. I’m not sure if he’s making the claim that millennial leftists view tweets as comparable to ICBM’s. I’d be surprised if any millennial leftists actually thought that. “Intercontinental ballistic tweets” kinda reminds me of those old Looney Tunes where Daffy Duck would send a big missile at Marvin the Martian. Then the tip of the missile would open up and it would just release a little message saying “Bang!” or “Ouch!” or something like that. Just imagine Putin writing a tweet, and when he hits “send” it launches an intercontinental missile, and it travels all the way to Washington D.C., and then it just stops and a little flag comes out, and it says “Welcome to Cold War 2.0,” that’s a ICBT right there.
So, if I was forced to try to interpret Higgins’ tweet as a whole, I would say that these are his main points: Millennial leftists [spooky] have not lived under an intense nuclear threat, and that is a bad thing. It has led to two distinct negative outcomes: the development of a woke [spooky] sky, and the creation of non-binary [spooky] fusses. Those two negative outcomes combine in a futile attempt to prevent tweets, which resemble nuclear missiles somehow.
In reality, it’s just a word salad that makes no sense. It’s just an angry guy throwing a bunch of words that he hates into a couple sentences that have no meaning. It’s almost like that sentence, “More people have been to Berlin than I have.” Each word seems to combine with the previous word, but as a whole, it’s meaningless.
Just for fun, I’ll make up my own tweet, in a similar fashion, against people like Clay Higgins. Here it goes: “Boomer conservatives, who never lived in fear of school shootings, can now consider their politically incorrect roadways. You made quite a 2nd amendment tantrum to change the world with high-capacity minion memes.”
Lefty Forrester 