The Worst People In America:

For starters, none of the people the Times spoke with seem to understand that they—personally—are culpable for Carol’s imprisonment.

Waitress Celena Horton says she loves almost everything Trump is doing—with the one tiny exception being that he imprisoned her friend and tore her friend’s life and family apart.

Does anyone in Kennett have the cognitive capacity to understand that a world exists outside their field of vision?

Do these moral monsters have any capacity for empathy for people they do not personally know?

Do you think they’d be willing to do something as unthinkable as voting for another political party in order to bring Carol home? Me neither.

These are people who caused harm to their friend, but express no remorse or contrition. They cannot imagine a world outside their own experience. And they aren’t doing anything to atone for their mistakes other than engage in base, performative sentiment.

These people are unserious. And because of that they are dangerous, both to people like Carol and to the larger American experiment.

These snowflakes in Missouri and Maryland are more provincial than any elite Manhattanite I’ve ever met. They believe that the world ends at their line of sight. They have no ability to empathize except with their own kind and kin. And in their malicious stupidity they have set the country ablaze.

Whatever you want to say about Donald Trump, he is what he is: a con man, a mafioso, a thug, a grifter. He has no illusions.

The people of Kennett and Emmitsburg have nothing but illusions.

If the Republic fails it won’t be primarily because Republican elites were craven, or because elected Democrats didn’t play perfect baseball. It will be because Real Americans were manifestly unworthy of their country.

Maybe this is just the Catholic in me but the thing I find most galling in this entire story is the lack of contrition.

It’s one thing to have made a mistake in voting for Trump, because you didn’t know or didn’t believe what he would do to one of your friends. But to see it happen—see the mother of your children’s playmates torn from her family—and not recoil in horror at your own complicity? How can a person be numb to that?

Sincerely: I don’t get it. There are two types of tribalism: Real and symbolic. In “real” tribalism, Carol’s friends from Kennett would vote Democrat for the rest of their lives. They’d never forgive the Republican party for literally tearing apart the life of someone dear to them.

Instead, we have symbolic tribalism, in which the fate of the literal member of their tribe is of secondary importance to the perceived solidarity with the hosts of Fox News.