Unlucky Gretchen Whitmer
Who could have imagined that her anodyne gesture in support of the CHIPS Act would inadvertently parallel the sacred rite of an obscure religious cult?
In another illustration of why, as Kamala Harris so eloquently puts it, “there has to be a responsibility that is placed on these social media sites to understand their power. They are directly speaking to millions and millions of people without any level of oversight or regulation, and that has to stop”, Gretchen Whitmer, the mild-mannered governor of Michigan, finds herself in an Internet kerfuffle because of her innocently intended endorsement of the CHIPS Act, a measure that offers microchip makers barrels of debt-funded federal subsidies in return for doing what they’re doing now and turning their HR departments over to Washington, D.C.
Governor Whitmer wanted to make a sure-to-go-viral Instagram “video about the importance of the CHIPS Act to Michigan jobs”. She picked the most straightforward – one might say stodgy – skit to make that point. She placed a chip (a Dorito, to make clear the connection to Vice President Harris) onto the tongue of a young woman who then rolled her eyes, lips and mouth lasciviously, thus showing what orgasmic Joy CHIPS would bring to the Wolverine State.
Unfortunately, the governor and her acolyte were unaware that, by an astonishing – or perhaps it is diabolical? – coincidence, a little known cult performs a ritual in which a shaman (not positive that’s the right title, but whatever) places a round bit of bread on the tongues of kneeling worshipers. The latter don’t roll their eyes and look as if they were engaged in intimate activity with the bread, but the resemblance was so eerily similar that the sect’s hierarchs (all males and mostly white, so you know what they are like) complained, and a whole bunch of MAGA types began mocking in unison with them on the Site Formerly Known As Twitter That No Decent Person Looks At Any More.
The governor should, of course, have stood firm and refused to apologize to those mouth-breathing deplorables. She is, however, such a sensitive person that she told the racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-trans, despicable MAGAyars that she didn’t mean to offend them. Of course she didn’t, because how could she have known anything about their weird “eucharists”? That’s no reason, though, to waste sensitivity on gap-toothed Twitter trolls. Come on, gov. Let them feel the full weight of your contempt. Maybe in the future they’ll think (if they are capable of that) before criticizing their moral, ethical and intellectual betters – and certainly before bitching about them. That has to stop!