The young voices in the messages left for North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis were laughing, but the words were ominous.
“OK, listen, if you ban TikTok I will find you and shoot you,” one said, giggling and talking over other young voices in the background. “I’ll shoot you and find you and cut you into pieces.” Another threatened to kill Tillis, and then take their own life.
Tillis’s office says it has received around 1,000 calls about TikTok since the House passed legislation this month that would ban the popular app if its China-based owner doesn’t sell its stake. TikTok has been urging its users — many of whom are young — to call their representatives, even providing an easy link to the phone numbers. “The government will take away the community that you and millions of other Americans love,” read one pop-up message from the company when users opened the app.
Cool zoomers to US congress and senate members : 
This one hill has a hill on it called “no one can afford a house anymore” and that has a hill called “you’re bankrupted for life if you go to the ER” and that has a hill called “we keep giving more money to cops” and that has a hill called “doing the republicans border policy” and that has a hill called “being obviously senile” and that has a hill called “getting worse day by day” and that has a hill called “threw abortion rights under the bus to use it as an incentive to get votes” and that has a hill called “Ukraine” and that has a hill called “being a rapist” and that has a bill called “hey didn’t he do the Crime Bill?” and that has a bill called “why did he do all that fracking if he said he was gonna solve the climate crisis?” and that has a hill called “student debt” and that has a hill called “being a corrupt piece of shit” and that has a hill called “holding a eulogy for Strom Thurmond” and that has a hill called “mishandling COVID worse than trump” and that has a hill called “owing me money” and that has a hill called “needlessly escalating tensions with China” and that has a hill called “funding a genocide” and that has a hill called “commiting a genocide”.
But yeah the GOP is also bad, so I guess I gotta vote for him. It is the most important election of our lifetime, just like the last one and the one before that and the one before that and that and that and that and that and that. We just gotta swallow our pride and accept that the nominee is less than perfect and then next election we can focus on getting some good done, but right now we need to avoid the dang Cheeto! And we can push Biden left anyway, of course we shouldn’t actually try to push him left because that might mean the Cheeto gets elected, but we could in theory try to push Biden left.
The way being a politician works is that you appeal to your base in order to win votes. You’re not owed those votes, they’re not a right. If you can’t appeal to your voters, you don’t get elected. Going “I’m not as bad as the other guy” isn’t really a good strategy, it only works if you’re the only other choice and the other guy is absolutely horrendous. If you’re just as or almost just as shitty as the other guy, then it most certainly don’t work.