The Leopards Are Hungry, And They Will Eat Well
A badge for the “Leopards Face-Eating Party”, which so many people thought would never eat THEIR faces.
For those of you who don’t know, the saying “leopards ate my face” comes from a 2015 post on the platform formerly known as Twitter (I call it Xitter, pronounced “shitter”). What it basically means is that people voted for a cruel political party because they wanted to impose its policies on other people, but these people will face the consequences of these policies themselves. In the past it’s been applied to people who voted for Brexit in the UK in 2016 when a British citizen resents having to go through passport control when returning from an EU country, or people in the US after voting for Trump that same year. With the reelection of Donald Trump in 2024, we are about to have a sequel to this movie. And the sequel is usually worse.
One of the reasons Trump won so decisively is because he was able to make some immense gains with the Latino vote. According to current exit polling data from Edison Research, 54% of Latino men voted for him, compared to 36% in 2020. Following his victory, Trump promised to begin mass deportations of undocumented immigrants on day one. Now, only United States citizens can vote in the country’s elections, but it won’t be easy for this orange fascist to tell who’s undocumented and who isn’t. It’s entirely possible that Latino U.S. citizens will be caught in the crossfire, and some of these people will be deported even if they have every legal right to be here. To be honest, if I were them, I wouldn’t mind being deported from Trumpistan, but that’s just me.
Pro-Palestine protestors objecting to the DNC, taken from the Associated Press. Some of these people are idiots, and we’re all going to suffer for their stupidity.
Then we have the pro-Palestine protestors. Now, I am no fan of the Israeli government. In fact, I think Benjamin Netanyahu is a genocidal maniac who should be in a war crimes prison, and it’s a disgrace that the Biden administration has kept sending him weapons even in the face of this genocide. But I’ve been saying for a long time that these people cannot be reasoned with, and that shows it isn’t only Trump’s cultists who live in an alternate reality. If anything I find the anti-Harris leftists more frustrating than the Trump cultists, because in the latter case, you at least know that you don’t have to convince them. If only Trump’s most diehard supporters had voted for him, he would not have been able to win Tuesday’s election. But instead, it seems many young people who claimed to support Palestine did not vote, and I’m about to demonstrate how stupid and short-sighted that was.
First of all, there’s literally a place in Israel called Trump Heights. My dad’s been there on business. That says it all. But if you’re still not convinced, Trump withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal in 2018, which Netanyahu really wanted him to do. That led indirectly to October 7, in which one of Iran’s proxies massacred Israeli civilians and gave the government casus belli to go after the civilians in Gaza. It’s believed by many that Bibi knew the attack was going to happen and did nothing to prevent it for that reason. Additionally, in the last few months he has escalated the genocide in Gaza, which has now spilled over into Lebanon, and all of that was in service of getting Trump elected. And it worked.
Over the last few months, I’ve seen a lot of people on the social platform BlueSky say that they wouldn’t vote for Harris because she supports genocide. Now, I don’t know what Harris would do about the Israel-Gaza conflict. Would she keep giving Netanyahu free reign, or would she try to check the Israeli Prime Minister’s worst impulses? I don’t know, and we’ll never know, because she isn’t going to be President. But Trump has openly said he wants to make Gaza beachfront property. He’s said he wants to deport pro-Palestine protestors and set the movement back “25 or 30 years”, per Vox. Given the aforementioned promise of mass deportations starting day one, I truly believe that for all the promises he hasn’t fulfilled, this is one he intends to keep. In other words, he’s repeatedly said he’ll give Netanyahu carte blanche to do whatever he wants, and the pro-Palestine people who sat out this election, voted third-party, or in some cases even voted for Trump just didn’t realize that. Or maybe they didn’t care, and they were just virtue-signaling to begin with. One of the two.
I could name many more examples. Lots of people who voted for Trump rely on the Affordable Care Act to survive. I’m not going to defend the ACA - ideally, it would have gone much further and given us truly universal health care. But things could also be much worse. We might have a government dedicated to repealing it…oh wait. Additionally, there’s this pastor I look up to (even if I’m not a religious man myself). His name is John Pavlovitz, and I’ll provide you all with this sage quote from him, which I think truly says it all:
A very wise and sobering quote about the state of our politics.
I’ve talked about all the things Trump has said during this campaign. He said all these things knowing that he needed to win the election, and that if he didn’t, he was likely to go to prison. And now he won’t go to prison, because he will be President of the United States instead. Keep in mind that once he’s President, he will never have to run another campaign again. I believe he will be truly unleashed in his second term to do whatever the hell he wants. And that’s a terrifying thought, to be sure, but if you voted for him, my sympathy for you is limited. The rest of us will be paying the price for potentially decades to come. But in the meantime, the leopards are going to feast like it’s Thanksgiving. And speaking of Thanksgiving, I feel very fortunate that nobody in my family voted for Trump; otherwise, it would be incredibly awkward at best. I’ll leave you with this meme shared by a user called “scottie1966” on Threads:
Thank you for reading.
