Cashew Chicken
Show me elected officials who should Log Off!
“Each day on twitter there is one main character. The goal is to never be it”
I will admit I have a long history of insisting everyone, especially elected officials, log the fuck off.
Even before Elon, when accounts were still (actually) verified and Twitter had an active moderation team, there were always main characters, and you never wanted to be one.
Rep. Sarah Unsicker, as of this writing, is currently the main character of Missouri politics Twitter (I’m sorry, I keep trying to call it X and it makes the skin on my typing fingers crawl).
It’s hard to find where all of this started, but as far as I can tell, it has something to do with Rep. Jamie Gragg's HB 1624, which seeks to make Cashew Chicken the official state food of Missouri. Yes. That’s where all of this started. People on Twitter got upset about the bill, as people on Twitter are literally always getting hyper-upset about uncontroversial things. It’s part of the fun of the platform.
And that also could have been where all of this ended. We all could have had a nice laugh about a superfluous bill that will never become law and moved on with our lives. But I am here writing about it because Rep. Unsicker began pointing to tweets about cashew chicken and HB 1624 as examples of a literal foreign influence campaign, meant to distract us all from the real issues. She has multiple multi-tweet threads about how there is a grand conspiracy to divide democrats and hurt Rep. Unsicker, specifically, using anger over cashew chicken. Seriously.
It only got worse and weirder from there, with Unsicker lashing out at friends and supporters who were concerned by her sudden and aggressive obsession with cashew chicken. Then, as if she had discovered another shovel to dig her own grave with in the middle of the tweetstorm, Unsicker posted a photo of her and Eric Garland getting drinks with a Holocaust denier with one of the longer “Controversies” sections on Wikipedia that I’ve ever seen.
If you’ve been following this weird saga since yesterday, there are probably important details that I’m leaving out, but I’m not sure the rest of it is particularly important. I wanted to write about this because it is such a clear example of the brain rot that comes with being Too Online. Twitter especially creates an environment in which it can seem like EVERYONE is talking about whatever you’re talking about, until you realize that it’s actually just you, a neo-nazi, and Eric Garland sitting around a bar table refreshing your feed while friends and family escalate their concern for your own well being. That is brain rot, and no way to spend your campaign time.
I know that, if she is reading this, Rep. Unsicker will just comfortably sort me into the column of people who are in on the conspiracy. That’s fine, I don’t have an actual dog in this fight. I didn’t write this for her, I wrote it for you.
And if you are an elected official reading this, take the Cashew Chicken saga for what it is — a really good reason to log off.
Wow.