Three days after the election, Justine Bateman, the former Family Ties star, catapulted herself into the political muck with a tweetstorm to her 140,000 followers that began: “Decompressing from walking on eggshells for the past four years.”
She continued: “Common sense was discarded, intellectual discussion was demonized. . . Complete intolerance became almost a religion and one’s professional and social life was threatened almost constantly. Those that spoke otherwise were ruined as a warning to others. Their destruction was displayed in the ‘town square’ of social media for all to see.”
In other words, she said out loud the thing everyone has been thinking.
The tweetstorm went viral, and her followers more than doubled. People responded on X with tweets like: “A long war just ended and I’m finally home” and “It’s okay to be normal.”
“She’s definitely striking a strong nerve!” Bateman’s publicist, Elizabeth Much, emailed me.
At 58, Bateman is a member of Generation X, as am I, so I was hardly surprised to see a Gen Xer—those of us who mostly grew up in the 1970s and early 1980s—willing to say what so many Americans (of all ages) had been thinking: that they were done with being told how to think. That they would no longer put up with the travesties of the past four or eight or 10 years, or whenever you mark the beginning of the Great Awokening: the cancel culture, the pronoun fetish, the war on supposed “disinformation,” and all the rest of it.