On Thursday, former Republican National Committee communications strategist Liz Mair expressed disappointment that fetid hellhole Twitter had gotten pretty boring recently. “I’m starting to consider tweeting deliberately crazy and offensive stuff just to try to spice it up again,” she wrote. Lo and behold, by Friday, Mair published something batshit enough to make herself Twitter’s main character of the day.
If you don’t know Mair, her personal website boasts that she “led an aggressive and groundbreaking online media outreach effort aimed at electing John McCain, Sarah Palin and Republicans across the US. In this capacity, she also served as a spokesperson, undertaking on-camera interviews and debates on behalf of the RNC and the campaign against representatives of the Obama campaign and the DNC.”
Mair has also been tied to politicians like Rick Perry, Scott Walker, and Rand Paul. But that’s not why she’s in the news today. Instead, everyone is talking about Mair because of what she said on Twitter.
“I have resorted to burning Pokémon cards as a punishment when my kid doesn’t do basic stuff he has to do,” she posted earlier today. What, you ask, qualifies as basic stuff? Eating, it turns out.
“He comes home without having eaten any of his lunch? Card burnt. He doesn’t eat enough dinner? Card burnt. Bear in mind my kid is about 4’6” tall at age seven and yet weighs less than 55 pounds. He needs to put some weight on, specifically muscle,” she continued.
These unhinged tweets made the internet feel pretty bad for the kid because what the hell. Why would anyone do something like this, much less boast about it to nearly 50,000 people?
Well, looking closer for a split second, despite the weirdly specific description of what qualified for card burning, it appears that Mair was just pulling everyone’s leg. At least, that’s the implication. Kotaku has reached out for clarification. Most people, it seems, didn’t catch the Tweet where she proposed losing it for entertainment. Really, most people are likely just looking at the viral screenshots out of context. Or they’re debating if that type of punishment is worse than Bean Dad, another full-blown adult whose 15 minutes of fame revolved around being strangely cruel to his own child.
But if you scroll through the woman’s actual timeline, she’s shared a couple of posts by people stating the situation was never real in the first place. They give the sense that she was instead trying to see how much she could rile people up.
Guess it worked, though even as a ruse, it’s a fairly baffling one. What sane person would be burning Pokémon cards right now given the wild prices they’ve been commanding of late? Not to mention, folks already have strong opinions about parenting, even when it comes to fairly innocuous things. Even jokingly, I’m not sure I’d want to be tied to the idea of abuse, nor would I want to be known as the burning Pokémon cards lady. But hey, what do I know. I’m not a comms expert.