This Was Never Going to Work

They can hurt people and the country, but they can't succeed.

Twenty million undocumented aliens make America a hellscape of crime and violent death. Previous governments had allowed, or even sought out, criminals in other countries to strengthen the Democratic Party at the ballot box. The federal budget is mostly scams, and when we cut those off, the deficit will disappear and we can FINALLY cut taxes on the poor billionaires at long last. All the laws and safeguards are there to protect corruption, so we don’t have to be careful.

This is the kind of genius we’ve come to expect of this Administration, and on the back of Xitter rumors like this, the Administration’s bull has smashed its way through the china shops of the world. Since the government is just a scam, it doesn’t matter if pimply young acolytes of the World’s Richest Man feloniously cut off funding for vital government services, because most of the recipients of say, USAID, were poor people of color in the Global South, so it wouldn’t matter if an estimated 14 million die after we cut them off without an act of Congress. Since brown people in this country are immigrants, we can stop every brown person, detain citizens, whatever it takes to meet the quota based on an online rumor.

The chaos, incompetence, and corruption of the Trump presidency is made possible by lies. Even without the opposition these cretins attract as moths to a flame, the things they want to do aren't possible because they are based on lies. ICE goons aren’t just bigoted and evil; they are desperate to fill quotas based on lies. That’s why they are hauling children out of school, patients from the hospital, and asylum-seekers from their meetings with immigration caseworkers. Their lawless violence on our streets is the result of a fever dream that has gripped white America. Reactionary media is insanely profitable, and the secret to profitability is fear. Middle-aged white men have been sold a vision of the world in which subhuman brown people are destroying America with their endless numbers and bestial crimes. The majority accept the narrative because it comes in the form of flattery. Such albinoids are held to be the repositories of ‘western culture,’ despite the fact that few seem to read or to listen to music written before 1970.

In reactionary parlance, ‘culture’ has become the laundry for race. Instead of arguing that people of color are genetically inferior or evil, it is just their cultures that make them inferior and evil. I almost asked myself what kind of moron would be fooled by such cheap evasions, before realizing the answer is likely most of the people I went to high school with.

None of these fantasies, nor this obsession with race, can solve the real problems with the American economy and political order. Even acknowledging real, measurable social and economic problems associated with economic inequality is considered unacceptable for most white people. To most American whites, the childish fantasies of American exceptionalism and innocence are just ‘common sense,’ not monstrous justifications for mass murder.

It has, therefore, been apolitical, partially-literate white people who have betrayed this nation over the last decade. For most of you reading this, that could be your family, your neighbors, coworkers and friends. Many accept the fever-dreams of reactionary media as ‘common sense.’ In the heyday of the printed word, when access to information and expertise was dependent on schools and libraries, ignorance was the natural state, which required will and interest to overcome. If you were born in the wrong zip code, you might be condemned to ignorance.

When almost every American adult has a networked computer in their pocket, this state of naivete becomes more difficult to maintain and to justify. Ignorance and bigotry have become a matter of consumer choice.

During the discovery phase of Dominion Voting Systems’ lawsuit against FOX News over 2020 election lies, we read the text messages from primetime FOX hosts complaining that the network’s ‘factual news’ wing factually reported that Job Biden won the electoral count. Viewers turned off their sets, or switched to the consummately unscrupulous Newsmax, in response. The wildly profitable agitprop outlet was losing market share, share price, and profitability! Fuck the Republic, I want my fucking money! FOX viewers aren’t just suckers. They demand to be lied to, and if FOX won’t do it, Newsmax will. Rank-and-file reactionaries have made a consumer choice to live in a nightmare world of hate and fear because a world in which brown people and queers are their equals is completely unacceptable. Literally anything is better than that. White people, unless they make it their business to learn better, are shit because whiteness is shit. It’s a lie, a myth. If Barack Obama, with one black and one white parent, gets to be black, but not white, then whiteness is irrational and non-existent. Being raised white in American culture is a vector of mass psychological injury. Whiteness makes white people crazy.

So, the American right rejects or distorts any standard or system of empirical truth. It’s psychologically unacceptable to the groundlings and a threat to the incomes and wealth of the performers, and for those performers who actually mentally reside in ReactionWorld, the combination of motives often produces the kind of meltdown guaranteed to boost clicks. This ‘authenticity’ gives the truly crazy a boost in the competition for market share, driving a positive feedback loop of unreality that is driving a third of the country, and a bare majority of whites, over the cliff.

It is from this aberrant sociopsychological environment that spring ICE officers, long in thrall to proto-, crypto-, and just plain fascist demagogues, eager to hurt brown people. The violence, intimidation, gloating publicity videos seemingly cut from C-grade action movies, and repeated murders are products of a propaganda feedback loop that most civilized nations would have long since sought to reform. They are living out the violent fantasies of a reactionary media turned outright fascist by simple market forces. Undereducated, book-averse whites raised to consider themselves racially superior demand a continuation of these childhood fantasies into senescence. White Americans, like Peter Pan, refuse to grow up, empowered by the magic of consumer choice.

So, this Administration, long cleansed of anyone with independent expertise or moral judgement, is trying to act out a fascist fantasy that they believe as well as promulgate, making correction of error all but impossible. They will lash blindly at the world, causing great harm and millions of private tragedies, but they can’t make their vision real. When they try to exert control, they will lose it. When they try to discredit opposition, they will unite and empower it. When they try to increase their power, they will lose it for years or even decades.

I can make these predictions with such confidence because of a simple truth: The wise enslave themselves to truth, but the fool tries to enslave truth. Truth fights back. So, our enemies, despite causing much suffering, misery, and death, will defeat themselves by showing their ideas to be false in a way that even inattentive, ‘apolitical’ Americans can’t miss.

It isn’t just that Trump himself is dumb, though he is. Even a ‘smart’ fascist in the modern environment is pressured into ideological rigidity that dooms any venture. Building power means interacting with, and learning from, reality. The rigidity of reactionary ideology and the modern tools of propaganda and ideological discipline require any practitioner to place continued membership of the Club. If they leave the Club, their paid career in politics is over, and they have to, like Cincinnatus, return to the law practice or car dealership in Southern Indiana.

Better a shill for the Apocalypse than that.