Author: Alan Buddug

We’re always talking about conservatives, but it isn’t clear that there are any. Sure, people say they are conservatives, but we know for a fact that white supremacists and other various kinds of fascists will call themselves conservatives. There’s the term “crypto-fascist” for a person who is a fascist but hides under some other label for the sake of safety and to facilitate spreading fascism.

I’m no fan of Hillary Clinton (or Bill, for that matter), but she did say something that really stuck with me. You’ve got to read the whole thing to actually understand what she was trying to say:

You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people — now how 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks — they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America. But the other basket — and I know this because I see friends from all over America here — I see friends from Florida and Georgia and South Carolina and Texas — as well as, you know, New York and California — but that other basket of people are people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they’re just desperate for change. It doesn’t really even matter where it comes from. They don’t buy everything he says, but he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won’t wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroine, feel like they’re in a dead-end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.

Hillary Clinton, https://time.com/4486502/hillary-clinton-basket-of-deplorables-transcript/

Like most liberal politicians, she won’t use the f-word (fascist), but that’s what she means — that half of Trump’s supporters are fascists, and the rest are conservatives who have valid concerns that politicians need to address. I’m pretty sure she doesn’t mean “roughly 50%” when she says “half” — no one really knows what the breakdown is. Fascists latched on to her statement and pretended that she was saying all Republicans are “deplorables” — an obvious lie, but it worked for them because most conservatives never bothered to read what she actually said.

We can’t know how many Trump supporters are fascists, because almost no one is an open fascist these days. The racists (for example) will say, “I’m not racist, I just think that it is objectively true that white people are better,” or something equally racist.

I’m not letting conservatives off the hook — if there are conservatives, they are standing shoulder-to-shoulder with fascists, and they need to take personal responsibility for that. As you’ll see, I’m still not sure there are any conservatives. What I’d like to do here is establish what would have to be true for conservatives to actually exist, and that might help you and me figure out who is a conservative. That seems like something really worthwhile.

1. If there are conservatives, they have empathy for other people — even people who are not part of their tribe.

“Fascism is a collective realization of the Death Drive.” Sigmund Freud’s ideas are clearly very outdated and mostly wrong, but some of his broad strokes are still worthwhile, including this idea that psychologically damaged people have a deep inner drive toward destruction, not just of others, but also of themselves, and the entire world. A fascist movement is when a bunch of people who want to destroy everything get together and work toward making that destruction happen. Instead of empathy for other people, fascists feel contempt — especially if they believe that other person is weak.

On the other hand, if you were to find a conservative, their ability to feel empathy for other people is going to be intact, even if they might have different (or even wrong) ideas about how (or whether) to help other people. It’s tricky, though, because a fascist and a conservative might both say, “Well, if I help this person, it actually hurts them by making them weaker.” The fascist is lying, and actually enjoying that other person suffering. The conservative feels bad for the person who is suffering but legitimately believes that’s how the world works.

I feel like the Breonna Taylor case is a nice barometer — if you can discern whether you’re getting a sincere response out of the person. A person with empathy will feel like something really horrible happened, and they will sympathize with the everyone who is protesting. They might include some conservative conspiracy crap about how antifas are infiltrating the protest to do communism, but they’ll acknowledge that the majority of the protesters have a legitimate complaint.

2. If there are conservatives, they will care about what is true — and that means their beliefs about what is true can change.

Fascists don’t care what is true. The whole fascist approach to reality is to just make shit up, and they make it up based on two things: 1) Whether the shit they are making up justifies what they’ve already decided they’re doing next, 2) Whether the shit they are making up increases their power. For example, when Donald Trump said that Mexico is sending mostly rapists and murderers to the US, he was justifying building a wall and putting immigrants coming across our southern border in concentration camps; in fact, those immigrants were less likely to be criminals than US citizens. It’s a completely backwards way of determining what is real compared to how you’re supposed to do it.

If a conservative tells you that they’re concerned that antifas are getting funding from a powerful evil because the conservative noticed that they have shields that look mass-produced, you should be able to explain to them that the left have these little workshops where they make stuff or teach a valuable skill (we’ve done chicken processing, sign making, rabbit processing, and beehive making, for example), and that those shields were mass produced in one of those workshops. Upon hearing this new information, a conservative would express that they might have been mistaken. In contrast, a fascist will change the subject because they never cared about the facts in the first place — they’re just trying to get you to shut up so they can be more successful in pushing fascism (or just making you look weak).

Here, you’re looking for very small changes in what the conservative believes to be true.

3. If you give a conservative concrete evidence of fascists in their midst, they will take action against them.

This might be hard to believe, but it has happened more than once: Leftists gun people at a rally were able to ID people in attendance who were fascist media personalities, and the conservatives in charge ejected those people from the event. You should take this seriously and before you organize a black bloc to fuck with a conservative protest, see if they will respond to requests to remove fascists from the event (you’ll need to be specific and have clear evidence, which might be hard given that fascists disguise themselves). Then, with the fascists gone, and nothing but a bunch of militant patriots remaining, there’s really nothing to counter protest. Sure, the display that remains might not be your favorite aesthetic, but it won’t be a danger to anyone.

The trick, of course, is how much evidence you have to provide. A fascist will pretend that they’re open to ejecting fascists from the event, but no amount of evidence will make them admit that anyone is a fascist. If Hitler’s there, and you say, “Look! It’s Hitler!” they’ll say, “Oh, well but he’s not goose stepping so he can’t be a fascist.” You’ll have to be reasonable about how much evidence you think is sufficient.

Here’s some things that don’t differentiate conservatives from fascists:

1. Thinking the US government is based on Christianity. It’s not, but that isn’t the point — even it if was, a conservative would respect the right of non-Christians to exist and be US citizens. On the other hand, a fascist has a version of Christianity that’s more about power than the teachings of Christ.
2. Thinking that evil socialist lizard people are going to destroy America. They don’t understand socialism at all, but that’s 80 years of propaganda to cut through. Even many Democrats are afraid of the left for this reason.
3. Thinking that the 2020 election was rigged. If literally everyone in your world said the election was rigged, you would believe it too.
4. Thinking that a republic (representative democracy) is better than a real democracy. I’m not trying to say conservatives are saints — they’re conservative, and part of that is not trusting the average person to make good decisions about how the world is run — but that should not mean that they want to restrict the ability of any group of people to vote for their representatives.
5. Thinking they may need to take up arms against the government. If the things conservative culture believes about how the world works were true, then taking up arms against the government would be both morally and pragmatically correct. People who think Satanic pedophiles are running the government but did not show up to storm the Capitol are literally more deplorable than people who believed those things and showed up.

If you’ve got a real conservative — with empathy, who cares about the truth, and who is willing to reject fascists — you’ve got a pretty good person despite the fact that they’re wrong about a lot of things. If we’re letting the “two sides” of evil — fascists and neoliberals — make us into enemies, we’re just working against ourselves. On the other hand, it’s entirely possible that there are no conservatives — just fascists with varying degrees of skill at hiding. It takes effort to separate those two “baskets” and you’ve got to do it one person at a time.

Aaron Sorkin’s recent film “The Trial of the Chicago Seven” is a great example of how liberalism (represented by Sorkin’s warped perspective of the events) differs dramatically from the left and seeks to erase it. We’ve found three different reviews of that film, but they all say roughly the same thing.

…Sorkin’s reformist retelling of this history is disappointing, if unsurprising. What could have been a moment to make the New Left and Black radical critiques of police terror and US imperialism (which are, of course, thoroughly intertwined) salient, particularly when so many of them continue to be relevant today, instead becomes yet another piece of centrist propaganda. It is in the end nothing more than apologia, offering cheap catharsis for anyone looking to be absolved of their liberal guilt and affirmed in their squeamishness toward protest and dissent.

“Aaron Sorkin’s Inane, Liberal History Lesson: Why his reformist retelling of the Chicago Seven fails to tell the real story of the leftists on trial.” by Charlotte Rosen, the Nation

Aaron Sorkin is probably best remembered for the candy-coated liberal optimism of the TV series “The West Wing”, a show which offered “the idealized fantasy of a calm, steady, liberal presidential administration doing its best to help the American people amid a sea of difficult political calculations” (Clint Worthington).

In Eileen Jones’s review of Chicago Seven, she writes:

…critics can praise the showy evidence of his craft while audiences get swept up by the way he makes ideological piety and cornball sentimentality look serious. If there are tears to be wrung, Sorkin wrings them. If there is patriotic fervor to spew, Sorkin spews it. And if there is any way at all he can demonstrate that America is great because our system works in spite of a few rotten apples, Sorkin demonstrates it with all the aggressive verbosity of a used car salesman.

“Aaron Sorkin Turned the Chicago 7’s Militancy and Defiance Into Bland Liberalism” by Eileen Jones, Jacobin Magazine

Jones concludes her review by saying that Sorkin’s work is “weak, toothless, and wholly inadequate”. Her issue isn’t just with this particular film, but Aaron Sorkin’s entire creative vision. Much like the Marvel Cinematic Universe is a world based on saccharine fantasies that is superficially similar to the real world, there is a Sorkin Cinematic Universe that is nearly as absurd.

The West Wing universe … is one in which an idyllic, two-term liberal presidency warmly embraces the military-industrial complex, cuts Social Security, and puts a hard-right justice on the Supreme Court in the interests of bipartisan “balance” — all the while making no observably transformative changes to American life. What matters most is how politics look and feel and whether the briskly striding people who staff the corridors of power possess diplomas from the right schools. Idealism, such as it is, has more to do with an abstract faith in American institutions and their inherent greatness (as in, “America is already great”) than any particular desire to make the world a better place or see a coherent set of values reflected within them. In Sorkin’s parochial fantasy, politics at its noblest and most high-minded consists mainly of wonkish sophistry and elegantly crafted speeches designed to offer vague comfort while saying nothing.

Luke Savage, quoted in “Aaron Sorkin’s Chicago 7 Are Shockingly Sympathetic, but Lacking Radical Substance” by Ben Burgis, Jacobin Magazine

If this is the squishy heart of liberalism — and I’m pretty sure it is — it’s easy to see why conservatives hate it. We also hate it.

In The Trial of Chicago 7’s liberal approach to history, those on the left must either be dismissed as idealists or kooks or properly sheared of their more oppositional ideas—all in the service of containing their political energies within the safer framework of incremental (read friendly to capital) reform. […] An animating belief of his work is that reaching for the center, no matter what the actual material realities of this bipartisan consensus may be, is the highest form of governance.

“Aaron Sorkin’s Inane, Liberal History Lesson: Why his reformist retelling of the Chicago Seven fails to tell the real story of the leftists on trial.” by Charlotte Rosen, the Nation

Given that Sorkin is fetishizing the American center — which is more accurately described as the “near right” — the functional purpose of his work is to build complacency rather than a better society. The actual material reality of succeeding in building a bipartisan consensus in US politics is suffering, hopelessness, and death. For example, what is the mid-point between “genocide” and “not genocide”?

The worst thing about Sorkin’s portrayal in Chicago Seven is that he does his best to avoid describing what it is that the leftists on trial want. This is an important part of the liberal erasure of the left. Liberals (and, specifically, Democrats) pretend that they are the left, and that makes the existence of the actual left a big problem, so they deny that the left wants anything different from what liberals want. Leftists are portrayed as liberals who use “bad” (synonymous with disruptive from the liberal perspective) methods to demand change, and therefore must be brought to heel. Meanwhile, conservatives (and, specifically, Republicans) portray the left as villains, and then pretend that Democrats are the left — even someone as conservative as Biden.

Both groups avoid accurately describing what the left truly wants because they don’t want the average citizen to think about it long enough to want it, too — although, Fox News occasionally presents a bulleted list of things intended to sound terrifying, but that actually sounds really good. The good that ultimately came out of the Bernie Sanders campaign was the fact that it let millions of Americans see that many things are possible outside of the false dichotomy of complacent liberalism vs. punitive conservativism.

It’s pretty frustrating that a person whose entire career seems to be built around trying to make people believe everything will be fine — so there’s no need to get off the couch — is so dang popular, but it isn’t surprising. Staying on the couch is what America wants more than anything.

From Narcissism can be contagious — and the repercussions extend beyond relationships by Matthew Rozsa:

As Kriesten explained, “The cult leader/follower relationship is based on psychological manipulation. The followers do not know what they are signing up for when they ‘attach’ to a leader, in the same way that people (usually women) don’t date and marry an abuser — the person they are dating and marrying is a devoted partner. Only later is it evident that the whole relationship is based on deception and coercion.”

and:

One reason is Stockholm Syndrome, a condition in which people identify with their aggressors as “a type of defense” in which “a bond is created where the victim is offered a locus of control.” Victims may also abuse others because “the victim internalizes the hostility in an effort to psychologically deny their own victimization. Therefore, through emulation, the victim alleviates the reality of helplessness and terror while maintaining the illusory bond of shared love and protection.”

and

Those who are researching narcissism by proxy online will quickly stumble across links that reference former President Donald Trump. After all, here is a political leader who has inspired literal cult-like movements such as QAnon, spent years conditioning his supporters to believe that it is impossible for him to legitimately lose an election and then became the first president to try to cling to power despite losing his reelection campaign. The end result is that thousands of his supporters rioted in the Capitol to try to overturn a legitimate election result.

There are a couple of new climate stories that have been circulating recently.

First off, is John Kerry’s assertion at the UN that global inaction on climate change amounts to a suicide pact. He was trying to get the issue upgraded by the UN so there might be some effective action, but other nations were not interested in that. The idea of suicide by willful ignorance mirrors what I said about the US COVID-19 response being a conservative mass suicide, and it has the same horrible side effect (which was pointed out by someone who commented to my previous post): That conservative mass suicide doesn’t just kill conservatives.

The conservative mass suicide of climate change now has a significant chance of ending the entire human specie — and that’s fine with conservatives because they would rather kill themselves and everyone along with them than admit they were wrong about anything. Right now, it looks like poorer nations — those that have been the victims of the west for hundreds of years — will suffer a lot more than the west. However, the entire continental US is also on track to become uninhabitable somewhere between 2050 and 2100. Conservatives don’t care — they’ll be dead by then, so it doesn’t matter.

In related news, climate change is melting glaciers and dumping huge amounts of fresh water into the oceans. That weakens the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), which is vital to the normal functioning of the entire planet’s climate. It might seem paradoxical, but weakening of the AMOC can cause severe cold weather in places like the northeast US and western Europe; it will also create more intense heat waves and storms. This is a separate phenomenon from the dramatic dipping of the polar vortex south that recently froze Texas (for example), but the two things are likely to affect one another. Both things are a direct result of the slow, but steady increase in the planet’s temperature caused by human activities.

The failure of the AMOC was the main theme of the very dumb movie “The Day After Tomorrow”. “The Day After Tomorrow” portrayed a sudden and complete AMOC shutdown that immediately created a new ice age, but no other consequences. While there is a “tipping point” for the AMOC, in reality, an AMOC shutdown would just make climate so unstable that we would not be able to survive (with continuous extreme heat, extreme cold, and extreme storms which would not be evenly distributed), and would likely create an oceanic anoxic event (depletion of oxygen dissolved in at least one of our oceans) which would kill everything there and would itself be a mass extinction event which humans are not equipped to survive. These consequences would not be instantaneous, but would rather be experience by humanity as a slow grinding down of everything.

When that happens, conservatives will blame antifa.

You’ve definitely heard conservatives (including nearly-conservatives like libertarians) mention how much they hate politics. It’s interesting given that the conservative information bubble is so incredibly political. Conservatives are really soaking in a dense fog of political propaganda which acts as a constant inoculation against any facts they may experience in the larger world.

Moreover, conservatives are more than happy to use the machine of politics to attack (you might even say “cancel”) groups of people that they don’t like. They cancelled trans people by kicking them out of the military, they cancelled Muslims by banning travel from majority-Muslim nations, they cancelled Jewish people by defining Jewishness as a nation (thus separating Jewish people from the American nation), they cancelled immigrants from across our southern border by putting them in concentration camps, they cancelled gay people by saying they shouldn’t be able to marry, and the list just goes on and on. Conservativism is politics — heavily armed politics — so you literally can’t be conservative without being political.

Recently, I saw a conservative define totalitarianism as a society in which everything is politicized, and you cannot escape politics. That seemed really weird to me because, in reality, everything is political anyway, so “escaping politics” isn’t something you can achieve without literally leaving society — and eventually, society will catch up with you. Conservatives aren’t planning to leave society, so what is it that they’re really trying to escape?

I think I’ve figured it out.

Conservatives often say they don’t want to talk about politics — especially with family, friends or coworkers. It’s because if they talk about politics, they’re going to say something intensely disrespectful to some group of people, and they will have to face criticism.

Conservatives say that they hate political correctness. Political correctness is just treating people respectfully — especially in terms of whatever groups they belong to. They hate political correctness because they don’t want to be criticized for being disrespectful to people.

Conservatives say that there is reverse racism, but on closer inspection, racism involves people being seriously harmed — even killed — while “reverse racism” just involves people being criticized for being disrespectful or even harmful to other people.

Conservatives say that the social justice movement divides people based on race. It’s an interesting claim given that racists are the ones claiming that there are significant differences between these made-up races, while the social justice movement is trying to correct the harm caused by those claims. But what they really mean is that bringing up racism is divisive — it creates conflict — and the conflict that they don’t want is criticism of their own racism.

The real definition of totalitarianism is “a system of government that is centralized and dictatorial and requires complete subservience to the state” not “a society in which everything is politicized, and you cannot escape politics”. However, we’ve got to try to understand what conservatives are talking about, and the way to do that is to replace “politics” with accountability. If we do that, then we learn that conservatives think it is totalitarianism if they are held accountable for their treatment of other people. In contrast, they think freedom is when they are not held accountable for their treatment of other people.

And of course they don’t really mean “totalitarianism” — they mean oppression. So, the real statement is “oppression is whenever I am held accountable for my treatment of other people, especially if I cannot escape accountability”. Conservatives don’t hate politics — they love politics! What they hate is accountability.

What’s another general group of people that hate accountability? Narcissists would be one. Let’s see if there are any similarities.

Here are 7 Tactics Narcissists Use to Escape Accountability:

1. Intimidate/Blame: Bullying the person trying to hold them accountable and trying to make the conflict the other person’s fault; e.g., “BLM is so divisive.”

2. Accuse/Project: This is the Peewee Herman Defense; “I know you are, but what am I?” They accuse the accuser of the very thing that they themselves did… including accusing the accuser of projection.

3. Argue/Exhaust: Instead of sincerely engaging, they choose small (less important) details, and argue them to death, creating such a flood of irrelevant bullshit that it wears out the accuser. This is also called the Gish gallop. If you’ve started out talking about how Medicaid for All would help small businesses but now you’re having to do a deep dive on the ideology and methods of the Bolsheviks, that’s what happened.

4. Deny/Rewrite: Outright denying reality; gaslighting. That would be QAnon, but also the entire narrative about “socialism” that conservatives obsess over, and, of course, the conservative version of US history.

5. Divert/Attack: This would be an outburst over a minor (generally misconstrued) detail that then becomes a major focus of attack. You’ve seen this as them taking something someone said in a completely incorrect way, and then spending months talking about that and only that like it’s the end of the world. For example, Hillary Clinton said (fairly accurately) that half of Trump supporters were deplorables (i.e., racists, fascists and other villains); somehow that became a years-long yowling about how Democrats think all Republicans are deplorables, including merch like t-shirts and morale patches referring to Clinton’s terrible, terrible criticism.

6. Fear/Avoid: Spinning a terrifying tall tale which makes someone else fearful, and then denying responsibility for their fear — like how conservative leaders told conservatives that their democracy had been stolen by Satanic, pedophilic socialists, and then denied responsibility for the January 6 insurrection.

7. Rescue/Retreat: Narcissists gain loyalty by creating the impression of having saved you. Once they’ve convinced you that you need them, they threaten to abandon you, and use that threat as leverage to avoid responsibility for their bad behavior. As an example, the police are always talking about how much they’ve saved the community from violent crime (which isn’t accurate at all) and then when they commit an atrocity, they threaten to withhold their protection; that tactic is meant to manipulate the community into obedience.

Conservatives — and narcissists — hate accountability. Interestingly, an old conservative meme is “personal responsibility” which is basically identical to accountability. Again, it’s clear now that this was bullshit. It was just meant as more sophisticated way to blame the victim. (Personal responsibility can have a more pro-active connotation, but is always brought up in terms of what a person should have done to avoid their current predicament.) When we try to get a conservative to take personal responsibility for their bad behavior, we get a flurry of the above tactics (and more) so they can avoid accountability.

Here, for no particular reason, is a list of narcissists greatest fears. I’ll point you to one specific quote in that article:

Ensconced in spinning a version of reality most favorable to them, narcissists tend to lie and misrepresent so readily that they become convinced that whatever they utter in the moment is true and right. To many around them, such conviction can be persuasive unless you spot the underlying man-behind-the-curtain dynamic.

I don’t think it is helpful to start accusing conservatives of being narcissists. That’s just falling into a trap where they pretend to be the victim, and lead you down a rabbit hole of Peewee Herman arguments. I would even go so far as to say that they want to be attacked, because that verifies their narrative of conservative victimhood. Instead, the answer is to recognize this problem for what it is and approach it in the same way you might approach the problem of having a narcissist in your life.

I’ve been watching a conservative video about how evil socialism is to try to parse out all the different factual errors that form the basis of the conservative worldview, and it sure is complicated and confusing. Maybe socialism and other leftist ideas are pretty confusing to conservatives — I’m pretty sure they are, because they’re pretty confusing to me sometimes. It really strikes me that maybe we should all drop these various details of our different ideologies and break everything down into something far more simple. So here it is:

Have you tried not being an asshole?

That to me is the most bare-bones way to describe the way of life that we all ought to aspire to. Just try not to be an asshole — do that all the time, every day, with everyone. It certainly isn’t easy in practice, but the point isn’t to succeed, but to just keep trying to be a better person, and the best way to put that is that I’m going to try not to be an asshole.

But have you tried not being an asshole?

I realize what you might be thinking: Everyone else is an asshole, so if I’m trying not to be an asshole, won’t that put me at a disadvantage?

Honestly, it might! Especially if you are participating in the Asshole Olympics. But the point is that the world can’t be a better place if we’re all being assholes, and we know all about personal responsibility, right? You are personally responsible for your own actions. If the world is a bad place, and you’re living in that world being an asshole, well, that means you are personally responsible for the world being a bad place.

I do realize that there are a lot of questions about what we have to do when someone continues to be an asshole. How do we fight against the assholes without being assholes ourselves? It’s an incredibly good question. But the first step — quite clearly — is for me and you to stop being assholes. And then when someone is being an asshole, we should try to come up with a way to address that without being an asshole.

One thing we can do about assholes — without being assholes ourselves — is to not promote, endorse, or support assholes. Because only an asshole promotes, endorses, and supports assholes. That’s pretty simple. We don’t have to “cancel” the asshole to do this; we just have to stop helping them. Now, I’m not going to name names, but think back over the last 5 years or so — did you maybe help some assholes? Well, I’m not going to be an asshole about it, but I will say that to stop being an asshole, you’re going to have to stop helping those assholes.

Assholes are the reason why societies go to hell. First some asshole does some asshole thing, and then next thing you know there’s a law created by some other asshole, and then yet another asshole is using that law to be an asshole to people who would never had done that first thing that set this machine of assholery in motion.

If you are still balking at this very simple idea at this point, I have to ask: Is it because you want to be an asshole? Are you the person who can’t let go of being an asshole? Are you the one that is the cause of all this? Maybe you actually like living in a world full of assholes. Maybe this hell is something that you’re really enjoying and so you’re resisting my call to stop being an asshole. Maybe you don’t even know how to stop being an asshole.

I certainly hope not. And I do believe you can stop being an asshole.

I hope you will join me in moving the world closer to a non-asshole utopia by simply taking that first step toward it: Trying not to be an asshole. It won’t fix the world, but it sure will make things better.

As you know, the Democrats are coming for at least some of your guns, and so all gun people are in the awkward situation of trying to figure out what they should buy now, given that this could potentially be our last chance to buy some items. James Reeves does a nice job coming up with a short list in this YouTube video. Even if you don’t agree with his exact choices, he provides some good things to think about when you’re making buying choices, and he does it without saying anything insane and/or factually incorrect, which I truly appreciate.

He’s also got a video called The Top 5 Guns to *NOT* PANIC BUY (For Beginners) (Coronavirus 2020 Remix) which I found pretty funny. Content Warning: One slightly homophobic comment.

In 1949, George Orwell wrote, “Who controls the past controls the future,” which is meant to reference how control of information can shape reality. Orwell was describing how the ruling party in a fictitious dystopian society would lie about the past in order to shape today’s reality and extend their power into the future. The power of raw, unbridled bullshit is a core feature and tenet of fascism. When fascists want something to be true, they claim it is; when fascists need something to be true to get what they want, they claim it is. Actual facts don’t factor into it.

On Saturday, the Republican party, which has slowly morphed into America’s party of open fascism over the last 12 years, again demonstrated the power of bald-faced lies when they acquitted Donald Trump — again. I was never confident that the Democrats could successfully convict Trump in the context of all that bullshit, but I was quite surprised at how quickly they failed.

Heather Cox Richardson’s post regarding the acquittal contains the usual optimism regarding what liberals like to call “our democratic institutions”. Her take is that the combination of A) voters beginning to understand that Republicans are simply lying about everything and B) the good results of Democratic party policies (manifested by Biden’s executive actions) will cost the Republican party further control in the midterm elections.

Related: Sign up for Heather Cox Richardson’s newsletter, Letters from an American

No one sane will argue that HCR is factually incorrect or that her insights aren’t outstanding; however, her optimism and the possibilities that it encourages her to leave out are worth exploring.

When we have a regime change in the US, as we just did, it takes somewhere between one and two years for the effects of that change to make themselves apparent. The most obvious reason for that is that the budget for this year was created last year, so the “Biden” budget won’t even go into effect for a year. The other big reason would be that the federal government is an enormous machine with a huge amount of inertia behind it. It can’t turn on a dime.

Two years into the Trump regime we were starting to see a number of issues, particularly with the economy. Then, COVID-19 hit. Democrats are still trying to blame the Trump administration for the virus, but that’s an obviously simplistic narrative. Regardless of where the virus came from, it certainly didn’t come from Donald Trump. The more accurate narrative — that the Trump administration dramatically increased the death toll from COVID-19 — is (in my opinion) too complex for a public that largely still thinks socialism is bad (for example).

To be fair, it may be the cultural selfishness of the American people that was really the biggest factor in our ability to properly respond to the pandemic. The Trump administration’s response (simply denying that the pandemic was a problem) seems insane on its face, but might have been a smart (though cynical and horrific) tactic given how selfish Americans are. It’s an essential part of fascism for a good reason — it works!

Two years into the Biden administration, we will still be dealing with the horrors of the Trump administration’s failings, but it will look like it is Biden’s fault, just like Trump’s first two years of success were due to the Obama administration but he successfully took credit for it.

It’s entirely likely, then, that Republicans will be able to sell a very different, bullshit narrative: That the Trump regime was great for the economy, but that was all ruined by COVID-19, which is the fault of China, and now look at how the Biden administration is failing in its recovery plan. In a country where the most simplistic explanation tends to win, this seems like a winning narrative. This narrative will certainly work within the 38% of Americans who are living in the Republican bullshit bubble — there’s little to no possibility that they will escape from it.

If the Democrats achieve any major gun control legislation in the meantime, that will likely aid the Republicans even more.

It seems likely, then, that the Republicans can retake the Senate and perhaps even get control of the House of Representatives. From there, McConnell can continue his campaign of sabotage — something that was extremely effective against the Obama administration — and they can blame Biden (and the whole Democratic party) for “not getting anything done”.

From there, it is an easy next step to a second Trump term. Once he’s in office, Trump can claim that no court of law can touch him, and of course, the Republican machine will support that absurd claim.

How can Democrats avoid this terrible outcome? They can aggressively use every existing law to go after fascists — both outside the government and within it, including fascists who have broken the law while in an elected office. They will need to treat this like the war it is, so that media is flooded with a constant stream of stories about different elements of American fascism being held responsible for their actions. They’ll need to shift resources away from the war on poor people and the left to the war on fascism.

Americans must be able to see that there are fascists and that they are criminals. That part is obvious. However, they also must see the fascists losing because there is a significant portion of the American public that will side with the winner no matter who they are. I don’t think the Democrats are going to be willing to do this. Their instinct is to always try to make peace with the right wing because they are right wing themselves and they want to have the tools of authoritarianism at their disposal — and of course, the real left is a bigger enemy to the Democrats than fascism.

I’m always concerned when I see someone talking about how “cool” the world of Mad Max is without acknowledging that it is a living hell that was caused by people. I don’t mean that it was caused by the whole of humanity, but rather that it was caused by the people in charge — their thirst for power, their inability to see the reality that exists beyond their own egos, their inability to admit that the very systems that handed them power are killing everything, and their insistence on spreading a pestilence of lies that keeps others from understanding reality.

Today, We’re All Living in Mad Max’s World by Jim Poe (Jacobin Magazine)

George Miller’s Mad Max film series has become synonymous with the postapocalyptic genre. At their core, however, Miller’s films aren’t so much a prediction of the future as an indictment of our capitalist present and the ruthless individualism that maintains it.

For a very long time, I thought the Mad Max films were rather silly, but then I realized that the only thing silly about them is that anyone is alive at all in a world that broken.