nihilism
yikes omg promoted secondary on geo floyd boogaloo infiltration
MERRI OK
MUSK NAZI SALUTE, PUNS
PSEUDO-POP ROLL DICE BURN DOWN FILL IN POOL
see beran something awful
john s edit bd says TP
rapture?!
mass shooters?
---
---
AHA HMMN connection to corruption? cruel? fascism? alt rt --> musk DOGEbags? alt fact Earth2
---
8 26
Run Hide Fight is a 2020 American action thriller film written and directed by Kyle Rankin. The film stars Isabel May, Radha Mitchell, Thomas Jane, Eli Brown, Olly Sholotan, Britton Sear, Cyrus Arnold, Catherine Davis, Treat Williams, and Barbara Crampton. It follows a teen girl who goes to save a group of hostages at her high school from a quartet of school shooters. The film's title derives from the "Run. Hide. Fight." procedure one can use during the event of an active shooter.[3][4]
The film had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival on September 10, 2020, and was released by The Daily Wire in North America on their platform on January 14, 2021. It received generally negative reviews from critics.
A standalone sequel, Run Hide Fight: Infidels, is scheduled to be released in September 2026.
...
The film has a score of 30% on Rotten Tomatoes based on 20 reviews, with an average rating of 5.20/10.[11] On Metacritic, the film has a score of 13 out of 100 based on reviews from 6 critics, indicating "overwhelming dislike."[12]
The film was described as "fundamentally tasteless" by Jonathan Romney of Screen International, though he praised its "strong performances from young stars".[13] Guy Lodge of Variety compared the film to a cross between Elephant (2003) and The Hunger Games (2012), and criticized the film for being "merely pedestrian at the levels of direction, craft and performance" and "a grab for attention by peddling an ambiguous line on gun control and eye-for-an-eye morality."[14]
David Rooney of The Hollywood Reporter stated, "Half-hearted posturing aside, this is Die Hard in a high school, with a seventeen-year-old female John McClane getting motivational input from her dead cancer mom as she dismantles the murderous plot using little more than gut instincts."[15]
David Ehrlich of IndieWire criticized director Rankin for several of the tropes he implemented, stating that the film is "a glib, artless, and reprehensibly stupid thriller that doesn't even have enough on its mind to be provocative."[16] Robbie Collin of The Telegraph negatively compared the ringleader of the school shooters to the Joker from The Dark Knight (2008) and noted that "May's performance feels as heroic as the character she's playing" but that the film "makes no attempt to grapple with the American school shooting as a nihilistic cultural phenomenon."[17]
Sequel
Main article: Run Hide Fight: Infidels
In February 2026, it was reported that Jonathan Majors had started shooting his first film in four years for The Daily Wire which was said to be an untitled action thriller written and directed by Kyle Rankin produced by Bonfire Legend that would be in the vein of Red Dawn and Toy Soldiers to be produced by Ben Shapiro and Dallas Sonnier.[18] In April of that year, it was reported that the film would be titled Run Hide Fight: Infidels and would be a standalone sequel to Rankin and Daily Wire's Run Hide Fight.[19]
---
an 11 25
In Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right, political theorist Laura K. Field explains how "under [President Donald] Trump, post-liberal intellectuals have abandoned tradition for radicalism and scholarship for vulgarity," according to a review in The Atlantic.
"For the past decade or more, the intellectual energy in American politics has been on the right," writes George Packer.
"The MAGA ideologues who provide America’s new ruling elite with any claim to having a world view should be understood as offspring of a shared parentage, not unlike the Lovestoneites, Trotskyites, and Shachtmanites of 1930s and ’40s communism," he continues.
"More reactionary than conservative, their political ancestry is in the underground of the American right — Strom Thurmond, Joseph McCarthy, Patrick Buchanan — rather than the forward-looking Reaganite libertarians who dominated the Republican Party for four decades," he adds.
MAGA's modern hero, Packer says, aren't philosophers or even a Nazi theorist of authoritarianism.
"They share a revulsion toward liberalism and pluralism, which, they believe, have corroded the moral and spiritual fiber of America by accommodating false ideologies and harmful groups. Their modern hero is Viktor Orbán," he writes, of the authoritarian Hungarian president.
Field's book explains how this affects American democracy today.
"The American experiment in egalitarian, multiethnic democracy fills these intellectuals with anxiety, if not loathing," Packer writes.
"As Field notes, they often express undisguised hostility toward women, sexual minorities, the 'woke Marxists' of the left, and the cultural elites of the 'soulless managerial class,'" he explains.
The mood of MAGA intellectuals, Packer notes, is "overwhelmingly negative."
“The movement is, in many respects, untethered from the ordinary decency and common sense that characterize America at its idealistic best, and from the pluralistic reality of the country as it exists today," Fields says.
Packer says that Field's "background perfectly positions her to deliver this lively, devastating taxonomy and critique of MAGA’s ideologues."
"She was originally trained in Straussian scholarship — a reading of classical political thought that criticizes the modern turn away from the sources of moral authority toward liberalism and, in Strauss’s view, nihilism," he explains.
Packer notes that "anti-liberal intellectuals made a Faustian bet that this coarse real-estate developer and reality-TV star would be the vehicle for realizing the Good, the Beautiful, and the True."
"Trump was the strongman brought to bring liberalism to heel,” Field writes.
Packer says that "in attaching themselves to MAGA, they did less to influence the new regime than Trump did to corrupt them."
"The MAGA right has filled a vacuum created by popular disenchantment with globalization, neoliberal economics, mass immigration, political corruption, technological power and democracy itself," Packer adds.
There's one thing Field doesn't have the ability to explain in her book, Packer writes.
"A question that Field touches on but never analyzes in depth is why liberal minds haven’t produced an equally potent answer" to the MAGA right.
"Liberals are in the necessary but untenable position of having to defend democracy from right-wing assault in an age of broad discontent," Packer explains.
"They need their own theorists and influencers, their own institutes and manifestos, to undertake the historic task of not only reversing America’s self-destruction, but showing the next generation why liberal democracy offers the best chance for a good life," he concludes.
---
---
FRANTIFA
6:42
MAGA has long tapped into pop culture
6:44
and internet memes. Trump's 2015
6:47
campaign was turbocharged by irony pill
6:49
alt-right subcultures of the internet
6:51
that lived on places like 4chan, 8chan,
6:53
and Reddit. Web traffic data from 2016
6:56
showed that 8chan was the ninth largest
6:58
source of referral traffic for Trump's
7:00
website, clocking in at about 2.3% of
7:02
all such traffic. This puts it just
7:05
below breitbart.com.
7:06
The campaign especially mobilized angry
7:09
gamers, which sensient liver spot Steve
7:12
Bannon understood. He called gamers
7:15
ruthless white males that can be
7:16
activated like an army. He said they
7:19
come in through Gamergate and then get
7:21
turned on to politics and then Trump.
7:23
Gamergate, remember, was the
7:24
misogynistic movement in 2014 against
7:26
female gamers. Okay. Memes were
7:28
laundered up from 4chan or 8chan through
7:30
Breitbart via Trump's former digital
7:32
media manager Brad Parcal to give us
7:35
Trump himself tweeting an image of him
7:37
as Pepe the Frog. Fun update. Parcal has
7:41
since taken his digital media skills to
7:43
a much different client, Israel. Oh,
7:46
he's a foreign agent now. But like, how
7:49
will he pivot his white nationalist
7:51
posts into Zionist posts? Let's answer
7:54
that question with a meme. They're the
7:57
same picture. Now, in 2025, the
7:59
administration is trying to convert the
8:00
kids that did the ice bucket challenge
8:02
into adult ICE agents. Adult is, I
...
15:59
Yes, they're doing a lot of talking
16:01
about it allegedly, while we are doing
16:03
the actual violence against people's
16:05
families. And those things are the same
16:08
if you huff enough glue. All because a
16:10
couple agents were doxed and communities
16:12
are defending themselves. Suddenly, ICE
16:14
is now the victim. DHS is now
16:16
objectively tweeting beta things like
16:18
the violence and dehumanization of these
16:20
men and women who are simply enforcing
16:22
the law must stop. To which user One
16:24
World Powerful replied, "We are the
16:26
storm. We are the reckoning. We are also
16:29
small beings, so please no bully." You
16:31
don't get to play Kairens with crocodile
16:33
tears while harming people. But again,
16:35
that is the behavior of fascism,
16:37
claiming victimhood to justify any and
16:40
all actions against an unarmed civilian
16:42
population. The hate memeing of this
16:44
administration's propaganda style is
reminiscent of the white supremacist
Nick Fuentes, someone who answers the
16:50
question, "What if a prepubescent
16:51
mustache started a podcast?" Nick began
16:54
his America First show after attending
16:56
the Unite the Right rally in
16:57
Charlottesville in 2017 and started what
17:00
he calls the Groper Army, a white
17:02
supremacist online cohort named after
17:05
this version of the Pepe meme. He very
17:07
much represents an ethos of [ __ ] posting
17:10
and saying things to get a rise out of
17:11
people, but also because he believes it.
17:14
Fuentes talks about the importance of
things like humor and memes in which to
couch bigotry so that one has plausible
deniability if they're ever called on
it.
17:23
Use irony because
you know when it comes to something like
Holocaust revision.
17:30
I mean this is a subject that you cannot
17:32
deviate from the popular consensus on.
17:35
But you also you also can't like I I
17:38
also think you really can't tell the
17:40
truth if you adhere to that. So, it's
17:43
sort of like getting in the middle. It's
17:44
being provocative. It's being I I can't
17:47
explain this in a very explicit way.
17:48
You're going to have to just sort of uh
17:50
get what I'm saying here. When it comes
17:52
to a lot of these issues, you need a
17:54
little bit of maneuverability that irony
17:57
gives you. Oh, well, you know, what does
18:00
that mean? Well, I was being ironic.
18:01
Well, I was joking. Well, it's whatever.
18:03
Well, you don't understand the tone.
18:04
Well, you don't understand huMOR. So,
18:05
when a viewer writes in with a coded
18:07
analogy to deny the Holocaust, Nick
18:09
jumps in, but then says, "I'm an irony
guy just to cover his ass." Max says,
"If I take 1 hour to cook a batch of
cookies, and Cookie Monster has 15
ovens, working 24 hours a day, every day
18:22
for 5 years, how long does it take
18:25
Cookie Monster to make six million
18:27
batches of cookies?"
18:29
I don't know. That's a good question.
18:32
Certainly. Uh Oh, no. No, it doesn't
18:36
really sound correct to me. Wait a
18:37
second. So, 6 million cookies. Uh-uh. I
18:40
don't buy it. That's all irony. I'm an
18:43
irony bro. That's all irony. I'm an
18:45
irony guy. That is actually how I open
18:47
every standup show when I know I'm about
18:49
to bomb my tits off. It works every
18:51
time. The irony defense. Trump Stooges
18:54
used to use it a lot back in his first
18:56
term. Remember, he's just joking.
18:58
The president was clearly joking with
19:00
his comments. But now that Steven Miller
19:02
is the shadow president, they know and
19:04
we know he is very much not joking cuz
19:08
he doesn't get jokes. That's why the
memes suck. In 2022, Nick famously got a
meeting with President Trump and Kanye
West. You know, the artist who is
19:17
currently putting out songs titled HEil
Hitler. Yeah. Speakers at Nick's America
19:21
First Conference have included
19:23
Representative Marjorie Taylor Green and
19:25
Representative Paul Gosar, who earned
19:27
his 8chan gamer cred when he tweeted a
19:29
video of himself as a Japanese manga
19:32
character killing Representative
19:34
Alexandria Kaziocortez. Gosar then
19:36
bragged that the video was made in house
19:39
and that the creativity of my team is
19:41
off the hook. Off the hook. It's amazing
19:45
that racist sneak in language
19:46
appropriated from people they hate.
19:48
That's fire, yo. and I know a thing or
19:50
two about fire. You should see me burn a
19:52
cross, son. Memes have actually been
19:55
vital to the recruitment of white
19:57
nationalists online. The neo-Nazi
19:59
website, The Daily Stormer, posts an
20:01
endless scroll of anti-Semitic memes
20:03
every Monday, calling it mEmeTic
Mondays. And while a lot of the violence
20:07
is in cartoon form, online hate has
20:09
translated more and more to realworld
20:12
violence. the Christ Church shooter who
20:14
killed 51 people in two mosques in 2019
20:17
and who said Trump was a symbol of
20:19
renewed white identity and common
20:20
purpose called on others to create
20:23
memes, post memes, and spread memes,
20:26
saying that memes have done more for the
20:28
ethnationalist movement than any
20:30
manifesto. The El Paso shooter, who was
20:33
inspired by the Christurch shooter,
20:34
posted the coordinates of his attack on
20:36
8chan before he killed 23 people. And
20:39
according to reporting by Robert Evans,
20:41
there was an obsession to beat the score
20:43
of how many people were killed in Christ
20:45
Church. He writes, "What we see here is
20:47
evidence of the only real innovation
20:49
8chan has brought to global terrorism,
20:51
the gamification of mass violence. We
20:53
see this not just in the references to
20:55
high scores, but in the very way the
20:57
Christurch shooting was carried out.
20:59
Brenton Tarant live streamed his
21:01
massacre from a helmet cam in a way that
21:03
made the shooting look almost exactly
21:05
like a firstp person shooter video game.
21:07
This was a conscious choice, as was his
21:09
decision to pick a soundtrack for the
21:11
spree that would entertain and inspire
21:13
his viewers. Fun. And now to inspire my
21:17
viewers, here is Chunk, a 12,200-lb
21:20
brown bear who just won Alaska's fat
21:22
bear contest. He has a broken jaw, but
21:25
he could still catch enough fish to
21:26
dethrone 128 Graaser, the female fat
21:29
bear title holder, two years in a row.
21:32
Girl, you should have watched the
21:33
throne. And more recently, acts of
21:35
violence don't always have a political
21:37
goal, but seem more like behaviors of
21:40
severely brained people who don't have a
21:42
specific worldview, but are just
21:45
posting, doing harm for harm's sake. The
21:48
Charlie Kirk shooter, who the FBI swears
21:50
is a hardened leftist, even though he is
21:53
a Mormon from a family of Republicans
21:54
and dressed as a Pepe meme for
21:56
Halloween, was described by one of his
21:58
former classmates as a Reddit kid. And
22:01
the best way I could describe him is
22:03
just like a Reddit kid. I don't know. I
22:06
feel like if you were in high school
22:08
around that same time and even probably
22:10
now, like 2018, and then like you know
22:13
those kinds of kids. But that's exactly
22:16
what he was. All I'm going to say is
22:18
this is the kind of [ __ ] that happens
22:20
when you spend way too much time online
22:22
and all of a sudden your beliefs are all
22:23
the way this way or all the way this way
22:25
and you do some dramatic [ __ ] to please
22:27
these people that are not your friends.
22:29
Yeah. The king of gropers who had
22:31
declared war on Charlie Kirk certainly
22:33
doesn't love his followers back. He'll
22:35
even disown them for acting on the
22:37
vitriol towards Kirk. I disavow you. I
22:40
disown you in the strongest possible
22:43
terms. I that is not what we are about.
22:47
Now I'm not saying Tyler Robinson was a
groper necessarily, but it is kind of
wild that Fuentes had to say all that. I
22:54
didn't have to say anything like that to
22:55
my audience. To my audience, I'd say
22:57
something like, "I know you love Greta,
23:00
but I just don't think you can pull off
23:02
the frog bucket hat." Robinson might
23:05
hold a bunch of different political
23:06
beliefs. What researchers call composite
violent extremists, where extremist
ideologies are blurring, and young
people with very salient personal
grievances are increasingly turning to a
salad bar of ideologies to explain their
anger and hopelessness. Okay, that's all
23:21
fine and good, but don't bring salad
bars into this. The cold hard-boiled
eggs aren't their fault, okay? They're
23:28
your nana's. She loves them. It's also
23:31
important to know that the Pepe meme
23:32
that Tyler dressed up as for Halloween
23:34
isn't so much left or right, but mostly
23:37
represents the alienation and
23:38
hopelessness of many terminally online
23:41
men, as Aiden, etc. explained on Tik
23:43
Tok.
23:44
But again, like many Pepe or Graper
23:46
memes, the core of this is is a lonely
23:48
male figure in sort of an emiserated
23:51
landscape looking sad. And that's part
23:53
of the story I wish more people were
23:54
talking about. What's driving our
23:56
political violence isn't just
polarization. It is that feeling which
these Pepe memes represent of you're
always going to be alone. You're never
going to have a future. And you're never
going to have a voice.
You're never going to have a voice
unless you join ICE where your boss is a
24:13
guy in a white suit with an eagle for a
24:15
head. You keep asking him how you're
...
description of being more alienated than
24:26
politically motivated also seems to
24:28
describe the recent ICE detention
24:30
facility shooter in Dallas who killed
24:32
two detained men, neither of whom had
24:34
criminal records and neither of whom
24:36
should have been detained in the first
place. According to his friends who
spoke with journalist Ken Clippenstein,
24:42
the shooter was an online edge lord. He
24:44
was most certainly an edge lord. An
24:46
irony guy, one friend said. Irony guy?
Where? Where have I heard that before?
24:51
I'm an irony bro.
24:52
Oh, right. One friend said he stopped
talking to him when he took his 4chan
irony stuff into daily interactions. He
was becoming unbearable. Once he dropped
out of college, he had no obligation to
25:03
be social and none of us reached out due
to his edge lord behavior. Yeah, usually
25:07
when you start sending noose memes to
25:09
the group chat, your friends probably
25:11
won't hit you up to go bowling. But it's
25:13
this very irony edgelord that this
25:16
regime's campaigns and propaganda
25:17
machine have targeted to come into its
25:19
ranks. They, like white nationalists,
25:22
prey on real feelings of hopelessness,
25:24
disenchantment with the two-party system
25:26
to the point of throwing down with a
25:27
dumbass strong man just to shake things
25:29
up. The very election of Donald Trump
25:32
was arguably the most cynical and
25:34
nihilistic thing our country has ever
25:36
done, next to the cinnamon challenge. Of
25:39
course,
25:46
why all of this makes it so rich that
25:49
Trump's FBI, under a guy who is
25:51
definitely not being honey trapped by
25:53
his girlfriend, claimed that they're
25:54
taking nihilistic violent extremism
25:56
seriously. Look, I'm not saying
25:58
nihilistic violent extremism isn't a
26:00
threat, which again, these ideologically
26:03
scattered joker-like acts of violence
26:04
are, but the fact that Trump's FBI will
26:07
take it seriously is giving big OJ going
26:10
to find the real killer vibes.
26:12
The simple answer, in my opinion, is
26:14
social media is wildly out of control
26:15
and there's too much clickbait in this
26:17
country. And one of the things I
26:18
highlighted at Congress in my testimony
26:20
last week was if we want to protect our
26:21
youth, we got to get more involved in
26:23
social media and online platforms
26:25
because that's where the folks, the
26:26
assassins of this world get radicalized.
26:28
That's where they're the lone afters in
26:30
general. And so we have to get after
26:32
that problem set. And I ask for
26:33
Congress's help in doing so. And because
26:35
this is a video about memes, let's just
26:37
answer that with this one. We're all
26:39
trying to find the guy who radicalized
26:41
young people online. We know the FBI
26:44
doesn't care about nihilistic
26:45
extremists. Instead, they're busy
26:47
hunting activists, trans people, and
26:49
this frog. That frog.
26:53
The cruelty of this administration and
26:55
its sociopathic lack of empathy towards
26:57
the families that ICE is destroying, and
26:59
the glee with which they celebrate any
27:02
outrage is truly reminiscent of the kind
27:04
of brain rot we've seen in mass
27:06
shooters. Their propaganda has mass
27:08
shooter energy. And that makes sense
27:11
since MAGA has capitalized on the very
27:13
dark humored online alienation of
27:15
Americans to get itself into power. We
27:18
don't yet know who the specific people
27:20
are behind DHS or the White House's
27:22
Twitter accounts. But in a way, it
27:24
doesn't matter because it really could
27:26
be any random 17-year-old who's angry at
27:29
the world and doesn't think he's ever
27:30
going to like that frog. And though at
27:33
the moment the AI seems to be
27:35
over-the-top and obviously fake, as the
27:37
technology advances and the regime's
27:39
minimal scruples fall away, we all know
27:42
Trump will only keep using AI in more
27:44
and more deceptive ways. And I don't
27:47
know the way out of all this, but it's
27:49
important to name it. If only we had a
27:52
government that actually took online
27:53
hate seriously instead of stoked it. If
27:56
only we had someone to save us, a a hero
27:59
of sorts, someone like
28:06
Gracias, Superbigote. Thank you so much
28:09
for watching the Bituation Rooms deep
28:11
dives. If you want to support this show
===
---
an 7 25
Over the weekend, Vox posted an interview with Vox journalist Christian Paz, who’d reported previously that the Democrats were ripe for a grassroots takeover like the alleged one that overtook the GOP. The headline claimed to explain “the Democrats’ Tea Party moment.”
But unlike the headline, in the interview Paz was more circumspect about the actual existence of a Tea Party-style movement inside the party. The best that can be said, he said, is that “the base has never really been as angry as it is right now. What we’re seeing is a combination of anti-Trump anger, wanting a change in direction, wanting a change in leadership, and also some folks who are like, maybe we should become more progressive as a party” (his stress).
What are they angry about?
To hear Paz tell it, Democratic voters are angry with party leaders for failing to concentrate on “a working-class vision for Americans. They should be more focused on kitchen table affordability issues” (his italics).
But if you listen to Democratic leaders, like Chuck Schumer in the Senate and Hakeem Jeffries in the House, that’s all they talk about. They speak endlessly about the need for the parties to come together and solve economic problems that all Americans share, and to rise above the bickering and the partisanship, and find common ground.
But despite that, the Democratic base is still angry.
Why?
Brad Lander suggested it’s because the real division in the party isn’t, as Paz suggested, between “the establishment” and progressives, but between “fighters and folders.” New York City’s comptroller said that’s what voters saw in candidate Zohran Mamdani when they gave him victory over Andrew Cuomo in that city’s Democratic mayoral primary.
“People want someone to go to bat for working people, paint a real vision of a city people can afford, fight for it and get on the field,” Lander told CNN last month. “And that’s what I think Zohran did.”
I have my own theories about the Democratic leadership. You can read more about them here, here, here and especially here. Basically, it’s that leaders don’t want to fight, because fighting is risky. But I wanted to bring into the conversation someone who has deep insight into the party, and who understands its mechanics and what it takes to win.
So I got in touch with Dana Houle. He has worked in organized labor, was once a congressional chief of staff, and managed campaigns from the local to the statewide level. His Bluesky feed is indispensable.
In this first of two parts of our conversation, Dana explained the true root of the problem: defeat in November. Whenever the Democrats, or the Republicans, lose a presidential election, Dana told me, there’s always a period of anger and distrust between the base and the elites.
Dana told me that as a consequence of this fundamental, it’s tempting to look for an “insurrection” of some kind, like the one that took place in 2010, when the Tea Party destabilized the old GOP establishment.
But, as Dana told me, the Tea Party is a terrible analogy. For one thing, it was a phony “revolt.” For another, it represented a serious policy fracture between Republican elites over the issue of immigration. Dana told me that the Democrats, meanwhile, agree on virtually everything, policy-wise. What they disagree on is style and strategy. More than anything else, however, the Democrats still believe in democracy.
“I don't think anyone has a clear idea of what the base-leadership tension will create, but I don't think it will lead to nihilism, and the Tea Party definitely was part of the GOP's devolution into nihilism.”
...
---
ANALYSIS MMA
On MSNBC's Deadline: White House, Angelo Carusone explains how the right-wing media landscape made the idea of mass death acceptable
Written by Media Matters Staff
Published 05/30/25
Video
Citation
From the May 30, 2025, edition of MSNBC's Deadline: White House
NICOLLE WALLACE (HOST): So, Angelo, you framed my political worldview around this idea of narrative dominance. I would say, and I know this isn't universal, but this is an example of slippage in that category here.
ANGELO CARUSONE (GUEST): Oh, yeah. It really is actually because -- and this ties into what John was saying before about an example. There's not -- I can't think of a political figure that's made that point, but I can think of right-wing media figures that have been saying that starting in 2020 with COVID. Tucker Carlson was the one when there, you know, there was a point with COVID where, you know, there was a little bit conspiracies, but people still wanted to protect themselves. And we largely agreed that, you know, we shouldn't just have mass death. Now, we had very different opinions about how to survive that, but we weren't cool with mass death.
And then Tucker got out there, you know, in the early summer and started saying, "We're all going to die," literally, on the timeline, we're all going to die. So, we have to put all these policies and all these efforts to protect ourselves from COVID on that scale. And since we're all going to die anyway, all of these Republicans that are lining up that are supporting policies that are restricting access to schools or thinking about how to sort of mask policies, all these things, they're taking away your life, your quality of life when you're going to die anyway. So, they're the enemy and you need to start putting pressure on them. And what he did was plant a seed in that larger landscape that started to take off and then they weaved in conspiracies to help grow it and propagate it. But that was one of the big turning points.
That and a few other conspiracies that really started to shift and soften the ground about where the tolerance level was for mass death, not the individual policies, but it shifted it. And yeah, it's not their whole scale perspective, I think, but it really has an example of the change because it's not that that's their overall angle, but what is a reflection of this other piece of the slippage that you're referring to is the rot. They've become callous and cruel and indifferent, nihilistic. You know, for the people that largely believe in something, right, these are supposed to be the religious people too, they're really nihilists.
She went right to the void. And I thought that was when she voted for Hegseth, like John said before, it was -- she sort of really gave up her position as a steward, as a legislator and whatever principle she had and said, "No, I'm all in for Trump now." If you can rationalize that, you can get up there just a few months later and say the thing that she said. And the last thing that's I think critical -- so one is that they've sort of tested this before and it worked; two, that they got cruel and callous and indifferent and nihilistic, and that's just a consequence of the poison being pumped into the system. And the third is that they are so confident or I don't think it's stupidity, I don't think it's indifferent.
But they've looked at their opponents, sized them up, at Democrats, and they've said, given what we're confronting and given the terrain that we stand on, which is our information landscape, and today has proved it so far -- no is going to write a peep about Ernst's comment in the right-wing media. Not one, not one critical, not even one saying, "Well, I'm an armchair quarterback and I think that's stupid." No, no, no, they're just quiet about it. She's not going to suffer any repercussions, at least in the larger landscape. She will politically a little bit, but she's sizing up her competition and she says, they're so bad, and I have so many advantages already with this larger terrain that Trump sort of is the conductor for, but I'm going to win no matter what I say, that I could literally tell my constituents to die, and I'm still going to beat whoever they put up against me. And that's the problem when you add it all up. And that's what I see. I see that overconfidence based on an assessment of the landscape, real cruel politics.
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an 4 25
A video of a
by anti-Elon Musk protesters was posted on March 18, 2025, by an account on X called EndWokeness.
The next day Musk replied to the post, “Some people just want to watch the world burn,” an iconic line from the 2008 Batman film “The Dark Knight.” Alfred, the Wayne family’s faithful butler, says the line to Bruce Wayne – Batman – to describe the motivations behind the Joker’s chaotic acts of violence.
Musk – and Alfred – was right. Some people do, in fact, say they think that society should be burned to the ground. It’s part of a psychological measure political psychologists created called “need for chaos.”
New data from the Center for Political Communication at the University of Delaware suggests that those people – the ones who want society to burn – are the ones with more, not less, trust in Musk. They also report more trust in the Department of Government Efficiency, the government entity Musk advises, which the Trump administration claims it created to cut government waste and fraud.
Yet, critics point out that Musk and DOGE’s seemingly indiscriminate approach to spending cuts risks damaging the infrastructure necessary for American innovation.
This desire to watch the world burn doesn’t come out of nowhere.
Fear of losing status
Somewhat like the Joker, whose perpetual sense of victimhood – “You wanna know how I got these scars?” – drove his need for chaos and destruction, people can develop a need for chaos in response to a sense that they are losing.
When political psychologists introduced this concept of “need for chaos” in 2021, they described it not as a psychological trait, but as a character adaptation that occurs when some people experience a cultural and political situation that makes them feel like they are losing status and power. For some people, this feeling triggers a desire to “burn it all down” – “it” being society, institutions, the world – maybe to rebuild it all anew, or maybe just to see it all destroyed.
Only a small percentage of the U.S. population – less than 15% – tends to score high in need for chaos. But even so, understanding this minority is important to gaining insight into this political moment.
For example, people who score high in need for chaos exhibit greater support for political violence and a willingness to knowingly share hostile and false information online. And in our data, those higher in need for chaos report holding more trust in Musk, DOGE and Trump than people who score lower in the need for chaos measure.
Who wants to burn it down
We are political psychologists who study the link between psychological traits and political beliefs. Last month, the University of Delaware’s Center for Political Communication ran a national survey that we designed to understand where the public stands on various political issues and how those beliefs relate to psychological traits, including need for chaos.
In our national study of 1,600 Americans conducted between Feb. 27-March 5, 2025, by YouGov, we asked respondents how much they agreed or disagreed with the following statements:
• “I fantasize about a natural disaster wiping out most of humanity such that a small group of people can start all over”
• “I think society should be burned to the ground”
• “We cannot fix the problems in our social institutions; we need to tear them down and start over”
• “I need chaos around me – it is too boring if nothing is going on”
Similar to prior work by author Kevin Arceneaux and his colleagues, our data shows that a very small number – fewer than 20% of the sample – agrees strongly or agrees somewhat with each item.
However, looking at need for chaos among groups of varying ages, education levels and media habits, we find the highest need for chaos scores among people under age 40, those with less education, and those who pay the least attention to politics.
Burning it down through government policy
Our new data also shows that while people highest in need for chaos report having more trust in Musk, DOGE, and President Trump, these chaos-seeking folks report having less trust in “people in general,” journalists or the federal government. These findings hold even when statistically accounting for other factors, among them party, race, gender, education and ideology.
Musk’s penchant for wielding chainsaws as a symbol of DOGE’s work provides some insight into why chaos seekers may like what they see in Musk.
It’s not clear exactly what Musk’s aim is with his work at DOGE, as he eliminates the jobs of hundreds of thousands of government workers.
What is clear, however, is that by many accounts, the mass firings and the gutting of agencies, like the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Institute for Peace, are sowing chaos. And a significant portion of Americans want just that.
Dannagal G. Young, Professor of Communication and Political Science, University of Delaware and Kevin Arceneaux, Director of the Center for Political Research and Professor of Political Science, Sciences Po
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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an 4 25
Activist Cameron Kasky said during an appearance on CNN that young white men think Democrats are "leaving" them out and MAGA is able to manipulate them into thinking the party's steps towards equity for women and minorities are "being taken at our expense."
Kasky, 24, is the cofounder of the student-led gun violence prevention advocacy group Never Again MSD. He co-hosts a podcast on Gen Z politics and culture.
He said President Donald Trump was able to garner support from Gen Z, but not due to his policies. "It was culture," he said.
ALSO READ:A Republican women's group is targeting Gen Z voters
"People in my generation are not focused on the nitty gritty," he said. "They're not thinking about the economy, health care and how those things exactly work," Kasky told CNN.
The activist said Trump is speaking in a language that resonates with them "and is pompous and aggressive enough that people respond to it."
"I always say the right has been able to cultivate fear more effectively than the Democrats have been able to inspire hope. So, what happens is: young men, especially young white men, say the democrats are leaving us out and MAGA is able to manipulate us into thinking that steps forward towards equity for women and minorities are being taken at our expense," he explained.
Kasky said the Democratic Party needs to "bargain" with people to convince them to vote for the party. "You can't just feel entitled to those votes," he added.
ALSO READ:Gen-Z congressman: Republicans 'want government to be in children's pants'
In the 2024 presidential election, the Democratic Party experienced a significant decline in support from younger voters, even among those who are historically marginalized.
Young white men from Gen Z, particularly those without a college degree, favored Trumpwith a substantial 67 percent vote.
"There's something so nihilistic in Gen Z right now, because we haven't been given a very clear direction to strive towards," Kasky said when asked by the host what the 'American experience' means for Gen Z.
"We're not quite sure what exactly we're fighting for at this point," he added.
ALSO READ:'Bring Kamala back': This influencer bought Trump a Rolex — now he’s lost '8 figures'
He said he was 15 when he heard Trump make a sexually suggestive comment about women, and later saw him become president.
"This next generation is growing up with an even more aggressive, unhinged and fascist version of that," Kasky added.
Watch the video below or at this link.link.
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AHA DOH MODERATION BUFFER
MUSK IS IRON MAN DIRTY HARRY MEL GIBSON LETHAL WEAPON ROGUE COP NOT BY THE BOOK BUT GETS RESULTS/JUSTICE EFFECTIVE VIA FORCE?
AN 2 25
According to the Washington Post, as many as 200,000 federal workers may be fired because of efforts by the Trump Administration and the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to greatly downsize the United States' federal government. And the criticism of their efforts is coming not only from Democrats, but also, from voices on the right.
Former Rep. Charlie Dent (R-Pennsylvania), during a February 17 appearance on MSNBC, slammed Trump and DOGE for carrying out mass government layoffs in a "haphazard" way. And the next morning, MSNBC's Joe Scarborough (a Never Trump conservative and ex-GOP congressman) argued that while government "waste" needs to be reduced and the U.S. needs to balance its federal budget, the Trump Administration and DOGE are recklessly jeopardizing "food safety" and "air safety."
The Guardian's George Monbiot also fears that Trump's second term could trigger some type of major crisis.
READ MORE:George Conway: Trump’s 'pathological narcissism' is fueling 'full-scale' DOJ 'revolt'
In a February 18 opinion column, Monbiot lays out a variety of frightening scenarios and offers some tips for surviving a worst-case scenario.
"Though we might find it hard to imagine," Monbiot warns, "we cannot now rule it out: the possibility of systemic collapse in the United States. The degradation of federal government by Donald Trump and Elon Musk could trigger a series of converging and compounding crises, leading to social, financial and industrial failure…. A financial crisis in the U.S. would immediately become a global crisis."
Monbiot continues, "But the hazards extend much further. Musk, calling for a 'wholesale removal of regulations,' sends his child soldiers to attack government departments stabilizing the entire U.S. system. Regulations, though endlessly maligned by corporate and oligarchic propaganda, are all that protect us from multiple disasters. In its initial impacts, deregulation is class war, hitting the poorest and the middle classes at the behest of the rich. As the effects proliferate, it becomes an assault on everyone's wellbeing."
The columnist warns that undermining regulatory government agencies could make everything from a pandemic to "future climate disasters" worse.
READ MORE:'Brutal': Ex-federal prosecutor reveals why Trump DOJ’s 'illegal order' was 'so corrupt'
"As Trump rips down environmental protections and trashes federal responsiveness," Monbiot explains, "the impacts will spiral. They could include non-linear shocks to either the insurance sector or homeowners, escalating into U.S.-wide economic and social crisis. If, or when, another pandemic strikes, which could involve a pathogen more transmissible and even more deadly than COVID-19 — which has so far killed 1.2 million people in the U.S. — it will hit a nation whose defenses have been stood down."
Monbiot urges Americans — as well as residents of the U.K., where The Guardian is published — by doing a lot of networking.
"So, though there is no substitute for effective government, we must seek to create our own backup systems," the Guardian columnist advises. "Start with this principle: don't face your fears alone. Make friends, meet your neighbors, set up support networks, help those who are struggling. Since the dawn of humankind, those with robust social networks have been more resilient than those without. Yes, we also — and urgently — need national and global action, brokered by governments. But it's beginning to look as if no one has our backs. Prepare for the worst."
READ MORE:John Roberts is to blame for Trump challenge of federal courts: analysis
*George Monbiot's full Guardian column is available at this link.
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an 2 25
...
Political theorists from the center to the far left are also prone to this delusion. They have built an edifice of psychological denial on the idea that even if there is a pervasive system of illegitimate corporate or governmental control, it is miraculously unconnected with the character of the people the system administers. Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent is typical of the species, a late-20th century adaptation of Karl Marx’s theory of mystification: that the common people do not recognize their genuine interest because they have been mystified by the powers-that-be.
Mystification merely being academic slang for bamboozlement, the theory never answers the question: why are the people so easily conned by the most childish lies and distortions when accurate information is easily accessible, and never more so than today? (This is quite apart from the fact that Trump told voters very explicitly about the horrors he would inflict, meaning that something other than gullibility is also at work).
It wasn’t always thus: farmers in the 1890s, the core support for the old People’s Party, knew very well who was screwing them: the railroads, the banks, the grain traders. So did 1930s production-line workers in steel, autos, and rubber, struggling for union recognition: they knew it was their own employers, not foreign competition or some culture-wars chimera that was responsible for their miserable conditions.
But now, farmers vote overwhelmingly for Trump, despite their suffering under foreign retaliatory tariffs resulting from his ill-considered economic policy during his first term and likely further damage in his second. And unionization is at record post-World War II lows, despite the material benefits of union membership.
What changed? Historian Rick Perlstein, writing in The Invisible Bridge, said that in the 1970s, as the crises of Vietnam, racial unrest, and Watergate abated, the American people had a chance to learn from these events: in other words, to grow up and be responsible citizens.
They didn’t. Ronald Reagan’s soothing fairy tale of innocent virtue, of a country sinned against but never sinning, became America’s secular religion. I would extend Perlstein’s thesis by suggesting that this bogus innocence has become embedded in the American psyche and individualized into a personalized martyr complex. Every vicissitude of life is now the fault of some detested minority, or the elites, or the system generally.
The vanguard of this personality type, the people who actually generate the atrocious ideas the Trump regime is now implementing, is what substacker John Ganz calls the “creep-loser.” You know the type from high school: awkward, asocial, and full of resentment against the world for failing to recognize his genius.
Many of them become brooding, failed intellectuals, the sort that were the idea engine of authoritarian movements throughout the 20th century, and who now infest places like the Claremont Institute and Heritage Foundation. They are to MAGA what the Old Bolsheviks were to the Communist movement. It is no coincidence that Steve Bannon described himself as a Leninist. Their goal is simply destruction as revenge.
It is true that all of these resentful fantasists together would barely fill a stadium: hardly a key national voting bloc. But their nihilistic attitude is surprisingly prevalent among “real Americans” who never read Ayn Rand or attended Hillsdale College. Beginning in 2015, pollsters have been rather surprised at the frequency that respondents claim they just want to “burn it all down,” not troubling themselves with what will happen to the social infrastructure that supports their very existence.
If it reaches the point where Americans are sent to Guantanamo for their political opinions, what will be the reaction of the unserious?
Add to them the rapturist Christians, the hard core of the Christian fundamentalist voting bloc (the largest single constituency of the Republican Party). The belief that a millennial holocaust wiping out earth is something to look forward to is in its basic psychology no different from Hitler’s Götterdämmerung in the Berlin bunker or suicide cults like Jim Jones’ People’s Temple. Even the wider fundamentalist belief system is prone to rigidly separate human beings into the blessed and the damned, a mindset hardly consistent with pluralist democracy.
A final demographic is the most diffuse and least attached to any ideology: the tens of millions of unserious Americans who refuse to take anything seriously, for whom the smallest exercise of civic responsibility is either uncool, or boring, or a violation of their freedom to be irresponsible. Some of them voted for Trump because “he’s funny;” you may know the type. No doubt they think even now that plundering Greenland or sending combat troops to Gaza is comedy gold. Others will apply a sort of degenerate folk wisdom that they think is clever, saying they “always vote those in office out, and those out of office in,” or some similar nonsense.
Other unserious people feign a righteous anger over the price of eggs on the assumption that the White House controls the cost of consumer goods regardless of circumstances like bird flu. The price of eggs or broiler chickens is much more important to them than living under the rule of law or handing down a decent and humane society to their children.
Maybe we were always deceived by popular culture, or misread it.
If it reaches the point where Americans are sent to Guantanamo for their political opinions, what will be the reaction of the unserious? No doubt indifference, because it won’t affect them, just as arrests of Jews or Social Democrats didn’t affect “good Germans” in the 1930s. As for the true believers, whether religious fundamentalist or secular neoreactionary tech-nerd, they’ll be cheering it on: they never believed in any nonsense about democracy or human rights in any case.
How can America’s purported thought-leaders seriously maintain that a working majority of Americans (those who voted for Trump and those who didn’t bother to vote because they didn’t care) didn’t consciously will what is now unfolding? As Steve Bannon’s role model Lenin was reputed to have remarked, “who says A must say B:” people are intellectually and morally responsible for the consequences of their actions. To argue otherwise is the equivalent of saying that tens of millions of Americans are legally incapable of signing contracts, marrying, driving cars, or exercising the franchise.
Maybe we were always deceived by popular culture, or misread it. It’s a Wonderful Life is conventionally viewed as a heart-warming Christmas movie, with a depressing second act making the finale all the more sentimentally fulfilling, like Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Yet, but for the contingency of George Bailey’s having been born and lived, Bedford Falls inevitably would have defaulted to Potterville, hardly an affirmation of the goodness and civic-mindedness of the majority, who might have been expected to resist the designs of the grasping Mr. Potter.
Contingencies work that way in real life, too. But for the pandemic and the resulting inflation, we might be living in a different world. Alas, given the recent price of eggs, most Americans preferred to ditch safe, staid old Bedford Falls for the vulgar excitement of Potterville. The town’s owner, whether Mr. Potter or Donald Trump, will cheerfully ensure that while he might fleece you for every cent and jail you if you defy him, you’ll never be bored.
NOW READ:Resistance to Trump alone will fail — unless we also do this
*Mike Lofgren is a former Republican congressional staff member who served on both the House and Senate budget committees. His books include: "The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government" (2016) and "The Party is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted" (2013).
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an 125
Journalist/author Katherine Stewart is known for her in-depth reporting on the Religious Right, which she has been highly critical of over the years. The titles of her books — among them, "The Good News Club: The Christian Right's Stealth Assault on America's Children" and "The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism" — underscore her view that far-right white evangelicals and Christian nationalists pose a major threat to religious freedom in the United States.
In her book, "Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy" — which has a February 18 release date on Amazon — Stewart warns that an alliance between Christian nationalists and billionaire oligarchs is pushing "an end to pluralistic democracy."
The Guardian's Adam Gabbatt examines the book in an article published on January 19.
Stewart, according to Gabbatt, warns, "Money is a huge part of the story, meaning that huge concentrations of wealth have destabilized the political system. Second, lies, or conscious disinformation, is a huge feature of this movement. And third, God, because the most important ideological framework for the largest part of this movement is Christian nationalism."
Gabbatt notes that although "billionaire oligarchs" and Christian nationalists "may not seem to have much in common," the "aim" of their "unholy alliance" is "the same: bringing an end to democracy in the U.S. as we know it."
According to Stewart, "The best label I can find for the phenomenon — and I do not pretend it is a fully satisfactory label — is 'reactionary nihilism.' It is reactionary in the sense that it expresses itself as mortal opposition to a perceived catastrophic change in the political order; it is nihilistic because its deepest premise is that the actual world is devoid of value, impervious to reason, and governable only through brutal acts of will."
Stewart adds, "It stands for a kind of unraveling of the American political mind — a madness that now afflicts one side of nearly every political debate."
Gabbatt points out, however, that Stewart, in her book, "insists the situation is not hopeless."
READ MORE:Biden preemptively pardons members of January 6 panel and other Trump targets
Stewart argues, "There's no feature as of yet in the American political system that would ensure that the MAGA movement is going to rule indefinitely. And frankly, I take heart from the fact that those of us who believe in democracy and its core principles probably represent a majority and not a minority of the population. I continue to believe more Americans support a democratic political system over some sort of cronyistic, kleptocratic and theocratic system that has authoritarian features."
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https://medium.com/@DaleBeran/4chan-the-skeleton-key-to-the-rise-of-trump-624e7cb798cb
very good and funny talk
https://www.c-span.org/video/?463096-1/it-awful
JULY 30, 2019
It Came From Something Awful
Dale Berantalked about his book, It Came from Something Awful: How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trumpinto Office, in which he profiled the counterculture online hub 4chan.
ctr-c vs materialism, but gets swallowed by it [recall cool hunters); in 90's nihilism was strategy to prevent co-opt.
black pill is nihilistic embrace of loserdom, suicide = hero "I'm going in"
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:{:{}:
}:
kyle verdict is alt rt boogaloo renaissance?! the power of [biden/feds/ gubmint / courts/law cannot stop us from doing whatever the fuck we want
:{:{}:
}:
see pepe
see nihilism happy smiley face "nothing matters" = threat warning: you evil Un-Am scum (or just other tribe enemy) pose such a threat (to our having power) that we will commit genocide.
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note neo-nazi militia mask/balaclava indistinguisable from SS death grin?
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aha: like hulk irrational but sorta smart like stark? ingenious sadist?
// trump boost half-crazy: i am a powerful opponent b/c i will hyper-escalate w/o warning b/c i don't care about diplomacy/ rep/the rules
joker can't beat batman in strength or tech (intelligence?) so he uses what instead? the dark knight at darkest is no different? thus no such thing as moral / superiority?
see rhet god/devil terms
guns of course muy macho, kyle said he picked the AR15 b/c it looked cool = manly, warrior, lethal = power
note pedo-commie and bitch (co-opts black thug rap?]
pudgey white suburban so gets invite/summons on facebook to man up and go help the good guy cops who are besiged by black thugs [dylann r radicalized by blk on wht crime]
aha anti commie, fag and semite:
omfg parasite = cockroaches = exterminate vermin carry disease dirty
https://www.alternet.org/2021/11/rittenhouse-2655770737/
no lnx pix req
Rittenhouse verdict championed on right-wing social media as green light for killing protesters
[Charlottesville "Unite the Right" Rally. Far-right Oath Keepers patrol Emancipation Park. Credit: Anthony Crider]
David Neiwertand Daily Kos November 21, 2021
The exultation on right-wing social media following Kyle Rittenhouse's acquittal has been sickeningly predictable: Mainstream conservatives loudly valorize Rittenhouse as a "hero," while more extremist voices, applying the same logic, demand that more Americans follow his footsteps—urging the likeminded to take to the street now to begin using guns to "be like Kyle." They have even appropriated his name for their future plans, voiced in numerous celebratory threads: Any leftist protester shot by a right-wing "patriot" henceforth will have been "Rittenhoused."
As we forecasted, the acquittal is now a beacon-like green light granting permission to violent right-wing extremists to openly wage the kind of "civil war" against "the left"—which ranges from liberal Democrats like Joe Biden to the "antifa" bogeyman they have concocted—that they have been fantasizing about for the past decade. In the words of Charlie Kirk's interlocutor, it's the signal that now they "get to use the guns."
The bloodlust has been palpable. Online trolls celebrated that "it's Open Season on pedo-commies" and boasted that the verdict means "there's nothing you can do about it." A neo-Nazi channel on Twitter urged readers to "let this win fuel your rage." A fan of pseudo-journalist Andy Ngo commented in a retweet: "Every one of these anarchist criminal thugs should be shot in the street like the worthless dogs they are."
Far-right maven Ann Coulter posted a meme showing a gantlet of [marvel nazi nerd wet dr] comic-book superheroes bowing to Rittenhouse. On Facebook, Ben Shapiro framed any future violence as being left-wing: "The Left accepting the verdict in a peaceable manner remains the sizable elephant in the room."
The white-nationalist site VDare also extolled Rittenhouse's heroism:
This much is true: Kyle Rittenhouse is the hero we've been waiting for throughout the turbulent summer of 2020, where a Black Lives Matter/Antifa/Bolshevik revolution has our country on the brink of total chaos.
[Coulter-RittenhouseMeme.jpeg]
Matt Walsh of the Daily Wire blamed the media for there even having been a trial:
The verdict is right and just but Kyle Rittenhouse never should have been on trial at all. Now themedia will go to work, like the demonsthey are, to ensure that Kenosha burns because they did not get their blood sacrifice.
Walsh then added:
I hope Rittenhouse bankrupts all of you dirtbags in media who smeared him as a white supremacist. [sue for libel based on verdict? // charlottesville ~ KKK case finished ] I hope he ruins your life. I want you to suffer. It's what you deserve. It's justice.
Idaho legislator Tammy Nichols, a Republican, posted a meme featuring the Gadsden-flag "Don't Tread On Me" design, but with a graphic of Rittenhouse firing from a seated position as he did in Kenosha.
The Gun Owners of America (GOA)—a gun-rights extremist group headed by far-right militia figure Larry Pratt—joined in the celebration by announcing it was giving Rittenhouse a new gun.
Alert: GOA will be awarding Kyle Rittenhouse with an AR-15 for his defense of gun rights in America. Join us in saying THANK YOU to Kyle Rittenhouse for being awarrior for gun rights and self defense rights across the country!
Other "Patriot" Movement extremists saw the verdict as vindication for vigilantism and militia organizing. The "Washougal Moms," a militia-friendly group from eastern Washington state, opined:
Today the jury and legal system has reaffirmed our rights as citizens. The second amendmentin all aspects, to form a well regulated militia, the right to bear arms in self defense, and against enemiesboth foreign and domestic!
Kurt Schlichter, the right-wing troll with over 380,000 followers, taunted MSNBC's Mehdi Hasan, who had expressed concern about the double racial standard that the verdict reflects, on Twitter.
Your pain delights me. Kyle Rittenhouse killed two leftistcatspawsand bisected the bicep of another and there's nothing you can do about it.
A white-nationalist Twitter account called "Based Teutonic" celebrated the verdict by posting a fantasy that Rittenhouse would now embark on an action-hero-like mission—with the help of Judge Bruce Schroeder, who oversaw the trial in markedly biased fashion.
About to exit court room
Judge yells from behind:
Rittenhouse turns around
You forgot this
Tosses him his AR15
Credits roll, Eye of the Tiger plays
"Based Teutonic" wasn't alone in celebrating Schroeder's role in the verdict. On Telegram, a commenter in a Proud Boys channel observed:
Kyle's case shows how important is to have your guys in power on a local level. One vaguely conservative boomer judge made all of the difference in a monumental trial.
Other Proud Boys were more focused on their long-anticipated civil war. "There's still a chance for this country," wrote one. Another wrote: "The left wont stop until their bodies get stacked up like cord wood."
The Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights monitored a number of far-right chat forums (particularly Telegram) following the verdict, and found an outpouring of extremist bile, much of it anticipating the ability to inflict lethal violence on "leftists," as well as Black "parasites" and, of course, Jewish people. A user called The Western Chauvinist commented: "The parasites are planning multiple 'protests' across the United States."
One user calling himself "Proud Boy To Fascist Pipeline" replied to one of these comments mocking Black leaders protesting the verdict as "parasites": "Your 17 year olds are already armed and terrorizing our neighborhoods, n----er."
Fittingly, Charlie Kirk fans—following the example of his Idaho audience member—were focused on the violence: "Arm up and tell them f**cking bring it!" one replied to predictions of leftist protests after the verdict. "Shoot these phukers," commented another.
Nick Fuentes' "Groypers" were also unbridled in their anticipation of gunning down their opponents. "The most American thing you can do is Killing Commies," opined one on the white-nationalist forum Gab.
Another Gab user exulted with a meme showing Joaquin Phoenix as The Joker, dancing: "When you find out it's officially Open Season on pedo-commies." Mocking "wannabe street thugs upset with the verdict," another Gab user replied, "you're gonna get Rittenhouse'd. Bitch."
Gab-OpenSeason.png
"Getting Rittenhoused" became a popular way of threatening leftists. After Ngo posted a handful of tweets from leftists angry about the verdict, hundreds of his fans piled on, making threats of violence against them. "Someone will Rittenhouse them too," one responded. Another replied: "I came here to say that!"
Antisemitism also was a common theme. Right-wing troll Keith Woods, who has 23,500 followers on Twitter, declared after the verdict: "Huge L for the Jews." His followers piled on; one responded with a GIF meme of Gollum and the text, "Curse you goyim." Another replied, "hopefully they take an L in Charlottsville trial too. WHITE BOY WINTER!"
White nationalist Eric Striker was more explicitly antisemitic, as well as strategic, in his commentary:
Beating the Jews to the narrative as incidents unfold is more important than anything that happens in court.
Once you frame a story with the facts (and the facts have to be 100% accurate) and disseminate it with an effective propaganda network, Jews will struggle to challenge it once it's cemented.
Notorious white nationalist and antisemite Mike "Enoch" Peinovich put out a statement through his National Justice Party: "This victory for Kyle Rittenhouse over the cosmopolitan elite forces that plague the nation isn't only a victory for the young man himself, it's a victory for justice and for all White people who take a stand," Peinovich said.
On Telegram, a white nationalist commented: "The victory of Kyle Rittenhouse over thejewish forces that plague the nation isn't just a victory for the man himself, it's a victory for justice, and for the masses of disenfranchised White people which populate the globe.
The neo-Nazi group White Lives Matter had this advice for its white-supremacist followers:
Don't let this one victory lull you back to sleep. That's what they want. They know small "victories" can placate the angry masses more than anything else. Instead let this win fuel your rage.Never forget the simple fact that this clear-cut self-defense should never have gone to trial in the first place. Muslim, Hispanic, and African invaders have raped millions of our women, WHITE women.Their time ofterrorizing our People with 0 consequences is coming to an end. The Rittenhouse verdict is a single tick in the scoreboard on our side. Our enemy doesn't have a scoreboard big enough for their victories. Fight harder, stronger, fiercer, and with the same remorse they have shown us. None. Get going, White man.
"This might be interpreted across the far right as a type of permission slip to do this kind of thing or to seek out altercations in this way, believing that there is a potential that they won't face serious consequences for it," Jared Holt of the Digital Forensic Research Lab at the Atlantic Council told NPR. "I worry that that might end up being interpreted by some people as a proof of concept of this idea that you can actually go out and seek a 'self-defense situation,' and you'll be cheered as a hero for it."
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aha/hmmn: koch gop TP libtards have been undermining faith in gov't, [only balance/mod w/ unions to corp power/authoritarian fascism] mebbe building on viet nam lies? but now big lie conspiracy theory says if dems win it was rigged/fraud, so voter suppression plus gerry allows minority gop rule. alt rt 8 chan ampl/accelerate to black pill --> mass shoot spark race war?
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aha: 2 sep big pict analysis see gt recession as root; (also effect); inequality
see salon, wa mo connects dots
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aha critical thinking is systems thinking, it is the antidote to nihilism and authoritarianism, which is radically reductionist
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aha: someone said alt right is search for uncastrated father; jordan p gives rules; muslim kids in french ghettos get radicalized, so do cuck in parent's basements who can't be pick up artists and wohl of wall street. [matrix 4 guy does sys analysis:darwin/ invis hand meritocrisy leaves losers to blame themselves, not structural forces.
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cdv
https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/matrix-4-writer-breaks-down-the-clash-between-trumps-right-wing-revolution-and-the-democrats-wishful-thinking/
Matrix 4’ writer breaks down the clash between Trump’s right-wing revolution and the Democrats’ ‘wishful thinking’
Written by Chauncey DeVega / Salon June 3, 2020
The American people are in pain. There have been days of protest and civil unrest in many American cities following the killing of George Floyd, an unarmed black man, by the Minneapolis Police Department on Memorial Day.
This article was originally published at Salon
These convulsions in the American body politic are not just the result of one more murder of an unarmed, surrendered black man by a white cop, televised before the world like a New Age lynching. America’s problems are vast.
The coronavirus pandemic has killed more than 108,000 people in the United States, with the total number of cases now approaching 2 million. Donald Trump and his administration have responded with malevolent indifference. These deaths are but another entry in a social Darwinist ledger where the “useless eaters” are being left to die for “capitalism” — and in service to Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign.
Now the American people are struggling through a second Great Depression, in which tens of millions cannot pay their rents or mortgages, or feed their families. Republicans have only offered a pittance for ordinary people amid this global economic disaster — a onetime payment of $1,200 — while giving big corporations and the richest citizens trillions of dollars of the American people’s money.
Overall, there is a sense that something is deeply wrong in this country and this society, which elevated a racial authoritarian demagogue and avatar of corruption to the presidency. Many Americans feel ashamed by how their country now appears before the world. There is great potential for positive change in America, but to this point no great hero or leader has emerged. That vacuum is what makes Trump’s power so great. Even though he lacks a great mass movement after the model of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, he commands cult-like followers who will carry out his every wish.
Trump is an authoritarian and neofascist, who only knows how to destroy and not create. He is not a unifier but a divider. Like other leaders of that ilk, Trump uses violence, chaos and pain as a primary means of expanding and securing power.
For Trump and the Republican Party, America’s pain is a target of opportunity for their gangster capitalist agenda.
Trump has used “stochastic terrorism” to encourage violent threats by his followers and enforcers against prominent Democrats like Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Trump has also targeted nonwhite people, Muslims, immigrants and “liberals” in general with violent threats.
Trump has made reference to “Second Amendment solutions” as a way of inspiring right-wing militias and other paramilitaries to attack his perceived enemies. As seen with his recent declaration of “MAGA Night,” Trump would like to mobilizes white supremacists and other right-wing terrorists as his street hooligan enforcers.
Trump has urged his armed followers to threaten or perhaps overturn the governments of Democratic-led states and cities if they do not bow to his will by ending public health measures designed to slow the spread of the coronavirus pandemic. To some extent, they have been successful: The Michigan state legislature was recently forced into recess by such threats of violence.
This week, Trump has threatened to invoke a 200-year-old law called the Insurrection Act to crush the protests and civil unrest which has burst forth in response to the killing of George Floyd. This is one more step in Trump’s effort to create an autocratic pseudo-democracy where he rules indefinitely. Martial law would be the most efficient way for Donald Trump to use a “state of emergency” — his personal Reichstag-fire moment — as a way to end America’s constitutional democracy and the rule of law.
Donald Trump has his knee on the throat of American democracy, just as surely as Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin had his on the throat of George Floyd.
In a recent article for the Intercept, Bosnian-born novelist Aleksandar Hemon — also the co-writer of the forthcoming “Matrix” sequel — warns that the United States is careening towards ethnic violence, civil war and self-destruction under Donald Trump. The “most important and troubling symptom,” he writes, is the rising atmosphere of conflict “meant to culminate in transformative, cathartic violence; this marks the beginning of collective self-actualization.” Hemon continues:
As we bear witness to armed white American militias storming or protesting outside government institutions, it is clear that the chaos and tragedy of Covid-19 are being used by Trump and the GOP to enhance the conflict and accelerate the birth of a new, greater America. At the heart of every nationalist mythology is some kind of a rebirth, usually bloody and requiring sacrifices, preferably of the weak and the doubtful. …
For many of my fellow ex-Yugoslavs, it was instantly clear that once the GOP and Trump committed to conflict and destruction, they could never afford to quit, for that would constitute a tactical error leading to an irreversible defeat. They now have no choice but to follow their trajectory to its logical extreme, which must be victory and rebirth at all cost. They will kill if they have to, or at least let Covid-19 do it.
When armed Trumpists pretend to be a happening of good people who demand the end of the lockdown, anti-fascist ex-Yugoslavs don’t necessarily see an American version of murderous Serbian paramilitaries. What we see with heart-clenching clarity is that the familiar nationalist strategy of perpetually inciting conflict is advancing along a predictable trajectory.
In our recent conversation, Hemon warned that Donald Trump and the far right are engaged in revolutionary politics where compromise is not possible because they are preparing for armed conflict, while Joe Biden and the Democrats are only worried about the normative strategy and tactics of electoral democracy. Hemon also described Trump as leading a death cult organized around white supremacy and the related existential insecurities of the white men who are attracted to such politics. Like other death cults, Trump’s supporters are willing to kill and die in his name, believing it will lead to personal rebirth and glory.
Hemon also shared details on a proposed project he developed with Lana Wachowski and David Mitchell in 2017, about a United States ruined by Trump-like demagogues, civil war, environmental disasters and — believe it or not — a pandemic. As usual, our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
So many people are in a state of terror and fear right now. From my perspective they should have been afraid at least four years ago in response to Trump. Why were so many people in denial about the dire dangers of Donald Trump and what he represents? Why are they so late in realizing the reality of the situation? It was all so obvious.
The fight is not over. This moment with Trump, the other members of the global right-wing and the virus is going to have consequences across many areas of our lives. We are struggling just to stay alive right now. There are going to be severe consequences from all the forces coming together that no one can quite predict.
The virus allows Trump, Boris Johnson, Jair Bolsonaro, Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán and other authoritarians to accelerate a total reconfiguration of their respective societies. Such leaders are not fighting the virus so much as they are fighting to radically change society to serve their far-right agenda. That goal and agenda is not always visible to many people.
Donald Trump keeps saying that he is a “war president.” That claim is being misinterpreted by most observers in the mainstream news media. What Trump really means is that he is an authoritarian and the rule of law does not apply to him. Trump is able to hide his true intent because hefloods the zone with chaos, distractions and lies. In most important ways, Donald Trump is open about his plans.
This is part of a strategy. The global right and its leaders want to make everything meaningless. They want people to “fish in murky waters,” as the saying goes back in my home of Yugoslavia. One headline by itself would stand out and the public would understand the danger. People either understand the entirety and wholeness of this dangerous situation or they choose not to. If the public cannot see the big picture, they will also not be able to see how the smaller parts fit together as a whole. It all seems like one isolated series of events after another. For those who cannot see the big picture, it is a maelstrom and they lack perspective to make sense of it all.
Another element of Trump’s authoritarianism — and this is why the mainstream media is still unable to effectively grapple with this crisis — are the threats against reporters and journalists, where he calls them “fake news” and “human scum”. Journalists have also been attacked and killed in America under Trump.
There is an inability to grasp the magnitude of the catastrophe. Before the war in Bosnia, in the former Yugoslavia, the catastrophe of war was so huge that people were too fearful to imagine what was happening because that would have meant — as turned out to be the case — that their entire way of life, the very structure of life, would be destroyed. If the people in Bosnia or the former Yugoslavia were then to have acknowledged or understood the magnitude of the catastrophe it would have meant making choices about changing their lives. This would have helped them to keep their agency. But too many of them waited, therefore losing their agency, and the catastrophe of the civil war and ethnic cleansing made the decision for them.//AGW
This is a frightening proposition to a lot of people. That meant, in case of their war, they would have to get up and leave their lives and not take much for themselves. And so one finds oneself in a situation where you see that there is a catastrophe unfolding and say, “But what am I going to do now?”
Difficult decisions must be made. And it’s terrible. It is a horrible proposition. People start negotiating with reality to avoid the catastrophe and the real possibility of death. In this country at present that looks like, “Maybe it’s not that bad? Maybe Biden is going to fix it? Maybe somehow Trump is going to turn presidential all of a sudden? Maybe the Republicans actually do love this country? Maybe I should wait to see what happens, and decide in a month?”
With Trumpism the news media has to change the entire way in which they interpret and engage with reality. The American news media, for the most part, cannot do it. They cannot make that pivot. The rules are different with an authoritarian such as Donald Trump.
At the same time, the advantage of Trump and his movement is that they do not care about reality or the truth. They are a death cult. They are not afraid to die. The Trumpists and Republicans are excited and motivated by the possibility of remaking reality itself, because they are in revolutionary mode. The Democrats and everyone else are, by comparison, trying to find a magical way to retain the status quo. Which, even if the status quo was somehow good enough, is now impossible to salvage. The American right’s, and the global right’s, revolutionary process is far too advanced at this point.
What guidance would you give the average person about maintaining perspective and reorienting themselves to this new reality?
People are struggling with the logistics of life, just staying on the surface and not drowning. Given the circumstances with the economy and the state of the world I would not blame anyone for that. But there has been this longstanding notion that America is a stable society. It is a country with its own deep tradition of checks and balances. In America, however deep the social injustice and inequality, the future was something that could be reasonably anticipated. Even if things were bad, there was a sense of continuity and predictability.
But what is happening now with COVID is that people in the United States simply do not know what is going to happen in a month. The future has become unpredictable. In America, people are now negotiating reality. Having to figure out reality and what is true or not on a basic level is a shocking change for many people in America and some other parts of the world. People are now thinking of the “future” in terms of months and not three or 10 or 30 years in the future. With this disruption in even being able to plan for the future, it takes agency away and gives it to other people and individuals. Someone else is now deciding your fate. Meanwhile, the people on the right have guns and think that they are some type of liberation force. They think they are the ones with the agency and freedom. Being on the left puts you in a position of not having agency in the United States at present.
One person’s dystopia is another person’s utopia. The global right wing has purpose. They have got the guns. They are highly ideological and committed. There is a core group of the global right-wing extremists who are committed to “accelerationism,” destroying society in order to create their own new world.
The right wing is in revolutionary mode because part of every nationalist movement or discourse is a myth of some kind of sacrifice or rebirth in blood and sacrifice. That logic justifies all of their wars and mass killing. Donald Trump has no ideology or understanding of political theory and philosophy. But Trump does have an instinctive understanding of nationalism.
He just said the other day, “Our doctors are at war.” It’s a war that is part of the rebirth of the nation.
Donald Trump and the right wing are in revolutionary mode, but there are so many observers who believe that they are just stupid and insane. These outsiders do not really understand what is happening. They dismiss what the right wing is doing as some type of farce or joke when it is deadly serious.
Revolutionary political parties do not need many supporters or members to succeed. Obsessing over how many people do or do not support Donald Trump is an error. Numbers are not the absolute measure of his strength. The true measure of Trump’s strength is how many people are willing to die for him. How many people in America and Europe are willing to die for a leftist cause? Donald Trump has stormtroopers. We don’t have stormtroopers. It is that simple. The Democrats are so afraid of anyone who even appears that they might just be a tiny bit radical. Even something like national health care is treated as too radical. The Democrats are not preparing for a fight; they’re preparing for a vote. Those are not the same things. It is not enough. And it is probably useless in the long run, when the Democrats are up against a revolutionary right-wing movement.
The other part of the equation is the people who are willing to kill for Donald Trump and his movement. Moreover, Trump’s supporters have been killing their “enemies” here in the United States through mass shootings and other violence. Those murders, assaults and other violence have been a feature of Trump’s regime. Unfortunately, the mainstream news media has not been consistently reporting on it because such outcomes are now normalized.
A large number of people who are willing to die for Donald Trump are also willing to kill for him. These Trump supporters are willing to sacrifice their previous morality and to be reborn through an act of blood and sacrifice in service to him. The military is very important here. During the wars in the former Yugoslavia it came down to who controlled the military. In the United States, people on the left are saying, “Well, if it really gets that bad, the military will intervene and save us.” We are at a point where people on the left in the United States are hoping for military intervention — as though that’s a good thing. What will the United States military do? I don’t know.
The Democrats really believe they can just vote Trump out of office. They are not properly organizing for all possibilities and in response to what the right wing is doing.
We hope that Biden will get elected and then somehow we’ll return to some status quo from before and pre-Trump democracy will be restored in some way. That’s just wishful thinking. Totally wishful thinking. Meanwhile, Donald Trump and the right wing and the Republicans are preparing for a showdown.
Trump and the broader right are now saying that people should sacrifice themselves for “the economy” by dying from the coronavirus pandemic. Specifically, those who should die are the elderly and others who are vulnerable to the disease. This is social Darwinism. It is fascistic. That logic should be abhorrent but there has been little outrage from the American people.
I don’t know what could constitute enough outrage and opposition. There has to be change at the end. Otherwise it is just yelling at the wind. Moreover, what is needed now to counter Trump and his movement is more than just objections — it must be a vision and an alternative plan. There must also be a movement that is created out of that rage and anger in order to follow through on the necessary work and struggle.
Being angry is a precondition, I suppose, for some kind of radical or at least committed action. But it’s a necessary but not sufficient condition. There is plenty of outrage. What is lacking is a framework for what to do with that outrage. Democrats are afraid of that outrage. Whatever happens with Trump and the 2020 election, and afterwards, the United States is going to be radically different than before. The question becomes, who wins? Trump and the revolutionary right wing, or the left and the Democrats?
Suppose Joe Biden and the Democrats win. Who in their sane mind thinks that will lead to a radical correction to the country? Who really believes that Donald Trump and his enforcers are just going to drop their weapons and go home? That is not going to happen. The United States is heading towards a conflict. This conflict cannot be resolved politically. I believe that it may have to be resolved extra-politically.
I initially accepted the fact that some people voted for Trump in 2016 because they are straight-ticket Republican voters. I think that is a horrible decision, but I can understand it on a certain level. But to continue to support Trump at present given the authoritarianism, corruption, white supremacy, misogyny, environmental destruction and malevolent negligence is to be complicit. Trump’s supporters are now active agents of fascism. I have suggested in my writing and interviews that people of conscience and other good people should not interact in any way with Trump supporters, even if they are members of the family. How have you made such decisions?
I agree. Trump’s supporters are participating in a project that directly impacts my life, my family and the people I love in a very negative and dangerous way. We are past the point of understanding with Trump and his supporters. That moment was gone a long time ago. Any intelligent, active citizen understands the consequences of their actions. The whole idea that somehow these white people voted for Donald Trump while not meaning to be racist is just nonsense. If they somehow did not know that Donald Trump is a racist, then it is their responsibility to find out. Now it is evident because Trump is a rabid white supremacist who is aligned with the worst racist elements in the country. To support Donald Trump is to be complicit with white supremacy. It is to actively support a white supremacist project.
I do not talk to Donald Trump’s supporters. They are my enemies. I want them to go away and not be anywhere near me. I do not want to “unite” with such people in this country. I do not care if they live in the same country as me. Donald Trump’s supporters are my enemies and I want them gone from my life. And that’s a hard thing to say. Countries break up over such things. This is imaginable in this country now. And what is imaginable is possible.
You have written about the ethnic conflict and civil war in Yugoslavia and your fears of how such a thing is now on the horizon in the United States. How are people — especially young men — seduced and radicalized into committing such acts of violence?
It is empowering. It flatters their masculine power. Nationalism and fascism are always masculine political projects.This is why misogyny is always an aspect of any kind of nationalism. Fascism and nationalism also empowers old men. And in the context of white male supremacy, the advances of people of color and women were imagined as somehow disempowering white men. These white men became disgruntled. They lost jobs. But the problem with that white male anger is that it ignores that black and brown people lost their jobs too from deindustrialization, neoliberalism, globalization and related forces. The anger and sense of loss and feeling that they do not have agency was compensated for by uniting behind Donald Trump.
I always took Trump seriously. He was always capable of reaching this point. It’s not that he’s exceptional. It is rather that the conditions were right for Trump to win the presidency because he embodies this vulgar, blatant misogyny, sexism and arrogance. His psychopathic characteristics exactly match the fantasies of fascism.
There is another aspect of Donald Trump’s popularity among his followers. There is something terribly reassuring to a certain type of person that one can be stupid and lazy and so openly unpleasant and still become president of the United States. By comparison Barack Obama had to be a saint. He had to be perfect, Harvard-educated and wise. But Trump’s white supporters hated him intensely. Trump restores a certain type of faith in white supremacy for his supporters because someone as stupid and bad and lazy and evil as Trump can become president of the United States. Trump’s supporters now know that the worst of them can still be president. That must be terribly reassuring.
Donald Trump’s narcissism and other mental pathologies exactly match the collective pathology of white nationalists. Trump is a natural-born white supremacist because in any other context he is an idiot and a psychopath.
You are one of the co-writers of “The Matrix 4.” The Age of Trump, and now this pandemic and associated economic collapse is a surreal living nightmare. Could you have sat down and made up such a story? Would it even be believable?
With the same writers I worked with on “The Matrix 4,” we developed a spec script in December of 2017. The premise of the project was the disintegration of the United States and what happened afterward, as seen through the lives of several characters over 25 or so years of time in the story. Anything imaginable is possible. In our story there was a pandemic, environmental collapse, random violence, militias and rogue governors of different states.
I am sure people are writing science fiction stories based in this current moment, and his gets us back to politics in this moment and the power of imagination. I believe that many people cannot accept what is happening and are in denial because they lack imagination. They cannot make sense of the headlines because their minds eliminate so many possibilities about what is happening in the world right now — and what will happen in the future.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/how-conservatism-could-kill-us-all/
no lnx
How ‘conservatism’ could kill us all
Written by Joe Conason February 28, 2020
Nothing confirms the human need for strong, honest and competent government like a looming pandemic. The possibility that thousands, or even millions, could die from a randomly transmitted virus reminds us of our species’ vulnerability — and why society cannot exist without institutions that can protect us from such staggering existential threats.
Only government can impose quarantines and precautions when necessary. Only government can trace contacts, control transportation and monitor communities. Only government can ensure that drugs, medical devices and care will be adequately distributed — and that sufficient resources will be directed toward production of a vaccine as soon as possible, without regard to profit.
At a moment like this, it suddenly becomes clear that every problem — indeed, the most pressing problems — cannot and will not be solved by “the private sector.” If that seems blazingly obvious, please inform the Republicans who constantly tell us they want to “shrink government down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” Facing a potential catastrophe, those old jeers from the right sound utterly mindless.
But that is precisely the outlook that has undermined our social defenses against a global pandemic, despite many warnings over the years from experts and academics that it was coming. President Donald Trump personifies the impulse to ignore the peril while insisting on prejudice, rather than science. It is exactly the same posture that he and his enablers take toward climate change. When he put on a stunning display of ignorance at a press conference meant to reassure us about the coronavirus, it was because he is capable of nothing more.
Trump alone isn’t responsible for the attitudes that undermine our response to the pandemic danger, of course. What passes for conservatism now is more akin to nihilism, promoting attacks on government and spending no matter what essential purpose they may serve. (Only the military, that mammoth of unconscionable waste, is exempt from right-wing dogma.) In the service of tax cuts for the ultra-rich, no vital program can be assured of adequate funding.
So the Trump budget actually aims to reduce funding for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — an idiotic proposal released just before the arrival of the coronavirus. The timing was perfect. And in fact, Trump and his minions have repeatedly vandalized the nation’s bulwarks against pandemic disease.
Exactly two years ago, the money budgeted by former President Barack Obama’s administration to deal with the Ebola outbreak in 2014 began to run out, and the Trump White House allowed that to occur, even though it meant reducing efforts to prevent a pandemic in most of the countries where we should be keeping watch.
The aim of that program was to stop any disease outbreak at the source, rather than allow it to leap oceans into the U.S. homeland. Among the 39 hotspot countries that saw this program eliminated were Congo, Pakistan, Rwanda — and China. Remember that the next time you hear a Republican politician barking about “wasteful” foreign aid. The simple truth is that a minimal investment in global health could have provided substantial insurance against the kind of menace we now confront.
The politicians who hate government also tend to be remarkably incapable of executing the most important government functions.Obviously, this is true of Trump and his gang, who have left an extraordinary number of posts vacant simply because they don’t understand why it is necessary to fill them. In other instances, their empty-headed disregard for the purposes of government has led to the abolition of indispensable agencies and offices — notably, the National Security Council global health security division.
For the past three years, Trump and the Republicans have busied themselves with attacks on our government’s intelligence capabilities, our health systems, even the health coverage that would enable Americans to cope with an epidemic like coronavirus might become. They railed against “the deep state”; they sabotaged fundamental services; they behaved as if society needs no sentinels or guard posts; and now they pretend to be able to protect us.
If America escapes tragedy this time, it must be taken as a warning: Never entrust the future to these numbskulls again.
To find out more about Joe Conason and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2020 CREATORS.COM
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/nihilism-on-meth-this-is-the-surprising-key-to-understanding-trump-and-his-christian-enablers/
np lnx
Nihilism-on-meth: This is the surprising key to understanding Trump and his Christian enablers
Written by Daniel Schultz / Religion Dispatches February 5, 2020
Last night President Trump gave his State of the Union address, the night before his expected acquittal in a sham impeachment trial in the U.S. Senate. To paraphrase Dylan, you gotta belong to somebody, and I at least would like it to be someone better than a walking avatar of nihilism.
I’m not kidding. Nihilism in its most common philosophical sense means that nothing really matters in the end, and certainly Trump has given us no reason to think that he thinks anything beyond his own whims and appetites have any kind of meaning or value. Burnt steak with ketchup, golf, getting even with enemies, self-enrichment, sexualizing his daughter and ignoring his wife—these are the things that make Trump’s world go around, not any sense of history, purpose, or calling.
Meanwhile, Trump’s Republican enablers practice a kind of Randian political nihilism, in which nothing matters more than the constant struggle of all-vs.-all for dominance and self-realization. Alex Pareene pointed to one form of this nihilism last year in the transactionalist politics perfected by Mitch McConnell, who would set your dog on fire or enact Medicare for All, depending on the highest bidder. But of course, McConnell has plenty of help in the Senate from people like Lisa Murkowski, who boldly proclaimed that she would vote against witnesses in Trump’s impeachment because she was convinced a fair trial couldn’t be held.
And as Mike Lofgren argued in 2018 (far better than I ever could), Trump is, as always, a symptom of the Republican party’s rot, not its cause. The GOP, Lofgren says, has slid through its own contradictions and overlapping consensus of hostility to the civic sphere, into the sort of nihilism Thomas Hobbes would recognize. Nothing really matters more to modern conservatism than the increase of the movement’s own power; or at the very least, of keeping the cold, dead grip of nostalgia for the “good old days” on the levers of social control, safely away from liberals, African Americans, women, and other undesirables.
Peter Wehner picks up the thread, if not the language, in considering an evangelical Trump defender. And what a defender Wayne Grudem is! The distinguished evangelical theologian pushes back on Christianity Today’s call for Trump’s removal from office:
I see nothing wrong with the president doing things that will bring him personal, political benefit. In fact, I expect that every president in the history of the United States has done things that bring him personal political benefit every day of his term. It is preposterous to claim that it is unconstitutional for the president to act in a way that is politically beneficial. In addition to that, when someone announces that he is running for political office, that does not mean he can no longer be investigated for prior wrongdoing. The opposite should be true.
I’ll let Wehner explain all the ways this is a deeply boneheaded argument. What stands out to me about it is the first sentence: “I see nothing wrong with the president doing things that will bring him personal, political benefit.” Really? If the president decided to eat a live puppy at his next rally, there would be nothing wrong with it? If there are no limits to a president’s self-seeking, then nothing can be more important than that self-seeking, and just like that, we have achieved nihilist reduction.
None of this exactly squares with the Christian faith Wayne Grudem and others proclaim. For one thing, to put a political leader beyond accountability introduces a sort of practical atheism into the conversation—not in the sense of belief or non-belief—but in that “God’s not watching, so who cares what we do?” Scripture has a thing or two to say about that.
Worse in some ways is what the nihilistic perspective does to a human sense of purpose. Mike Lofgren quotesRichard Hofstadter:
The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. Like religious millennialists he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to set a date for the apocalypse.
Peter Wehner agrees, citing “a deep sense of fear” among the president’s supporters, and “the belief that they are facing an existential threat and, therefore, can’t concede any ground, lest they strengthen those they consider to be their enemies.” But of course, Christianity teaches exactly the opposite: that there are worse things than dying (chief among them the hardening of one’s heart), and that life can only be properly lived by surrendering it compassionately to others. That’s what it means for Christians to belong to Jesus. It isn’t remotely radical to say that we believe that Christ gave up his life for God and for the community of people who followed him; Christians give up their lives for Christ, and for one another. (In theory, anyway. Practice is another thing.)
I don’t expect anyone reading this to agree with these theological assertions, of course. The point is that the nihilism-on-meth displayed in the Trump years doesn’t line up with the stated Christian beliefs of many of its practitioners. Not for the usual reasons given about liberal Jesus commanding us to be kind to the poor, the widow, and the orphan, but because Christian faith involves a sweep of purpose and meaning far beyond seeking power for no better end than to stay on top of the social heap.
According to the Heidleberg Catechism, our bodies and our souls, our births and our deaths, matter because they are caught up in the important work of reconciling the world to itself. Again, feel free to disagree or agree. I just hope we can all be of one mind on the idea that there has to be some reason to live our lives beyond what we can stuff in our pockets and shove down our throats. Otherwise, the nihilists have won.
Thanks for your support! This article was paid for by reader donations to Raw Story Investigates.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/an-age-of-manufactured-nihilism-a-writer-details-the-disquieting-assault-on-truth-from-trump-bannon-and-putin/
no lnx
‘An age of manufactured nihilism’: A writer details the disquieting assault on truth from Trump, Bannon and Putin
Written by Alex Henderson February 6, 2020
The term “information overload” has been around since at least 1964, when it was used in the Bertram Gross book, “The Managing of Organizations.” But the concept — being overwhelmed by too much information — is alive and well in 2020. And journalist Sean lling, in a think piece published in Vox this week, takes a look at some of the ways in which information overload can affect politics.
“We live in a media ecosystem that overwhelms people with information,” Illing explains. “Some of that information is accurate, some of it is bogus, and much of it is intentionally misleading. The result is a polity that has increasingly given up on finding out the truth.”
Politically, information overload can manifest itself in different ways, according to Illing.
Some people, feeling overwhelmed, don’t know what to believe and ignore politics altogether; others only rely on sources that cater to their biases.
“We’re in an age of manufactured nihilism,” Illing observes. “The issue for many people isn’t exactly a denial of truth as such. It’s more a growing weariness over the process of finding the truth at all. And that weariness leads more and more people to abandon the idea that the truth is knowable.”
Illing cites Steve Bannon as a perfect example of someone who uses information overload as part of his political strategy. Bannon headed Breitbart News before becoming, in 2017, chief strategist for President Donald Trump’s administration — and in 2018, Illing notes, Bannon reportedly said, “The Democrats don’t matter; the real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin, Illing adds, is also a master of “flooding the zone” —and so is White House Adviser Kellyanne Conway. Illing observes, “We don’t need a master puppeteer pulling the media’s strings. The race for content, the need for clicks, is more than enough. Bannon or Conway can shake things up by feeding nonsense into the system.”
Although the term “information overload” was being used decades before the internet was created, the concept is more relevant than ever in an era of smartphones, laptops, e-mail, social media and text messaging. Trump, according to Illing, “can dictate an entire news cycle with a few unhinged tweets or an absurd press conference.”
“What we’re facing is a new form of propaganda that wasn’t really possible until the digital age,” Illing asserts. “And it works not by creating a consensus around any particular narrative, but by muddying the waters so that consensus isn’t achievable.”
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https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/1/16/20991816/impeachment-trial-trump-bannon-misinformation
"Flood the zone with shit”: How misinformation overwhelmed our democracy
The impeachment trial didn’t change any minds. Here’s why.
By Sean Illing@seanillingsean.illing@vox.com Updated Feb 6, 2020, 9:27am EST
On Wednesday, the Senate voted toacquit President Trump of charges of abuse of power and obstruction of justice.
Despite all the incontrovertible facts at the center of this story, it was always inevitable that this process would change very few minds. No matter how clear a case the Democrats made, it was always highly likely that no single version of the truth was ever going to be accepted.
This fact underscores a serious problem for our democratic culture. No amount of evidence, on virtually any topic, is likely to move public opinion one way or the other. We can attribute some of this to rank partisanship — some people simply refuse to acknowledge inconvenient facts about their own side.
But there’s another, equally vexing problem. We live in a media ecosystem that overwhelms people with information. Some of that information is accurate, some of it is bogus, and much of it is intentionally misleading. The result is a polity that has increasingly given up on finding out the truth. As Sabrina Tavernise and Aidan Gardiner put it in a New York Times piece, “people are numb and disoriented, struggling to discern what is real in a sea of slant, fake, and fact.” This is partly why an earth-shattering historical event like a president’s impeachment did very little to move public opinion.
The core challenge we’re facing today is information saturation and a hackable media system. If you follow politics at all, you know how exhausting the environment is. The sheer volume of content, the dizzying number of narratives and counternarratives, and the pace of the news cycle are too much for anyone to process.
One response to this situation is to walk away and tune everything out. After all, it takes real effort to comb through the bullshit, and most people have busy lives and limited bandwidth. Another reaction is to retreat into tribal allegiances. There’s Team Liberal and Team Conservative, and pretty much everyone knows which side they’re on. So you stick to the places that feed you the information you most want to hear.
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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi reading totals of a vote approving articles of impeachment. Robert Alexander/Getty Images}:}:
My Vox colleague Dave Roberts calls this an “epistemic crisis.” The foundation for shared truth, he argues, has collapsed. I don’t disagree with that, but I’d frame the problem a little differently.
We’re in an age of manufactured nihilism.
The issue for many people isn’t exactly a denial of truth as such. It’s more a growing weariness over the process of finding the truth at all. And that weariness leads more and more people to abandon the idea that the truth is knowable.
I call this “manufactured” because it’s the consequence of a deliberate strategy. It was distilled almost perfectly by Steve Bannon, the former head of Breitbart News and chief strategist for Donald Trump. “The Democrats don’t matter,” Bannon reportedly said in 2018. “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”
This idea isn’t new, but Bannon articulated it about as well as anyone can. The press ideally should sift fact from fiction and give the public the information it needs to make enlightened political choices. If you short-circuit that process by saturating the ecosystem with misinformation and overwhelm the media’s ability to mediate, then you can disrupt the democratic process.
What we’re facing is a new form of propaganda that wasn’t really possible until the digital age. And it works not by creating a consensus around any particular narrative but by muddying the waters so that consensus isn’t achievable.
Bannon’s political objective is clear. As he explained in a 2017 Conservative Political Action Conference talk, he sees Trump as a stick of dynamite with which to blow up the status quo. So “flooding the zone” is a means to that end. But more generally, creating widespread cynicism about the truth and the institutions charged with unearthing it erodes the very foundation of liberal democracy. And the strategy is working.
What flooding the zone actually means
For most of recent history, the goal of propaganda was to reinforce a consistent narrative. But zone-flooding takes a different approach: It seeks to disorient audiences with an avalanche of competing stories.
And it produces a certain nihilism in which people are so skeptical about the possibility of finding the truth that they give up the search. The fact that 60 percent of Americans say they encounter conflicting reports about the same event is an example of what I mean. In the face of such confusion, it’s not surprising that less than half the country trusts what they read in the press.
Bannon articulated the zone-flooding philosophy well, but he did not invent it. In our time, it was pioneered by Vladimir Putin in post-Soviet Russia. Putin uses the media to engineer a fog of disinformation, producing just enough distrust to ensure that the public can never mobilize around a coherent narrative.
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Russian President Vladimir Putin appears onscreen during a press conference in Moscow on December 19, 2019. Mikhail Svetlov/Getty Images}:}:
In October, I spoke to Peter Pomerantsev, a Soviet-born reality TV producer turned academic who wrote a book about Putin’s propaganda strategy. The goal, he told me, wasn’t to sell an ideology or a vision of the future; instead, it was to convince people that “the truth is unknowable” and that the only sensible choice is “to follow a strong leader.”
One major reason for the strategy’s success, both in the US and Russia, is that it coincided with a moment when the technological and political conditions were in place for it to thrive. Media fragmentation, the explosion of the internet, political polarization, curated timelines, and echo chambers — all of this allows a “flood the zone with shit” strategy to work.
The role of “gatekeeping” institutions has also changed significantly. Before the internet and social media, most people got their news from a handful of newspapers and TV networks. These institutions functioned like referees, calling out lies, fact-checking claims, and so on. And they had the ability to control the flow of information and set the terms of the conversation.
Today, gatekeepers still matter in terms of setting a baseline for political knowledge, but there’s much more competition for clicks and audiences, and that alters the incentives for what’s declared newsworthy in the first place. At the same time, traditional media outlets remain committed to a set of norms that are ill adapted to the modern environment. The preference for objectivity in political coverage, in particular, is a problem.
As Joshua Green, who wrote a biography of Bannon, explained, Bannon’s lesson from the Clinton impeachment in the 1990s was that to shape the narrative, a story had to move beyond the right-wing echo chamber and into the mainstream media. That’s exactly what happened with the now-debunked Uranium One story that dogged Clinton from the beginning of her campaign — a story Bannon fed to the Times, knowing that the supposedly liberal paper would run with it because that’s what mainstream media news organizations do.
In this case, Bannon flooded the zone with a ridiculous story not necessarily to persuade the public that it was true (although surely plenty of people bought into it) but to create a cloud of corruption around Clinton. And the mainstream press, merely by reporting a story the way it always has, helped create that cloud.
You see this dynamic at work daily on cable news. Trump White House adviser Kellyanne Conway lies. She lies a lot. Yet CNN and
have shown zero hesitation in giving her a platform to lie because they see their job as giving government officials — even ones who lie — a platform.
Even if CNN or MSNBC debunk Conway’s lies, the damage will be done. Fox and right-wing media will amplify her and other falsehoods; armies on social media, bot and real, will, too (@realDonaldTrump will no doubt chime in). The mainstream press will be a step behind in debunking — and even the act of debunking will serve to amplify the lies.
UC Berkeley linguist George Lakoff calls this the “framing effect.” As Lakoff puts it, if you say “don’t think of an elephant,” you can’t help but think of an elephant. In other words, even if you reject an argument, merely repeating it cements the frame in people’s minds. Debunking it is still useful, of course, but there’s a cost to dignifying it in the first place.
There is some research that points to the utility of fact-checking. Political scientists Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler have shown that repeated exposure to fact-checking does tend to increase the accuracy of beliefs. But the issue with zone-flooding is an overabundance of news, which diminishes the importance of any individual story, no matter how big or damning.
In this environment, there are often too many things happening at once; it’s a constant game of whack-a-mole for journalists. And we know that false claims, if they’re repeated enough, become more plausible the more often they’re shared, something psychologists have called the “illusory truth” effect. Our brains, it turns out, tend to associate repetition with truthfulness. Some interesting new research, moreover, found that the more people encounter information the more likely they are to feel justified in spreading it, whether it’s true or not.
Flooding the zone, polarization, and why many people still don’t know what Trump did
This all intersects with political polarization in troubling ways. One consequence of pervasive confusion about what’s happening is that people feel more comfortable siding with their political tribe. If everything’s up for grabs, and it’s hard to sift through the competing narratives to find the truth, then there’s nothing left but culture war politics. There’s “us” and “them,” and the possibility of persuasion is off the table.
It’s worth noting that this polarization is asymmetric. The left overwhelmingly receives its news from organizations like the New York Times, the Washington Post, or cable news networks like MSNBC or CNN. Some of the reporting is surely biased, and probably biased in favor of liberals, but it’s still (mostly) anchored to basic journalistic ethics.
As a recent book by three Harvard researchers explains, this just isn’t true of the right. American conservative media functions like a closed system, with Fox News at the center. Right-wing outlets are less tethered to conventional journalistic ethics and exist mostly to propagate the bullshit they produce.
All this has created an atmosphere that has helped Trump. The Trump administration was remarkably successful at muddying the waters on Ukraine and impeachment, and Republicans in Congress helped by parroting the administration’s talking points.
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Reps. Guy Reschenthaler (R-PA), Jim Jordan (R-OH), and Louie Gohmert (R-TX) look on as fellow Republicans speak to the press after the House Judiciary Committee approved articles of impeachment against President Trump on December 13, 2019. Drew Angerer/Getty Images}:}:
The fact is, Trump did what Democrats have accused him of doing. We know, with absolute certainty, that the president tried to get a foreign government to investigate a family member of one of his political rivals. And we know this because of the witnesses who testified before the House Intelligence Committee and because Trump’s own White House released a record of the call proving it.
Yet all the polling data we have suggests that public opinion on Trump and Ukraine basically held steady. Again, some of this is pure partisan recalcitrance. But there’s good reason to believe that the right’s muddying of the waters — making the story about Ukraine and Hunter Biden, pushing out conspiracy theories, repeatedly trumpeting Trump’s own version of events, etc. — played a role.
The issue is that the coverage of the trials, in both the mainstream press and right-wing outlets, ensured that these counternarratives are part of the public conversation. It added to the general atmosphere of doubt and confusion. And that’s why zone flooding presents a near-insoluble problem for the press.
The old model is broken
The way impeachment played out underscores just how the new media ecosystem is a problem for our democracy.
It helps to think of zone-flooding less as a strategy deployed by a person or group and more as a natural consequence of the way media works.
We don’t need a master puppeteer pulling the media’s strings. The race for content, the need for clicks, is more than enough. Bannon or Conway can shake things up by feeding nonsense into the system.
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Fox & Friends hosts Steve Doocy, Ainsley Earhardt, and Pete Hegseth interview former US Army Lt. Clint Lorance on November 18, 2019. John Lamparski/Getty Images}:}:
Trump can dictate an entire news cycle with a few unhinged tweets or an absurd press conference. The media cycle is easily commandeered by misinformation, innuendo, and outrageous content. These are problems because of the norms that govern journalism and because the political economy of media makes it very hard to ignore or dispel bullshit stories. This is at the root of our nihilism problem, and a solution is nowhere in sight.
The instinct of the mainstream press has always been to conquer lies by exposing them. But it’s just not that simple anymore (if it ever was). There are too many claims to debunk and too many conflicting narratives. And the decision to cover something is a decision to amplify it and, in some cases, normalize it.
We probably need a paradigm shift in how the press covers politics. Nearly all of the incentives driving media militate against this kind of rethinking, however. And so we’re likely stuck with this problem for a very long time.
As is often the case, the diagnosis is much easier than the cure. But liberal democracy cannot function without a shared understanding of reality. As long as the zone is flooded with shit, that shared understanding is impossible.
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heath ledger actor batman died of OD? nihilism?
does not care for $, just burn it all down?
obama portrayed as joker, just saw AOC 619 [ i dl?]
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