Chaos reigns and the descent into the nightmarish carnival continues. No long form well-constructed essay here. Just bits and pieces along the way.

Tough Talk

Republicans and their ilk talk tough on crime. They love to talk tough on crime. They talk big shit about cracking down, about making arrests, about stymying the rampant VIOLENT CRIME. They are obsessed with the idea of a land RIDDEN WITH CRIME.

But the reality is, all of that talk, that obsession - it comes from a place of fear. They talk tough but they live in fear. The supposed toughness, the lashing out - it comes from a place of cowardice. They are terrified of a vague notion of the marauding criminal coming to terrorize them. THE RIFF RAFF COMING TO TERRORIZE THE COMMUNITY! They present their response as being tough on crime, like a sheriff in the Wild West single-handedly maintaining the sacred LAW AND ORDER. But that’s not what it is. They aren’t Wild West sheriffs. They aren’t cowboys. They’re vanilla straight-laced suburbanites that live in fear of a specter they rarely encounter. And by obsessing over it, by making opposition to it a fundamental part of their platform, by puffing out their chests and shouting about how tough they are - they show their cowardice.

“PROTECT OUR COMMUNITIES!!!" Sure, no want wants crime to run rampant. But to dwell on the possibility day in and day out? To give the specter center-stage in your psyche? Get a fucking grip. Grow a fucking spine. Walk tall, and learn to tuck that fear away. Walk tall, and don’t hide behind THE TOUGHEST CRACKDOWN YOU’LL EVER SEE, conducted by AGENTS OF THE LAW. All while you hide away from the world behind gated walls, shouting from the paralytic safety of your padded cocoon. No, this is not toughness; it is fear. And fear is no thing to be allowed to dominate a life. A life given over to fear is a life lived in cowardice. You understand? So carry yourselves, you fucking cowards.

Standard Operating Conditions

Former Texas governor and Republican presidential candidate Ricky Perry is apparently our nation’s most prominent advocate for ibogaine. Donald Trump has federalized the Washington DC police force for the first time since the Civil War. And it turns out that our elites may actually be satanic pedophiles after all!

It’s a strange timeline. The boomer-esque executives shout, “No one wants to work!” as they make the enticing offer of twelve dollars an hour, no benefits, TEAM SPIRIT REQUIRED! Meanwhile, Blackstone owns some 300,000 homes, and rent is going up, up, up, and healthcare is an abysmal mess.

“NO ONE’S HAVING KIDS!!!” they scream from their multi-millionaire dollar homes as a small staff of servants scurries around in the shadows performing all of the mundane but necessary menial tasks that it takes to function as an adult in modern society. “NO ONE WANTS TO WORK!!!” they shout as they are driven to the clinic for cutting edge experimental drug therapy, passing by a small line of tranq-ed out zombies frozen along a decrepit brick wall. “THIS GENERATION IS IN MORAL DECLINE!” they nod approvingly to each other around the dinner table, each of them just today having crushed a union, or laid off a large portion of their workforce in favor of cheaper and shittier AI, or, at the very least, foregone any form of raises yet again as the cost of living goes up, up, up.

Right. And meanwhile, you sweat and toil and debate each purchase, and the stock market surges to record highs. The president flips his decision on tariffs like a kid playing with a light switch, but instead of getting yelled at to stop by an aggravated parent, people like Charles Schwab get laughingly introduced in the Oval Office as having just made 2.5 billion, “TODAY!”

How much money did you make on the stock market that day? Oh? What’s the matter? You didn’t get the word ahead of time? YOU DIDN’T HAVE THE FUNDS FREE TO INVEST???

What a shame. Press on, pion.

The people in power now slammed THE GOVERNMENT GRAVY TRAIN and told us costs are being cut, for the good of the nation! AND NO MORE FOREIGN WARS!! Ok. Sure, maybe, in theory. But now what? ICE has been allocated a record budget and has begun a recruitment drive, offering multi-staged bonuses and student loan assistance! And ICE is now steamrolling into cities that don’t want them, raiding restaurants and Home Depots and conducting heavily-armed patrols of CESSPOOLS like public parks! ICE is rounding up everyone that can to meet arbitrary quotas developed in the horrific dungeon that is Stephen Miller’s shining bald ass head. Masked agents with no identification are snatching and grabbing, piling people into vans, and whisking them away to shadowy detention facilities. But fear not! It’s only the worst of the worst of the worst of the WORST criminals! It’s surely not just anyone who looks vaguely Latino, or African, or Asian, or uh, not white. As Kristi Noem, having moved past the casual killing of canines, responded to the allegation of racial profiling, “And don’t you dare ever say that again.”

So the small government conservative has gotten into bed and FORNICATED with the brave new world tech lord, and what have we gotten? Reduced government spending and a tidy adherence to free market principles?

FUCK OFF! Let’s try domestic militarization and a war within! States’ rights are so out of vogue. Government overreach is a silly notion when you’re just doing what needs to be done. The LONG ARM OF THE LAW can’t be long enough when you’re just cleaning up the country! Don’t tread on me, but please, PLEASE, run over my neighbors with treads!! DEPLOY THE ARMORED PERSONNEL CARRIERS TO MY NEIGHBORHOOD AND DESTROY MY ENEMIES BOTH REAL AND IMAGINED!!!

God. The hypocrisy and the short-sightedness are exhausting.

What are the interests of the common man? I cannot speak for us all of course, but I think it’s something largely as simple as a decent life. I will work, yes, but I will be paid fairly and not want for either the necessities or basic comforts. And there should be the real possibility for more - for better.

Is that how we feel today, in modern America? Does it feel like we’re on the cusp of getting more - of things getting better? Does it seem like a decent life is something that is going to come increasingly easily?

The Republicans are in power and they are in a race with themselves to see who can abandon the most of their principles the most quickly. The Democrats are happy to tell us that this is BAD, and then they return to offering nothing, and no one, having the vision of a stone buried beneath the earth. Meanwhile, they all profit, and Wall Street profits, and Corporate America profits, and the tech lords certainly profit, and they all use these profits to keep the wheel GREASED and turning. Turning, turning, turning in their favor.

We are encouraged to argue if perhaps the wheel should be a bit bigger, or a bit smaller, or turn a bit faster or a bit slower, or perhaps even be nudged a little to the left or the right. And so we argue, and the wheel keeps turning, and even when one side of the argument wins out and some minor adjustment is made to the wheel - it keeps turning. And that’s all THEY need - the politicians, the executives, the power brokers, the wealthy, the connected, the elites. They can adapt rapidly to any small adjustment that is allowed. And no adjustment that could be large enough to affect the fundamental turning of the thing is ever allowed. Certainly not.

Aftermath

Charlie Kirk was assassinated in broad daylight in front of a crowd on a college campus in Utah. As is standard in this bizarre day and age we live in, high quality gruesome video of the killing was almost immediately available across the internet. It was horrific. One shot was fired, and one shot hit him in the neck. His body went rigid and then limp, and blood spurted out - an absolutely haunting image. Then the smallest moment of disbelief, suspended animation, as often follows a sudden terrible event, and then pandemonium as the crowd began to panic and disperse.

And, not quite as immediately as the dissemination of the video, but close, the murder became a political flashpoint. The internet was quickly full of people on the leftward side of things celebrating Kirk’s death, or at least disregarding it - “good riddance” energy with a more malicious bent at times. And then full of people on the rightward side of things condemning those reactions and those people - “how dare you” energy with a more consequential bent at times.

Nuance is something that my countrymen seem to struggle with quite often. The average American mind is a dichotomous thing - THIS or THAT, GOOD or BAD. If one thing is true, then nothing seemingly in opposition to that truth can possibly be. There is no ability to hold two conflicting opinions in this mind - no potential to hold onto parts of an opinion while rejecting others. There is no shading. There is black or white, and no gray in between.

It should not be difficult to say that the assassination of Charlie Kirk was terrible and wrong, and then disagree with Charlie Kirk’s viewpoints and message in the next sentence. It shouldn’t be, but it seems that it is. It seems it’s difficult for some people to acknowledge the first point while believing the second point, and difficult for other people to believe that someone could speak of the second point while believing the first.

The administration has come down emphatically in the latter camp, highlighting the ghoulish celebrations and good riddances and using their disgust as a cudgel to pound a perceived opposition as broad as they please - any and all they deem guilty by association. It’s certainly not a new tactic - highlight the most extreme examples within a loose group or ideology, the ones that are difficult for anyone to defend, brew that strong sentiment into a potent toxin, and then pour it broadly across those one, two, three, six, ten, twenty seven degrees removed. Use the fervor to wipe them all out before anyone can notice that, hey, perhaps the net has been cast a little too wide here?

A smattering: people are losing their jobs over social media posts that are purported to celebrate Kirk’s death, with the administration encouraging and loudly cheering on such action; an arrest of a woman celebrating Kirk’s death at a vigil on a college campus in Texas, with personal investment from the Governor; Jimmy Kimmel’s show being cancelled after he highlighted Trumps hypocrisy around Kirk’s death, after encouragement from the commissioner of the SEC; Attorney General Pam Bondi promising to go after hate speech around Kirk’s death; the administration sidestepping the pending investigation of the killer’s motives to whip up frenzy around leftist groups, promising a multi-faceted crackdown - most recently, with Trump claiming that Antifa will be designated a terrorist organization.  

We have an administration and a President that ran on conservative sentiment that the Biden administration and democrats in general were overseeing an unprecedented attempt at stifling free speech. They shunned terms like “hate speech”, saying that had no place in a country where the First Amendment is sacred. And they highlighted examples such as the Twitter Files, where the government liaised with think tanks to “encourage” social media companies like Twitter to throttle back or punish certain forms of speech. And, more broadly, the sentiment - conservatives felt like they were being punished for speaking their minds and going against what they saw as the far too left-leaning cultural zeitgeist.

So, now they’re in power, and they’ve encountered a form of speech that they find reprehensible. What will they do? Will they take a principled stand? A nuanced stand? Will they slam the wrongs that were committed against them while they stand tall holding the torch of liberty and freedom, leading by example to show that they are better than what came before?

Right.