The Rot Goes To The Core
The Rot Goes To The Core
Where we are and how we got here. Fascists at play in a land of no consequences, where hypocrisy is a virtue.
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Word is we've got a 2nd moon for a few months. It's a rock the size of a city bus that's going to hang out in our gravity well for a half-spin before heading off into the void to do whatever asteroids do. So the big brains tell me. I don't know what to do with that information. The asteroid isn't big enough to hold all the people that I'd like to see put on it, and even if it was, we'd still have the logistics of getting them there before it departs in November. Another opportunity missed, I guess. The lesson I'll take on this is you never know when the gravity you exert might have an effect, or on what.
Also departing in November, perhaps: whatever remains of democracy in the United States. It's on the table.
Democracy is a way of doing government, which involves a number of things, but which perhaps most prominently involves elections. Elections are a way of choosing leaders where the most popular choice gets to be the leader, or that's the idea anyway. This will lead the leaders to promise popular things to win and then actually deliver those things if they hope to win again, is supposed to be the idea.
We have an election in November, the same month that our planetary gravity will finish its work on our 2nd moon. In this country, elections happen every year, though in odd-numbered years the ballots tend to be a bit thin. However, on even years we choose leaders by the bunches, and then on every leap year we choose a president, who has power by the bunches and gets to be the main character of reality on all our screens, so everyone tends to sit up and pay attention, or at least become momentarily and vaguely aware of it, as if the democratic process were an occasional and temporary 2nd moon.
We have two choices if we want to participate in this election, practically speaking. Behind door 1 we have a group that largely wants to hold the course with "the way things are" and make very incremental improvements. This is variably good or bad depending on whether the aspect of "the way things are" we're considering is good or bad, and whether the needed change we are contemplating can afford the luxury of an incremental approach. And sometimes "the way things are" is indeed very good and includes opportunity and openness and legal protections for basic freedoms, including for marginalized people who desperately need those protections, people who would like this needed safeguard of justice to remain "the way things are." And sometimes, incremental improvements really do make a huge difference for a huge number of people. The governor of Kentucky has just signed a bill outlawing the vile and abusive practice of conversion therapy, for example, which I think probably means a great deal to gay people in Kentucky.
But sometimes "the way things are" is very bad and includes support for indiscriminate mass killing in other countries or funding brutal and authoritarian police departments at home, and draconian border practices. These are things which enjoy a lot more general popularity then we'd hope to see, but are also the sort of things that—rather understandably—an increasing number of people in this country do not want at all and do not want to support at all.
And we're burning up the planet, which is the sort of thing that suggests urgency rather than incrementalism, and so on.
It's a mixed bag behind door 1, is my observation.
It's a little more direct behind door 2, where you'll find a group that intends to engage in whatever ruthless acts they need to, in order to change whatever they need to change as quickly as they can, in order to dominate all of our bodies and lives forever for the sake of profit and the satisfaction of their own creepy twisted morality—because their core belief is that dominating others is their duty and their right. It's an ethos called "fascism," and whatever else you might say about it, dude, it is an ethos, and it's very clearly stated, so it is massively popular with greedy fascists, religious fascists, and greedy religious fascists.
Having our bodies and lives dominated forever by greedy religious freaks is still largely unpopular with the larger population of awesome freaks who are not greedy freaks or religious freaks, however, and it's also against our constitution, to boot. In order to deal with this problem of unpopular and illegal goals in a governmental system that's meant to run on what is popular and legal, the fascists also intend to end democracy, and they sure have been making strides with rules they've changed and rules they're changing. In the swing state of Georgia, Republican election saboteurs have seized control of the election process and are rather predictably sabotaging the election, which they claim they are doing in the name of protecting the election. And Republicans are pushing an election law they call SAVE, which they claim is written to protect elections from fraud, even though the danger they are safeguarding against is non-existent, and one real effect of the rule may be to prevent women from voting. And they're trying to move the goalposts in Nebraska—even though the voting has already started—to claw back a single electoral vote Republicans have managed to let squirt free of its moorings, and they say they're engaged in this clear disenfranchisement of the people in the name of letting the will of the people be heard.
This means that every 2 years or so the main choice we're making is whether or not we ever get to make choices again, which doesn't seem sustainable, probably because it isn't sustainable. It's like playing football against a team that only has to score a single touchdown to win no matter what the scoreboard says, because instead of playing football they spend their energy changing the rules, and now they've got one that states that if they (and only they) score one touchdown, then they get to execute any referees they don't like—according to the head referees, who they have been bribing.
And if all the cheating fails and they lose anyway, then retaliatory violence is all but assured, partly because that's what happened last time and partly because that's what they are promising. This gang wants killing and they intend to have killing, one way or another.
Anyway, we have an election coming. Maybe it'll be the last one, as the leader lurking behind door 2 promises. And afterward, no matter what happens, there will almost certainly be violence, because the people who belong to this cult of greedy religious freaks has been told so often that violence is their right that they believe it to their cores. This is distressing and distracting, at least to me, and maybe to you, too. There's so much happening all the time, it can be hard to remember where we are, much less how we got here. They say it's important remember the lessons of the past, though, or else we're fated to do ... something or other, I forget what. Anyway, in the interest of remembering, I'll try to make a summary without repeating myself—maybe for the benefit of whatever presumably friendly creatures presumably live on our temporary 2nd moon, so they have something to think about on their trip to wherever.
Where we are, and how we got here. Let's go.
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It's really hard to know where to begin when it comes to where we are. There's just so much grotesque and horrible stuff that you can get tangled up even trying to contemplate it all, and there will inevitably be so much scandal that arrives next week that a lot of what happened this week will be forgotten. There's only so much sheer volume of blatant corruption and noxious hate that a person can stay aware of even if they're trying.
It came out this week that North Carolina Republican gubernatorial nominee Mark Robinson has in past years spent his time posting comments on porn sites, where he enjoyed watching videos featuring transexual people, which is notable mostly because he (like the rest of his fascist party) is also actively persecuting and dehumanizing trans people (among others) and promising to bring harm and devastation and death to them (among others). He was also posting about being a "Black Nazi" and about being in favor of bringing back pre-Civil War chattel slavery, and issuing racial slurs in slanderous statements about Martin Luther King, Jr., and other things that are shocking as hell to the majority of awesome freaks in this country who are simply normal decent people, but will be unlikely to concern the fascist freaks in the Republican party. Robinson was already a known Holocaust denier who had admitted to paying for an abortion before becoming the nominee, and abortion is something Republican voters claim to care about so much that they use it as justification for controlling women's bodies to the point of death, and are trying to restrict interstate travel in order to exert even more control over those bodies.
Certainly there seems to be a certain amount of license granted to Republicans for the sort of things that ought to end careers. There's a bunch of hacked emails on prominent Republicans that news organizations, who would be publishing all of this under headlines a foot high if the subject were Democrats, are just sitting on. At least one journalist in possession of such documents says their newfound probity is because the sorts of scandals contained therein are so common to what is already known that they wouldn't "move the needle."
Robinson also posted far worse things on the porn site than the things about his predilection for peeping on unsuspecting women and other sexual misconduct, which we know, because CNN, who broke the story, decided not to publish the worst stuff, because it was too bad to print. So I guess there's even worse out there that's just ... not being reported on, for our protection, I guess. Protection from what, I might wonder. Maybe CNN is sparing us the boredom of learning things about Republicans that we already assume are true, things that it has decided to decide for us won't "move the needle." Maybe CNN decided that we all already know that the true reason Republican voters liked Robinson enough to nominate him is that he is the sort of person who says things like "some folks need killing," and that statement so obviously represents the true core value of Republican voters that it no longer bears repeating. But it also presumes that Robinson's shocking statements about slavery and Nazism are all things that should probably be assumed of anyone these days who is a Republican candidate for high public office.
Still, let's not single Robinson out. It also came out in court documents this week that Florida Representative Matt Gaetz attended a drugged-up sex party with an underage teen, which I could have sworn is something that already came out about Matt Gaetz. But then again sex crimes and predatory behavior and protecting those who commit them just seem to be standard party-issue stuff for Republicans these days, so perhaps it is notable mostly because Gaetz (like the rest of his fascist party) uses the protection of minors from pedophiles as the unfounded justification for their active persecution and demonization and dehumanization of trans people and other queer people and elementary school teachers and librarians (among others).
And of course we have the head donut Donald Trump and his vice donuthole JD Vance, who along with demonizing trans people (among others) just won't stop inciting terrorist violence from their violence-aligned cult against Haitian people living in Vance's home state, smearing these poor people with a blood libel for the fake crime of eating neighborhood pets—animals that everyone by now knows were only temporarily missing and are still alive and well. At a recent fascist rally, Vance insisted—even while admitting that the targeted Haitians are there legally—that as far has he is concerned, the Haitians are illegal. And they intend to round up and deport "illegals," even as they signal that the definition of "illegal" has nothing to do with law, is in fact something that is entirely up to them and their bigotries. It's just directly shocking Nazi propaganda straight out of the genocide playbook, and it's quite popular with the sort of people who like that sort of thing, which for many of us includes neighbors and family.
Speaking of family, it's notable that both Vance and Trump have spouses who are either themselves immigrants or the child of immigrants. Which is of course perfectly fine: A lot of people are married to immigrants or to the children of immigrants, and many of them are Republicans, who are doing all they can to vilify and demonize and harm and menace and expunge immigrants. And recently pallid Trump ghoul Steven Miller announced that denaturalization—that would be stripping citizens of their citizen status—would be "turbocharged." Like all Nazis, they and only they decide who is an illegal. The truth will be no defense.
So I suppose this is notable only because it, like everything these fascists do, is drenched in hypocrisy: an open show that the rules are something for them to inflict upon others, not something meant to apply to them.
The hypocrisy is notable, because hypocrisy is a virtue to fascists.
Hypocrisy is a primary fascist virtue, an intrinsic component of its core virtue, which is dominating the lives of others with violence and abuse.
Have I said that before? I feel like I've said that before. When we don't learn the lessons of the past, we are doomed to repeat history. The corollary is that when we don't repeat the lessons of the past—literally repeat these things we know, even if a journalist decides it doesn't "move the needle"—we tend to forget we know them.
I think that's how we got here.
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A lot of people forget that Mitt Romney ran an anti-immigrant campaign in 2012.
These days it's fashionable among liberal cryptozoologists to pretend that Willard Mittens Romney was that most beloved of mythical creatures: the Good Republican. A moderate statesman, a man of character treated poorly by smears from an overreaching left, a steady hand on the tiller who would have made a fine president. I guess this is because he voted to impeach Trump twice out of three opportunities (2 impeachments, 3 counts), and because of that admittedly brave act, he has to pay for security, because ... well, because a lot of Republicans want to murder him. We might wonder how that equates to being treated poorly by the left, but that's only if we forget that a core rule in American public life is that threats and crime and abuse are things that only ever happen to Republicans.
But a lot of us forget that Mitt Romney ran an anti-immigrant campaign in 2012. A conservative campaign, it was—severely conservative, if you recall—premised on making life so hard for immigrants in this country, so impossible, that they would self deport (and I can already hear the old familiar justification "only for illegal immigrants!" but we are men of action, you and I, and lies do not become us, so we should both face the fact that this has been admitted to be a lie).
Remember that one? The "self deportation"? It was shocking, at the time, until other more shocking things came along to shock us, and make what had been shocking seem normal. Republicans used to pretend to think that they believed people coming to this country to find opportunity and life was a good thing, but by 2012 a very moderate Black person had become president and a traumatized white conservative population of mostly Christian American fascists had entered the grips of its murder-suicide pact/mental breakdown, so that was no longer a politically viable stance for Republican candidates to take. Romney played the hand he was dealt, and put the screws to immigrants.
Better remembered I think is what came after Romney's failed campaign, which was a self-postmortem for the Republican Party, which concluded that their continued appeals to the bigoted base of mostly Christian white supremacists was making them unviable as a party, and that dramatic change would be needed if they wanted to survive further into the new century.
The reason for this is, again, that Romney had run a seriously racist campaign. All the other hallmarks of the present moment were present: the misogyny and open angling to end women's bodily autonomy, the anti-queer demonization, the defense of sexual and other abusers and the minimization of sexual and other abuse. It was a bit more polite than we have now. I suppose there was that. This appeals to people for whom politeness is the main goal, I imagine. But Romney's campaign was what it was, as were the campaigns that had come before him. The Republicans knew their base, knew what their base demanded, and were only trying to figure out how far they could go.
The evidence was already present, and is more stark today. Republican presidential candidates haven't won the popular vote since 2004, when Bush the Younger won re-election. The last time a Republican president entered the White House while enjoying the majority of popular support was 1989—close to four decades ago—when Bush the Elder secured the bag. And yet despite being a shrinking minority, Republicans and their base of white supremacist mostly Christians believe that to rule is their right, and that anyone else who rules is a tyranny that justifies whatever violence they deem fit.
So the report's conclusion was clear: The Republican Party could not succeed in a democracy any longer. Something would have to change. Republicans decided to take the report seriously, and set about making change; not attempting to build popular support by abandoning their base of white supremacists, but rather by destroying democracy.
And here we are.
Trump is here because he is very popular with fascists, and fascists are numerous enough that Republicans can still squeak out wins by using every anti-democratic tool at their disposal and inventing new ones. Trump is fascist because he sensed that fascism is what fascists wanted, and that fascism could be harnessed by somebody willing to give it in undiluted form. And the fascists responded because he was right about them, even while our institutions all agree to tell exonerating myths about them. All the tales I hear about how Republicans actually have other motivations and other, better, more honorable desires ignore the inescapable evidence that Trump took over the party with no shots fired, with only a few objections quickly walked back, a few murmurs and harrumphs.
Trump didn't invade the Republicans. They summoned him. They were what they had decided to be. Trump was an inevitability just as whoever comes after him will be an inevitability, for as long as what he is is what they want. The rot isn't at the head; there is no head. The rot goes to the core.
Republicans intend denaturalization and deportation and ethnic cleansing because those are the things that fascists want, and they intend to cheat at the election as much as they can, and they intend chaos if the cheating fails, and they plan violence if the chaos fails, because fascists don't care about rules, they only care about ruling, which is a matter they insist has nothing to do with questions of whether they have actually won the right to do so.
They're doing all this openly because doing it openly is maximally menacing for the people they want to target, and fascists enjoy the fear of others, because the fear of others demonstrates that they are still dominating others.
They're lying about why they're doing it, not because most of them don't know that they are lying, but because getting away with lies demonstrates domination. And the lies are ridiculous and laughably obvious because getting away with obvious lies demonstrates more dominance than being forced to craft believable ones does.
They're calling themselves heroes for doing it, even while they mock and scorn true heroism, because being held blameless for abuse when you are the cause demonstrates dominance most of all.
And they're getting away with it, because our institutions and systems and even the political opposition favors civility and politeness over truth and consequences. Even acting as if fascists intend to do what they say they intend to do is seen as gauche.
And so fascists play on, in a land of zero consequences for fascists.
Usually I try to have solutions for the problems I present—or at least concepts of solutions—but and I'm sorry, today I only have this bell in my hand, so I'm going to ring it, and I'm going to talk about where we are, and how we got here, and who we are up against, and what they are, and I'm going to call all of their lies lies even if most people in positions to do so won't, and I'm going to speak of the dangers that they themselves insist are real even as they lie that they aren't; I'm going to call them the villain they are even as they call themselves heroes.
What do we do? Whatever we can to keep power out of the hands of these hateful and deceitful monsters, using whatever skills and abilities we have.
I'm going to ring this bell, because that's what I've got. Not much maybe, but we all exert the gravity we can, and maybe it will have its effects, however slight, on the trajectory of things I don't even know are out there.
I'm going to repeat all of the lessons we've learned from history, so we aren't doomed to learn them again firsthand.
Forgive me if I'm doomed to repeat myself.
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A.R. Moxon is the author of The Revisionaries, which is available in most of the usual places, and some of the unusual places, and the upcoming essay collection Very Fine People, which you can learn about how to support right here. He is also co-writer of Sugar Maple, a musical fiction podcast from Osiris Media which goes in your ears. When we all fall asleep, where does he go?