If there ever was any doubt, there’s none now. There’ll be no justice, no mercy, and no place to hide so long as Trump, Vance, Musk, and their coterie of bootlickers, wannabes, and volunteer thugs are running things. Act accordingly.
(Nur) die Gedanken sind frei
A MAGA Bestiary
Cruelty, venality, mendacity, sanctimony, ambition, and greed. Also self-delusion. Also ignorance.
Greg Abbott
Samuel Alito
Steve Bannon
William Barr
Maria Bartiromo
Lauren Boebert
Pam Bondi
Don Bongino
Dan Caine
Tucker Carlson
Kenneth Chesebro
Tom Cotton
Ted Cruz
Paul Dans
Ron DeSantis
John Eastman
Tulsi Gabbard
Newt Gingrich
Rudy Giuliani
Neil Gorsuch
Paul Gosar
Lindsey Graham
Marjorie Taylor Greene
Alina Habba
Sean Hannity
Josh Hawley
Pete Hegseth
Paul Ingrasssia
Kay Ivey
Mike Johnson
Jim Jordan
Brett Kavanaugh
Robert Kennedy Junior
Jared Kushner
Karoline Leavitt
Leonard Leo
Brad Little
Nancy Mace
Mitch McConnell
John McEntee
Linda McMahon
Christopher Miller
Katie Miller
Stephen Miller
Stephen Moore
Elon Musk
Peter Navarro
Kristi Noem
Bill O’Reilly
Mehmet Oz
Kash Patel
Mike Pence
Vivek Ramaswamy
John Ratcliffe
Tate Reeves
John Roberts
Kevin Roberts
Marco Rubio
Rick Scott
Jeff Sessions
Roger Severino
Roger Stone
Enrique Tarrio
Clarence Thomas
Ginni Thomas
Donald Trump
Donald Trump Jr.
Eric Trump
Ivanka Trump
Lara Trump
Melania Trump
Tiffany Trump
Tommy Tuberville
J.D. Vance
Russell Vought
Ryan Walters
Greg Abbott
Samuel Alito
Steve Bannon
William Barr
Maria Bartiromo
Lauren Boebert
Pam Bondi
Don Bongino
Dan Caine
Tucker Carlson
Kenneth Chesebro
Tom Cotton
Ted Cruz
Paul Dans
Ron DeSantis
John Eastman
Tulsi Gabbard
Newt Gingrich
Rudy Giuliani
Neil Gorsuch
Paul Gosar
Lindsey Graham
Marjorie Taylor Greene
Alina Habba
Sean Hannity
Josh Hawley
Pete Hegseth
Paul Ingrasssia
Kay Ivey
Mike Johnson
Jim Jordan
Brett Kavanaugh
Robert Kennedy Junior
Jared Kushner
Karoline Leavitt
Brad Little
Nancy Mace
Mitch McConnell
John McEntee
Linda McMahon
Christopher Miller
Katie Miller
Stephen Miller
Stephen Moore
Elon Musk
Peter Navarro
Kristi Noem
Bill O’Reilly
Mehmet Oz
Kash Patel
Mike Pence
Vivek Ramaswamy
John Ratcliffe
Tate Reeves
John Roberts
Kevin Roberts
Marco Rubio
Rick Scott
Jeff Sessions
Roger Severino
Roger Stone
Enrique Tarrio
Clarence Thomas
Ginni Thomas
Donald Trump
Donald Trump Jr.
Eric Trump
Ivanka Trump
Lara Trump
Melania Trump
Tiffany Trump
Tommy Tuberville
J.D. Vance
Russell Vought
Ryan Walters
A Quasi-biblical Revelation
I’ve never been in any doubt about the depth of Donald Trump’s depravity, but I’m familiar enough with German history to understand why half the country voted for him, and why our titans of industry rushed to provide him with the means to fulfill his vile ambitions. I am surprised, though, at some of the people I’m belatedly finding in the miles-long line of fools waiting to kiss his ass.
It’s not just the hypocritical gasbags who’ve been lecturing us for decades about ethics, morality, courage, manliness, and the sanctity of free enterprise. Everyone knows that commoditized list of virtues by heart, and all of us know at least one person who’s made a career out of preaching from it. It’s not as shocking to me as it should be to see them now suddenly burning their own books, scrubbing their own mottoes off the walls, and looking down at their shoes when I ask them why.
No, the people who’ve surprised me are those I’d come to know as decent, compassionate, human beings, who now refuse to defend the defenseless, who turn away now from those in the greatest need with a shrug, with platitudes, with lectures about choosing one’s fights, with supposedly sage advice that one must be patient, that this too shall pass. This won’t do, this won’t do at all. If we want to keep calling the United States the Land Of the Free and the Home Of the Brave without being consumed by shame, this temporizing, compromising, agreeing that black is white, that President Zelenskyy should wear a suit when invited to lick the tyrant’s boots—all this nonsense will have to go. We need to do better. A whole lot better.
Слава Україні!
Equivalencies
What we might get if we were to draw comparisons the way the Washington Post or New York Times does. Too bad their digital editions can’t be used to wrap fish in, or line the bottoms of bird cages.
All Your Base Are Now Belong To Us
Die Fahne hoch! Die Reihen fest geschlossen.
Der Musk maschiert mit mutig festem Schritt
Kam’raden, die Wokist’n vernichtet haben
marschier’n im Geist in unsern Reihen mit.
(For those of my readers who don’t know German, this is a contemporary parody of the 90 year-old Nazi party anthem das Horst-Wessel-Lied.) In English, it goes more or less like this:
The flag held high, ranks firmly closed together!
Musk marches on with bravely stiffened stride
Comrades who’ve done away with Wokeists
march with us in our ranks in spirit now.
GERMAN CITIZENS PLEASE NOTE: Reproducing these lyrics is, with few exceptions, currently illegal in the Federal Republic of Germany. In the US our laws are more permissive. My apologies to the citizens of the Federal Republic, but given the current constitutional crisis in my own country, I felt the need to fiddle with them here.
Followup
A couple of hours after publishing my previous post, I found this in my Mastodon feed. It’s the perfect response to Musk’s juvenile provocation. Così diciamo anche noi (So say we all) is the only thing I can think of to add.
The Irrelevance of Precedent
What do I think about TikTok? What do I think about X? What do I think about all our 21st century digital anxieties—China’s nefarious designs on democracy, Musk’s knee-jerk racism, Zuckerberg’s peculiar concept of masculinity, Thiel’s equally peculiar attitude toward his own mortality, and by extension our own?
What I think is that once the box is opened, Pandora can no longer help us—or, in more contemporary terms, scale matters. What does that mean? It means, to resort to the original Latin, Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto. Genuine freedom of speech reveals things to us about ourselves that we’d rather not know. Content moderation can’t help us with that. Neither can the clever pretense of algorithm patrolling, nor bans that, for obvious economic reasons, won’t ever actually be enforced except selectively. Not even some real version of the Butlerian Jihad can help us.
The singularity may never come to pass, but governmental interventions in the creations of the digital age, legislative, executive, or judicial, are, like the military career of Josef Švejk, tainted with all the accidental qualities an indifferent universe can conjure. The truth is, we can no longer afford our own immaturity. My advice is simple: don’t go with the tech bros if you want to live. They really have no idea what they’ve wrought.
A Pledge of Non Allegiance
With Austria now governed by Nazis, the US destined to follow at the end of the month, and Germany itself due to join both of them in the wake of its upcoming election in February, I have an announcement to make. Since there’s nowhere to go now that isn’t under threat from the Zeitgeist, it’s time to stop merely alluding to my lack of allegiances, and to publicly and formally declare myself a rootless cosmopolitan.
Yes, I know that’s what Stalin called the Jews. I can even give it to you in the original Russian: безродный космополит. (No, I don’t know any Russian I didn’t learn first from the glossary at the end of A Clockwork Orange, but we have Wikipedia now, don’t we? If nothing else, it allows us to more accurately catalog our afflictions.)
Full disclosure: I’m not a Jew, but I could easily have been one—I suspect a great grandfather of converting to Catholicism in his native Austria during the waning days of the Habsburg empire, something he seems to have done to advance his career prospects in uncertain times. Be that as it may, I’m willing to grant Stalin a bit of poetic license here, as the phrase clearly has resonances well beyond the obsessions of a single autocrat. (I doubt Donald Trump is aware of it, but Stalin was a poet laureate of brutality long before Donald stumbled into the role on idiot TV.)
So, with my apologies to the muse of history now made, I can say openly that I feel no allegiance to any current political faction, nor to any forseeable future faction, no reverence for any religion (in my view they’re all based on fear and steeped in superstition and hypocrisy), and finally, no desire to submit to hagiographies and catechisms past, present, or future. If you need help, I’m available. Whatever I can do, I will do. But if you want me to rat on my neighbor, round up people you consider undesirable and put them in camps, reeducate the children of the very poor, or otherwise kiss a vicious imbecile’s ass, look elsewhere.
Unbidden Bits—November 27, 2024
Seeing behind the curtain isn’t easy for children, the poor, the otherwise marginalized. They simply lack the necessary resources. Recognizing that the curtain is there, though, is the first step toward liberation.