Even NPR and PBS have gone a little sus. And look. We do need to talk about what it is about Trump that keeps clicking, what is going on with Americans that he resonates so strongly (despite so clearly being horrible and a sharp worsening of everything everywhere). But we can have that conversation without taking something he says and saying “Huh. That’s interesting. Is there any validity to that?”

No. You don’t have to report on him like a normal politician. You don’t have to default to treating what he says like it’s probably valid. You can rightly and justly act like he’s a weird shit cunt who just says whatever to see what lands with people, and then just keeps repeating those verbal tics people liked.

And this rings true for so much of American politics. We treat every political corruption scandal past watergate like it’s a complex web of people and we don’t know who knows what. The Iran-Contra scandal, the 2003 invasion of Iraq, russian collusion, the coup, voter surpression and the rise of right wing politics globally and at home, are actually all VERY simple when you get right down to it. But the media acts like it’s complicated and hard to understand so the populace thinks it’s complicated and hard to understand.

The simple truth is this: we live in a global system of torture. Every day you go to work and do your job and struggle to afford groceries, you are getting tortured. You are getting tortured slowly. But you are surely getting tortured. Your work is boring and demeaning, and it doesn’t contribute in any real way to causes you care about. Your boss makes more money than you do despite you doing the work. Their boss makes a fortune despite not even knowing what it is you do. You go to the grocery store on the way home. The produce was grown with prison labor, the coffee was grown with slave labor, and everything else was grown with refugee migrant labor. To heat your house you need electricity or natural gas. The minerals used to make this happen were extracted at the price of blood from someone just like you in another part of the world (Appalachia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan all come to mind). Your government kills anyone who tries to resist against these extraction economies. The imperial powers of China, Russia, and the United States battle over extraction economies that aren’t fully at scale yet (Ukraine, the Congo, Afghanistan all come to mind).

The secret to getting consent for all this from the populaces of the countries doing the torture is to make it seem like the torture is incomprehensibly far away from you, and that the imperial power over you is who is protecting you from it. Maybe they declare they’re taking action to protect against terrorism following an apartment bombing in Chechnya. Maybe their friends in Israel provide information about Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq. The important thing is they go do their imperialism so they can keep torturing you while saying they do it to keep you safe.

But now the torture is here. In your neighborhood. The pretenses are gone. The world can all plainly see that the genocides that have been cropping up across the globe in Gaza, Darfur, Ukraine, Myanmar, Xinjiang, Ethiopia, Iraq, Syria, the Congo, Rwanda, Bosnia, Somalia, Zimbabwe, Beirut, Cambodia, East Timor, Uganda, Burundi, Bangladesh, Zanzibar, Guatemala, Chechnya, Crimea, and Poland AFTER the Holocaust are ultimately all part of a single unending war between those with power who shouldn’t wield it, and those without power who don’t want it. The entire planet has been locked into a growth mindset where the success of a country is measured by its GDP and not by the quality of life of its worst of citizen, and the easiest way to maintain that is to just keep on killing.

And some of the people who are about to be victimized by the torture voted for it, asked for it. They wanted it because they thought it was too far away to be truly real. They thought people like us, people saying “No it’s real, and we have a moral obligation to do something about it” were exaggerating and fear mongering. Well now it’s fucking here, and those of us who been saying it’s real are first in line to get fucked. Soooooo… IDK, fuck fascists I guess. Done molly cottling them and trying to tell them they’re misdirecting their anger. They had their chance and they fucked it, and now I’m who’s getting fucked by it.

Fuckers.

Probably mostly to create engagement, and it worked.