This is a screed. Nothing really new here, but I need to get some things off my chest.
There are hundreds of hours of analysis across the spectrum of media trying to understand what is going on right now. Why are they doing what they’re doing? The simple realities involved are, admittedly, harsh. But we aren’t going to get anywhere if we don’t take them for what they are.
At this point, Why doesn’t matter.
It has by now become obvious to anyone (probably even the most obdurately MAGA loyalists) that these “programs” are not doing what the administration claims they will do. They just aren’t. But the fact that they are being pushed into law and into execution at the same time we see mass firings of the very people and shuttering of the very institutions that could explain, mitigate, or even block them tells us pretty much everything we need to know. Facing that is the hard part. Decent people tend to avoid harsh judgments, often until it’s too late.
This is simple: the people now running things have been telling us for decades what they want and now they’re taking steps to do exactly that. What is there to “analyze”? They want smaller federal government (or none). Full stop. For decades we have been subjected to a tireless harangue from self-styled conservatives and Constitutional fundamentalists about bloated bureaucracies and federal overreach. In response, measures have been taken to address inefficiencies and waste, to the extent that now, after the pillaging of DOGE, it’s fairly obvious that the “waste” they’ve been touting for so long is minuscule compared to the size and apparent efficiency of our institutions. Efficiencies? We’re seeing it now, as these agencies are being shuttered, how much damage is being done by their absence.
But it was never about efficiency. In fact, efficiency was the enemy. It was necessary to demonstrate how all this government did not work in order to justify closing it down. How to do that? Fire people and hamper the agencies so much that they simply cannot do their jobs.
Again, the why doesn’t matter, but it should be obvious: government obstructs them from doing what they want. It doesn’t even matter so much what they want to do, just that if they get up one morning and think It would cool to do this, anything that might tell them they can’t has to go.
You all know this. A lot of you anyway. Telling people like Bondi and Noem and Rubio that they seem to be wrong about their analyses is pointless because they don’t care. They want it shut down. Because at the end of the day, that government was a barrier to them.
They have what I call a kitchen table view of the world. Some might say echo chamber, but the reason their campaign rhetoric worked so well was because their base, their supporters, have that same view of the world, arrived at the same way. Not through research and reason, but by passing bullshit stories heard from a guy who knew a guy about supposed injustices that impacted on people like them.
(Of course, there are those who simply look at all those programs—like USAID—and ask why is all that money going there when it should come to me?)
And those stories? Well, they kinda sorta “make sense” in the way that facile formulations of so-called common sense do. But we have to remember how gullible so many people are. The image of the Welfare Queen that was huge in the Seventies and Eighties was based almost entirely on one person in New York City. The rampant abuse supposedly in the system did not exist in anywhere near the degree propagandized, but the blowback from conservatives hobbled what was potentially a reliable safety net system and made it stagger along as a wellspring of examples for political campaigns and resulted in damage. The hampering of the system contributed more to the “generational” malaise than the basic idea behind it. If you want to prove something works badly, underfund it and then continually demand it explain why it can’t do more with less. Much the same can be said about the malignant mischaracterization of immigrants going on now.
The reality, though, is beside the point. They don’t care. This is an exercise in power with the aim to cow entire populations.
There have always been people who resented safety nets. “I never got that, why should they?” The justice of the programs doesn’t convince because the condemnation comes from an impoverished empathy.
This is what contemporary conservatism has produced. Combined with an archaic understanding of how economies of scale work, you can put the politics of resentment on steroids.
It is all bullshit and now we’re seeing the costs.
But it was never complicated. Isolationists. America Firsters, which is the same thing but with a flag wrapped around it. Bigotry. And a fear of change. These factors can be played with by adepts who wish to have power. Immigrants are an easy target because they in fact have no political power. And it’s clear the way the ICE raids are being conducted that this is not about criminals—they have decided that if you are here “illegally” then you are the equivalent of a rapist or murderer (even if you are only six years old)—but about the siege mentality of threatened privilege.
These are people who are not very smart, who in many cases never had to be, who believe that as long as they know the words to the company song they will get all the goodies. They punch all the right buttons and get the votes and then do horrible things which, it turns out, their supporters didn’t really want them to do. They don’t understand, so they double down and do all the horrible things harder. They do not understand. Understanding would simply mean they can’t do what they want to do, so it’s in their interest to not understand.
But it doesn’t matter. As long as they get to do all the things, they think they’ve won. And what they want is to be in charge. They’re destroying anything that might stand in their way.
When any reporter challenges them on the morality or legitimacy of what they’re doing, while that question is certainly relevant, no one should be surprised by the non-responses and the cluelessness on display. None of that matters.
When Napoleon was challenged about his evident betrayals of the Revolution, his response was revelatory: “I am the Revolution.” That’s Trump. Or someone. He’s not in charge, not in any reliable way. He doesn’t care. He’s all about the credit and, therefore, the money.
My point here, and forgive me if I’m repeating myself, but the point needs making again and again, my point here is that what we are seeing is exactly what it looks like. No justice, no fairness, no interest in serving the American people. Control. We’re at the early stages of the systemic frightening of the public. We’re well into the lobotomization of the populace. Stupid people who cannot parse information in any useful way but just react to panic-inducing stimuli who back efforts to strip education from everyone so no one can make them stop.*
Why are they doing this?
Well, again, not that Why matters, but at the end of the day, it’s all about the vanity of the wannabe potentates.
It’s simple. Now we just have to get them out of there.
* Stupid people? The “authorities” in Kerr County Texas were offered funding for the emergency warning system by the Biden Administration. They rejected it because they believed some talking head that with that system would come surveillance of their private lives. They were advised by another Texas politician to go ahead and take the money anyway, which they did and spent on something else. They’re complaining now because they weren’t warned, but the NWS has been pillaged by mass firings, which included the office of the guy whose job it was to inform local services of the warnings which, it turns out, were issued. No one heard them in the name of cutting waste. We have a measles outbreak, measles deaths for the first time in three decades because people accept nonsense from conspiracy theorists and reject established health protocols. People voted to deport illegal immigrants and then somehow convinced themselves this wouldn’t include the workers they rely on. And don’t start on the obvious shell game over the Epstein Client List. On and on. Yes, stupid people. We’ve reached a point wherein anyone dispensing reliable information that contradicts the chants and rituals of the tribe is immediately suspect and pilloried. Until, I suppose, people start dying in sufficient numbers.
The Distal Muse
The Vanity of Wannabe Potentates
This is a screed. Nothing really new here, but I need to get some things off my chest.
There are hundreds of hours of analysis across the spectrum of media trying to understand what is going on right now. Why are they doing what they’re doing? The simple realities involved are, admittedly, harsh. But we aren’t going to get anywhere if we don’t take them for what they are.
At this point, Why doesn’t matter.
It has by now become obvious to anyone (probably even the most obdurately MAGA loyalists) that these “programs” are not doing what the administration claims they will do. They just aren’t. But the fact that they are being pushed into law and into execution at the same time we see mass firings of the very people and shuttering of the very institutions that could explain, mitigate, or even block them tells us pretty much everything we need to know. Facing that is the hard part. Decent people tend to avoid harsh judgments, often until it’s too late.
This is simple: the people now running things have been telling us for decades what they want and now they’re taking steps to do exactly that. What is there to “analyze”? They want smaller federal government (or none). Full stop. For decades we have been subjected to a tireless harangue from self-styled conservatives and Constitutional fundamentalists about bloated bureaucracies and federal overreach. In response, measures have been taken to address inefficiencies and waste, to the extent that now, after the pillaging of DOGE, it’s fairly obvious that the “waste” they’ve been touting for so long is minuscule compared to the size and apparent efficiency of our institutions. Efficiencies? We’re seeing it now, as these agencies are being shuttered, how much damage is being done by their absence.
But it was never about efficiency. In fact, efficiency was the enemy. It was necessary to demonstrate how all this government did not work in order to justify closing it down. How to do that? Fire people and hamper the agencies so much that they simply cannot do their jobs.
Again, the why doesn’t matter, but it should be obvious: government obstructs them from doing what they want. It doesn’t even matter so much what they want to do, just that if they get up one morning and think It would cool to do this, anything that might tell them they can’t has to go.
You all know this. A lot of you anyway. Telling people like Bondi and Noem and Rubio that they seem to be wrong about their analyses is pointless because they don’t care. They want it shut down. Because at the end of the day, that government was a barrier to them.
They have what I call a kitchen table view of the world. Some might say echo chamber, but the reason their campaign rhetoric worked so well was because their base, their supporters, have that same view of the world, arrived at the same way. Not through research and reason, but by passing bullshit stories heard from a guy who knew a guy about supposed injustices that impacted on people like them.
(Of course, there are those who simply look at all those programs—like USAID—and ask why is all that money going there when it should come to me?)
And those stories? Well, they kinda sorta “make sense” in the way that facile formulations of so-called common sense do. But we have to remember how gullible so many people are. The image of the Welfare Queen that was huge in the Seventies and Eighties was based almost entirely on one person in New York City. The rampant abuse supposedly in the system did not exist in anywhere near the degree propagandized, but the blowback from conservatives hobbled what was potentially a reliable safety net system and made it stagger along as a wellspring of examples for political campaigns and resulted in damage. The hampering of the system contributed more to the “generational” malaise than the basic idea behind it. If you want to prove something works badly, underfund it and then continually demand it explain why it can’t do more with less. Much the same can be said about the malignant mischaracterization of immigrants going on now.
The reality, though, is beside the point. They don’t care. This is an exercise in power with the aim to cow entire populations.
There have always been people who resented safety nets. “I never got that, why should they?” The justice of the programs doesn’t convince because the condemnation comes from an impoverished empathy.
This is what contemporary conservatism has produced. Combined with an archaic understanding of how economies of scale work, you can put the politics of resentment on steroids.
It is all bullshit and now we’re seeing the costs.
But it was never complicated. Isolationists. America Firsters, which is the same thing but with a flag wrapped around it. Bigotry. And a fear of change. These factors can be played with by adepts who wish to have power. Immigrants are an easy target because they in fact have no political power. And it’s clear the way the ICE raids are being conducted that this is not about criminals—they have decided that if you are here “illegally” then you are the equivalent of a rapist or murderer (even if you are only six years old)—but about the siege mentality of threatened privilege.
These are people who are not very smart, who in many cases never had to be, who believe that as long as they know the words to the company song they will get all the goodies. They punch all the right buttons and get the votes and then do horrible things which, it turns out, their supporters didn’t really want them to do. They don’t understand, so they double down and do all the horrible things harder. They do not understand. Understanding would simply mean they can’t do what they want to do, so it’s in their interest to not understand.
But it doesn’t matter. As long as they get to do all the things, they think they’ve won. And what they want is to be in charge. They’re destroying anything that might stand in their way.
When any reporter challenges them on the morality or legitimacy of what they’re doing, while that question is certainly relevant, no one should be surprised by the non-responses and the cluelessness on display. None of that matters.
When Napoleon was challenged about his evident betrayals of the Revolution, his response was revelatory: “I am the Revolution.” That’s Trump. Or someone. He’s not in charge, not in any reliable way. He doesn’t care. He’s all about the credit and, therefore, the money.
My point here, and forgive me if I’m repeating myself, but the point needs making again and again, my point here is that what we are seeing is exactly what it looks like. No justice, no fairness, no interest in serving the American people. Control. We’re at the early stages of the systemic frightening of the public. We’re well into the lobotomization of the populace. Stupid people who cannot parse information in any useful way but just react to panic-inducing stimuli who back efforts to strip education from everyone so no one can make them stop.*
Why are they doing this?
Well, again, not that Why matters, but at the end of the day, it’s all about the vanity of the wannabe potentates.
It’s simple. Now we just have to get them out of there.
_________________________________________________________________
* Stupid people? The “authorities” in Kerr County Texas were offered funding for the emergency warning system by the Biden Administration. They rejected it because they believed some talking head that with that system would come surveillance of their private lives. They were advised by another Texas politician to go ahead and take the money anyway, which they did and spent on something else. They’re complaining now because they weren’t warned, but the NWS has been pillaged by mass firings, which included the office of the guy whose job it was to inform local services of the warnings which, it turns out, were issued. No one heard them in the name of cutting waste. We have a measles outbreak, measles deaths for the first time in three decades because people accept nonsense from conspiracy theorists and reject established health protocols. People voted to deport illegal immigrants and then somehow convinced themselves this wouldn’t include the workers they rely on. And don’t start on the obvious shell game over the Epstein Client List. On and on. Yes, stupid people. We’ve reached a point wherein anyone dispensing reliable information that contradicts the chants and rituals of the tribe is immediately suspect and pilloried. Until, I suppose, people start dying in sufficient numbers.
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