Who Are These People?

One of the problems America faces is the incredulity of our citizens. Even a year into round two of Dystopia Kingdom, many of us still refuse to believe Trump is as bad as he seems. There is no way the country elected a corrupt, bigoted madman for the second time, right? He’s just playing 3D chess when he blubbers incoherently, institutes overtly racist policies, and threatens to invade allies. Yup.

But the truth is that the insanity and neo-fascism are on full display, all the time. You don’t have to dig for this.

Even when disturbing facts are pointed out, however, Americans launch into denial. Before the last presidential election, voters in focus groups were informed about the Republican agenda. When they heard “accurate descriptions of real GOP proposals, the truth struck those voters as so cartoonishly evil that they found the charge implausible.”

For example, it might strike you as unbelievable that that “with increasing momentum, voices on the Christian right are preaching that empathy has become a vice.” This is indeed confusing, because as many theologians have pointed out, empathy is “the whole message of Jesus.”

And if conservative Christians no longer agree with Christ, who are they following?

More and more, it looks like Hitler.

I know, it’s bad form to compare one’s political opponent to der fuhrer, and certainly most Christians, even the right-wing ones, are not fond of the guy.

But “a growing constituency on the right wants America to unlearn the lessons of World War II,” and MAGA influencers are actively working to rehabilitate Hitler as a misunderstood dude who may have been correct about a few things.

Consider also that “neo-Nazi voices are becoming more obvious in the MAGA party.” We’re talking about “hardline pro-Trump factions of Young Republican groups” that text each other witticisms about “slavery, rape, gas chambers, and torturing their opponents” while expressing “admiration for Adolf Hitler.” We’re also talking about White House nominees for high-ranking positions who proudly say they have “a Nazi streak.”

That can’t be true, right?

Yeah, it is.

But one can argue that the infiltration of sociopathic Christians and self-proclaimed Nazis is a relatively minor contingent of the MAGA base. I’ll grant that the Republican Party is not awash in Hitler-loving goose-steppers (even though anything above zero percent should be cause for alarm). I will insist, however, that the people at the top are, how to say this politely… fucking morons.

You see, Trump “has attracted acolytes by being the patron saint of the third string, gathering people who seem to feel, for various reasons, that they were iced out of national politics” or dissed by so-called elitists, who tend to value absurd concepts like experience, intelligence, creativity, competence, and basic decency.

The Trump Administration is an obnoxious gaggle of “crude people displaying their incompetence as they flail about in jobs—including the presidency—for which they are not qualified.” They are “people who in a better time would never have been allowed near the government of the United States,” and have provoked the “collapse of a superpower into a regime of bullies and mean girls and comic-book guys.” 

You might ask why Americans keep “electing a class of public officials who seem to be all id” and who are “driven by grievance and a continual, unfocused sense of injury.”

It’s because hardcore Trump supporters are angry Americans who “want to bring others down to what they think is their own underappreciated station and identify scapegoats to bear the blame for their misfortunes, real or imagined.” These furious conservatives “see politics as a way to get even with almost everyone outside of their immediate circle,” but the “juvenility and coarseness among both the Trump elite and its most loyal supporters” doesn’t translate into meaningful change or innovative solutions. You won’t get that from cackling jerks who “treat grave issues of national and even global importance as little more than raw material for mean-spirited jokes and obscene memes.”

Indeed, it remains “wildly ironic that MAGAs now have control of the Presidency, Congress, and the Supreme Court, and yet they still manage to feel themselves oppressed, still picture the world as unfair, still rage against a machine they’ve made and are part of.”

As touchy-feely liberals have pointed out, MAGA is a perpetually torch-wielding mob, and “the only time they do show anything resembling joy is to reflect the arrogant, self-satisfied sneer of their leader; almost always in the face of someone else’s heartache or misfortune, almost always when someone else loses something,” and the “only happiness they seem capable of manufacturing is in response to pain.”

And since they are striving only to inflict punishment on others, and not make anyone’s lives better or improve America is any significant way, there is no end goal. There is no point where they can claim success, because there will always be another freak to attack, another culture war to ignite, another deviant who just doesn’t conform. 

They have found out, and the rest of us now realize, that getting all that power doesn’t make their misery go away.

Turn It All Around

We have not lost our democracy. That’s the good news.

We are rapidly losing our democracy. That’s the bad news.

Recently, the New York Times assessed how America is doing on 12 key aspects of democracy. They concluded that we have declined in all dozen areas, which is “a warning of how much Americans have already lost and how much more we still could lose.”

Ok, so we’re 0-12 when it comes to maintaining the guiding principle of our republic. That’s about as bad as it gets, right?

No, it’s even worse. You see, the Times analysis did not get into some of the grayer areas of America’s decline, such as the fact that in the last year, we have witnessed “a parade of rapid-fire knee-bending that has heralded in a new era of American exceptionalism—one in which we prove that no country capitulates to authoritarian tendencies faster than us.”

However, it’s not all bad news. This week’s election results imply that people are getting sick of Trump and his boorish brand of authoritarianism. 

The Democrats “won every race that was in meaningful contention anywhere in the country.” They won governorships, mayoral races, school board seats, “long-held [Republican] dog-catchers,” and “flipped a dungeon master in a rural Iowa D&D club… just everything.”

It is, of course, far too early to launch into a touchdown dance. But the off-year election’s results shows, at the very least, that GOP dominance is not a given.

In fact, it gives credibility to my assertion that the Democratic Party does not need to move to the right to win elections. Maybe Trump’s victory was not a sea change in American politics and harbinger of conservative ascendancy. More likely, the guy won because of “high inflation, Joe Biden’s disastrous decision to try to run for reelection, an underwhelming Kamala Harris campaign, and an anti-incumbent mood.”

If so, the “anti-MAGA majority has reemerged,” and democracy is not dead yet. 

That’s our hope anyway.

Nothing Personal

Whenever you hear someone brush off the existential crisis that this administration is inflicting on America with the words “It’s just politics” (or variations on this phrase), you are dealing with someone who feels they are immune. And to fair, most of the people who say this are unlikely to be grabbed on the street by masked thugs and whisked off to an impoverished country.

These people are usually white.

I had a friend inform me that I had no need to be concerned about ICE raids here in Los Angeles because I am obviously not a member of MS-13, so I would not be detained.

What a relief that was!

Granted, when I recently attended a Dodgers post-season game, a different friend asked if I was concerned about being swooped up and thrown into the back of an unmarked van. I told him that, yeah, it had crossed my mind, but the odds were in my favor with 50,000 people (half them Latino) surrounding me.

This second friend was closer to the truth of my situation, because obviously, this is not a great time to be brown in America.

You see, our pals at the most pliable U.S. Supreme Court in history have “allowed the Trump administration to use racial profilingin its militarized immigration raids.” The conservative justices have “effectively compelled all Latinos ‘to carry enough documentation to prove that they deserve to walk freely’ at risk of indefinite detention.”

The Trump Administration can now “target people because of their appearance and how they speak, as well as where they were found and what kind of work they do,” meaning that “to move freely in this country, it may become increasingly important to look white.” 

But what about the viewpoint of my naive friend, who said I had nothing to worry about because I’m not an undocumented gang member? Well, he should know that at least 170 U.S. citizens “have been held by immigration agents,” with many of those detained getting “kicked, dragged, and detained for days.”

So immigration status is no guarantee. All that matters is how dark your skin is.

These developments imply that I should walk around with my passport in case some overzealous ICE goon decides I look far too swarthy to be walking in a respectable neighborhood. Just the fact that I have to consider this shows you how far this nation has plummeted in its promises to its citizens.

And I assure you that I take it very personally indeed.

Hit the Streets

We are now a few days removed from the No Kings protests, so I’m fairly certain that if antifa was going to attack and unleash hell on innocent citizens, they would have done so by now.

Wow, maybe all those protesters didn’t hate America after all.

I spent the day at a protest that, to be honest, felt more like a block party than a political demonstration. But it’s possible that was the whole point, because one of the methods for fighting authoritarianism is to mock those in power, which is pretty damn easy with the Trump administration. We’re talking about the biggest collection of fools, sycophants, and delusional has-beens that has ever been assembled in one place. They would be comical if they weren’t so lethal.

In any case, our easily triggered chief executive proved the protesters correct when he responded in a childish, boorish, cringy manner by posting an AI-generated video of him literally shitting on Americans. His base cheered him on because these pathetic sheep would cheer if he actually did shit on them. The rest of us just said, “instant metaphor.”

The AI video was just the GOP’s latest clumsy attempt to embrace the modern maxim that the “truth no longer matters[because] all you have to do is go viral.” Americans have shown that they will believe just about anything, so why not the ridiculous, the grotesque, and the obviously fake?

Speaking of believing absurdities, many conservatives continue to insist that everyone protesting against Trump is being paid. I find this belief fascinating because it illustrates the conservative mindset.

The conspiracy theory posits that conservatives are both overwhelmingly popular (because liberals have to resort to bribery) and outnumbered (because a vast organization of shadowy globalists are out to destroy them). But this contradiction is not the most egregious act of non-thinking.

After all, if millions of Americans were being paid to protest, why have we not seen one person waving her check around? Even loyal partisans can’t keep secrets well. These are apparently desperate, nonmotivated participants. So you would have thought one (or more likely, thousands) of them would reveal the Venmo payment or flash the cash for a TV reporter. Or at least one of these MAGA theorists would have gone undercover to reveal how he got paid. It can’t be a very sophisticated network if millions of unemployed losers just show up and get money.

But no, we get idiotic theories that can be disproved with nine seconds of logic. And we are supposed to take these concerns seriously.

The fact is that millions of Americans gathered together to display their disdain for a wannabe dictator. These participants “reported disagreement with political violence, in a turn from similar surveys at previous protests” and were less likely than Republicans to trash the place. 

Conservatives were disappointed that these so-called ferocious radicals marched through every major city and even in deep-red states, with few arrests.

It was, by some estimates, the largest one-day protest in American history.

That’s good news, because studies show that “if you want to guarantee success against authoritarianism, there is one more thing you must do: You must grow until at least 3.5% of the population is out in the streets protesting.”

This is the 3.5% rule, which theorizes that “if you manage to get that 3.5% of the country out in the streets with you, the historical data suggests your movement will win.”

Over seven million people protested last weekend. And the protests keep getting bigger. So achieving 3.5% (12 million people) doesn’t “seem so far away.”

And even while Republicans mocked the protesters, and seemed genuinely confused that the “no kings” name was metaphorical, a recent survey illustrated a disturbing truth for conservatives.

The survey gave people two options: Is Trump a “potentially dangerous dictator whose power should be limited before he destroys democracy” or is he a “strong leader who should be given the power he needs to restore America’s greatness”?

Americans chose the “dictator” option by a strong margin, 56% to 41%.

It took a while, but people are catching on.

The New American Dream

A friend of mine from college recently texted me a cryptic sentence:

“We did it.”

Except it wasn’t that mysterious, because I had a fairly good idea of what she had done. 

My friend (let’s call her Mary) is married to a guy from Europe. They have talked for years about relocating to his homeland. Well, that idle chit-chat turned into active planning once a certain xenophobic blabbermouth reentered the White House.

Mary and her husband have now moved, most likely permanently, to a European country where they have universal healthcare, almost no gun violence, and higher standards of living than just about anywhere in America.

It’s one of those hellholes of “socialism,” foreign languages, and fancy pastries.

Mary is a well-educated, high-income professional. And now she will take that education and spending money to Europe. But don’t worry, she is easily replaced. Trump’s legions of the poorly educated and massively angry will crank out dozens of babies to take the place of libtards who create most of the nation’s GDP.

I know this sounds like the plot of liberals’ favorite movie, Idiocracy, but I now have first-hand evidence (albeit anecdotal) that it is actually taking place.

But don’t take my word for it.

Data for 2025 indicates that more Americans are leaving the United States. The number of Americans renouncing their U.S. citizenship has also risen. In the first quarter of 2025 (i.e., when Trump took office), expatriations more than doubled compared to the last quarter of 2024. If this rate continues, 2025 could see a record number of Americans moving overseas, exceeding the previous peak seen in 2020, when the pandemic provoked many Americans to seek out a country where people don’t spit in doctors’ faces or punch someone out for wearing a facemask.

This time, political polarization is a chief motivator. You would think this would make conservatives happy.

After all, right wingers have been screaming at liberals for decades to leave America if they don’t like it. Curiously, they never aim this advice at Trump, who hates America far more than any liberal ever could. Seriously, look at the guy’s rants about how horrible this country is. They are the assembled quotes of a rambling lunatic, yes, but they are also the diatribes of someone who truly despises the United States as it actually exists.

And that’s one reason he and his acolytes want to change it. They don’t want an America that bares any semblance to those European nations where people are happier, believe in democracy, and avoid working themselves to death.

The conservative vision of America is a country that “is no longer synonymous with the aspiration to freedom, but with transactionalism and secrecy: the algorithms that mysteriously determine what you see, the money collected by anonymous billionaires, the deals that the American president is making with world leaders that benefit himself and maybe others whose names we don’t know.” Republicans see the USA as 3,000 miles of a theocratic fiefdom where they are permanently in charge.

They would be shocked to realize that not every America shares this vision, and some of them — ok, a lot of us — are talking about leaving once and for all.