Remember, 1 million Chinese people could die in the next few weeks and it would still not be enough to cancel the Superbowl. But one white person keels over on 5th Ave and suddenly that happens. (Systemic racism is a hell of a drug.)
I don’t expect WuFlu to be a problem. I see it as simply another Ebola. If it’s used for political ends it will be more a reflection of the polarization of American political life than anything else. But let’s imagine the worst happened and suddenly a dozen (white) people dropped in the middle of the street in various major cities across the United States.
If that happened anytime soon, they might cancel the Superbowl and Republicans would use it as an excuse to “vindicate” Trump even sooner than they might otherwise. Or, the WuFlu might be the first be crisis the Fourth Reich faced after its birth.
Some things to take into consideration — apparently WuFlu is a lot like smallpox in that there’s about two weeks between when you get it and when you start to feel ill enough that you might go to the doctor. That’s a lot of international travel you might undertake. Also, on a macro historical scale, commerce and pestilence are very much intertwined. The Black Death only happened because of the potency of the Silk Road that only existed because of the stability that the Mongol Empire provided. That also works in reverse, commerce could very well come to a halt on a macro scale if WuFlu shuts down all forms of international transportation — the moment that breaks down, the lives of every day people will begin to be affected in some pretty big ways.
Also, it might be only one (white) person dropping in NYC to cause a panic that would only make matters worse. People would stop going to work. People wouldn’t send their kids to school. States, then cities, then towns might self-quarantine in an effort to save themselves. When the lights go out on a massive scale, then you don’t have access to the Internet or other forms of mass media.
A lot of smaller nations — DPRK and Iran — would likely use a significant pandemic as an excuse to achieve otherwise unobtainable geopolitical goals. China might strike Taiwan as well.
I don’t expect any of that to happen. I really don’t.
By Shelt Garner @sheltgarner So, there you are, watching TV when you see one of several interchangeable sliver haired middle-aged angry dough boys ranting about how if only we let Trump be Trump then he could fulfill his role as the anti-Christ, Jews would be driven into the sea and the Rapture would occur like the Bible says America would be made great again. Here’s a list of the major actors in the racist, misogynistic, bigoted bullshit bad faith argument bullshit echo sphere that will dominate the lives of millions in the Fourth Reich for years to come. Oddly enough, they all kinda look the same, as if birthed from some sort of dystopian They Live podchamber.
Hugh Hewitt Hewitt is notable for the lengths he will go to debase himself for Trump in a reasonably cogent fashion. He is the apologist’s apologist when it comes to Trump. It has started to seem as though he’s angling for some sort of apparatchik position in the Fourth Reich. Does he want to be gruppenführer of the new Washington Military District of Columbia or something? What is his deal? He is also notable for having sufficient respect among Twitter liberals that he pops up on the Sunday chat shows and the Washington Post babbling in the most obsequious manner possible that if only we’d leave Trump alone, he would, at last, make America great Again.
Dennis Prager Prager does PragerU, which is a middlebrow bad faith and very formal online conduit of MAGA bullshit that a lot of otherwise reasonable people eat up because it gives them some sort of intellectual framework for being a Good American in the Fourth Reich. He conveys with great gravitas racist, misogynistic, ignorant and historically oblivious bullshit that conflates anything necessary to get your middle-aged mom to think somehow Trump is not so bad after all.
Glenn Beck Beck is simply fucking insane. After having shown a modicum of principle at the onset of the Fourth Reich, Beck has switched gears and is just another fucking Trump cockholster in an pretty elaborate bullshit echo chamber of bad faith arguments. He’s completely unhinged and sees conspiracies under every rock. In a way, Beck’s change of heart about Trump is all you need to know about modern Trumpian conservatism.
Mark Levin I don’t know what to tell you about this guy. He’s not as deranged as Beck, but he’s somewhere between Hewitt and Schlapp in intelligence and the ability to make a cogent badfaith argument. He’s very fascist friendly and you start to think he would be cool with American Killing Fields in update New York if Trump suggested it.
Matt Schlapp Oh, Matt Schlapp. I see him as one of the most dangerous of these pasty white MAGA thought leaders because he’s the smartest and best educated of the bunch. He honestly believes that the racist and misogynistic bullshit he spews isn’t either one of those things. In an earlier time, he’d be the German somewhere in the east of the country who had an “overnight conversion” to Communism at some point in late 1945 when it became apparent the Soviets weren’t going anywhere and he still had mouths to feed.
Newt Gingrich If the Fourth Reich was a video game, he would be the last guy you had to defeat to win the game. His MAGA rhetoric can’t be beat and he probably is far closer to The Dear Leader in private than any of us could possibly imagine. In fact, you could say that MAGA is nothing more than the deranged ideological child of Pat Buchanan and Newt Gingrich. But Buchanan isn’t a pasty silver-haired dough boy, so he’s not on this list.
Not that it will matter in time, but we still don’t know what Trump knew about what Robert Hyde told Lev Parnas in March about his efforts to monitor the movements — and God only knows what else — of American Ambassador Maria Yovanovitch.
It doesn’t really matter the way I thought it might because she was out of the country by the time Trump told the president of Ukraine that she “was going to go through some things.” But I mean, what the fuck? She was already out of the country and he says THAT? What did he mean by that?
Barring a significant bombshell in the next few days, this is shaping up to be just another shady thing Trump has done that no one really cares about. Things are going to get very dark once he’s aquitted.
And so we find ourselves waiting for the impeachment trial of one Donald John Trump, 45 president of the United States. Though there’s credible evidence that he was at least aware of Robert Hyde’s intentions to contact goons in Ukraine to physically harm Marie Yovanovitch in an effort to eliminate her as a problem for a corrupt Ukrainian prosecutor who promised Trump dirt on Joe Biden, the Right is more concerned about transgender athletes ruining the Olympics, so, lulz. With that in mind, I thought I would do something of a personal deep dive into the issues associated with the Trump’s Senate trial and its implications, no matter the outcome. Though Maggie “Trump Whisperer” Haberman of The New York Times thinks I’m just a hayseed rube, I need to get some things off my chest nonetheless.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi keeps mentioning the apocryphal comment by Benjamin Franklin about the nature of our newly established government. Well, Nancy, we couldn’t keep it. Though Trump is nothing more than a vessel for some pretty titanic macro forces in American political life, he’s accomplished his historical purpose — he’s a transitional figure that marks the end of the American Republic. I say this because it’s pretty obvious that a President Pence isn’t going to, like, put the tyrannical genie back in the bottle. President Pence is a Republican — an a homophobic theocrat at that — and as such he may very well keep much, if not all, of Trump’s team going forward. So, in a sense, not only will nothing change, but it will get worse because Pence is not a deranged lunatic but someone who will establish the conditions for someone like President Kooch to put me in an ICE Camp where I become just another victim of the coming American Killing Fields. I say this not as a form of hyperbole or some sort of Infowars level of bonkers conspiracy — all signs point to the existing ICE camp infrastructure being weaponized within 10 years, if not far sooner. They’ll first throw the homeless and mentally ill (to keep them safe and prevent gun violence) into the campus with undocumented immigrants and then, as I’ve mentioned, work their way up. Prove me wrong on this one, folks.
Either Trump is acquitted or he’s not. If he’s acquitted, then he pardons half a dozen high profile people, rants about the need for a Constitutional Convention to “pass a balanced budget amendment,” indicts another half dozen political opponents, and potentially is extremely brazen in his efforts to get the actual human beings who make up the Electoral College to vote for him. He could bribe them or dox them, you name it. And the only reason I’m not snatched in the middle of the night by ICE agents by about 2022 because of my anti-MAGA ranting online is Trump’s simply too incompetent to do the necessary governmental shenanigans to make it possible. It will still happen, but it may be the Cuccinelli or Kobach administrations that do it.
Meanwhile, if Trump is somehow miraculously convicted we will simply punt this same future down the road a few years. We can delay this dystopian future, but we can’t prevent it. I say this because between 2020 and 2040, we’re going to reach peek “Ok, Boomer.” We have to wait until the youngest of the angry old male Baby Boomers shuffle off this mortal plane on a macro level before the browning of America kicks in an AOC becomes a viable presidential candidate. Though, I think a more likely outcome is America in the 2040-2060 will likely be a toxic mixture of modern day Venezuela, Apartheid South Africa and Putin’s Russia. Though, given how rapidly the globe is warming, there’s a chance all we’re going to have some pretty rapid population movements that may change that dynamic in some pretty dramatic ways. Preventing our dystopian future would require a tragedy of such magnitude that if we were given the two options as a choice by God, we probably would be torn. Do we really want 20 million people to die in a limited nuclear exchange with the DPRK that we blame on Trump? Would that be worth it? Though, if you really wanted to be gratuitously sanguine, you might say if Trump goes so fucking bonkers that he collectively scares us so badly that we won’t elect Republicans president for a generation that might do the trick as well.
No matter what happens with Trump’s coming impeachment trial in the Senate, we’re in a new era. People will mark post-WWII America like this: 1945-1963, 1963-1973, 1973-1989, 1989-2001, 2001-2020. A liberal trope exists that we’re always just a few hours away from this or that otherwise normal event happening that will bring Trump down and everything will go back to normal. This is a result of both desperation and an unwillingness to admit that political tribalism and negative polarization have reached such extremes that Trump is now nothing less than an act of God.
He is completely immune from any sort of accountability. The only thing stopping him establishing an American Fourth Reich is he’s nothing more than a deranged version of Chauncy Gardner in Being There. As such, Trump is a transitional character in American political history. While I have no doubt he will call for a Constitutional Convention to “pass a balanced budget amendment” once he’s acquitted in the Senate, there’s a decent change he may simply turn into a mental puddle before can do it.
But once the idea is out there, it will one of his fascist white ethnostate advocating successors who finish the job. Such a Constitutional Convention will be sold to liberals as an opportunity to pass the ERA, but in reality it will be a Trojan Horse used to codified American Carnage into the Constitutional through a series of Enabling Acts. The ICE camp infrastructure will be weaponized and that will be that. Initially they’ll start with the homeless and the mentally ill and work their way up the political foodchain until the usual suspects of Jews and homosexuals (transgenders!) will be thrown into the camps as well. There will be American Killing Fields and people like me will get nothing more than our name etched on a monument at some point in the distant future — if ever.
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