I spent an hour pacing around my room ranting and raving out loud. Screaming to myself in the shower, I parsed through the past four years we as a country have all endured. And now that I’m ready to put it all in blog form, I have no idea what the hell I want to actually say.
I blame Clarissa Explains It All.
I must have watched reruns because the show’s last season happened when I was a toddler, but I’ve been talking to myself like a main character in a sitcom out of habit for the majority of my life. It’s me thinking out loud, which is nothing special. How I assume most people think silently within the confines of their own heads, I do the same – only I talk aloud as if I’m conversing with a friend.
If I had a dollar for every time my parents asked me who I was talking to on the phone, I’d be Jeff Bezos.
After nearly three decades on this planet, I’ve yet to really come to terms with the sheer ignorance of the world in spite of practically every bit of information you could ever dream of being available on every laptop and smartphone and tablet with Wi-Fi.
For example, did you know that there’s an entire library of medical journals you can readily access on a whim? Hundreds of thousands of peer reviewed CONCRETE, SCIENTIFIC, FACTUAL DATA just sitting there free of charge, no account needed whatsoever?
Just think about this for a second, please. We have legions of self-styled experts out here telling us shit like the Covid vaccine is a Satanist conspiracy when you can read the ACTUAL STUDIES undertaken by the makers of the vaccines. No one is stopping you from logging onto the National Library of Medicine, typing in “Covid vaccine” and pulling up an honest-to-G-d scientific article detailing the development and methodology behind the making of the vaccine.
And it’s not just vaccines. You can find studies on the effects of phytoestrogens within Australian sheep from the 1940s! Australia! Like, dead-ass down-under-shrimp-on-the-barbie-in-the-outback Australia (I saw the sheep thing in a YouTube video, OK? Quarantine’s weird for all of us).
So, with oodles of historical texts, archived information, textbooks, encyclopedias, etc. all out there waiting for you to click on the link, what in the name of Christ compels people to believe demagogues and dictators and wannabe-Nazis? What is it about human nature that prevents a segment of our species to just accept the world and the reality we live in without resorting to pure fantasy as a way to convince yourself you are always right and never possibly capable of a lapse in judgement or reason?
In the quaint days of 2012, the original year (in the 21st century) that everything was supposed to end, a feverish backlash sprouted out from so-called “forgotten America” – people from small towns abandoned by the liberal elites and the Washington establishment. Pundits across cable news channels tried to explain how these tax-hating patriots of the Tea Party movement were seemingly always connected to some form of racist shitbaggery and white supremacy with the most cynical of excuses.
Economic anxiety.
In other words the Teabaggers were so afraid for their pocketbooks, they felt the need to hang the first Black president in effigy while spreading the bald-faced lie that he was a secret Kenyan Muslim and occasional homosexual who somehow consulted a radical America-hating pastor for regular spiritual guidance. You know, a Christian pastor. A.K.A. NOT a Muslim.
To no one’s surprise, an influential figure throughout this budding political movement was none other than our 45th President and current number-one threat to our national security.
Trump tweeted conspiracies about everyone from Barack Obama to Kristen Stewart. He lodged scathing attacks against the then-current administration for not being pro-America enough. As we’d come to learn, Trump’s idea of loving America apparently means sexually assaulting the flag whenever possible.
He stoked anti-liberal fears for years before running for president in 2015.
And from the very start, it got super racist super fast.
Before you knew it, anti-immigrant trolls banned together under the Trump name. Anti-Semites regularly endorsed him (sometimes twice!). Islamophobes and homophobes and for some reason people unhealthily obsessed with pedophiles clamored to his mish-mash psycho campaign. They bought his schtick from day one, proudly running around the country with red armbands in red-hat form.
Make America Great Again, they said.
Great how? Good question. There was no one answer…other than conveniently circling back around to white supremacy and fascist perversions of reality – like calling any news coverage painting Trump in a negative light as “fake news”.
Fun fact: Adolf Hitler had a similar thing he’d say. Lügenpresse, or “lying press”.
Trump regularly winked to the crowd when making suggestions like Second Amendment enthusiasts could take shots at his opponent if she dared to introduce legislation to “take their guns”.
His campaign peddled anti-Semitic tropes while he praised modern-day authoritarians and his supporters threatened to kill their perceived enemies. “Enemies” being people who didn’t unnervingly worship at the altar of Trump à la the Hebrews and the Golden Calf.
Pretty quickly, the cult became more boisterous, and soon the mob mentality started to become more visible.
The hatred grew more blatant – fostering a disdain for minorities as the central tenet of the MAGA Cult.
And thanks to a lukewarm opposition, rampant cynicism and distrust from an electorate long tuned out from the news of the day, and a farcical electoral system, the demagogue “outsider” became the political establishment.
All the talks of draining the swamp manifested in the non-stop succession of swamp creatures appointed to federal office all over our government. From Russian spies to oil lobbyists, billionaire elitists to full-throated xenophobes, white nationalists to literal opponents of civil rights, it was a parade of horribles. Real-life Creatures from the Black Lagoon. Cartoonishly evil caricatures missing only sinister facial hair and menacing laughter.
Gradually, and not very subtly, these miscreants hopped on the bullshit train Trump rode to the Oval Office. They excoriated reporters and ostracized critics, ginned up the minions of Cult 45 to threaten and even attack journalists online and in person.
And it only got worse.
Every new press secretary willing to stand on live television and unashamedly twist and distort reality to fit an insane narrative. An army of surrogates parroting utter garbage on any news channel willing to entertain them. The cycle never changed.
Time was a flat circle.
And by the time the scandals started flooding in, it became like a new reality show every week. First, it was the Russian collusion. Next, it was paying off porn stars. Then, Ivanka using the office to benefit her fashion line. The Twitter rants, the wall, the trade war with China, the near-actual war with North Korea, his National Security Adviser pleading guilty of lying to the FBI, his campaign manager going to jail, his former personal lawyer going to jail, a bunch of motherfuckers associated with the campaign going to jail…
And then Ukraine. The “perfect phone call”. “WITCHHUNT” tweets at 5am.
The impeachment.
The pandemic.
Pulling out of the World Health Organization.
Destroying the U.S. Postal Service.
Lying about Biden.
Lying about Bernie.
Lying about everything.
And then, he lost.
He LOST.
Like, the election!
For REAL!
After the concentration camps, kids in cages, targeting women of color in Congress, the Bible photo-op beatdown, all of the fucking mail-in ballot histrionics, and it was all for nothing.
HE LOST!!!!!!!!!!!!
And yet, 10 days until the end of this unyielding nightmare, we’re not sure if the new president will even be sworn in without a civil war erupting.
We’re at the finish line of the marathon.
Too bad it’s the finish line of the Boston Marathon.
We’re not even five days removed from the outright terrorism that was committed at the Capitol in the name of Trump, and already the sycophants are obfuscating the truth behind what we all saw with our very own eyes on live fucking television.
The President of the United States goading his mob and inciting them into attacking the United States Congress, but still top Republicans won’t send him down the river.
Conveniently after four years of either complicit silence or outright defense for his actions, a handful of current GOP lawmakers and officials are saying it’s time’s up for the Terrorist-in-Chief.
Meanwhile, two of the top architects of the failed coup continue their ride on the Trump Train to the permanent destruction of their reputations as being anything but a couple of spineless wannabe-fascists groveling to inherit the undying adoration of his seditious band of insurgents ahead of 2024.
It’s all too much.
It’s fucking overwhelming.
Four years.
FOUR YEARS OF THIS FUCKERY.
What makes this all the more infuriating is how fucking obvious all of this was back when President Trump was still Citizen Trump and therefore not in possession of the nuclear launch codes.
All of the bully-pulpit grandstanding buffoonery was the attention-getter for all of those who watched. But those of us with an idea of how quickly this sort of thing can go South saw the writing on the wall long before designating journalists as the “true enemy of the people”. We saw the Nazism being echoed by his campaign.
The uber-religious mimicry.
The ceaseless deification of not only a flawed man, but an outright monster.
The religious right gospelizing the ground he waddled on.
The stupid fucking perma-scowl.
The obsession with toughness, strength, and pandering to the military.
It was all so painfully obvious.
But the problem in a country like America is when you haven’t had brownshirts ripping your loved ones out of your homes and shooting them like dogs in the street, you don’t know what that type of evil looks like.
Racists tend to miss an obvious prejudice detector thanks to a narrow definition of what “racism” actually is. To these folks, if you don’t say the literal N-word or equivalent racial/ethnic slurs, then you can’t possibly be a racist.
You can blame lazy people on welfare, foreign criminals sneaking into the country, and conniving Hollywood bigwigs controlling the “liberal” media (even if said media was all too happy to cover Orange Hitler’s every speech for two whole years). But as long as the magic words n****r, s*** and kike don’t leave your mouth, you’re just making valid points!
Our lack of nuanced education of what fascism is and how it operates led us to this crisis. Like WarGames, the best move was to never play the game at all.
But now that we’re in the bottom of the 9th with two outs, all we can do is pray that the Fascists get off the field, accept that they’ve stranded the winning run, and choose not to set the ballpark on fire.
Diary of a Mad Millennial 