Twilight's Last Gleaming, Part Two.

When words stop meaning anything, when truth doesn’t matter, when people can just lie with abandon, democracy can’t work. ~Barack Obama

This morning, when I got up and logged into my various social media feeds, the first thing I saw was Matt Gaetz referring to Trump as "President God." Whether he did this accidentally or simply as a function of being a sub-literate dumbass, I don't know, but the point is, he said it.

One part of the statement, an empirically provable lie about a deadly ongoing crisis, the other part of it a spiritual lie that anybody who has ever claimed to be a Christian, particularly of the Evangelical or Fundamentalist varieties, should vehemently rebuke.

I spent much of my life as a conservative, when did those people decide that they were Okay with being lied to?

And when did they decide that they were Okay with Aktion T4-style "disaster preparedness" plans being issued by their state governments? I KNOW several people with varying levels of mental disability. In fact, lots of those people that I know are workers for a local recycling company who spend their days picking up trash, in all weathers, without complaint or anything. Many people have aged relatives who have dementia...most of them people who have done their bit for this country and whatever ideals they followed and they don't deserve to just be left to die. Lots of people...from combat veterans to those injured on the job-site while doing physical labor have traumatic brain injury. Hell, I have traumatic brain injury from a car accident, as well as various physical problems from the same thing, and due to aging while not having taken care of myself in my younger years. The only reason I'm not working now is because my job is shut down thanks to the virus...and I've done my bit besides that in more ways than one.

There;s an abiding characteristic of Trump and Trumpism that particularly disgusts me.

At best it could be described as "What have you done for me lately" and at worst it could be described as "FUCK YOU IF YOU TRY TO STOP ME FROM PLEASURING MYSELF RIGHT NOW!" or "If you are not doing something for me this very minute you are expendable and useless so fuck you!" There is no thought given to the future, hell, there is no thought given to what might happen ten minutes from now, or tomorrow.

And no amount of self-abasement or self-destruction is enough, either.

Not only is there no leadership, but besides a certain hatred of democracy, liberalism, the media and anybody else who's not "in the club" or who needs anything (and isn't rich) there are no requirements either, so long as you worship Donald Trump. There is very much a "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law" ethic that pervades the Trump-right. I mean, I would think it would bother the Evangelicals that they're part of a movement that's closer to the libertine ideals of Aleister Crowley than it is to the Evangelicalism of Mike and "Mother" Pence.

But it's actually worse than that. Basically you could commit murders and worship the devil and so long as you show proper fealty to Mr. Trump, it seems like that would be Okay with a lot of these fucking people.

And all this for a guy who doesn't do much more than sit on his ass while watching the news and sit there and Tweet stuff that might actually prove to be destructive to the country and expose innocent people to disease, strife, and violence for no damned good reason.

Seriously, did these fucking people have that much of a hankering for an authority figure that would say dumb shit and talk bad about the media and people of color? Was this that important to them, that they'd sacrifice their own life for basically nothing more than a dumb ass reality show?!

People are dying, more people died yesterday than all the US military personnel who were killed in Afghanistan in 19 years of fighting.

And the worst part is "Conservatives" care more about conspiracy theories, racism, religious hokum about the "Mark of the Beast" and whether or not they can get their hair done.

You know, I'm pretty sure if you care more about getting your hair done or otherwise making yourself feel good than you do about other people's lives, something in my brain tells me that you've already accepted that particular black mark on your soul, because you care about your own materialistic desires than you do about life that is not yours to take, even though you're only taking it by indifference.

Let's look at something. Here the former head of the Michigan Republican Party, Jeff Timmer, is saying that Governor Gretchen Whitmer is doing a good job, and he's also specifically saying that he's going to vote for Joe Biden in November. Let's take a moment to make a note of something here; The Biden coalition spans the spectrum from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Tea Party Joe Walsh, and about the only thing they all have in common is some ability to see what's really going on and a desire to act accordingly.

Ronna Romney-McDaniel's response to this mess is simply to make ad hominem attacks with no context and to make shit up, because what's really going on isn't important to her, not one bit, not in the least.

It's not that she doesn't care if she survives the virus or the conflict that the Trump-Right is trying to create around things like science and social distancing...it's that it never occurs to her that she would ever be threatened in the first place. This is the ultimate expression of America's "Gated Community" mentality. Death is not for her, she's mad because reality has inconvenienced her politics and wealth. Death is for those gomers that were "protesting" with their guns and racist traitor flags in Lansing the other day. She thinks she's immune.

It's like I keep saying, COVID-19 is a virus, it doesn't give a fuck who you are, what your politics are, or how much money you have. It cares only that you are a living host, a warm body that can spread it. But of course, you have to believe in science in order to believe that.

And they don't, they just...don't. They believe in whatever power they think they have and whatever shitty resentments drive them from day to day.

And that's all, that's literally it. I don't know how people live like that but it seems that they do.

"People are dying, but I can't get a burger" Except that yes. they can get all the burgers they want. They just think they're too good to order takeout and want to be waited on like the entitled shits that they are.

But here's the thing, especially as regards these entitled rural white motherfuckers. Everybody is pretty much expected to practice social distancing, everybody is being encouraged to do stuff like sit on the couch, order takeout, maybe drink some beer or smoke a blunt and watch Netflix or Pornhub. I shouldn't have to tell you how many of the right-wing lizard-brain judgment switches this trips automatically...and if everybody who isn't working in an essential job is doing it, that means lots of LGBT people, poor people and people of color are doing exactly that. And the last thing these fucking people want, if only for their own self-image, is to be doing the same thing as everybody else, especially people that they don't like and tend to judge excessively as a matter of course.

COVID-19 is a virus, it doesn't give a fuck who you are, what your politics are, or how much money you have. It doesn't care what color you are or whether or not you drink or smoke or what your self-image or socioeconomic status are and there's nothing that offends these people more than being held as equal to or having to do the same things as people that they hate. They think their routines and whatever are somehow better than everybody else's, because they're...them, I guess.

And if they can't have everything be all about them...by definition, it must be the end of the world, or something. I've heard it said that when you're used to superiority, equality feels like oppression.

These fucking people apparently literally cannot face that we're all human and thus susceptible to this virus. I have to wonder how these fools might react to a foreign invasion of the United States or an alien invasion of the Earth, or a Zombie apocalypse? Probably throw in with the bad guys, whatever those might be, because they're basically Quisling humans anyway.

They cannot face this reality, so thus and so it must be the End Of The World. Apparently, the "Mark Of The Beast" bullshit is still making the rounds.

I don't know what, if any beliefs Elizabeth Birx, Tony Fauci or Bill Gates follow (nor do I care, that's their business.) George Soros and Steve Mnuchin are Jewish, and Mike Pompeo is very loudly and publicly an Evangelical Christian who believes in the Rapture and espouses Christian Dispensationalist End Times theology himself, and from the connections that got him into West Point, all through his military service and time in Congress he has taken actions that are based on that belief and evidence that he really believes this stuff and he's done so on a lifelong basis. To be quite honest, the one thing I find inconsistent with it all is...well, Trump. If this were really the End Times, if there's anybody who could be expected to be preaching about the End Times and talking about Jesus in a cabinet meeting or a virus briefing it's that fucking guy. Mike Pence is just a convert from Catholicism and a careerist shitbird by comparison.

If this is some kind of End Times Cabal, it sure isn't a very good one. I mean hell, what kind of malevolent New World Order would be so incompetent that it would have somebody in the big scary cabal who would be able to undo and expose the whole mess? Of course, If these are the End Times they're missing pretty much all the markers that I was taught would be present and there was no doubt that they would be present, because to suggest that the theology itself was incorrect was, well, heretical and wrong in and of itself. Yet the first time something bad happens on a global scale in their lives, these fucking people throw out all this theology that they equated with or even put above the Gospel itself?!

It's no wonder they'll just lump Mike Pompeo in with something something Gazpacho End Times cabal bullshit.

If any of these people actually believed any of the stuff they say they do, this wouldn't be happening.

If Mike Pompeo isn't conservative, Evangelical or Republican enough, ain't nobody that is.

But this isn't about that, it never is. Nothing ever is with these people.

These fucking people feel like their wealth, their Whiteness and their social status, that is...their real objects of worship...is what's threatened and that's all there is to it, and nothing and no one that doesn't remake the world in their own twisted image can ever go far enough.

If you wonder why I see the end of America in all this, like the collapse of Yugoslavia on a bigger and potentially nuclear scale, it's because even Donald Trump will probably ultimately fall short of these people's mentally ill sociopathic fantasies. Their foolishness may take the form of Christian End Times stuff on occasion, but the truth is, it's making the leap from there into secular YouTube conspiracy theory shit very easily because it was never about Christ in the first place.

I was paying attention and had a little bit more knowledge than a lot of people did when the Srebrenica Massacre was going on in Bosnia. If you don't think there's people in this country who would do the same to Montgomery, Alabama or San Francisco, California you have not been paying attention. Hell, if you don't think these fools would destroy their own damned selves and everybody they know for some stupid ideological or racial point, you aren't paying attention right now.

And the only way to stop these fools is for the rest of us to stand up and do it ourselves.

I can't put it any more simply than that.

Part One.

Part Three.