Atlas Whacked (American Revelation VI, Part Four-Bravo.)

Auntie Entity: And what did you do before all this?

Max: I was a cop, a driver.

Auntie Entity: Well, how the world turns. One day cock of the walk, next a feather-duster.

~From Mad Max, Beyond Thunderdome

There's something I see going on that bothers me. There's a certain percentage of the (mostly white) media that keeps bumping Trumpist, thinly veiled white nationalist talking points about the border in a supposed effort to find fault with President Biden.

Why? Because they miss Trump. They miss the constant chaos, the constant drama, the scandal-a-day ethic, they miss the money and the props for being seen as "fighting" Trump. And yeah, for a lot of them it was just cosplay, or personal dislike, or they bet correctly on the direction things would go.

It sure wasn't belief in life and freedom, or the Constitution.

Never mind that Trump basically wanted to arrest and/or kill any journalist that didn't kiss his ass. Never mind that his supporters developed and still have a bloody-minded hatred of the media, which has even expanded to Fox News for a lot of them.

Because of course, they think it could never happen to them. That's how a privileged mentality works. They thought all the bad shit was going to happen to somebody else.

Never mind that the numbers concerning support for Biden and his policies thus far are almost unheard of in recent memory, as regards his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic in particular, well it's damn near impossible in my experience to get 70% of Americans to agree on anything, but here we are.

And of course, good government and smooth functioning of things isn't good for business, it isn't good for the infotainment media complex in particular.

Good, fuck those people. I'm sick of this horse shit, and these motherfuckers want to start it back up again? Yeah, fuck all that.

It needs to be said that in a lot of cases this crisis is far from over.

A Q-Anon nut recently tried to storm an Army Reserve Center with a paintball gun to try to "test the loyalty" of the military, and basically preached nonsensical Q-drivel while doing so, and while a couple of Army reservists tackled him and sat on him and waited for the cops to show up. This guy had been arrested and put in mental hospitals before over this bullshit.

So when these fucking people start shooting at the rest of us, will it be the big-time media personalities like Chuck Todd and Joe Scarborough who are out there embedded with the troops? Will it be Ross "Chunky Reese Witherspoon Fancier" Douthat or any of these other Very Serious People?

No, it won't. And to be quite honest I'll bet you can guess the color and the gender and the orientations or religions of the reporters they stick downrange of the enemy as well as I can. It's sure as hell not going to be the older rich white assholes who are the ones making these decisions, let alone the CEO's and the owners who made bank off of the media's performative opposition to Trump that they're now effectively doubling back on and hoping we won't notice.

But what happens when we end up stuck with a violent right-wing insurgency because these assholes are against democracy and anything else that stands in the way of their power? Now that they know amassing political power instead of persuading people didn't work, "owning the libs" didn't work, ideological masturbation isn't working and it's quite likely trying to suppress the vote won't work either (and what happens to their own voters who are so rabidly against protecting themselves from or getting vaccinated for the virus?) they're going to make up their minds that violence is their only option, and they will use it. I'm serious, I've been saying this all along for a reason.

When that happens these same assholes who miss the political drama of the Trump years will fill the 24-hour news cycle with footage of firefights in the French Quarter of New Orleans and airstrikes against rebel positions in Appalachia and pictures of BUFF's orbiting at high altitude over the Great Plains waiting for a strike order to be put up, and likewise, the atrocities, the massacred civilians, the soldiers in the streets, and all the uncivilized fuckery that always goes with any war.

And they'll shed plenty of crocodile tears in the process, and some fucking idiot will opine that this would never have happened if Republicans were in power.

Never realizing that it's the unending Republican lust for power and the willingness of too many people to whitewash that crap that's pushing us in this direction to start with.

And people will die because of it. Who will be the ones held to account?

Never mind that Trump himself is far from gone, though he certainly does seem to have faded quite a bit and to be honest, there's probably not much of a story there either.

It's not that all these media people or Republicans really miss Trump. They just liked the sensationalism, or the idea of authority or whatever, and the lies and myths they told themselves to feel important and justify it all.

And they resent the fact that the rest of the country is not playing along with their bullshit.

So you get stuff like Trump plotting to start a new social media network. As if that worked out so well for Gab or Parler. Let me tell you what's going to happen, if it gets off the ground and goes live at all it won't last very long, and Trump will steal a whole bunch of somebody else's money while somebody else tries to protect him from the consequences of his actions and from prosecution, and likely sets their own life and career on fire in the process. That's the part that mystifies me, nobody in all of this mess ever really came out ahead but Trump, yet all sorts of gullible idiots are perfectly willing to light they own ass on fire for this asshole. And for what? That's the part that I don't get.

And there's people who will follow along with this garbage. 

There's people who believe in Trump more than they ever believed in Christ, and they'll be happy to extend their "faith" to anybody affiliated with Trump and they literally don't give a damn about what their own claimed religion says about people who do that kind of thing.

Because it never was about that. It never was about making America "Great Again." It was sure never about having good leadership. It was never about making the world a better place. It was about bread and circuses and entertainment and seeing what they could get out of it and titillation for the roaring mob so that it wasn't coming at them with the pitchforks and torches and these fucking assholes were hoping they could keep this scam going on literally forever at the rest of our expense.

Of course, something would have broken, something would have lit the whole mess on fire. You can see that even more clearly now that Trump is gone. He was never anything more than a symptom of the main problems. He was never more than a figurehead for the Republicans, a fake-as-hell populist label slapped on the same old crony capitalism, a new gold-plated asshole to advance the same old racist agendas.

And it didn't work.

But along the way they became addicted to the bullshit, they started believing their own propaganda.

And in their minds Trump will go down as a great liberator, because he freed them from having to act like decent, civilized people, because he was the cool dad who let them do whatever they damned well pleased...and for all his bluster he lacked the force of personality to bend damn near anything his way, even the Republicans, who were all but bending over and waiting for him to do exactly that.

Yet for all that, they took a lot more of him into their souls than even they thought they did and only now is it really coming out. It wasn't Trump that did this, it was them. They made him their god, with malice aforethought toward the rest of us. If extremism and racism look indistinguishable from modern conservatism, well, conservatives have nobody to blame for that but themselves. Trump didn't do that. Trump didn't call out to them to be their god. They did that, and they were the ones thirsting for a dictator with a cult of personality, or a king to bow down to, or whatever.

They threw the previous right-wing Jesus, Ayn Rand, down from her pedestal because functionally she wasn't shitty enough.

And they thought they'd get away with it, forever.

So now they're more or less left with the ideological and political equivalent of E-mailing dick pics around and trying to impress people that way, and there's those in the media perfectly well willing to pretend to be impressed by this shit.

A good leader, by contrast, knows that respect is earned and takes a stand on some things. A good leader knows he or his country is going to have some enemies and doesn't waste time trying to appease them.

A good leader is willing to draw a line in the sand and will stand and deliver when somebody tries to cross it. Good leaders understand that if you want to have a better nation, you have to be better citizens, because they sure as hell can't do it all. They don't want to make all of your decisions for you...because they get that you have to be responsible enough to make said choices on your own.

Look around you, look at who wants to run away from the responsibilities of adulthood and life, from the choices that make us free...and look at who is willing to embrace those things for better and worse.

And throw your lot in with those of us who are willing to do the work of citizenship and life, and who aren't hankering after bread and circuses in the service of would-be emperors, because it's the only way.

Part Four-Alfa.

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