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We Are Not Powerless. [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-05-06
I refuse to get drawn into any discussion about America's fascist upwelling. There's no point. You already know the score if you read well enough to skim a newspaper article.
Since Goldwater's Resounding defeat in 1964, right-wing forces have made patient, incremental gains in American politics. In 1980, Ronald Reagan burst onto the scene. His “voodoo economics” policies and mindless deregulation mark the genesis of our current thirty-six trillion-dollar debt crisis.
Rightwing agitprop factories began springing up like toadstools in the night. Psychopathic reptilian cockroaches like Limbaugh, Gingrich, and Hannity proliferated, dragging the political middle ever further toward a far-right, bizarro universe of ignorance and cruelty. And every time it seemed things couldn't get worse, they did. This culminated in a herald cry of true insanity, with Donald J. Trump slithering into the Oval Office a second time.
There's no point in listing all the ways this marks America's descent into mortal danger. There is only one rational question that needs to be answered at this point: What can we do to stop the right-wing crazies from dragging us ever deeper into madness?
To understand this, we must uncover the dark, elemental psychological forces that brought us to this point.
We can catalog the results of those forces easily enough: irrational social policies, a complete disregard for the law, willful ignorance, and wanton cruelty. But this list fails to answer the question: Why is this happening? What bizarre impulses are forcing Americans ever farther into this dark crevasse of insanity?
The core of our crisis is this: Far too many of our friends, family, and coworkers have somehow come to derive happiness from the suffering of others.
Impassioned warnings of imminent danger from scientists, researchers, and other experts are derided at the highest levels, laughingly dismissed as hoaxes. Government officials glory in the spectacle of migrant children being ripped from their parents' arms and thrown into dogpens. Stylishly coiffed cabinet members hold press events in front of Central American concentration camps, promising more lawless incarcerations to come.
Meanwhile, right-wing politicians and their enablers preen on national TV, happy to be “owning the libs.” And the MAGA-verse applauds.
Exchange students are snatched off the street at random by masked thugs. From there, they are subjected to abuse that would leave any gulag prison guard flush with pleasure. The Trump brownshirts incarcerate their victims for weeks or months, with no charges filed. The prey are bounced from jail to jail in Three-Card-Mont-style scams, denied food, water, toilets, menstrual products, and medical care, shackled for days on end. Then, they're spirited away to some third-world prison.
Again, Trump-publican party representatives smile and strut, glorying in their repudiation of Christian values. Again, their enablers cheer them on.
Overseas, we gift Benjamin Netanyahu and his religious-fanatic Zionist “settlers” with an endless supply of high-tech weaponry, which they then use to bomb tents and piles of rubble—all hospitals, water treatment facilities, and electrical plants having been long since destroyed. We turn a blind eye as they murder aid workers and journalists. We click away from the images of tiny, headless corpses. We do nothing as they cut off food supplies to surviving families and their desperate, traumatized children. And still the carnage continues, the tens of thousands of civilians already murdered being insufficient to Zionist designs.
The response from the Trump Universe is more laughter and boasting, with a promise of some final solution of ethnic cleansing to come. Once more, the right-wing responds with self-righteous shouts of joy.
In all these cases, our fellow citizens respond to other people's suffering with satisfaction and happiness. Never mind that America's position in the world economy is trembling on the verge of collapse. Never mind that our long-term allies are edging away from us with looks of horror. Forget that we are barreling toward a recession that will make COVID shortages look like a warm-up exercise. The netizens of Fox News and the rest of the Trump-o-verse are pleased and proud of what they're doing.
The conclusion is inescapable. Rightwing cruelty is not merely a by-product. Instead, they're causing all this suffering on purpose. For them, inflicting pain is a feature, not a bug.
What in the ever-loving fuck, one might ask, is going on?
The sad answer is this: We are all capable of such travesties
Even before our simian ancestors picked up their first sharp rock, it behooved us to meet danger with rage—and to take pleasure in the destruction of that danger. That instinctive response is hard-wired into our DNA.
The archaeological record is firm on another point: All too often, that danger comes from our fellow human beings. Being suspicious of “outsiders” has always been a rational act. If you doubt it, pick up a history book and thumb through it for five minutes.
But warfare and widespread slaughter have never been universal. There have always been instances of alliance, cooperation, and mutual benefit. What differentiates the first outcome from the second is the answer to a simple question: Does this other group represent a danger to me and my loved ones? If the answer is yes, then the outsiders must be avoided, ostracized, or liquidated. If the answer is no, then they can be welcomed as friends and allies. This remains as true today as it was a million years ago.
Unfortunately, it also leaves warlords, emperors, and other sociopaths with a simple method of social control. If they can imbue us with fear, we will take violent action. And to direct our murderous impulses, they need only label the others as threats. After that, nature will take its course.
In modern-day America, rightwing carnival barkers have learned to conjure our deepest fears like dark wizards summoning Satan.
In their twisted universe, Hillary Clinton is a pedophile who drinks blood in the basement of a pizza parlor. Sexual deviants are constantly recruiting our children and grandchildren in every public school. Brainwashed children come to believe they are animals and begin to defecate and urinate in sandboxes, which school officials allow. Foreign criminals stalk us at every turn, not only killing and raping our women, but even eating our dogs and cats. Weak-willed liberal pansies work tirelessly to lower testosterone levels in America, while screeching lesbians seethe to cut our balls off. Other nations take advantage of our innocent natures with “bad” trade deals. Meanwhile, government bureaucrats work feverishly to stifle creativity and honest business activity on the orders of that dark, shadowy, demonic entity, George Soros. News reporters join forces with academics, scientists, and professional agitators to spread lies, hell-bent on destroying America, Capitalism, and Christianity. Falling wages and high prices are conspiracies perpetrated by liberal Democrats, intent on giving away our hard-earned taxdollars to whores, drug addicts, illegal immigrants, and othermurderous criminals.
If you believed all those things—and far too many people do—you would be a fool not to be angry and afraid. The fact that they are a parade of idiotic lies doesn't matter. If you can convince people that those lies represent the truth, you win. Sadly, social media provides endless venues for shouting those ridiculous delusions from the rooftops. And not only do demagogues hold a constitutionally protected right to knowingly lie, the Supreme Court has also ruled that there can be no limit on the amount of money they spend spreading those lies.
This brings us back to the central question: What can we do about it? How can we possibly stop it? To arrive at an answer, we must first digest one more obvious fact. These lies are being spread in the service of greed.
Climate denialism is pushed and encouraged to protect the short-term profits of the fossil fuel industry, no matter the long-term cost to our descendants. Tax exemptions for billionaires, mindless deregulation, and even murderous foreign policies are all driven by the lust to acquire and hoard wealth. Invasions and genocide are driven by greed for land.
Halting the destruction of our biosphere, solving social issues, stopping wars of aggression and genocide, re-instituting progressive tax policies—all these things will cost trillionaire corporate “persons” large sums of money. Their determination to avoid these losses is what's driving this frenzied rightwing drive to drag us back into feudalism.
It's greed that renders captains of industry, media moguls, and legal priests unwilling to resist fascism. It’s greed that explains why they fall over each other in the rush to shower Trump and his minions with monetary obeisances and oaths of fealty. It's greed that drives war.
Sadly, elected officials are powerless to confront the massive concentrations of wealth and power that exist today. Those who try are met with primary opponents who receive limitless donations from AIPAC, corporate trillionaire “persons”, and shadowy black-money think-tanks.
But every strength brings weakness. Every illness carries the germ of its own cure. Greed can be turned against those who are driven by it. If their lies begin to bring a loss of profit, they will respond with all the mindlessness of an amoeba withdrawing a pseudopod.
To achieve that end, we must boycott them.
Boycotts are not our only avenue of resistance. We must also run for office, volunteer for those who do, contribute money, knock on doors, publicly denounce liars, demonstrate, etc., etc., etc. But those actions are long-term. And we can begin boycotting evil today, this very minute.
Can boycotts save us from fascism? History suggests they can. From Gandhi's Salt March, to Rosa Parks' refusal to give up her seat, to Tesla's plunging profits, all demonstrate the effectiveness of this simple resistance method.
Republicans certainly believe they are vulnerable. Why else would they scramble to pass a law that makes boycotting Zionist Israel punishable by a million-dollar fine and twenty years in prison?
By simply declining to do business with those who are enabling this insane, idiotic plunge into fascism, we can effect change. By rewarding any whiff of appeasement with a denial of custom, we can turn greed on itself like a U-shaped gun barrel in a cartoon. We can force the gold idolators to think twice about whipping MAGA into a frenzy with delusions, lies, and agitprop. At this historical crux, we can make Elon Musk's ruination merely the portent of a coming wave of targeted takedowns.
We can do it. And we must do it, before all the things that make America good and strong are consigned to the dustbin of history.
BOYCOTT!!!
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