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Bow Down Before The One You Serve (You're Going To Get What You Deserve) [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-07-03
THAT MILITARY BIRTHDAY PARADE WAS FUN, WASN’T IT FOLKS? Not quite what we expected, I fear. It was meant to inspire imperial terror and send a firm message to Trump’s enemies at home and abroad that “The empire is here! Democracy is over!”
Instead: a sad and anemic affair. The tank treads squeaked, for lack of oil. The soldiers marched lazily and out of step with each other. The President looked bored (on his birthday!). "The empire has arrived" quickly became “America needs a nap and is for sale. Hand the baton to the Chinese, we’re done."
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EVERY DAY WE AWAKEN TO SOME FRESH HORROR THAT TRUMP HAS INFLICTED ON US, chiseling away at the pillars of a functioning society. What are some of the effects of this (not very) slow progress? One thing is the destruction of cause-and-effect, brought to us hundreds of years ago by the scientific method.
DOGE and others have made cuts to parts of the CDC, FDA, and other agencies that measure and study...well, everything. Statistics on the national foster care system. The CDC's database on accidental deaths and injuries, as well as its tool for tracking the spread of HIV and communicable diseases. The EPA is stating that oil refineries no longer have to report their greenhouse gas emissions. NOAA is shutting down its hurricane tracking system, including the one which has operated for 50 years in Miami.
Interestingly, Project 2025 seems to make no recommendation of shutting down the nation's data collecting. Why is “Trump” doing it, then? I suspect because it suits the larger techno-fascist goal of creating an information dark age, one where we grasp in ignorance for answers as to why our lives are becoming worse.
In their future, our only truth will be what the AIs tell us. Instead of asking the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau if you have any recourse against the crypto rug pull that destroyed your 401K and wiped out your savings, look it up on Google AI. (Google AI says you don't).
If, two years from now, you're worried about that new mine that Trump let his Peruvian billionaire friend construct near your city's source of fresh water, and if it has anything to do with your toddler's recently diagnosed leukemia, ask Grok. (Grok says no.)
How did we get here? Well…
DURING THE CRIMES AND CORRUPTION OF THE FIRST TRUMP ADMINISTRATION, we would often hear Resistance Libs say things like “this is not who we are.” Even if it was abundantly clear that it VERY much who “we” are, just the next iteration on a trajectory set by the nation’s long history of dubious deeds.
But they are not saying this quite so much anymore. Maybe because they see that it’s not true. So, what are we, then? And what kind of future do we deserve?
Nostalgia for a mythic past has always been the food and drink of reactionaries and fascists, while liberals and leftists tend to take a more nuanced/annoying approach. They’ll point out things like how the "taming of the Western frontier" was genocidal. Reconstruction ended decades too early and abandoned black people to the same racist system that enslaved them. The George W. Bush administration did not "accidentally" get us into the Iraq War because they were "tricked by faulty information." President Biden did not do anything to stop Israel's behavior in the Gaza War, and in fact facilitated it.
But “nuance” and “facts” are now seen as "wokeness." And we are told on both sides of the political aisle that the (extremely narrow popular) win of Donald Trump is a repudiation of “wokeness.” So Democrats can now do nothing but shrug as all of the DEI and human rights gains of the last two generations are stripped away; as women bleed out from miscarriages in American hospitals, while our military is purged of minorities in leadership and in its general corps.
I recently discussed how the world's plutocrats are acting as if there is no tomorrow, or rather they are building one that does not have a place for you in it. This is not what they are saying out loud, of course. They have an entire political class to run interference for them, and the messaging for “what you deserve” is critical.
The reason that Republicans are winning the fight for the future is that they are capable of articulating a vision of tomorrow, despite (or because!) this vision being brutal, merciless, and utterly fantastical. It is world where strong men (like you) will dominate the weak (everyone else). Where beautiful women will be compelled to fuck you and bear you sons that respect you. Where "illegals" will be violently removed from the country, which will lead to lower crime and get you a high-paying job, somehow. You will not have to deal with global warming, because our refusal to acknowledge it will prove that it is a hoax, even as it destroys the future for anyone who doesn’t have their own private island.
Democrats, on the other hand, have failed to articulate any kind of positive vision of what the future will look like; fanciful or not. They can’t be bothered. All I can say, with some certainty, is that it will be carefully focus-grouped, means-tested, it will provide a superficial environmental policy that fails to accomplish anything, "abundant" neo-liberal deregulation, and have unlimited money for Israel.
Seventeen years ago, the Democratic party had the greatest success of my lifetime with a young and charismatic leader named Barack Obama, who ran on a platform of “hope and change.” The lesson that the the Democratic political establishment (and especially Obama) SEEMS to have learned from this, is that they should run the oldest and most corrupt candidates they can find. They have disciplined, cowed, or outright crushed people like Cori Bush, India Walton, Jamaal Bowman, and AOC. There is only room for Nancy Pelosi and her insider trading, Diane Feinstein and her vegetative contempt, and Chuck Schumer waving one hand in a gesture of performative helplessness while using the other to collect a check from Palantir.
So, what happens when someone comes along and DOES offer a different vision of the future? Turns out, they are not greeted so kindly.
ZOHRAN MAMDANI has won the Democratic party primary for Mayor of New York City, besting Andrew Cuomo, a prolific sex pest and arguable murderer, whose administration as Governor was characterized by the innumerable ways that he fucked over NYC. Cuomo waited until about a month before this election to do any campaigning, then sprung into action by inundating the citizens of the five boroughs with direct mailers warning that Mamdani hates Jews; generally giving the impression that the young Muslim might construct a Queens annex of Buchenwald.
Mamdani’s victory in America’s largest city was driven by a charismatic, grass-roots campaign of small donations, passionate supporters, and cost-of-living promises. It was refreshing, energized, and obviously a big fucking problem for America’s party establishment and donor class; who would much prefer you lower your expectations about the kind of future that small-donations losers like you should expect for you and your gross children
Top Democratic party consultants question the wisdom of promising constituents a better life.
And this is why everyone with any power fucking hates him. Because the New Deal idea that the “government should improve your lives” is not as favorable to our current group of leaders as the idea that “power exists to protect the property of the strong and brutalize the weak, so keep your head down or you’ll attract violence to your door.” Maybe they’ll even strip you of your citizenship, if you get too mouthy.
These people would much prefer if you resigned yourself to the idea of politicians being useless and the system being unfixable and corrupt. That the best course of action is to keep your head down, pray you don’t get cancer because of some deregulatory act they quietly passed, and hope that AI doesn’t take your job despite the richest people in the world investing hundreds of billions of dollars into the technology with the explicit hope that it will do so.
Will Mamdani win the election? Will he be a disappointment? Too early to tell. But trying for something better is preferable to giving up. And if you’re waiting for the people who run America to give you permission to have a better life, you’ll be waiting a long time.
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