Super Slo-Mo Collapse

by on Jun.06, 2025, under Politics

The Iraq War was supposed to be the GOP’s death knell.

Then Hurricane Katrina was supposed to be the GOP’s death knell.

Then Trump becoming the party’s nominee was supposed to be the GOP’s death knell.

Then Trump winning the electoral college in 2016 was supposed to be the GOP’s death knell.

Then the botched response to Covid was supposed to be the GOP’s death knell.

Then the January 6 attack was supposed to be the GOP’s death knell.

Then Trump winning the nomination again was supposed to be the GOP’s death knell.

Then DOGE was supposed to be the GOP’s death knell.

Then tariffs was supposed to be the GOP’s death knell.

Then…

OK, the point is that we are closing in a dozen death knells, yet here is the Republican Party, in control of all three branches of government and executing its maniacal agenda with incredible speed (although not with incredible efficiency).

Also, this theoretically moribund political movement currently enjoys a higher approval rating than its opposition.

But it hasn’t stopped political commentators from declaring, “This is really it. The death knell of the GOP is coming. We mean it this time.”

Yup, I’m sure this time it will be different.

In truth, the fight between progressives and conservatives will likely go on as long as this country exists. Of course, that might not be for very  much longer, but let’s be bold and optimistic.

There are many reasons to believe that the GOP is doomed in the long run, ranging from the dismal history of xenophobic political parties to the high death rate of the Republican base to the likelihood of right-wing implosion.

But even if the GOP goes the way of the Whigs, there will always be a remnant of lunacy in American culture. There will always be a large contingent of people who feed on fear, hatred, and ignorance. The objects of their scorn and the wars they declare will look different, but there will never be a time when progressives will sit back and say, “Everybody relax. We won.”

Consider that even if Trump literally destroyed America, 20% of the survivors would still worship him. Another 20% would turn on him, but refuse to admit that liberals were right. They would eventually go back to voting Republican (or the equivalent in a post-apocalyptic society that still allowed voting) in the next election. So even in a worst-case scenario, about 40% of Americans would continue to reject liberalism.

Clearly, there will never be a death knell that abruptly finishes off the right-wing mindset.

The fight is permanent and unending.

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Dumb Enough to Know Better

by on May.30, 2025, under Culture

We all live in a state of delusion. 

Most of these misconceptions are harmless or even helpful to our daily functioning. They are along the lines of “My cat really loves me,” or “I’m happy with this mid-level managerial job being the pinnacle of my career.” These delusions help us carry on.

But it’s a different level of denial to have objective proof that you are wrong, to hear esteemed professionals present mountains of evidence that is easily accessible about how your opinion is absurd, and then insist you are right.

I knew a guy who insisted that smoking was good for you. He claimed it helped digestion or made your lungs stronger or something equally ridiculous. Anyway, he died of cancer. True story.

The point is that some people, for psychological reasons that range from the tragic to the pathetic, will respond with hostility to any fact that scraps off the thin veneer of their deep-seated delusion.

I’m talking about climate-change denial, the belief in an immigrant crime wave, the insistence that hitting your kids is beneficial, and myriad other opinions that have been proven incorrect — over and over again — and yet cling to our culture like barnacles of ignorance. 

Since the advent of social media, it has been easier for conmen, hucksters, lunatics, and bigots to spread lies that take root in the imaginations of those who want to believe. But that approach has likely maxed out.

So now we have a new tactic in the war on facts. And that is “the sweeping attack on human knowledge and progress that the Trump administration is now undertaking—a deliberate destruction of education, science, and history, conducted with a fanaticism that recalls the Dark Ages that followed Rome’s fall.”

Conservatives have always viewed reality with suspicion, likely because it so rarely aligns with their vision of how the world should be. So they have spent this entire century attacking objective evidence, data, and reason. 

Under the reign of their hyperemotional, logic-free emperor, they have “launched a comprehensive attack on knowledge itself, a war against culture, history, and science.” It’s not just because this is politically expedient — although it is, since “by destroying knowledge, Trumpists seek to make the country more amenable to their political domination, and to prevent meaningful democratic checks on their behavior.”

It’s also because the right wing has a long-festering, overt hostility toward fancy-pants learning and so-called elites (i.e., anyone who went to college but didn’t become a big-business conservative). This mindset catalyzed with the election of George W. Bush, a man who famously felt it in his gut because his brain was barely functional. It advanced with the rise of Sarah Palin, when Republicans embraced her undeniable stupidity and lauded her idiocy as a virtue. And it has reached its apogee with the current king of misinformation, a president who doesn’t understand the Constitution, basic laws, American history, or simple economics.

Indifference to facts and anger at expertise are now foundational aspects of the Republican Party. Conservatives are trying to “annihilate some of the most effective systems for aggregating, accumulating, and applying human knowledge that have ever existed,” and it successful, America “could find itself plunged into a new Dark Age.”

We already have a large segment of the populace that believes vaccines cause autism, airplanes emit mind-controlling chemtrails, and Jews have a space laser. A Republican-controlled society “will undermine Americans’ ability to comprehend the world around us.”

Of course, we could just go merrily on our way, optimistic that everything will work out, insisting that our country will just snap out of this self-inflicted descent into ignorance all by itself with no real effort from us.

But that would be delusional.

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The Proper Distance

by on May.22, 2025, under Culture

Here’s a trivia question for you:

What’s the opposite of myopia?

Yes, it’s hyperopia. You have heard of the former because it’s more common, but hyperopia (i.e., farsightedness) is a real thing. People with either of these conditions just don’t see very well.

These terms are a nifty metaphor for our political situation, which is somewhere between authoritarian-leaning and full-blast oligarchy. We can’t be sure because we are living it, and people are notoriously bad at identifying the eras in which they exist. We need the perspective of time.

For example, baby boomers weren’t nostalgic for the 1950s while they were kids. It was only when they hit middle age that they proclaimed that those were the days and insisted on dragging the country back to this mythical decade that was vastly overrated, never mind the consequences.

So while it is perfectly obvious that the America of 2025 is a shitshow, it is unclear how much of a catastrophe we are enduring. We will have a better answer circa 2050, if the nation survives until then.

The effects of myopia and hyperopia exist on a political scale. People who are too close or too far from a situation often have a skewed perspective.

Consider the Y2K bug, that wacky relic of the Clinton years. I’m old enough to remember computer scientists who insisted civilization would collapse. They knew all the risks and potential for disaster, so they focused on that. At the other end of the spectrum, people who thought the fledgling internet was a fad and didn’t know the first thing about technology were busy stockpiling canned goods for their underground bunker. They didn’t understand how any of this worked, so they freaked out.

One set was myopic, and the other was hyperopic.

You can see the same results with the Iraq War, when experts smugly asserted that Saddam Hussien had weapons of mass destruction, while people who couldn’t identify Canada on a map yelled, “Invade somebody now.” Yeah, they were both wrong.

There are other examples throughout human history, and in our current maelstrom of misery, it is difficult to figure out who is overreacting and who is way too chill about all this.

Experts on fascism are fleeing the country. Are they too close to the situation or spot on in their analysis?

People who have no idea how tariffs work are saying everything will all be ok. Could this blasé attitude possibly be correct, or is their ignorance not just reprehensible but dangerous?

Is the right path somewhere in between, a concoction of justified anxiety mixed with Zen-like hope?

Again, we don’t know.

I will say, however, that my theory is not perfect. You know all those experts who said Covid-19 would kill a million Americans? They were criticized and ridiculed, but yeah, they were right.

Sometimes, the alarmists are absolutely correct.

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Warning Shots

by on May.16, 2025, under War

Everything is a distraction, but nothing is a distraction.

The president receiving a $400 million jet from a foreign nation in an overt display of greed, corruption, and potential bribery? That’s a distraction. Also the motherfucker really wants that jet.

Once again, everything that Trump says is true — in his mind at that moment. 

For example, that whole Gulf of America imbroglio wasn’t on anyone’s radar until it popped into the Dear Leader’s head, ex nihilo, after which it suddenly became a top priority. The guy wanted to do it, and the process was surprisingly easy. So now we have a cartographic catastrophe.

In contrast, taking over Gaza and building Trump hotels on the land is substantially more difficult. That means it isn’t going to happen. Again, our butterfly-brained chief executive meant it when he said it. But when the endeavor turned out to be a chore, he forgot about this particular desire and moved on to some other scattered, ill-conceived project.

This brings us to the most troubling aspect of the Trump administration’s constant flinging of bizarre ideas and psychotic master plans.

You see, even though this bloviating sack of lies “never mentioned taking over Greenland—or Canada, or Panama, or Mexico—during the 2024 campaign, he has made such takeovers a key objective of his administration.” The reason these absurd threats keep surfacing is because of “a historical truism: when one country invades another, it usually reflects the problems of the invader’s domestic politics, no matter what the justification for the invasion is.”

So if Trump’s poll numbers keep falling, and there is every reason to assume they will, the warmongers and lunatics who surround him will no doubt realize that “war seduces entire societies, creating fictions that the public believes and relies on to continue to support conflicts.”

It worked for George W. Bush, who likely would have lost reelection if not for the argument that he was a “wartime president.” Yeah, and that war, which he started, turned out great — didn’t it? And his second term was a raving success — right? 

But I digress. Let’s get back to our current Republican incompetent.

Now, we certainly aren’t going to pick a military fight with China. We can’t even win a trade war against them. 

But we can shoot it out with a smaller nation. Hey, didn’t you ever wonder why the Reagan administration invaded tiny Granada? 

The drive to dominate a smaller country is even stronger among conservatives than it was during Ronnie’s time. This is because “the reactionary patriotism we’re so familiar with is now infected with an apocalyptic mindset.” The Republican Party has morphed into “a toxic system of belief, capable of overriding material self-interest and logic because the main offering is revenge.” This goes way beyond “the shallow emotional fix of winning elections or sticking it to the libs.” At its core, Trumpism is “not so much a hatred for any one group … but a hatred of civilization itself.”

There’s a whole lot of civilization in the world that right-wingers want to vanquish. The hope is that we can white-knuckle it out for three years without bombs dropping. But it all depends on how easily we get distracted.

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What Was the Point Again?

by on May.08, 2025, under Immigration

I’m not a sentimental guy.

But it’s good to look back from time to time, just to see how far you’ve come and how you’ve grown as a person. Even better, it’s good to meet up with your old college roommates, get drunk, and reminisce about the time you stole that guy’s bed and stuffed it in the dorm elevator at midnight.

Did I mention that I’ve grown as a person?

But if it’s fine to look back on one’s life, it’s not such an uplifting experience to look back on our country’s past. 

By this, I mean you shouldn’t look at clips of Obama speaking circa 2010. You are likely to burst out weeping with the realization of how far we have plummeted, while pining away for a president who could speak in full, coherent sentences.

I don’t say this often, but damn, those were the days.

However, when we shorten our gaze at the past, narrowing it down to 2017 or so, we realize that the nation hasn’t moved at all in the past few years. Seriously, it’s like Biden never happened.

Remember that assertion that the cruelty is the point? Yeah, it’s still true.

Witness the fact that even conservatives are stating that the GOP is waging a war on empathy.

The conservative movement has always had a core of right-wing sociopaths who express disdain for any life other than fetuses and abhor the very idea of sympathy. But today, it is at the forefront of the Republican Party’s agenda.

For example, there is no logical reason to deport immigrants, even undocumented ones, en masse. Acres of studies show that immigrants have lower crime rates, contribute more to the economy than they cost, and fuel economic and cultural developments.

This is why any discussion of immigration eventually turns into a conservative bitching about hearing Spanish in the grocery store. It’s an emotional argument. We have prioritized the hypersensitivity of white Americans and said it’s perfectly normal to want to crush people who have done nothing to you.

This has created an America that grabs people off the street and sends them to a gulag in another country. But Trump’s xenophobic agenda — evident in all those “mass deportations now” posters waved around at his rallies — will never really come to fruition. Among other issues, it is impossible to deport 10 million people in any kind of efficient, humane manner, and doing so would destroy the economy.

There are also those pesky legal arguments. All you conservatives out there should note that none other than that famous bleeding-heart liberal Antonin Scalia said, “It is well established that the Fifth Amendment entitles aliens to due process of law in deportation proceedings.”

That’s just in case you don’t know if you have to follow the Constitution.

The whole premise of mass deportation rests on the idea that “some people are better than others” and therefore “some people have special insight based only upon their superiority,” which means they can do pretty much whatever they want, especially to those who oppose them.

People are scared in America today. I’m not just talking about undocumented immigrants, progressive leaders, or ethnic minorities. I’m talking about Republican senators.

Experts are warning that the “fear of government retribution is now spreading through society,” and that Trump’s style of governance “involves a desire for total dominance and an increasingly unhinged delusion of omnipotence” that aligns nicely with Mussolini.

But if you think “quietly yielding in small, seemingly temporary ways will mitigate long-term harm,” you are sadly mistaken. The truth is that “acquiescence will probably embolden the administration, encouraging it to intensify and broaden its attacks.”

This is a movement based on an “ideological architecture to excuse violence and suffering on a mass scale.”

It’s not just the cruelty anymore. It’s also the anger, the fear, and the unchecked power — all that is the point.

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Undue Process

by on May.01, 2025, under Culture

If you voted for Trump because you wanted egg prices to go down, you are no doubt disappointed (which is just as well, because this was an idiotic reason).

But if you voted for Trump because you wanted to live in a police state where power-drunk government officials can grab somebody off the street at their whim, whisk him out of the country without allowing him to plead his case, throw him into a hellhole to rot, refuse to explain what crime he broke, and refuse to bring him back even after the US Supreme Court tells them to do so, then your wildest dreams have come true.

Also, you are a fascist.

Only an authoritarian could love the following developments (this list comes courtesy of NextDraft’s Dave Pell):

The sending of potentially innocent people to a gulag-like prison in El Salvador. 

The disappearing of people and due process. 

The glad-handing, jubilant Oval Office meeting with a leader who has referred to himself as “the coolest dictator” by an American president who said he’d love to send American “homegrown criminals” to a similar prison abroad. 

The ignoring of a series of court orders and the wanton flouting of a 9-0 Supreme Court ruling. 

The presidential displaying of a clearly doctored photo that makes it seem like a man sent to the CECOT terrorism confinement center by mistake was a member of a dangerous gang. 

The firing of the Justice Department lawyer who made it clear that the man’s fate was due to a clerical error. 

The sadistic photo ops from the US head of Homeland Security posing in front of CECOT prisoners.

The ceding of America’s high ground when it comes to due process and the rule of law. 

The refusal to apologize for any mistakes. 

The refusal to rectify any of those mistakes.

The celebration of cruelty.

All of this makes for a disturbingly lengthy list.

In addition, there is also the fact that government agencies are now acting like snitches, federal officials are suggesting rounding up immigrants like Amazon Prime handles packages, scientists working on life-saving breakthroughs are being detained, and people just trying to become patriotic American citizens are being arrested.

Plus, we have a president who falls for painfully obvious internet hoaxes like he’s a damn nine-year-old child.

Until recently, I thought right-wingers were against jackbooted government thugs. Clearly, their principled stance against government oppression was just as strong as their principled beliefs in freedom of speech, the US Constitution, and Jesus Christ, which is to say, all that talk was bullshit, and they believe in nothing except power.

Someone should tell those freedom-loving warriors that “if government officials can say anything, true or not, to justify their actions… what stops them from doing that to an American citizen?” In such a country, the government “can claim anything and act with impunity against anyone.”

Yes, right now, they can do it to anyone.

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Shifting, Always Shifting

by on Apr.24, 2025, under Economy

It would be immediate golden age.

OK now there’s going to be a recession, but that was the plan all along.

The stock market was set to soar to new heights.

OK, now it’s tanking, but don’t worry because Trump is playing 4-D chess with the market.

Inflation was going to drop.

OK now it’s accelerating, but the president couldn’t care less if you pay more for basic goods and services.

If you are a rational person, you might think back to Trump’s promises to make every American instantly wealthier on day one of his administration, and contrast it with the reality of just three months later, when recession signs are flashing, Americans’ expectations for the economy are at their lowest level since the end of the Great Recession, and financial experts say our nation’s fiscal strength is “on course for continued decline.”

But if you are a MAGA supporter, you see the best of all possible worlds.

For hardcore Trump fans, it doesn’t matter that “almost everything the administration and congressional Republicans are doing to the economy is making a collapse more likely.” It is irrelevant that Trump’s policies “have shaken a once-solid economic outlook.” And it is an insignificant detail that the GOP wants to fling America back to the Gilded Age of the 1890s, which was a great time for the rich but a horror show for everybody else.

You see, Trump’s followers have a history of not just moving the goalposts, but tearing the goalposts down, leaving the stadium, and passing out drunk in the parking lot while denying anybody was ever trying to kick a field goal in the first place.

Back in November, virtually nobody voted for a complete government overhaul that would be orchestrated by an unelected, unvetted, unaccountable billionaire. Republicans never said this was even remotely part of the plan, much less the whole objective. Many people claimed their vote for Trump was because of fucking egg prices.

But now, a lot of those same voters are cheering on oligarchs who are “effectively gaining control of the U.S. government” and threatening to end Social Security. They have rationalized their horrible decisions.

The economic outlook has gotten so bleak that a brand-new conspiracy theory — we can never get enough of those — has erupted to explain why Trump is screwing over the very people who voted for him. 

It’s a QAnon for tariffs, and it attempts to explain Trump’s “incoherent, inconsistent, self-destructive mess” and transform it into “a carefully orchestrated master plan to revive American manufacturing, reduce the national debt, reconfigure the international-alliance system, and deliver the greatest geopolitical deal of the century.”

In truth, the theory is so preposterous that it is “less a genuine plan than a way for Trump’s backers to put a strategic spin on the president’s inchoate impulses.”

This conspiracy theory has “somewhat implausibly gained adherents, if cautious ones, in respectable quarters” because of “the intense demand for some kind of coherent rationale” that covers Trump’s bizarre, self-destructive actions.

His followers can’t accept the fact that a belligerent man-child has taken over the Oval Office (again) and has no idea what he is doing.

The need to justify Trump’s nonsensical policies is evident in the fact that congressional Republicans recently passed a measure saying, “each day…shall not constitute a calendar day” as a legislative maneuver to help the buffoonish chief executive out of a legal quandary. But the GOP’s insistence that “a day is not a day seems to prove the truth of Burke’s observation that by trying to force reality to fit their ideology, radical ideologues will end up imposing tyranny in the name of liberty.”

Again, there are no goalposts here. And there never were.

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Tariffs Are Terrifying… I Mean, Terrific!

by on Apr.10, 2025, under Economy

Listen, I know you’re feeling nervous about the economy sinking faster than an anvil thrown into a black hole. Hey, even people who mere months ago were saying, “Get over it” are now screeching for salvation from the economic tsunami towering over us. And those people are billionaires — most of whom are apparently not very smart.

In any case, this should make you feel better: the president doesn’t give a fuck about you or the economy.

OK, maybe that’s not very comforting, but it is the truth.

You see, Trump has been “insulated from the consequences of his own actions his entire life and appears to care very little about the economic sinkhole he just created.”

In fact, the guy is more defiant than ever. And because there is no master plan, and no real desire to improve the lives of Americans, this bloated and rambling lunatic will continue to lead the nation down a path of chaos and despair until we hit Great Depression levels, at which point he will declare victory.

That’s what he did when he paused his idiotic tariffs for 90 days that will no doubt be filled with apprehension, dread, and confusion. But the damage has already been done.

In the interim, economists and financial experts will debate if the Trump tariffs are “the dumbest economic policy in modern history,” or merely a harbinger of recession. 

One can’t keep up with all the rationales the Trump administration has given for their arbitrary and mathematically challenged policy. But what the justifications have in common is that they are, at best, the kind of conservative magical thinking that got us the Iraq War and an imaginary wall on the border that Mexico paid for.

At worst, they are the active mechanization of oligarchs and madmen who want to burn the country down and reduce us all to serfs.

Somewhere in between is the most likely scenario, at least from Trump’s perspective, which is that he said he was going to do this, and now he is doing it, no matter the consequences to anyone else. In 90 days, or less, we will likely go through all this needless suffering again.

The bizarre and random nature of the tariffs have led some politicians to claim the Trump administration “is the most sloppy, unprofessional, arrogant, and stupid group of people ever assembled in government.” They are saying Americans “haven’t learned yet how to battle this stupidity, [and] the country and the world is suffering from the whims of a madman.”

By the way, those are the words of Republicans.

It’s that clear to everybody. 

The tariffs are “a torrent of nonsense that threatens to destroy the very thing Trump insists on saving,” which brings up the disturbing realization that “if this is what it looks like when Trump decides he wants to save the economy, God help us if he ever decides to destroy it.”

It’s like they always say — never trust a narcissistic sociopath with 32 felonies and a half-dozen bankruptcies.

Well, maybe they didn’t say it before, but they are most certainly saying it now.

Too bad it’s far too late.

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Astronomical Odds

by on Apr.04, 2025, under Economy

So it appears that we are doomed.

Maybe it won’t be the collapse of civilization (although that is a charming possibility). But at the very least, America is headed for a financial cataclysm.

Is this because Trump insists on pushing through tariffs that are virtually guaranteed to tank the economy, for no discernable reason other than “because I said so”?

Yeah, that’s one factor.

Another issue is that this administration appears to be staffed solely by incompetents, lunatics, dullards, and stooges. 

Also, an egomaniacal oligarch and his fellow billionaires are raping the government so they can add another zero at the end of their net-worth calculations.

All of that is true, and the horrific combination is enough to tilt us toward economic Armageddon.

But there is another reason why America will likely be scrounging for pennies and begging for spare change soon. And that is because Republicans are in charge.

Oh sure, you are saying, once more I’m lambasting the GOP and shrieking that they will lead us into ruin. 

Actually, I’m not saying that. Historians, economists, and scientists are saying that.

You see, a recent Harvard study analyzed decades of America’s economic performance and assessed the odds of financial outcomes being based on random chance or political choices.

For example, it is a fact that the last five recessions all started under a Republican president. The researchers put the odds of getting that outcome by chance at about 3%. 

Let’s keep going. The researchers point out that “a remarkable 9 of the last 10 recessions have started when a Republican was president, [and] odds that this outcome would have occurred just by chance are 0.0098%.”

But wait — it gets crazier. Ten times since World War II, an incumbent from one party handed over the White House to a leader from the other party. In five of the last 10 transitions, a Republican followed a Democrat, and each time the economic growth rate went down. In the other five transitions, a Democrat followed a Republican, and each time the economic growth rate went up. As the researchers point out, this means, “No exceptions. Ten out of ten.” 

So when people talk about a Republican inheriting a good economy, messing it up, and then having a Democrat come in to clean up the disaster? Yeah, that’s a real thing. It has literally happened 10 times in a row over the last 80 years.

Again, what are the odds of this happening by chance? The answer is the same odds of flipping heads on 10 coin tosses in a row, which is one out of 1,024. The researchers say the “difference is statistically significant at the 99.9% level.”

What does it say about a political party that is consistently, overwhelmingly wrong on economic policy? What does it say about Americans who continue to vote for that party, generation after generation?

The answers are both disturbing and illuminating. And they likely explain why our country is the richest in the world by many measures, and yet our citizens are far poorer, stressed, and more miserable than just about any other industrialized nation.

So why does the GOP suck so bad at economic policy?

Well, other researchers have theorized that a main reason for this discrepancy is because Democrats, when faced with a financial crisis, will focus more on objective facts and try different approaches to resolve it. Republicans, on the other hand, have exactly one answer for everything: tax cuts for the rich. This is not an exaggeration. Witness the current GOP, which is desperately trying to figure out how to slash Medicaid or Social Security for the express purpose of extending Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, which benefitted only the wealthy and did not prevent America from sliding into economic chaos. 

Throwing money at billionaires and hoping for the best is the GOP’s only method for boosting the economy, getting out of a recession, and presumably, treating frostbite and losing those last pesky 10 pounds.

This philosophy persists despite mountains of evidence that supply-side economics doesn’t work.

If we think of the economy as an automobile, and the political parties as mechanics, it’s as if the GOP’s fix is to attach square wheels to the car. And they will do this whether the car suffers from a busted engine, a cracked windshield, or an oil leak. It will be square wheels, every time.

The Democratic mechanic, in contrast, will diagnose the issue and try to repair the problem. And they will take the square wheels off the fucking car. And the car will run fine until four years later, when the car’s owner (the American people) will insist that the previous mechanic was better.

We are now entering our latest square-wheel era.

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The Fisting of America

by on Mar.27, 2025, under Politics

It’s not something to brag about, but I’ve seen Caligula, that 1970s cinematic monstrosity that is widely regarded as the most expensive porno ever made.

The film is repulsive, but it makes an impression.

One scene that I’ve never forgotten is when the mad emperor, played with wild-eyed intensity by Malcolm McDowell, saunters into a wedding celebration of one his army’s generals. Everyone is terrified to see him there, because they know he is a sociopathic lunatic. Sure enough, he rapes the bride in front of her newlywed husband, then rams his fist up the general’s ass. The whole movie is like that.

In any case, I’ve always wondered why everyone in ancient Rome, even tough military leaders, allowed Caligula to issue psychotic orders, destroy their society, and literally rape them without objection.

I don’t wonder about that anymore.

We live in a society where people with advanced degrees argue that tariffs will lead to prosperity, that white men have been unfairly excluded from leadership positions, and that European countries are bigger threats to us than Russia.

They believe this because one old man who struggles to speak in coherent sentences has insisted it’s all true, and they have fallen in line.

People who, just a year ago, would have guffawed at the idea of the United States annexing Canada are now seriously advocating for making that country the 51st state (against its will, no less).

There are several reasons for this, ranging from the infantile need to “own the libs” to the zealotry of the true MAGA believer to the conservative quest for power.

But one of the chief motivators for hardcore supporters is psychological preservation. Admitting that you are wrong, especially about something major and/or central to your identify, is incredibly disturbing for most people.

If you’ve enthusiastically supported Trump to this point, despite years of evidence that he is a menace to the nation, it’s not so easy to say, “Woopsie, I guess those libtards were right after all.”

In fact, the individuals who are most likely to admit their mistakes “tend to be empathetic, self-aware, and curious — all traits that prevent ever having voted for Trump in the first place.”

So people in red hats with Trump flags in their yard will come up with tortuous explanations for, say, administration goons who endangered national security “by chatting about a military strike in a Signal chat that included a journalist.” 

Now, that’s a really crazy example, because nobody is that bafflingly stupid, right? But if this were to happen, Trump fans will not admit the administration displayed ungodly levels of incompetence and exhibited glaring hypocrisy. 

Hell, they will even defend the administration for deporting their spouses rather than admit they were wrong to vote for a corrupt autocrat. Think about that — even after Trump has destroyed their lives, his devoted followers will not acknowledge that the man is anything less than perfect.

Of course, there is another reason why so many people acquiesce to Trump, and that is simple fear.

But as powerful as that emotion is, it remains in second place when it comes to subservience to Trump. Fear is not the reason why Republicans are trying to “make Trump’s birthday a federal holiday, rename Dulles Airport in Trump’s honor, carve Trump’s face on Mount Rushmore, and create a new $250 bill with Trump’s likeness.”

That’s just blind obedience. And there is a lot of it going around.

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