Dog Barks at Car

trump trump trump trump trump, it barks, until you get tired of the barking

It takes a long time to describe it, but it only takes thirty seconds to show it.

I hope by now you’ve read John Carter’s “Political Conflict in the Age of Psychic Warfare,” a very long Substack post that serves the function of a book. It tells us where we are, how we got here, what the problem is, and what we should do about it, and it does all of that with clarity and precision. If you haven’t read it yet, it’s here:

Political Conflict in the Age of Psychic Warfare

Take your time with it. Read it more than once.

Soon after I read it, I came across the mayor of Richmond, Virginia speaking on social media about how bad Donald Trump is, in response to the shocking news that Orange Devil Man is speaking in the mayor’s own city. Ohhh, he’s very upset, ladies and gentlemen. This is UNACCEPTABLE. I can’t embed Twitter video on Substack, so you have to click here to watch it, but I’ll transcribe the relevant portion below if you don’t want to take the time to watch an idiot gibber about literally nothing.

I’m here to remind folks that President Trump has chosen Richmond as a campaign stop. And I wanted President Trump to know this: That your rhetoric of division and hate and destruction of our democracy is not welcome here in Richmond. We reject those values. We believe in the values of being more inclusive, more welcoming, a place where people belong, a place where people can thrive, and that’s the opposite message of Donald Trump.

We believe in being welcoming, and that’s why you’re not welcome. We believe in inclusivity, and that’s why we’re excluding you. We believe in being a place where people belong, and that’s why you don’t belong here.

He delivers this message in paired sentences that are separated by less than a single breath: you’re not welcome here / we’re more welcoming. Because he doesn’t hear himself, because he isn’t thinking about what he’s saying, and because there’s no message in any of it. The mayor of Richmond is a thing that doesn’t think; you crank its handle, and slogans fall out. Levar Stoney, by the way, is a charter member of the Jacinda Ardern policy class, one of the army of career apparatchiks who’ve never had anything that could be identified as a job: He’s worked for John Kerrey, the Democratic Party, Barack Obama, and Terry McAuliffe, and so on. So, by long practice, his voice is a mechanism defined by its automaticity, a set of trigger-slogans connected to a set of feelings, like a wire with electricity running through it.

Zap! Did that hurt?

John Carter: “Now, consider the addictive Skinner boxes that form the lynchpin of the Regime’s 5GW apparatus.”

It’s chanting, ritual repetition to dig a set of feelings into your nerves. Trump’s bigotry, Trump’s bigotry, Trump’s bigotry, Trump’s bigotry, Trump’s bigotry, Trump’s bigotry, Trump’s bigotry. It doesn’t matter that it means literally nothing at all. It’s not meant as meaning. See also my last post about the shamefully stupid books being published this election year with a flood of nonsense about, for example, the massive armed assault on the Capitol by the armed insurrectionists who attacked our nation on January 6 armed with their deadly assault weapons. Armed insurrection armed insurrection armed insurrection. Every time I claw your face I say the word “Trump,” and every time I say the word “Trump” I claw your face, and that’s the message.

I find it useful to think of all of this messaging as product, like a bag of Doritos.

Look for this. Watch. Once you become conscious of the marketing maneuver, you’ll see it everywhere. Watch for the constant flood of messaging in which the second sentence doesn’t pair with the first sentence, and the third sentence arrives as if from outer space, in a jumble of nonsense with no logical throughline. “But you JUST SAID….” The technical term for this kind of barren intellectual landscape is “politics,” and the contemporary political class has perfected the art. We welcome everyone, and that’s why you’re not welcome here.

Here’s John Carter again, and think about all of this in the context of the example I’ve just suggested:

The Regime is parasitic, not symbiotic, on its host society. It is purely extractive, providing nothing of value, existing solely for itself. It is composed of people who are not brave, or honourable, or intelligent, or competent, or benevolent, or possessed of any of the virtues with which a ruling class is expected to be blessed. As such it is a curse upon humanity, and deep down it knows this. It understands perfectly well that everyone would be much better off if it simply shuffled away into the unlamented oblivion of history. It doesn’t care, mind you, because it sees people as livestock of no moral importance. But it’s self-aware about this disconnect between its interests, and those of the human species at large.

Which is why it must lie, about everything. It must make the society it dominates into a garden of lies: lies about race, about sex, about ‘gender’, about nutrition, about medicine, about history, about elections, about the causes and outcomes of wars, about the climate, about the very nature of existence.

Maintaining that artificial world picture against the immense pressure of reality imposes a heavy cost. The Regime’s vast apparatus of indoctrination centres, propaganda organs, and social media operations is absolutely necessary if the edifice is to remain intact. It requires great and ceaseless effort, immense ingenuity, and vast expense.

There’s a solution, an appropriate and effective response, and I encourage you to click over to John Carter’s essay to read it. He’s right.