Missing: One Satan Figure, Heavily Overused – Reward Offered, No Questions Asked

Comes now the recoding.

The great central given in our lives for the last decade has been that it’s outrageous to support that man, and we’ve all had someone who dropped a friendship or a family connection over the question. People from my old life, from things I used to do in academia and journalism, have reached out to warn me that they see what I’ve become, and we just want you to know that we’re watching, Chris, and we’re not going to forget. You’ll be judged for supporting your Literally Adolf Hitler figure. Independent bookstores still carry the little circle of books about fascism and Nazis in their place of honor around the cash register, starting with Timothy Snyder’s deeply silly pamphlet On Tyranny. Supporting Democrats is being reasonable, being fair, being kind; supporting that man is being a Nazi, making your peace with authoritarianism, embracing a terrifying extremist ideology.

Democratic Party slogan-chanting all centers on the same rhetorical foundation, and it makes politics deceptively easy. What policies will you pursue as the governor of Virginia? Well, I’ll be very angry about Trump!

What policy priorities will you pursue as the attorney general of Virginia? I’ll stand up to Trump!

Vote Smith for East Smallville Municipal Water Board, I’ll stand up to Trump!

This person is the communications director for California Governor Patrick Bateman, and this is absolutely typical of what he posts all day and every day:

He’s a machine in a factory, taking anything you feed into the front and dropping an endless stream of BUT TRUMP slogans out the back. Gardon posted this on Sunday, as Trump took off for the Middle East to speak to the Knesset in the place where he negotiated the end of a war, but whatever, because Trump golfed the day before, and golfing is always an absolutely shocking and unconscionable Nazi not-helping-people behavior. And by the way:

Congratulations on paying that salary, California taxpayers. Worth every penny.

Donald Trump is the presumptively evil Great Deflection, the roadblock to all forms of critical discussion. Why is California falling apart in such crushingly obvious ways, combining soul-crushing expense with astonishing filth and decay?

Because something something Trump something something, Nazi moron!

The presumption of reasonableness in Trump opposition has been taken as a conversation-ender, a dead end. You are trying to talk about [Topic X], but we will now discontinue that discussion, because I will invoke the Rule of But Trump. I mean, I don’t know, California has sharply increased government spending¹ while producing ever-more-obvious decline and decay, doesn’t it seem like LOOK, I SAID “BUT TRUMP,” CONVERSATION OVER.

We have a politics of things that are presumptively bad and things that are presumptively good, producing a total absence of fact, reason, and debate.

So currently the GREAT NAZI DEVIL is over in the Middle East, ending a war and freeing people who’ve been held in conditions of appalling misery for over two years. Like Adolf Hitler, he’s, he’s, he’s….okay, he’s bringing peace. You Nazi!

The presumption is collapsing, as the person assigned the role of Hitler Satan fails the assignment. A politics that demands the presence of an all-encompassing evil figure collapses if the assigned figure won’t hold the weight. And he won’t. The moment is here. Literally Adolf Hitler just brought peace to Israel.

Literally Adolf Hitler the Nazi bigot is also sharply reducing violent crime in Washington D.C., by the way, in ways that became apparent early on: “In the nearly three weeks since President Trump deployed federal troops and law enforcement agents throughout Washington, D.C., a CBS News analysis of crime data shows violent crime is down in Washington by almost half when compared to the same 19 days in 2024.”

YOU KNOW WHO ELSE REDUCED VIOLENCE A LOT, THINK ABOUT IT

A bunch of presumptive positions are collapsing. You anti-vaxxers are morons who don’t believe in science, and you’re far outside the mainstream! Current uptake of the mRNA injections is parked around 20%, and falling rapidly, while actual science is peeling back the disturbing realities of those pharmaceutical products. And so on. You vicious transphobic bigots don’t support our deeply kind castration of teenage boys and our warm and affirming elective mastectomies for healthy 15 year-old girls, why are you so cruel?

All of this is going away. Monday’s presumptive evil is Tuesday’s common sense. Historical change recodes the meaning of events. See, for example, the wonderful efforts of the brilliant and deeply kind Bruno Bettelheim to treat autism by firmly severing family connections, making him a “media darling” and a pop culture saint:

It wasn’t until 1990—after Bettelheim’s death by suicide at 86—that residents and staff from the school began talking about his rages, name calling, constant lying, and abuse.

“I would characterize the atmosphere at the Orthogenic School, at that time, as the beginnings of a cult, with Dr. B. as the cult leader,” wrote a former counselor, W.B., in a letter to the Chicago Reader in July 1990.

But by that point, almost 50 years of damage had been done, during which any clinician who came up with a different diagnosis or questioned Bettelheim’s practices suffered immediate and devastating professional consequences.

A bunch of extremism has been dressed up as mainstream behavior, and a bunch of mainstream behavior has been dressed up as extremism. Reality is intervening. The presumptive rhetorical coding is becoming absurd to the point of total collapse.

I’ve said over and over again that I don’t believe in a politics that saves us, and I don’t believe that any politician is THE SAVIOR. We save ourselves, and culture matters before you can get to politics. A healthy country comes from healthy families and healthy communities, and health is bottom-up much more than it can be imposed from the top down. Donald Trump is a brilliant figure who is frequently frustrating, and his health report last week noted that he received a Covid-19 booster — shortly after welcoming the CEO of Pfizer to the Oval Office. This is…interesting. Interesting. I’m not banging my head into the wall, I swear.

But to the extent that politics can fix things, it’s becoming unavoidably true that Donald Trump is addressing real problems and offering real solutions, against constant stupid opposition, while a self-declared mainstream suffers a painful case of monomania, TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP, endlessly denouncing and shaming in a way that’s becoming actually shameful. A bunch of people who are the heroes of their own made-up story, David French, are going to wake up and find themselves on the cultural equivalent of that ice floe that carries the dead and dying out to sea.

• FY 2024: $223.1 billion/$494.1 billion

• FY 2023: $195.2 billion/$413.8 billion

• FY 2022: $216.8 billion/$442.2 billion

• FY 2021: $162.1 billion/$498.9 billion

• FY 2020: $146.3 billion/$357.1 billion

• FY 2019: $140.4 billion/$300.4 billion

  First figure is general fund spending, second figure is total spending. Source:

  https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiatives/state-and-local-finance-initiative/projects/state-fiscal-briefs/california

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