The Panic Strategy

is very familiar, and ends in disintegration

The Supreme Court just said that businesses can refuse to serve gay customers, and now America will become a fascist theocracy immediately, so here comes the chattel slavery and the non-ironic wearing of handmaid costumes, which will all only be temporary, because everybody will end up in the camps soon and die screaming, which may ironically turn out to be a bit of a relief because of all the slavery and handmaidening.

The Brynn Tannehill person was WARNING ABOUT THIS in the Huffington Post all the way back in 2014, sheeple, so MAYBE YOU SHOULD HAVE LISTENED WHILE THERE WAS STILL TIME TO NOT LITERALLY TURN INTO A SLAVE or something.

But just one small hitch. If, like a literal Nazi literally invading Poland, you read the court’s actual decision, you’ll find this paragraph on the very first page:

I read and listened to the coverage of this case with great care, and never saw or heard a single reference to this extremely explicit page-one stipulation that the plaintiff will work with “all people,” including LGBT customers, and “will gladly” serve clients “of any sexual orientation.” Did you? Page one. It’s on the first page. Her objection was to a single and specific type of content, a narrow piece of compelled speech, rather than to LGBT customers, who she explicitly pledged to serve in all other contexts outside her religious view of the meaning of marriage.

So all of the news telling you that if you’re gay YOU CAN’T EVEN BUY ANYTHING ANYMORE BECAUSE ALL THE BUSINESSES CAN JUST TURN YOU AWAY, NOW — please, please just let me buy one tiny morsel of food before I starve to death and can’t be gay anymore! — is an invention, not just completely made up but completely made up at the cost of ignoring the opening discussion from page one of the document that all of these journalists are “reporting on.”

Go look at the social media accounts of the usual suspects, if you feel the need, and you’ll learn that everyone who isn’t a straight white male is LITERALLY going to be LITERALLY “eliminated” at LITERALLY any moment, unless they let y’all live but put y’all back in chains. (And if people communicate what they think of their supporters by the way they speak to them, take a look at what Hakeem Jeffries thinks of his constituency, which is apparently getting ready to start preschool.) We’re embarking on a new season of aggressive, deliberate fearmongering, the calculated promulgation of strategic terror. The volume is LITERALLY going to eleven, oh my god you guys like LITERALLY. There are no mysteries about why this is happening. California Democrats have been announcing their plans to end homelessness for twenty years, and here’s my favorite example:

Meanwhile, here’s the news from this week:

We have a political class of slogan-chanters who can’t do anything. They can’t fix anything, they can’t build anything, they can’t maintain anything. If the Democratic single-party California machine tried to fry an egg, we’d lose an entire county to fire and still not end up with the egg. Ditto the national governing class, the wisdom of which is leading to headlines like this:

Stay the….course? I guess?

And so the deflective pivot, against a record of deep and endless failure, is to constantly point offstage and scream that oh no, they’re, um, literally exterminating you! Ohhhh, look out.

We’re wading through this culture war sewage because we have a political class that’s deliberately pumping it into the culture to keep us from noticing that, how can I put this in a sophisticated way, they suck.

But this really tedious maneuver is increasingly leading to moments like this — and Twitter still won’t let Substack writers embed tweets, so click to watch video, but here’s the substance of the thing:

The fake conflict is increasingly likely to be a dozen sanpaku-eyed AWFL’s against a thousand genuinely multicultural parents, battling over insane questions like the “book bans” that remove highly explicit sexual content from elementary school libraries. In 2023, the culture war is rapidly cooking down to STOP PREVENTING US FROM TALKING TO YOUR EIGHT YEAR-OLDS ABOUT SUCKING DICK, YOU NAZIS.

If you’ve never read what I wrote about Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple, please take a moment to go read this. About 900 people died at Jonestown in 1978, but Jones started in Indianapolis in the 1950s. He moved his church to a rural property in California, and then to Guyana, by constantly telling his parishioners that they were threatened by hostile forces outside the church that were maneuvering to destroy them. The frequent recourse to invented threats is a sign of a sick movement, not a sign of something the grows and flourishes.

That’s where we are. We’re watching a sick thing die. The question, now, is how long it takes to die, and how much damage it does in its death throes. But the increasingly hysterical tone, against an increasingly matter-of-fact response — a thousand parents saying calmly that no, we won’t let you inflict this curriculum on our children — suggests that the inflection point is getting closer.

Maybe when it comes we can figure out how to fix the freeways.