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.
It's starting to seem like it may just be impossible to have a democratic society based on adults conversing and compromising with each other here in the 21st century, which is defined by life lived inside the digital panopticon and the Circe effect of this, which turns everyone into swinish rage-addled infants.
Because everyone has been primed by the virtual Pavlovian Skinner Box to vomit rage and hatred on cue (and because our media class exists only to pour gasoline on every fire), we just can't seem to approach any kind of adult acceptance of life in a free country. As in, the realization that all these issues represent conflicting rights which people may understandably disagree on: like, fetus vs mom, whose right prevails?; or, asking a business to craft a personal message they may disagree with vs compelled speech (would it be ok for a black caterer to refuse working a KKK reunion? is an obvious rejoinder); or does Affirmative Action represent racial discrimination or its opposite?
The irony here for me is that our liberal ruling class never stops preening about democracy, saving democracy, their commitment to democracy, while at the same time refusing to abide any decision they lose, and refusing to accept that different people have different values, but instead painting all opposition in the most extreme deranged terms, while also trying to ban dissent and sentence their opponents to social death. You can either be in favor of democracy or you can paint all your political opponents as evil Nazi fascists, but you can't do both.
But then again I've come to see the flaw in my thinking: in our age of "this word needs whatever i need it to mean", I guess "democracy" has come to mean: I get my way all the time and hold all power in perpetuity, or else I will try to destroy you.
Since Trump the Left has gone full Vietnam: they will destroy this village called Democracy in order to save it.
You can’t tell somebody at work that they look good in their outfit, but non-binary furry cocker spaniel queer tree humpers can instruct your 8 year old on anal sex it out in a burlesque show. Right.
Democrats think black people can’t get into college, which is run completely by Democrats btw, because black people, according to Democrats are incapable of intellectual achievement, but if a white guy were to repeat the lyrics from a rap sing on the radio, he’s a racist. Right.
If I gave 280 billion dollars during COVID to crooks fraudulently applying for emergency loans, I’d be in Supermax for 300 years, but if the federales screw that up, well no biggie. Right.
The problem is that the ruling class is out of touch and they don’t care. They aren’t interested in equality or Justice or America for that matter. They are interested in you ShuttingTFU and letting them grind you down. The only way to make them care is either to take away their money or take away their power. At at that point we don’t have to care about these clowns either. The question is how to do it.