There is an endless carousel of people like him being propelled into prominence by the billionaires: slick, arrogant, tanned men in dark blue suits and sadistic women with blonde helmets and cavernous eyes, using the words of the radical pacifist Jesus Christ to propose the most insane cruelty one can imagine. Their betrayal of the basic principles of decent human existence is so profound, and the degree to which they are simply products constructed by the think tanks and foundations of the enemy class is so advanced, that in some ways they scarcely qualify as real people. Of course there is a real individual behind the mask but they are simultaneously simulations of a real individual assembled and designed to fulfill a specific purpose in the mediasphere. They advocate for fascism with American characteristics, a kind of libertarian fascism: unimpeded freedom and authority for the hyperwealthy, brutal and violent discipline for the dispossessed masses, covered with a thin veneer of the sickest variety of faux-Christianity and all wrapped up in an American flag.
These grotesque marionettes see most of their fellow humans as contemptible and worthy of nothing but scorn. Their vision of God is an evil delusion which they use to give gravitas to their worship of naked power. Watching capitalism propel their country and their compatriots ever further into a nightmare of alienation, misery and melted brains, they clamour more, more, harder, harder. Grinning his death’s-head grin the simulated man demands: give the enemy class even more power! Crush the working poor like bugs! Strip mine the land and dump the sludge in the rivers! Kill every last wild animal and keep the rest in torture factories! Strip the stranger of his sacred personhood, leer at him in his cage, cackle at the dismemberment of his children, spit on him and hold hands and pray.
He and his accursed ilk are ‘opposed’ by neoliberal weasels who see no real problem with any of this but just wish that it wasn’t quite so nasty. There’s no need to say all the quiet parts out loud, they whine on their dismal morning shows. Yes, all conceivable power should be concentrated in the hands of the enemy class and yes, daily life for most people should be a miserable grind ending with the bank taking their homes to pay for a hospital bill but they should be allowed to use their preferred pronouns, come on, we’re not barbarians here. These useless moaners are as bad as the bloodthirsty MAGA freaks, and together they have gibbered and snivelled us into this brave new world of peak alienation and the resulting phenomenon of pointless spectacular violence.
In the old days when someone tried to shoot a president or a fascist or whatever it was because they were an Italian anarchist who had gone to an Emma Goldman meeting and gotten riled up. These days it is deeply unwell post-political young people who are haunted by the internet and would have just as easily carried out a school shooting or gunned down worshippers in a mosque. They put memes on their bullet casings for the police to find and broadcast, as a way to reach out to each other. They livestream the insane violence they perpetrate so that their online friends can watch it on smartphones. They sacrifice other human beings in a bid to gain notoriety and then are killed or, in an outcome so gut-wrenching I can hardly think about it, spend the rest of their lives in prison, having thrown away their one and only life in some kind of hellish screen-induced fever dream.
There is a growing prevalence of young people who are ‘radicalized by the internet’ they say. But so many are not radicalized into any actually existing group or even a real political ideology. They are radicalized into being insane murderers who don’t believe in anything, who carry out acts of terrorism ironically. In what kind of society can such a thing take place at any kind of scale? A society in which human life is self-evidently worthless. The glaring anti-human policy environment of North America and especially of the United States is made even more twisted by the ranting of white-toothed ‘Christians’ and the bleating of pointless liberals. Whether we know it or not we all understand it; it leaches into our psyches like toxic effluent into the water table. To believe these obvious liars is to be a sucker; the truth is all around us; human people do not matter, animal people matter less, it is not even possible to conceptualize plant people mattering. Lacking any other ethical structure to keep us above water some of us drown in the churn of worthlessness and aloneness and what comes dragging itself out of the waves is a corpse clutching a gun, cut off from itself, from God and from the world. A vicious and suicidal society induces an ambient sociopathy in its constituent parts.
When one of these simulated fascists is snuffed out by a walking corpse with memes on his bullets what is there to say? The machine is devouring itself. It’s one more blip of spectacular violence in a progression which reaches into the past and the future, which is an inevitable outcome of the world and worldview expressed by these pitiless monsters. Human lives are sacred and the individual was perhaps redeemable in some distant timeline but what are any of us supposed to think? He hated human life and served a cabal of leeches and lechers and was devoted to the heretical demon god of total objectification. 150,000 human beings die every day. Each is a universe. He joins them. We go on.