The Worst and the Dimmest

The Game | Directions | Part 1 | Part 2

Hey cousins. The world's richest man held court in the Oval Office this week while his pet president watched from the Resolute desk wearing his trademark pants-shitting scowl. The world's richest man was telling the press lies to repeat while holding his hands in a variety of poses he cribbed off of TED talks, while his pet president sort of smirked and shrugged. The pet president is perfectly happy to let this guy drive the country for him, having already received his bribe of $250 million or so. Meanwhile one of the world's richest man's many kids wandered around. He was bored, and I don't blame him. The kid's name is X, which I don't blame him for either, and he received roughly the same number of votes to run the country as his dad did, and he'd surely do a better job at it, and he's certainly far less unsuited to the role, given that at least he's not a whatdycall, open Nazi. The kid may or may not have told the pet president that he isn't really the president and he should get out of the chair, which maybe he did, but it would still only make him the third most spoiled toddler in the room. Certainly it's the sort of thing a 4-year-old son of the world's richest man might say to his bribed president and get away with. And one thing I know about Republicans is that they don't give a shit about this, any more than the pet president does.

Good morning!

We're in a series about directional alignment. I think I forgot to tell you last time. This entry involves facing the worst. So let's do that.

[Taking a running start ... ]

Because of their deliberate decision to emigrate from observable reality and immigrate into a dark land of coddled ignorance, smothering complacency, delusional fear, and celebration of greed, cruelty, and bigotry, American Republicans and their so-called "moderate" enablers are the very worst people on the planet right now, and, given their deliberate demolition of as many centuries of human progress as they can get away with, and their acceleration of a global catastrophe that threatens the suitability of this planet for human life, they're a strong candidate for the very worst people in the entirety of human history.

There was lot of profanity in the first draft of that last sentence. I deleted it, because I wanted to state the reality as plainly as possible without the semiotic distraction that sometimes attends cussing. I think it's important to face facts, and the fact is that the Republican Party—which has for much if not all of my life operated as a hate group—is now a vector for an astonishing level incompetence and cruelty and corruption and bigoted hate that somehow seems destined to succeed at its main objective, which is the demolition of human society and the suffering and death of billions and billions of humans, all for the almost incomprehensible enrichment of only a handful of people, all of them among the very worst human beings this planet has ever produced—the most uncaring, the least intellectually curious, the most disconnected from their own humanity, the most gleefully malicious and deliberately destructive, with an all-consuming greed at the center of their being that renders them almost alien in their bland but fathomless evil. And one thing I know about Republicans is that they either love it or they don't give a shit, and you'll know it too, if you ask them.

I hope that's stated plainly enough. We've all seen the results over the last couple weeks, as the richest man in the world fired off a couple Nazi salutes for the delight of the voting base and then he and his gang of pimple-faced digital stoßtruppen started firing everyone else. They've canned cancer workers and other health workers, if you care about preventing cancer or fostering health. They've canned people who deliver aid to foreign countries that alleviate human sickness and suffering, if you care about alleviating suffering. They've canned the nuclear workers, if you care about securing nuclear weapons. And so with education, and with air traffic safety, and national parks, and disaster response in a time of disasters, and pandemic response in a time of pandemic, and so with every aspect of our shared life together. It's smash-and-grab looting of our entire shared life together as human society, enacted by a guy who needs none of it, a man who has fattened himself in time of slaughter, who eats long after he is full to bursting, who grinds other humans between his strange teeth just for the love of chewing. And one thing I know about Republicans is that they either love it or they don't give a shit, and you'll know it too, if you ask them.

What he's doing is illegal, if you care about law. It's massively expensive, if you care about expense. It's a national security crisis, if you care about national security. It's unconstitutional, if you care about the Constitution. It's likely to be devastating to the economy, if you care about the economy. It's burning the future for us and for our children, if you care about children. It's the most corrupt activity in the history of our country, if you care about corruption. Republican Americans claim to care about these things. They observably do not.

No Republican with any power to do anything about this is doing anything to stop any of it, and almost all Republicans at whatever level of power are either monumentally complacent or actually happy about what's happening. It's their favorite. It's exactly what they want, exactly what they voted for. They think it's great. It comforts them. They do get upset sometimes when all this destruction touches upon them—when the billionaire vultures who run most aspects of public life start treating them the way the country has historically treated Black people and women and queer people and so on—but outside their outsized empathy for themselves over their own suffering, they really like all the suffering that's happening, all the destruction that's occurring, all the devastation and trauma and grief that the rest of us are experiencing.

If you ask them about this joy, they already have their narratives that let them think of themselves as good as they support limitless evil: stories about why it isn't actually happening, or why it won't actually happen, or why it's not actually bad that it's happening, or just open glee that it is happening and at how distressed this makes us, and even though many of those stories involve mostly mutually exclusive positions (happy it's happening but also assured that it isn't happening, for example), the same person will hold all of them at once, because the stories they tell themselves to make it all right are just stories, and they know it, and the open inconsistency increases the menace for the rest of us, and delivers to us the distress and fear and trauma that so comforts them to see. These fascists seek only to steal and kill and destroy. They are openly working to create genocide and slavery for the population they were elected (or, in many cases, were not elected) to represent, and for everyone else on the planet as well.

They're the worst fucking people in the world—worse than most of us were even capable of imagining, worse than we can imagine even now. They're genuine pieces of fucking shit and while it may be possible that at some point in time politicians might need to build some sort of pragmatic (and hopefully as temporary as possible) coalition with whichever among them are so disaffected by the damage that has been done to themselves personally that they are willing at last to oppose this fascist menace, I am not a politician, I'm just an individual dude, and speaking as an individual dude I want nothing to do with these fucking fascist fucks for the rest of my life. I will hopefully be morally strong enough to stand ready to help any of the tiny few of them who actually choose to change, if they are willing to do the work to repair the damage they've done and to pay the cost of it including the cost of blame, and if they begin to take all other steps necessary to no longer be the humanity-rejecting monsters they currently are and reclaim their own self-rejected humanity—but other than that I'm hoping to reorganize my life to make it so that the only interaction these unreconstituted shits ever get from me is delivery of the fruits of my deeply felt and appropriate anger and contempt.

I forgot not to cuss that time. Whoops. No way to change it now. Fuck off if it bothers you.

Please forgive this brief interruption.

Maybe you've noticed that it's getting harder to truly know what's going on these days. Legacy media—controlled by corrupt billionaires and addicted to the false equivalency of balance rather than dedicated to the principle of truth—has failed us. I am recommending that if you have money to do so, you subscribe to independent sources of information instead. This week I'm suggesting you support Wikipedia, which is an open source of information—one that has been targeted by sad boy and famous rubbery megalomaniac Elon Musk specifically because it provides information without being owned.

We now return you to the essay in progress.

I would hate for you to come away thinking that these fascists are only evil. They're also some of the most incredible dipshits and the biggest most embarrassing jagoffs the world has ever seen. Out to lunch, detached from reality, semi-literate, devoid of imagination, totally incompetent, demonstrating the emotional intelligence of a He-Man villain from 80s cartoons.

The richest man in the world who bought our government, for example, is not just an evil fascist, he's also a real jagoff dork. He poses as a genius inventor but he's never invented anything; he constantly says the most astonishing ignorant shit imaginable partly because he truly seems to believe it and partly because it seems to amuse him; he pathetically attempts comedy without understanding humor, seeking validation from his vapid army of Nazis and trolls; he always has a little smirk playing about his lips as if he has crafted a special little joke, but when you get to the punchline it's always some stolen empty-brained meme that redounds to some form of pulling the wings off of flies. His main genius is for the instruments of corruption, an orchestra of malfeasance at which he is admittedly a maestro. His skills are four: Acquiring things that smarter people made and then claiming to have made them; promising solutions that he has no intent of delivering to prevent anyone from developing already-available solutions to those problems; taking advantage of deregulated privatization of the public sphere to take sole ownership of things that should belong to society so he can provide worse services at a higher cost; using his wealth to destabilize markets so that he can pick through the wreckage for loot; and taking ketamine—five skills. I dare say he wouldn't even understand the reference there. He a morally stunted dork. A cultureless dim-witted bully lacking in any sort of social or moral grace. A real jagoff.

And the rest of the cabinet are jagoffs just like their boss. Take his pet president, who cosplays as a business genius but who has succeeded in life largely by discovering that, first, if you are rich and white and repeat a lie long enough then people believe it and it no longer matters if it is true or not, and, second, if you don't pay your bills you still have the money. He's one of the most astonishingly ignorant and incurious people that has ever lived; a grotesque jelly-filled donut who lumbers through life wearing the lazy self-satisfied glare of a prize circus bear who has only ever been fed foie gras and orphans, a man who seems like he would have a hard time solving the word jumble on the children's menu at Elias Brothers Big Boy.

Speaking of Elias Brothers Big Boy: JD Vance. Vance is the the VP, our President of Vice, a guy who grew himself a big-boy beard to impress all his misogynist podcast buddies and is now one french-fry heart attack away from being a billionaire's pet president himself. Vance is a man (of sorts) who had his conscience and sense of shame surgically removed but beyond that doesn't seem to know much about much. Just this week he stepped out onto the world stage to advocate for the Nazi party in the upcoming German elections, in an apparent bid to try to lose us whatever friends we have left after President Baconburger hit them all with tariffs. The tariffs were delivered in as vindictive language as possible without really managing to get at exactly what the offense is that is going to be vindicated by kicking off mass inflation events globally. Perhaps the white christian president is upset that Canada and Mexico sent us firefighters to help combat the horrific California wildfire. He seems like somebody who would take the fire's side.

And the Attorney General and Secretary of State are quisling toadies. And the Secretary of Defense is a drunken wife-abusing propaganda network personality with no relevant experience who as a member of the military was prevented from serving on duty because of his ties to white nationalists. And the Heath Secretary is an anti-science conspiracy nut who has already manufactured a deadly measles epidemic in Samoa. And the nominee for Education Secretary ran World Wrestling and covered up a sex abuse scandal, and the latter fact appears to be the more appealing qualification for Republicans. And the team of advisors and administrators being appointed are all a bunch of the most pallid moist-lipped crackers you've ever seen, all of whom appear great at smiling without using their eyes, operationalizing bigotry and corruption and violence, and not much else. Secretary gin-for-breakfast and the rest of these jagoffs now represent us all over the world. It's all hugely embarrassing, as if we just invited all our closest friends over for a dinner party and then started screaming at them to buy into our pyramid scheme (Cutco Knives) while stabbing them with the merchandise and demanding to be thanked for the lovely dinner (unopened cans of Campbell's cream of anger soup). People from other countries, who haven't abandoned observable reality in order to satisfy the fear and bigotries of the worst people in the world, confronted with these blow-dried dicks yelling about "the Gulf of America" or "Red, White, and Blueland," all look at each other with faces that clearly convey the absolutely correct and appropriate message get a load of these dumb assholes.

Many have noted this universal incompetence, and many have noted the irony that this horrifying gang of failsons and faildaughters are enacting all their destruction in the name of "appointing the best candidates to the job." All that it means in practice is the eradication of diversity, an open return to our country's tradition of apartheid-level segregation.

That's right! These evil jagoffs are demolishing society in a quest to end diversity, equity, equality, and inclusion. They say it's not because of delusional fears and spiteful bigotries that they claim they don't hold even while they never stop expressing them out loud, but rather specifically because they (who have never been good at anything and yet despite this have spent their lives falling upward at a velocity that may prove terminal to the rest of us) are concerned about preventing waste and hiring the best candidates. This formulation contains the unspoken (and, more frequently these days, spoken) underlying assumption that people who are not wealthy straight white christian cis men, or at least appropriately subservient to wealthy straight white christian cis men, are automatically a waste, automatically not the right candidates. And it's true that the blatancy of this hypocrisy is probably used in service of increasing overall levels of menace for marginalized people, but also it really seems that they think they're pulling one over on us, and that we can't see what they are doing.

At the end of the day these are just not smart people. They're going to carry themselves as far as meanness and shamelessness can go, and that seems to be terrifyingly far, but they're a bunch of incompetents and dipshits who have no idea of how to do their jobs and no experience at building anything or creating anything, who have nothing but scorn for governance, the trust that has been given to them, and the public who bestowed that trust.

So: They are evil. The worst people in the world.

So: They are dim. The worst people for the job they are supposed to do.

We're led today by the worst and the dimmest. They're proving it.

The thing I'd point out about the incompetence is that it's a feature of the evil, not an unaccountable departure from it. These evil fuckers didn't just happen upon the worst possible candidates for each job; the job they want done requires the least competent people in the world to hold their hugely important positions.

First, as others have surely pointed out, the MAGA cult's lack of ability and knowledge and suitability effortlessly conveys the message to everybody else: The worst of us are better than the best of you, and it does this far better than actually hiring qualified people ever could.

But second, it allows for indiscriminate destruction—of other human beings, of society, of law, of order, of truth, of progress, of humanity—and that's exactly what fascism and autocracy, which are most hampered by these things, most want. You demolish a building with precision explosions to cause it to fall in on itself when you have an intent beyond destruction. When your intent is destruction for destruction's sake, indiscriminate destruction suits your purpose. Let the abandoned casino fall on the apartments nearby—why not? We were going to rob the people living there anyway. This way we can just pick through the rubble and gather the watches and jewelry and poke through their safes.

For indiscriminate destruction, you want a bunch of real unqualified dipshits. So that's what we have been given.

I have a couple last thoughts about that.

Another quick interruption to scroll quickly past before you continue the essay.

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First, the incompetence of their evil reveals the great weakness of the Republican Party, those nightmare people, those fascist pieces of shit, which is that they are bad at everything but theft and destruction, and eventually that will matter.

Evil eventually destroys indiscriminately, and so it destroys even its own abilities. Its abandonment of its own humanity leaves it unable to access humanity's great strengths. Its abandonment of the truth leaves it unable to perceive reality. And while brute force and mindless terror can be hugely effective weapons in destruction, they are utterly useless when it comes to any of the actions that are necessary at succeeding at anything else. They are doomed. They are their own doom. They can't be trusted to clean a gas station bathroom. They certainly can't run a country.

I don't want to be blithe about this. They are going to kill a lot of people first. Millions, probably. More, if they can. They're going to destroy much of value first, because destruction and theft is all the fascist mind knows. They have nothing but contempt for the notion of human society, of humanity itself. It is definitely our duty to minimize the killing and destruction as much as we can by opposing them. But they are doomed, and when we oppose them, we should oppose them in that knowledge. Speaking for myself, in this moment of their great empowerment, the knowledge of their inevitable doom lends me bravery and strength that I don't possess all by myself, and every instance of dipshittery and incompetence and damn-fool nonsense, while it rightly frightens and angers me, also reminds me that they are fools who cannot last forever because they oppose reality itself, and reality will not be denied forever.

Second, the totality of the Republican demolition of our society and the all-encompassing nature of their malice and hatred and ignorance can give those of us willing to face the worst a very clear view of the fact that our present system is designed to let the very worst people rise, designed not only to allow them to rise but to prefer that people such as this will rise.

That truth is going to be inescapable for more and more people now that it is more blatant than it ever was before. And that will open up opportunity for us, to recognize people who are moving into truth, and, while never accommodating the delusions they may still hold, or failing to make the defense of our most marginalized cousins our priority, finding ways to encourage that movement into greater truth.

The shock of that truth may unlock new boldness and imagination for many of us who have benefitted from such a system, and who have been complacent enough to believe that such a system, designed to devour human beings, would never get around to devouring us. It might unlock for our society new heights of imagination about what society should be that were previously inaccessible, which is what leads to greater imagination about what society could be which is what leads, eventually but inevitably, into a new reality regarding what society actually is. It might allow us to imagine a totally different system, one that might not have been imaginable before, a better one that not only does not seek to devour any people at all, anywhere at all, ever, but one that refuses to do so, and refuses to accommodate or tolerate people or systems who do.

Because remember, we are about playing the right game, and the right game is demolishing the billionaire system. The way you score points in the right game is by repairing broken things and paying all the natural costs of maintenance and repair.

The reason we face the worst is not to fall into despair.

The reason we face the worst is because it helps us imagine the best.

That's next week. See you then, cousins.

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A.R. Moxon is the author of The Revisionaries, which is available in most of the usual places, and some of the unusual places, and the essay collection Very Fine People. You can get his books right here for example. He is also co-writer of Sugar Maple, a musical fiction podcast from Osiris Media which goes in your ears. He's the best around, and nothin's ever gonna keep him down.