"What transforms this world is... Nothing else can change anything in this world. Knowledge alone is capable of transforming the world, while at the same time leaving it exactly as it is. When you look at the world with knowledge, you realize that things are unchangeable and at the same time are constantly being transformed."
Yukio Mishima, The Temple of the Golden Pavillion
As someone who lives in Trump Country but frequently moves in left-wing circles online, I have heard a lot of nasty things about Trump supporters and plenty of them are true. I didn't exactly have a great time growing up Queer in a town where boys are raised to believe that manhood is defined by torturing kids like me. Rural Pennsylvania can certainly be a cruel place to the strange little creatures.
So yes, my neighbors can be pig-headed, short-sighted, close-minded, assholes who lash out at people they choose to know nothing about, but they're also a few other things that grab far fewer headlines. My neighbors are also hard-working, outsourced, war weary, poor folk, acutely aware of the fact that they have been getting played for generations by a system rigged against them by Wall Street and much of their petty prejudices are mirrored by some of their city slicking liberal critics who take about as much time to comprehend country people as country people do to understand trans kids and Somalian immigrants.
It's easy to be terrified of a boogeyman you've never met before, and Republicans aren't the only monster's adept at playing this game. For decades now Democrats have used the specter of the redneck deplorable to scare Queer folk and people of color into voting for slightly more passive aggressive white supremacists like Joe Biden and Bill Clinton, but their caricature of rural monstrosity is only a fraction of the story at best. What most MSDNC shitlibs leave out of their grotesque portraits of rust belt, white trash, MAGA folk is the fact that most of these people were actually motivated to vote for Donald Trump largely as a reckless act of vengeance against the two-party system.
In 2016, the GOP was pushing another Bush, the Democrats were pushing another Clinton, and both teams were equally horrified by the scatological antics of a foul-mouthed, dayglow ginger, rodeo clown who seemed more committed to the LOLs than he did to any coherent ideology. The people of my native Pennsyltucky had spent the worst part of the last twenty-something years losing everything to a Clinton or a Bush administration. They had their factories sold out from under them by shitty trade deals and their kids sent to die in wars that never seemed to end or add up. To put a long diatribe short, regardless of how I feel about the people I grew up with, they worked hard and paid their taxes to a couple of parties who fucked them until they couldn't walk straight in the name of globalism.
Trump was one of the few candidates to actually address this fact and he did so while horrifying the media that helped the Bush and Clinton dynasties to get away with it. Most of the people I knew who voted for Trump in 2016 did it to get even. That doesn't make voting for a race-baiting serial rapist acceptable, but it does make it somewhat understandable to a transgender feminist who has watched both of these parties take turns feeding my people one lie after another while feeding one abused sex worker after another to the prison industrial complex. Shit like that made me crazy enough to route for Putin as a badly closeted communist. So, I get how easily oppression can lead to temporary insanity.
The trouble with MAGA was that the insanity stuck. Trump's first four years in power should have shot the illusion that he was some kind of isolationist in bronze armor to shit. The bastard ripped up the JCPOA, sold Ukraine the offensive weaponry that convinced Putin to invade, gave Israel the green light to rape and pillage Jerusalem, and facilitated a Saudi genocide in Yemen. Not to mention that he stacked his cabinet to the gills with neocon vampires like Mike Pompeo, Eliot Abrams and John Bolton.
But the mainstream media didn't really cover any of this. They mostly just stuck to the narrative that Donald Trump was some kind of dangerous, Putin appeasing, NATO stomping, old right nationalist to which your average MAGA supporter responded by doubling down on their support for a man who could have easily been exposed as just another cold-blooded swamp monster if the news wasn't too busy defending cold-blooded swamp monsters to do so.
Biden won in a coma in 2020 largely thanks to COVID and then graciously took the blame for Trump's blowback by doing nothing to stop it. The JCPOA remained in tatters, Russia invaded a nation Trump armed to the teeth, and Hamas went on a rampage that Trump's servitude to the Israel Lobby inspired. Then the Democrats made it worse when they ignored their base and ran Kamala as some kind of Zionist Oprah posing with the Cheney's while Trump scored points with all the young bros on the blogosphere.
The Democrats and the Republicans pretty much tripped over each other to make Trump's reanimation possible and in 2025, their mess has become a menace worth being hysterical over. Donald Trump has always been his own worst enemy. The man's pathological ego has always been the stuff that psycho killers and dictators are made of. However, his erratic mood swings and gawdy lack of anything resembling class have always kept him from acquiring the kind of establishment gravitas necessary to make him dangerous to anyone but migrants and Muslims.
That all changed during the last election when Elon Musk and a host of other Silicon Valley billionaires decided to hedge their bets on a wild card in a gamble to put a man in the White House impulsive enough to let them replace the old military industrial complex with Artificial Intelligence. The bet paid off and now Trump finally has the corporate sponsorship to play Hitler for real this time.
Perhaps the only good news here is that it turns out that some of Trump's supporters really did want to put America first and are finally displaying a little buyer's remorse and it's about fucking time. No sane human being could possibly consider that psychopath to be an actual conservative while he micromanages the liquidation of the Gaza Strip and uses borders and cartels as an excuse to shred what's left of the Constitution and hand the Federal Government over to Palantir. The man being outed as a pedophile didn't exactly help either. I guess even neo-Nazis have a red line.
In recent weeks the fallout has become downright torrential with even Marjorie Taylor Greene turning on her beloved Übermensch over the Epstein files before cowering in a corner at the spectacle of her own unexpected chivalry. But it's Venezuela that looks primed to be the tipping point.
With Little Marco whispering sweet nothings in his ear, Donald Trump has followed the neocon playbook every step of the way on this one. Making up phony threats to national security with totally fabricated cartels. Changing the dictionary to define America's addiction to hard drugs and cheap labor as a license for total war. Bypassing Congress, the Constitution and international law to unilaterally demand regime change at the barrel of a cannon. It's all there and America sees it. 70% of those polled across party lines in a recent CBS News poll oppose military action in Venezuela.
Republican Senator Rand Paul probably summed it up best when he said: "If he invades Venezuela or gives more money to Ukraine, his movement will dissolve." Such a fabulously catastrophic outcome should be approached as an opportunity to all those who truly seek to dissolve Donald Trump and the evil empire for which he stands in a vat of molten lava. MAGA has become an increasingly sick cult of braindead foot soldiers devoted to a Big Mac gagging Caligula, but the America First Movement that developed in the run-off of this panic factory has some legitimately descent values to stand by.
My neighbors are right to disdain globalism, forever wars and the deep state. They are correct in observing that all of these imperial vices rob the homeland to rape the third world. But they are going to need to purge themselves of more than just Trump to forge a truly affective revolutionary movement.
While paleolibertarians likes Rand Paul and Thomas Massie are laying down the groundwork for a post-Trump America First Movement that could easily become the kind of gateway drug to anarchism that Rand's father's movement proved to be in the wake of Bush, opportunistic trolls like Tucker Carlson are taking things in a far darker direction, glorifying oligarchs like Viktor Orban and Vladimir Putin while pushing uncut antisemitism and backing unrepentant neo-Nazi parasites like Nick Fuentes.
This is why anti-fascism needs to be injected into any form of Isolationism to keep it from mutating into national chauvinism. The brilliant Japanese isolationist Yukio Mishima correctly observed that the death of the Japanese nation came with the birth of the Japanese Empire, that foreign entanglements like initiatory war disintegrate the integrity of any truly benevolent culture. He should have taken it one step further and recognized that unchecked power itself is defined by the disintegration of everything that stands in its way, including the people it is supposed to put first.
It's not too late for my neighbors to learn this lesson but someone has to be willing to deliver it to them without burning them at the stake. That means weird people like me agreeing to drop our own prejudices and preconceived notions at the door as long as my neighbors are willing to meet me halfway by doing the same.
Color me a contrarian, but this is one genderfuck anarchist willing to give it a shot. How about you?
Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH
Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post
* All the Young Dudes by Mott the Hoople
* Joiner by Blondshell
* Mamma Tried by Merle Haggard
* In Bloom by Nirvana
* Down to be Wrong by HAIM
* Psycho Killer by Talking Heads
* Liar by Rollins Band
* Goodbye Stranger by Supertramp
* Working Class Hero by John Lennon & the Plastic Ono Band
* All My Life by Foo Fighters
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