How many fingers?

Their first violence, and our first duty, is to truth

Lately, when I write directly about politics (that is, without running it first through the tinted glass of satire), you may notice there’s always at least a tiny gleam of optimism in it — like when I said Americans who may not get that it’s fascism may get that it’s racism and demur on those grounds. It’s not deliberate. I don’t sit down and try to think of ways to cheer you up. (Fascists are on the rise! But look, here’s a lawn sign!)

Rather I think that, because I’m a typical cheeseball Substack essayist (though uniquely branded; I’m funny, use swears!), the bleakness of the times has pushed me to hunt down the missing element — that is, something that the other guys who are writing about the same thing have missed.

I don’t know how many columnists and newsletterists you read; I read many many, an insufferable amount. But I know anyone who touches politics is right down here on the linoleum with me, trying to scrape up crumbs of difference like crack fiends looking for wayward flecks of rock.

It’s partly a journalism thing — you know I hate journalism but I guess it takes one to know one: Every scrivener (who isn’t duty-bound and well-paid to churn cliches, that is) is after what in the wretched terminology of the trade is known as an angle. You could say I am, too, though I insist what I’m looking for is The Truth (that’s what they all say, buddy, sneer the other wiseguys in the expressionist jail).

Maybe it’s just that I want to see a bright side because I’m a human being and can’t stand being shut up in the dark dungeon of hopelessness. Well, whatever, see if you like this one.

Things have gotten absurd. I mean absurdly absurd. I’m not even talking about the constitutional crisis — the courts telling Tubby “stop that” and he and his goons going “make me.” Though it’s related, because it comes out of the same fascist playbook as what I’m talking about.

What I’m talking about is the MAGA gang’s stark insistence on unreality — like muscling Google to call the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.” Now it appears Apple has also knuckled under.

And the White House has revoked the Associated Press’ media credentials because they won’t alter the AP Style Book to accept “Gulf of America.” (Will the Chicago Manual hold the line?) Even when the targets resist, it still sounds like bad dystopian fiction.

These are just the latest and craziest manifestations of language edicts coming out of the administration, like the lists of words banned from the communications of the National Science Foundation, the CDC, and other agencies thought to be contaminated by “DEI.”

Amy Harmon has a pretty good essay in the New York Times about the Trump administration’s abuse of language, specifically as regards trans rights. For example, Trump’s executive orders, Harmon writes, “define women as ‘belonging to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell.’” Also, one of those orders states as a fact that trans identity “cannot satisfy the rigorous standards necessary for military service.” (Go tell the Spartans!) And so on.

Now, being rational people, we may want to say that the constitutional crisis, and the many humanitarian and just plain helpful government functions that crisis has thrown into chaos, is more important than terminology. After all, what’s more offensive — the demand that hospitals stop providing gender-affirming care to trans patients, or the Orwellian language with which it is demanded?

But I say that the language stuff is at least as important to focus on if we want to fight the whole scourge. In fact it’s the first step.

For one thing, it’s like that old Voltaire thing, “Anyone who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” Except we don’t even have to go that far: You don’t have to believe the absurdities — you just have to accept them as something not worth getting worked up about (it’s just words, come on!) in order to accept the atrocities that, it’s clear, the administration is quite capable of performing without our help.

The absurdity itself is the nub of the whole thing. These guys are criming and totalitarianing to beat the band, but the main reason they’re getting away with it is that everyone (especially the Prestige Press) is acting like it’s normal, just a slightly more energetic, “muscular” use of power than normal.

You and I can see the brute force and lawlessness of the DOGEbags’ siege of government agencies is a live threat, but because it’s couched in yak about “bureaucracy” and “cost-cutting,” they can get a lot of ordinary people to at least consider it business more or less as usual. And its criminality can be couched as firmness, dynamism, action — all things ordinary Americans admire and, given the decades of violent entertainment that have softened their brains, they may no longer have the capacity to tell when it’s too much.

But, as I’ve said before, I believe many of them still have the capacity to smell bullshit. It’s one of the last vestiges of our American patrimony still in working order.

Look at the Trump-Musk conference promoting the DOGE siege. I know the New York Times has to take it seriously. But if you can just disintermediate the normalizers and show Mr. and Mrs. America this rich, drug-addled Afrikaner lecturing them on what government agencies should be destroyed, I think they’ll see that it’s absurd, ridiculous — weird.

Remember “weird”? Remember how it was working pretty good for Democrats in 2024, until the apparatchiks made them shift to the Liz Cheney Fan Club strategy? The campaign is over, alas, and with Tubby and his mob actually smashing and grabbing, you may think it’s far too late to bring that up. But I still think it’s a good idea to say out loud that what these guys are doing is nuts — that they’re nuts. The people who can’t be bothered to pay attention to an assault on their institutions may be more attentive to an insult to their intelligence.

If you don’t believe the masses can be swayed, then let’s just make it this: There’s been a lot of talk lately about the conditions for liberty, and whether America has the stuff for it anymore. Conservatives used talk a lot about how John Adams thought a “moral and religious” people were the only kind who could sustain democracy. Based on their behavior, I guess they took “moral and religious” to mean “bigoted and hypocritical, but church-going.”

I’m not religious as it’s generally understood, but I am moral, and my morality rests to a very great extent on not saying something that ain’t so is so. I believe that if there is any such thing as sin, promoting obvious bullshit as the truth in order to advance in power is among the greatest. Also, while I’m not deceived about how cracked the world is, I do think that if liberty and democracy mean anything (and I accept that your mileage may vary on that), they mean that reality — I mean real reality, two plus two equals four reality, not the false verities of Trump executive orders — has got to be triumph over unreality.