You’ve met them. You see them everywhere. The dumb, toxic bastard. Covid’s the pandemic, but they’re like the plague of this age. I keep thinking of that weird scene from some kind of horror-comedy movie that happened in real life: the planeloads of people who took off their masks, whooping and cheering, in mid flight, egged on by airlines — never mind if anyone elderly, sick with cancer, immunocompromised, or someone who just doesn’t want to get sick was trapped on a tin can at 35,000 feet with them. Never mind reality, decency, common sense, civilization, truth, science, facts, logic, thinking, morals. High five me!!!
Dumb. Toxic. Bastards.
Why are they so omnipresent? Why is that history will remember this as the age of the DTB?
Think about the three trends which really define this age.
The first is that the hard right is ascendant, in an eerie and scary way. India, America, Russia, and China should not all have the same political macrodynamics. But they do. So do Britain, half of Europe, Australia, and beyond. Something is very, very wrong here. The world’s politics should not be playing out in precisely the same way in every corner of it. But in this age, it’s as if a mega-tsunami is racing around the globe, in the wake of a planet-killer of a meteor strike, at least politically.
The far right is in control. Even when it’s not in power, it has power. Like how a Supreme Court can take away the rights of half the population, by overturning Roe v Wade, even though 70% of America doesn’t want it to. That is how ascendant it is. Think about that. It doesn’t even need to be in power to be able to alter the course of entire nations anymore — because it has redefined society and politics to such a degree that it is now indistinguishable from power. What do I mean by that?
The far right is ascendant because it’s managed to shift everything far to the right. It threw a Molotov cocktail through the Overton Window. What used to be the centre doesn’t exist anymore. Everything is now tilted ultra far right, listing so heavily that way that the whole edifice of human civilization is beginning to topple over. The far right has redefined the basic ideas of democracy to be what it wants — and they have nothing to do with democracy at all, just with having the license to be a dumb, toxic bastard.
The far right has recoded the basic ideas of democracy to mean their very opposites. And so people act as if they’ve lost their minds, because reality has turned upside down for them.
Let me give you a few examples. Free speech used to mean things like being able to express yourself in the face of autocracy and hate. Now it’s basically code…for…hate speech. When Elon Musk wants to buy Twitter for the sake of “free speech,” we all know — even his sad gamer-desk alt-right bro army — what it really means: that they should have the power to harass, insult, mock, demean, bully, and threaten anyone they like, but particularly “libs,” women, minorities, gay people.
Free speech has been turned on its head. Free speech was never hate speech. We teach kids at the precise moment we teach them why it really matters. To say I can bully and threaten you is the precise opposite of a net gain in free speech. And yet the right has coded intimidation as free speech, not hate…and so…guess what…dumb toxic bastards rule us now.
Here’s another thing the right has recoded. Freedom itself. Think of all those dumb, toxic bastards on those planes. Have they lost their minds? The answer is: yes, yes they have. The far right has recoded freedom as “doing whatever you want, no matter how hurtful or damaging to anyone else.” Not a “net gain in human liberation for all of us, including you.” What’s the difference? Everything. Freedom in this context, now, during a pandemic, is increased by masks. Freedom is public health right now. Less people dying of the virus. Not more of them. The exact same logic is why we have, say, speed limits, seatbelts, or traffic lights. It maximises freedom for all of us.
But no. The morons on the planes cheered at taking their masks because the far right has recoded freedom as “the right to hurt others” — and hammered this message into everybody’s mind over and over again, until plenty of people’s minds have broken right apart. Of course freedom isn’t the right to hurt others. That’s not a right at all. it’s where rights, all of them, end. We teach literal second graders this. No, we don’t hurt others. That isn’t what freedom is. Freedom is being able to lift people up, to be kind, to think well, to care, to be able to accept truth, to live with grace. It isn’t just lashing out in hate.
We teach kids this stuff.
Or at least we used to. Here’s another example of a basic social force the far right has recoded. Democracy itself. What is democracy? It’s not just voting — in Rwanda, the President won 99.8% of the vote, LOL, and so we know it’s not a democracy. Democracy is really enacting the basic ideals of it: truth, justice, equality, freedom.
It isn’t just dominating others. It’s liberating them.
If all we are doing is dominating others — hurting them, subjugating them, forcing them to our will without their consent, which is what’s so odious about people cheering as they take off the masks on planes — that is not democratic. Even if it is done putatively using the tools of democracy. The President of Rwanda gets 99.8% of the vote — and we know he’s just really dominating and subjugating the entire country and the democracy of it is a sham.
Democracy is more than domination. It is liberation. It’s me wanting to set you free. It isn’t just me saying, “Freedom is my right to hurt you!! Hahaha! Here, give your grandma my Covid!!” Democracy is me enacting the basic values of truth, justice, equality, and freedom, and giving them to you.
But the far right has completely recoded all of that. “Democracy” means me dominating you against your will, without your consent, and hurting you, because that is what freedom is. If a few lies are told along the way, so be it, because truth doesn’t matter — only power does. Equality goes out the nearest window. Justice is turned on its head, and rage and hostility are all that count. The far right has managed to recode democracy itself — as authoritarianism, regress, just a way to get what you want, even if it means hurting anyone and everyone else, not giving them liberation, too.
And millions upon millions of people believe this. They’ve become the dumb, toxic bastards you can see literally everywhere. Those poor people have been tricked. Conned. Hoodwinked. By the far right, which is a set of billionaires, funding millionaires, to embezzle these people’s minds from them. Their futures. Their better selves. The billionaires — the Spotify guy, for example, or Zuck — fund the millionaires — Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson, whomever — to recode everything into its opposite, from freedom to democracy to truth itself.
And bombarded with this recoding of everything into its opposite, this Great Gaslighting, the average person mind just suddenly shatters after a time, like glass hit too long with a hammer. They become a dumb, toxic bastard.
Hence: The Great Gaslighting. This is how everyone became a dumb toxic bastard. You can see that they outnumber us. Nobody on those planes was like Jesus, people, stop. Think. It was like a zombie movie in that regard. They all succumbed, and those who didn’t were a) outnumbered and b) quaking with silent horror. The Great Gaslighting works.
Because of the far right’s Great Gaslighting, everything coded into its opposite, hate now rules our world. Think of the way the far right is ascendant everywhere. And now think of how much it hates.
It’s almost comical when you think about it. What does the far right hate? Everything. Everything you can think of. Masks. Books. Kids. Women. Gay people. Immigrants. Science. History. Reality. Civilization. Disney World. Kids books about unicorns. Kids wearing masks. Women wearing masks holding kids. Kids who want to grow up to be scientists. You can see how insane this is.
If you don’t, let me spell it out. Someone like this walks around hating most of the people they see. Way more than half of us, after all, are women and kids. That much hate is actually pathological. It is literally insane to hate this much. Who does that? Who wants to live like that? It’s not normal and it’s not healthy. Imagine walking around hating…most people and things you see. 99% of what you see makes you angry, curdles your lip in rage. That’s psychosis. It’s paranoia. It’s delusional.
The far right is a hate movement. It triggers people to hate everything. Normal things. Peaceful things and nice things and good things. Like…people just existing. Science, truth, civilization, women, kids. It makes people literally lose their minds with hate. And they become this figure the rest of know all too well: dumb toxic bastards.
The Great Gaslighting works. The whole world is turning into dumb toxic bastards these days at light speed because the far right has recoded everything to mean its opposite. Women aren’t people — just wombs. Kids aren’t people — they’re just genes to be purified. Science is a lie, and liberals drink kids’ blood. The real crisis in the world isn’t strongmen — its not enough tough-guy masculinity. Hey, we’re the real victims here! Everything is turned upside down. The basic ideas of democracy curdle into their antitheses. Freedom is the right to hurt others, truth a lie, equality the right to dominate others, justice the moral obligation to subjugate the weak.
Hammer this into people a million times a day, their minds shatter — and they become dumb toxic bastards. Whose only goals in life are domination, power, subjugation. They become obsessed with hurting others as “freedom.” They are not capable of democracy anymore — because what democracy really is is me setting you free.
And that’s precisely what the far right wants. We’re beginning to live in it now: a world of dumb, toxic bastards.
