I’m going to start tonight by stating the obvious: the Republicans control both chambers of Congress: the House of Representatives and the Senate. They also control the White House and the Supreme Court. If they wanted to get rid of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), for example, they could introduce a bill, debate it, pass it, and send it on to President Trump for his signature. And there would be very little the Democrats could do to stop that change.
But they are not doing that.
Instead, they are permitting unelected billionaire Elon Musk, whose investment of $290 million in Trump and other Republican candidates in the 2024 election apparently has bought him freedom to run the government, to override Congress and enact whatever his own policies are by rooting around in government agencies and cancelling those programs that he, personally, dislikes.
The replacement of our constitutional system of government with the whims of an unelected private citizen is a coup. The U.S. president has no authority to cut programs created and funded by Congress, and a private citizen tapped by a president has even less standing to try anything so radical.
But Republicans are allowing Musk to run amok. This could be because they know that Trump has embraced the idea that the American government is a “Deep State,” but that the extreme cuts the MAGA Republicans say they want are actually quite unpopular with Americans in general, and even with most Republican voters. By letting Musk make the cuts the MAGA base wants, they can both provide those cuts and distance themselves from them.
But permitting a private citizen to override the will of our representatives in Congress destroys the U.S. Constitution. It also makes Congress itself superfluous. And it takes the minority rule Republicans have come to embrace to the logical end of putting government power in the hands of one man.
Musk’s team in the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, has taken control of the U.S. Treasury payment systems that handle about $6 trillion in annual transactions for the U.S. government, thus gaining access to Americans' personal information as well as information about Musk's competitors. From there, Musk claims to have been cancelling those transactions he thinks are wasteful. He claims, for example, to have “deleted” the popular Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Direct File system that enabled people to file their taxes online for free, without the help of paid tax preparers.
Musk’s team apparently consists of six engineers, aged 19 to 24, who are taking control of the computers at government agencies. From the Treasury Department, they went on to the U.S. Agency for International Development, which receives foreign policy guidance from the State Department. Their breaching of the computers there compromises our national intelligence systems, which must now be considered insecure.
From there, they went on to the General Services Administration (GSA), which manages the federal government’s 7,500 or so buildings. Musk’s people sent an email to regional managers telling them to begin ending the leases on federal offices. According to Chris Megerian of the Associated Press, the person in charge of that initiative is Nicole Hollander, who describes herself on LinkedIn as employed at Musk’s social media company, X.
Today, according to an email sent to employees of the Small Business Administration, Musk’s people have gotten into that agency’s human resources, contracts, and payment systems. The Small Business Administration supports small businesses and entrepreneurs, and under the Biden-Harris administration, small businesses boomed thanks to small-dollar loans to women, Black, and Latino entrepreneurs.
By this afternoon, Musk’s people were digging into the data of the Department of Education with an eye to dismantling it from the inside before Trump tries to shut it down with an executive order, although only Congress itself can shutter the department. According to Laura Meckler, Danielle Douglas-Gabriel, and Hannah Natanson of the Washington Post, Musk’s DOGE staffers had accessed sensitive internal data systems, including the personal information of millions of students who are taking part in the federal student aid program. It is highly unlikely that Congress would destroy the Department of Education, so Musk and Trump hope to hollow it out from within.
On a livestream last night, Musk said of his destruction of the federal government: “If it’s not possible now, it will never be possible. This is our shot, This is the best hand of cards we’re ever going to have. If we don’t take advantage of this best hand of cards, it’s never going to happen.”
Three federal employees unions are suing the Trump administration to stop Musk, and today, Democratic members of the House and Senate tried to enter the USAID building but were denied entry. Led by Senators Chris Murphy (D-CT), Brian Schatz (D-HI) and Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) and Representatives Jamie Raskin (D-MD) and Gerry Connolly (D-VA), the Democrats condemned what Raskin called Musk and Trump’s “illegal, unconstitutional interference with congressional power.”
“Elon Musk, you may have illegally seized power over the financial payment systems of the United States Department of Treasury,” Raskin said, “but you don’t control the money of the American people. The United States Congress does that—under Article I of the Constitution. And just like the president, who was elected to something, cannot impound the money of the people, we don’t have a fourth branch of government called Elon Musk. And that’s going to become real clear.”
Senator Murphy said: "[L]et's not pull any punches about why this is happening. Elon Musk makes billions of dollars based off of his business with China. And China is cheering at [the destruction of USAID]. There is no question that the billionaire class trying to take over our government right now is doing it based on self-interest: their belief that if they can make us weaker in the world, if they can elevate their business partners all around the world, they will gain the benefit.”
Murphy continued: “But there’s another reason this is happening. They’re shuttering agencies and sending employees home in order to create the illusion that they’re saving money, in order to…pass a giant tax cut for billionaires and corporations.”
While Musk and his DOGE team are trying systematically to dismantle the government, today Judge Loren L. AliKhan of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia blocked the Trump administration’s attempt to freeze trillions of dollars in grants and loans before DOGE got going. AliKhan said that by impounding funds—which Congress declared illegal in 1974—Trump’s Office of Management and Budget “attempted to wrest the power of the purse away from the only branch of government entitled to wield it.” It is Congress, not the president, that determines federal spending.
Meanwhile, the elected president, Donald Trump, sparked a crisis last Friday when his White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, announced that he fully intended to go through with the trade war he had hyped on the campaign trail. Trump announced he would levy tariffs of 25% on most products from Mexico and Canada and of 10% on products from China, beginning at 12:01 a.m. on Tuesday, in violation of the trade agreement his own team had negotiated during his first term.
As soon as Leavitt announced the upcoming tariffs, the stock market began to fall, and by last night, stock market futures had fallen 450 points on the expectation of tariffs hitting at midnight tonight. Today, the stock market continued to fall. Even reliable Trump allies began to complain that the tariffs would raise prices. The Wall Street Journal editorial board called Trump’s tariffs “the dumbest trade war in history.”
Today, the president of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum, announced that she and Trump had “reached a series of agreements” that would pause the threatened tariffs for a month. Mexico agreed to “reinforce the northern border with 10,000 elements of the National Guard immediately, to prevent drug trafficking from Mexico to the United States,” while the U.S. “commits to work to prevent the trafficking of high-powered weapons to Mexico.”
When Trump announced their conversation shortly afterward, he omitted the part of the agreement that committed the U.S. to try to stop the flow of guns to Mexico. He also did not mention that, in fact, Mexico committed to putting 10,000 troops at the border in 2021. As Catherine Rampell of the Washington Post commented above a record of Mexican troop deployments: “Any news outlet reporting Mexico conceded anything to Trump to get him to delay tariffs has not done its homework. Trump boasts he got Mexico to commit to stationing 10K troops at our border. Apparently he didn’t realize Mexico already has 15K troops deployed there[.]”
The crisis at the northern border worked out in a similar fashion. After conferring, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Trump announced a 30-day pause in the implementation of tariffs. Trudeau agreed to appoint a border czar and to implement a $1.3 billion border plan that Canada had announced in December.
In other words, while Musk was causing a constitutional crisis, Trump created an economic crisis that threatened both domestic and global chaos, then claimed Biden administration achievements as his own and declared victory.
The tariffs on Chinese goods went into effect as planned. China has promised to levy tariffs of up to 15% on certain U.S. products beginning a week from today. It also said it will investigate Google to see if it has violated antitrust laws.
Luxembourg’s foreign minister Xavier Bettel wins the day in Warsaw [EU leaders trade minister meet in Warsaw as bloc continues to work handle challenges US president presents] with the most clear-eyed and entertaining explanation of Trump’s trade policy.
Bettel, who worked with Trump as his country’s prime minister during his first term, had this to say:
If you are weak, he eats you. And if you don’t negotiate, he kills you.
He is losing the appetite on Europe. This is how we should deal with him: be strong, but be united.
America first does not mean America alone, because America needs partners too.
Bettel added that the consequences of any trade war would also hit Maga voters at home with higher prices. “I thought that was not Trump’s goal,” he said.
Joking about the need to talk with the new US administration, he went on to say:
It is like a wedding. I was a mayor, I did a lot of weddings before being a prime minister, but I was also a lawyer, did a lot of divorces. The most important thing is to speak together, and when you have problems ... to discuss, to be around the table.
In summary, he tried to hit an upbeat note…
I worked for years with him, with Donald, and we survived. And her survived it too. So I am convinced that we are all going to survive and have a strong economy. It is in no one’s interest trying to weaken someone.
And I told you, the best thing is that he is not hungry for Europe.
…but eventually said that if Trump moves against the EU, the bloc will have to retaliate:
Usually the cleverest is the one who gives up, but here is something where you would have to answer. If there are attacks, you have to defend.
Shortly after 1:00 this morning, Vittoria Elliott, Dhruv Mehrotra, Leah Feiger, and Tim Marchman of Wired reported that, according to three of their sources, “[a] 25-year-old engineer named Marko Elez, who previously worked for two Elon Musk companies [SpaceX and X], has direct access to Treasury Department systems responsible for nearly all payments made by the US government.”
According to the reporters, Elez apparently has the privileges to write code on the programs at the Bureau of Fiscal Service that control more than 20% of the U.S. economy, including government payments of veterans’ benefits, Social Security benefits, and veterans’ pay. The admin privileges he has typically permit a user “to log in to servers through secure shell access, navigate the entire file system, change user permissions, and delete or modify critical files. That could allow someone to bypass the security measures of, and potentially cause irreversible changes to, the very systems they have access to.”
“If you would have asked me a week ago” if an outsider could’ve been given access to a government server, one federal IT worker told the Wired reporters, “I'd have told you that this kind of thing would never in a million years happen. But now, who the f*ck knows."
The reporters note that control of the Bureau of Fiscal Service computers could enable someone to cut off monies to specific agencies or even individuals. “Will DOGE cut funding to programs approved by Congress that Donald Trump decides he doesn’t like?” asked Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) yesterday. “What about cancer research? Food banks? School lunches? Veterans aid? Literacy programs? Small business loans?”
Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo reported that his sources said that Elez and possibly others got full admin access to the Treasury computers on Friday, January 31, and that he—or they—have “already made extensive changes to the code base for the payment system.” They are leaning on existing staff in the agency for help, which those workers have provided reluctantly in hopes of keeping the entire system from crashing. Marshall reports those staffers are “freaking out.” The system is due to undergo a migration to another system this weekend; how the changes will interact with that long-planned migration is unclear.
The changes, Marshall’s sources tell him, “all seem to relate to creating new paths to block payments and possibly leave less visibility into what has been blocked.”
Both Wired and the New York Times reported yesterday that Musk’s team intends to cut government workers and to use artificial intelligence, or AI, to make budget cuts and to find waste and abuse in the federal government.
Today Jason Koebler, Joseph Cox, and Emanuel Maiberg of 404 Media reported that they had obtained the audio of a meeting held Monday by Thomas Shedd for government technology workers. Shedd is a former Musk employee at Tesla who is now leading the General Services Administration’s Technology Transformation Services (TTS), the team that is recoding the government programs.
At the meeting, Shedd told government workers that “things are going to get intense” as his team creates “AI coding agents” to write software that would, for example, change the way logging into the government systems works. Currently, that software cannot access any information about individuals; as the reporters note, login.gov currently assures users that it “does not affect or have any information related to the specific agency you are trying to access.”
But Shedd said they were working through how to change that login “to further identify individuals and detect and prevent fraud.”
When a government employee pointed out that the Privacy Act makes it illegal for agencies to share personal information without consent, Shedd appeared unfazed by the idea they were trying something illegal. “The idea would be that folks would give consent to help with the login flow, but again, that's an example of something that we have a vision, that needs [to be] worked on, and needs clarified. And if we hit a roadblock, then we hit a roadblock. But we still should push forward and see what we can do.”
A government employee told Koebler, Cox, and Maiberg that using AI coding agents is a major security risk. “Government software is concerned with things like foreign adversaries attempting to insert backdoors into government code. With code generated by AI, it seems possible that security vulnerabilities could be introduced unintentionally. Or could be introduced intentionally via an AI-related exploit that creates obfuscated code that includes vulnerabilities that might expose the data of American citizens or of national security importance.”
A blizzard of lawsuits has greeted Musk’s campaign and other Trump administration efforts to undermine Congress. Today, Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Representative Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), the minority leaders in their respective chambers, announced they were introducing legislation to stop Musk’s unlawful actions in the Treasury’s payment systems and to protect Americans, calling it “Stop the Steal,” a play on Trump’s false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.
This evening, Democratic lawmakers and hundreds of protesters rallied at the Treasury Department to take a stand against Musk’s hostile takeover of the U.S. Treasury payment system. “Nobody Elected Elon,” their signs read. “He has access to all our information, our Social Security numbers, the federal payment system,” Representative Maxwell Frost (D-FL) said. “What’s going to stop him from stealing taxpayer money?”
Tonight, the Washington Post noted that Musk’s actions “appear to violate federal law.” David Super of Georgetown Law School told journalists Jeff Stein, Dan Diamond, Faiz Siddiqui, Cat Zakrzewski, Hannah Natanson, and Jacqueline Alemany: “So many of these things are so wildly illegal that I think they’re playing a quantity game and assuming the system can’t react to all this illegality at once.”
Musk’s takeover of the U.S. government to override Congress and dictate what programs he considers worthwhile is a logical outcome of forty years of Republican rhetoric. After World War II, members of both political parties agreed that the government should regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, promote infrastructure, and protect civil rights. The idea was to use tax dollars to create national wealth. The government would hold the economic playing field level by protecting every American’s access to education, healthcare, transportation and communication, employment, and resources so that anyone could work hard and rise to prosperity.
Businessmen who opposed regulation and taxes tried to convince voters to abandon this system but had no luck. The liberal consensus—“liberal” because it used the government to protect individual freedom, and “consensus” because it enjoyed wide support—won the votes of members of both major political parties.
But those opposed to the liberal consensus gained traction after the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, decision declared segregation in the public schools unconstitutional. Three years later, in 1957, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a Republican, sent troops to help desegregate Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. Those trying to tear apart the liberal consensus used the crisis to warn voters that the programs in place to help all Americans build the nation as they rose to prosperity were really an attempt to redistribute cash from white taxpayers to undeserving racial minorities, especially Black Americans. Such programs were, opponents insisted, a form of socialism, or even communism.
That argument worked to undermine white support for the liberal consensus. Over the years, Republican voters increasingly abandoned the idea of using tax money to help Americans build wealth.
When majorities continued to support the liberal consensus, Republicans responded by suppressing the vote, rigging the system through gerrymandering, and flooding our political system with dark money and using right-wing media to push propaganda. Republicans came to believe that they were the only legitimate lawmakers in the nation; when Democrats won, the election must have been rigged. Even so, they were unable to destroy the post–World War II government completely because policies like the destruction of Social Security and Medicaid, or the elimination of the Department of Education, remained unpopular.
Now, MAGA Republicans in charge of the government have made it clear they intend to get rid of that government once and for all. Trump’s nominee to direct the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, was a key architect of Project 2025, which called for dramatically reducing the power of Congress and the United States civil service. Vought has referred to career civil servants as “villains” and called for ending funding for most government programs. “The stark reality in America is that we are in the late stages of a complete Marxist takeover of the country,” he said recently.
In the name of combatting diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, the Trump administration is taking down websites of information paid for with tax dollars, slashing programs that advance health and science, ending investments in infrastructure, trying to end foreign aid, working to eliminate the Department of Education, and so on. Today the administration offered buyouts to all the people who work at the Central Intelligence Agency, saying that anyone who opposes Trump’s policies should leave. Today, Musk’s people entered the headquarters of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which provides daily weather and wind predictions; cutting NOAA and privatizing its services is listed as a priority in Project 2025.
Stunningly, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced today that the U.S. has made a deal with El Salvador to send deportees of any nationality—including U.S. citizens, which would be wildly unconstitutional—for imprisonment in that nation’s 40,000-person Terrorism Confinement Center, for a fee that would pay for El Salvador’s prison system.
Tonight the Senate confirmed Trump loyalist Pam Bondi as attorney general. Bondi is an election denier who refuses to say that Trump lost the 2020 presidential election. As Matt Cohen of Democracy Docket noted, a coalition of more than 300 civil rights groups urged senators to vote against her confirmation because of her opposition to LGBTQ rights, immigrants’ rights, and reproductive rights, and her record of anti-voting activities. The vote was along party lines except for Senator John Fetterman (D-PA), who crossed over to vote in favor.
Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency is the logical outcome of the mentality that the government should not enable Americans to create wealth but rather should put cash in the pockets of a few elites. Far from representing a majority, Musk is unelected, and he is slashing through the government programs he opposes. With full control of both chambers of Congress, Republicans could cut those parts themselves, but such cuts would be too unpopular ever to pass. So, instead, Musk is single-handedly slashing through the government Americans have built over the past 90 years.
Now, MAGA voters are about to discover that the wide-ranging cuts he claims to be making to end diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs skewer them as well as their neighbors. Attracting white voters with racism was always a tool to end the liberal consensus that worked for everyone, and if Musk’s cuts stand, the U.S. is about to learn that lesson the hard way.
In yet another bombshell, after meeting with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump told reporters tonight that the U.S. “will take over the Gaza Strip,” and suggested sending troops to make that happen. “We’ll own it,” he said. “We’re going to take over that piece, develop it and create thousands and thousands of jobs, and it will be something the entire Middle East can be proud of.” It could become “the Riviera of the Middle East,” he said.
Reaction has been swift and incredulous. Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA), who sits on the Foreign Relations Committee, called the plan “deranged” and “nuts.” Another Foreign Relations Committee member, Senator Chris Coons (D-DE), said he was “speechless,” adding: “That’s insane.” While MAGA representative Nancy Mace (R-SC) posted in support, “Let’s turn Gaza into Mar-a-Lago,” Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) told NBC News reporters Frank Thorp V and Raquel Coronell Uribe that there were “a few kinks in that slinky,” a reference to a spring toy that fails if it gets bent.
Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) suggested that Trump was trying to distract people from “the real story—the billionaires seizing government to steal from regular people.”
Quote:“If you would have asked me a week ago” if an outsider could’ve been given access to a government server, one federal IT worker told the Wired reporters, “I'd have told you that this kind of thing would never in a million years happen. But now, who the f*ck knows."
When majorities continued to support the liberal consensus, Republicans responded by suppressing the vote, rigging the system through gerrymandering, and flooding our political system with dark money and using right-wing media to push propaganda. Republicans came to believe that they were the only legitimate lawmakers in the nation; when Democrats won, the election must have been rigged. Even so, they were unable to destroy the post–World War II government completely because policies like the destruction of Social Security and Medicaid, or the elimination of the Department of Education, remained unpopular.
Now, MAGA Republicans in charge of the government have made it clear they intend to get rid of that government once and for all.
Industry thrives on war. Autocrats feast on it. Politicians cling to it like the mother’s milk that will feed their approval ratings. War cements their position at the apex. War is their best friend. War is their secret fetish: they might not admit it publicly, but they salivate at the prospect. Profit, profit, profit, blood, blood, blood.
And it’s not just them: plenty of ordinary folks want it too, or at least don’t care if it’s happening, as long as it’s not on their street. It's like an action movie that plays out in someone else’s backyard. All those bombs and missiles—big, shiny, and oh-so-impressive—lighting up the sky on the evening news: you can hear the commentary, feel the adrenaline, the excitement. Something is happening! Did you hear? And then you switch the channel to some cooking show to see if the sauce is thick enough.
The fake “age of stability”
We live in an age of comfortable ennui. We Europeans pat ourselves on the back for the so-called stability we’ve had since World War II, as if that war was the last big one, as if the echoes of Yugoslavia or the Middle East or anywhere else never counted. We wrap ourselves in the duvet of illusions, thinking we’re “above” it all, that we’ve evolved. We act like we found the magical formula to never let Hitler happen again, that we overcame the evils of fascism and its close brother, imperialism. Meanwhile, the rest of the world was torn to pieces in countless wars, often financed or influenced by European powers. Our “peace” and material comforts were built on their destruction, their resources, their lost generations. Americans don’t even attempt to hide it—they wage constant war, but never too close for comfort.
Bored? Have you tried watching people die?
But behind the veneer of progress, there’s an itch, a primal twitch in the soul of society that yearns for… something. Something raw, something dangerous, something that lets us know we're ******* alive. War would do that, wouldn't it? War reminds us that there’s a heartbeat raging in our veins, a capacity for primal violence simmering under the surface.
Over and over and over again: times of extended peace breed boredom, dissatisfaction. People start tinkering with radical progressive ideas—like real democracy, real equity, real revolutions—until suddenly, the narrative shifts. A scapegoat emerges (usually a foreign enemy, or some demonized minority), and the wheels of conflict start spinning. The talk of peace is replaced by talk of “self-defense,” “national pride,” “our moral obligation.” We see it happening right now.
Our modern lifestyles, of course (I keep repeating myself): we shuffle from bed to desk job, from desk job to entertainment, from entertainment to bed. Maybe occasionally we hit the gym, treat ourselves to a romantic date, or indulge in some regulated, safe nature hiking. But it’s all rather… placid, so distant from our primal ancestry that used to wrestle with animals (but not as often as most people think), with storms, with each other, with death on a daily basis. Today, we’re distanced from death. We hide it in hospitals, nursing homes, warzones far away from the bright screens of our living rooms. We’ve severed ourselves from nature’s ancient rites, from the stench of actual, tangible blood, from the brutality of survival. So it’s no wonder some people crave war, especially men with their tribal instincts and macho illusions—some men actually jacking off to the idea of “defending the homeland.” They’ve only seen the images and know nothing of the horror. They imagine the glory, but not the maggots. I know nothing of it, too, of course. But my parents do, and what they told me is enough to tell you IT’S A BAD ******* IDEA.
War = money = control
You know the cycle: the capitalist system hits a crisis—maybe a recession, maybe a spiritual crisis, a loss of purpose, maybe all of those. People are pissed, wages stagnate, inequality spikes, and the lower classes rightfully begin sharpening their pitchforks. So how do you distract them? Wave a flag, spin a heroic narrative, show them an enemy. War is the tried-and-true formula for unifying the populace behind the authorities. Once the drums start pounding, you can brand anyone who dissents as a traitor, a coward, a scoundrel who doesn’t love the motherland. And just like that, you tighten control, you command loyalty, you rake in profits from arms deals, oil, reconstruction—rinse, repeat.
Horny for death & destruction
We saw it before World War I. Europe had an extended period of relative stability. Politicians got restless, their power waning, and so they started building alliances and forging romantic illusions of heroic conquest. They were practically salivating for an excuse to unleash chaos. War was almost… fashionable. Of course, they lied to the public, told them it would be “over by Christmas,” a grand romantic fling. Millions died in muddy trenches, gassed, shell-shocked, devoured by machine guns.
Fast-forward a century, you see the same pattern forming. Tensions simmer, militaries flex their latest hardware, politicians deliver speeches about “protecting national interests,” institutions are dismantled (like right now in the US), checks and balances abolished, and behind closed doors, arms manufacturers grin ear to ear. Look at them jacking up their stock prices with every rumor of conflict. Because when bullets fly, money flows. When bombs drop, bank accounts swell. War is an orgasm of profit for them.
“But no one actually wants war!”
That’s the comforting lie. It soothes the average office worker who does their 9-to-5 in marketing (like me), then heads home to scroll the news. Because who wants to face the truth that many, many people do want it? Think about the doping effect of war hype. All the right-wing (and “centrist”) politicians, all the populists, all the autocrats, they thrive on conflict. It’s the ultimate adrenaline injection for their base. Suddenly, people rally behind them. Suddenly, they’re saviors, heroes, righteous guardians of the homeland. War is a political goldmine.
Many men daydream about the glorious battlefield. They fetishize the uniform, the sense of belonging, the ultimate test of manhood. They fantasize about getting “the respect they deserve.” War is the ultimate belonging: you’re with us or you’re one of them. It’s tribal, it’s primal, it’s a savage dance that humans have performed since the dawn of time. This urge never disappeared. We like to think we’ve banished our darkest instincts to the rotten pages of history, but that’s nonsense. War is the stage upon which many re-enact their fantasies of dominance.
Gladiators and arenas
War also entertains. From a distance, conflict looks like a spectacle, a documentary you watch to get your blood pumping, an action flick for the bored masses. It’s always in some far-off place, some desert or mountainous region or city with an unpronounceable name. It’s exciting, exotic. The footage is crisp and shiny. Journalists stand in flak jackets, narrating your evening’s entertainment, and when you’re done, when you’re satiated, you just turn off the TV.
We don’t want war where we live, of course. That would **** up our lawns, our kids’ playgrounds. We don’t want bombs dropping on our malls, our schools. We want it conveniently located in someone else’s country. Contained to a specific arena with us watching from the stands. That’s the sweet spot: maximum spectacle, zero personal risk, ultimate moral detachment.
Territorial animals
We dress it up with ideology. We call it “defending freedom,” “protecting democracy,” “liberating the oppressed,” “preserving the homeland,” or “fulfilling God’s will.” The slogans change, but the primal urge remains. Tribal lines get drawn. “Us versus them.” It’s been like this for thousands of years, from cavemen fighting over hunting grounds to modern nations sparring for resources. Apparently, we can’t suppress that evolutionary wiring forever, no matter how many institutions we create. All the fancy tech, all the philosophical treatises about moral progress—none of it kills that ancient beast inside the human male. Not every man, of course, but enough for it to matter.
Sure, some women get off on it too—especially those who crave an old-fashioned sense of security. The whole “cottagecore” or “tradwife” fantasy: imagine a manly soldier returning from the front lines, battered and triumphant, providing safety and order and pride. It’s a fringe kink, I think, but it’s there, lurking in corners of the internet, hammered into the fabric of old fairy tales. War hero. Strong arms. Flag-waving triumph. There's a macabre romanticism to it.
Because war is the great simplifier. It simplifies complex social issues into “friend or foe.” All the complexity of the world suddenly falls away. It transforms deep-rooted discontent into a war cry. It kills the revolutionary spirit. In war, there is only black-and-white, no space for nuance or subversion.
So where does that leave us?
In a fucked up limbo, just waiting for… something. Don’t you sense it coming? Trump and his likes are merely the accelerators, sensing the Zeitgeist and then abusing it for their profit.
It’s all games and posturing in the distance, until the day the illusions shatter. Then we’ll look at each other with that dumbfounded expression again—How did this happen?—like we haven’t been walking toward this cliff for decades. Liberal, centrist parties have walked us there, done nothing to stop it, then freely given way to the autocrats. Symbolic resistance is all there ever was. They just don’t care.
The next couple of years: sure, you can refuse to play along when they crank up the patriotic machinery. You can question the narratives. It won’t matter, because you will be drawn into it. There is no escaping it, and the innocents are always those who suffer the most.
“No one wants war.” Yet global war is around the corner, lurking. They want it. They crave it. They stoke it. And we’ll find ourselves, once again, trudging through the mud of some obscure battlefield, fighting other people for no reason, death all around us, suddenly present and tangible, wondering why the hell no one stopped this.
But maybe we want that.
