Stupid is as stupid votes.

The stupidification of politics and its consequences.

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There are dopes, there are dullards, there are fools. They wander through life getting their heads caught in beehives and both feet stuck in a bucket, finding themselves involved in all types of buffoonish scenarios. What separates the stupid from the fool is a post-industrialization phenomenon. The stupid look at the world and think, “I don’t know how this works… Wait–YES I DO!” A fool walks around like Winnie the Pooh with a t-shirt barely covering his genitals because they forget to lock their doors and someone stole all their pants; you will run into them and try to ignore the tip of their penis poking out from the bottom of their shirt, and when you ask them how their day is going, and they’ll respond, “I’m not really having the best time right now…” If you ask a stupid person about their day, they will plunge into a batshit diatribe about how they stormed into a parent-teacher conference with an assault rifle despite not having a child, and they will complain about how there’s a federal case against them all because of wokeism. The stupid have armed themselves with certain words and phrases that simulate intelligence but are in no way the product of independent thought.

So much of right-wing media is about keeping their audience in a veal crate of studiously cultivated ignorance and arrogance, to reinforce the tendency to never question or doubt oneself, to double down and counterpunch in the face of contradictory evidence but also be mentally pliable enough to pivot from your beliefs when it’s expedient. This vain and annihilating and wildly metastatic politics found its soggy avatar in Donald Trump. He has been elected president twice despite being a prissy golf blob who just says whatever he wants, who appears on a prime-time interview to smear a migrant because of his inability to parse a very obvious bit of reactionary shitposting and an even stronger disinclination to basic humility. The image in question purported to show his tattoos—a pot leaf, a smiley face, a cross, and a skull—with the letters “MS-13” superimposed on them, and this had percolated up through social media’s various toxic strata of influential bigots and mutants until it arrived on the Oval Office Desk. Of course, it is axiomatic that no one close to Trump has corrected him on this, because they would not be close to Trump if this was something they were inclined to do.

After a decade spent alternately threatening and occupying the White House, it is evident that any belief that makes it into Trump’s mind will bump around there forever. His understanding of the world is the sum of thousands of permanent and perpetual irritants cut loose from any context or factual accuracy, smashing into each other and echoing forever inside his luxuriously gilded skull. None of his core beliefs are new, really, it’s just a matter of which echoes are ringing most loudly at the moment. Trump’s vanity is limitless, and he has empowered a swelling tranche of pink-faced homunculi to think and feel and act more like him—and they are cocksure that if they act the way he acts then they can become powerful and rich and unaccountable in the ways that he is.

The hothouse dynamics of social media have warped some lingering cultural pathologies among the left, bending their perception of the world into an oddly stilted and inert version of what it should be like. And BlueAnon is more susceptible to groupthink, dogmatism, cognitive bias, and propaganda than they would ever admit to themselves. But the baseline level of delusion required to buy into MAGA as an ideology and a lifestyle is something far more dramatically slack. Woke libs have a disposition towards an endless rolling of irritating histrionics, but at least they vote in the vague direction of what they support, and what they claim to support at least makes a degree of sense on a very literal basis. MAGA fanatics are intellectually repulsive. I have to imagine that any resident online contrarian still cheerleading for this fat fuck just hasn’t witnessed the pathetic mental gymnastics exhibited by his diehards.

The point and principle of MAGA Brainrot is to believe everything that blasts out of their Facebook firehose, even and especially when those posts cancel out or contradict one another. It is also a central tenet to hold these beliefs tightest when they are most tenuous. To do anything less would be cowardly, not merely a concession but existential defeat. Most people form a lot of judgements based on vibes rather than concrete evidence, but what separates MAGA from an average voter is they lack the self-awareness to understand that their facts are feelings. It’s a kind of soft-brained idiocy that is dedicated to impenetrable and subjective Trumpian incoherence. It unfolds in more or less in the ways it always unfolds, incapable of building any kind of epistemic cautiousness.

It’s easy to write off their contradictory nonsense as insane hyperpartisan hypocrisy, but the animating vectors of MAGA are much stupider than that. This shitty “ideology” essentially boils down to three pillars:

1. Reflexive anti-liberalism (or “triggering the libs”)

2. Viewing Trump as an avatar and proxy for their own self-interest

3. A simultaneous loathing of pop culture and a desire to dominate it.

If that’s the standard, there’s no sense in playing “gotcha” or pressing them any further because they are babbling in a way that is so unsophisticated and profound that it is logically impenetrable. It’s like getting mad at an old housecat for not having consistent opinions regarding the UV spectrum. Trump himself contradicts his own free-jazz bluster every other hour, entirely dependent on a reporter’s futile attempt to blitz through a list of Important Questions that Trump is both unwilling and unable to answer in any meaningful sense. Any answers to those Important Questions will only make things more unintelligible, because Trump’s singular brand of toxicity represents both a man and a movement that defies analysis. Not in the sense that anything about him or MAGA is unknowable, but in the sense that it is all instantly identifiable precisely as stupid and venal as it appears to be. Trump means what he says, unless that thing is unpopular and insane, then he’s just trolling the libs, and since he’s just trolling, we shouldn’t take him so literally because he doesn’t actually mean what he’s saying.

It’s a circular logic that requires no consideration for anything but a slavish deference to the irritable mental sharts from an Alzheimer’s queen. Hooting for Trump scratches that amygdala itch of beating the other side and gloating about it online. Trump scowled and blustered and blinked his eyes a lot since he launched a belligerent tariff war, which alternated between madman negotiating tactic to justifying why little girls should be happy with less dolls, depending on how badly the bond yields were tanking. The guy who has bankrupted multiple casinos will somehow deploy tariffs to remake the American economy and compel multinational corporations to reshore manufacturing jobs, but they’re also a bluff. Tariffs are good, but it’s also good whenever Trump pauses them. Whenever these idiots are pressed about the inevitable cost increase associated with assembling iPhones in America, they say automation will do most of the work—so the factories are coming back, but the jobs aren’t?

MAGA understands the rhythm of politics in a way that only someone profoundly warped and wounded by cable news and Facebook can. Their thoughts mostly contain gallons of flat, room-temperature scandals about migrant crime and CRT sloshing about within a dead ocean. The interplay of these moral panics will assume the conventional shape of a belief system, just with any attendant moral values replaced entirely with lead and chalk. Anyone who has the patience to engage with them will inevitably become more confused, and in some meaningful ways, more stupid.

I have plenty of disagreements with conservatives, mainly that they are oblivious to corporate tyranny and market inefficiencies, that their gripes with socialism are literally happening under capitalism, and that much of their ideology is just rationalized selfishness and willful ignorance. But at least there is some semblance of internal logic, even if it amounts to whatever makes me the most money. I’d rather engage with someone with disagreeable principles than someone with no principles. At its core, MAGA doesn’t really believe in anything, or it’s what Matt Christman calls “Zen Fascism.” They trust in the guiding hand of the free market, but when companies go “woke” to advertise to a market demand, then it’s a kind of perverted deviation from “real” capitalism. They think America is unquestionably the greatest nation in the universe, but also an irredeemable dumpster fire. They will deify Our Founding Fathers and preach about Law And Order but have stood down as Trump has defied the Supreme Court, looks to suspend habeas corpus, and said “I don’t know” when asked if he would defend the Constitution. They spent years fuming over Hunter Biden’s laptop and corruption but have been silent about how $TRUMP memecoins and a free Qatari jet are enabling foreign influence peddling, or how DOGE is raiding the federal government without any transparency or accountability. They’ll claim systemic racism doesn’t exist in America while a woman raised over $500,000 after calling a child a racial slur. Boomer Republicans will remind you of how much they despise big government and hate handouts, and then spend 13 hours a day explaining why the richest man on the planet needs billions in subsidies to build, in Trump’s words, “rocket ships to nowhere” and “driverless cars that crash.” MAGA free speech warriors claim that they will die for the First Amendment, but are fine with the Trump administration deporting legal residents for criticizing Israel, or threatening to withhold federal funding to universities if they do not eradicate DEI, or Elon Musk censoring whatever he feels like on X. Their beliefs are built on flimflam talking points that shift on a demented whim. Everything recedes from there.

Even their grievances are boring because there’s nothing to them; they’re meaningless and ephemeral, unattached to anything, something that they saw somewhere. It’s not even bullshit, it’s just gossip. Shane Gillis said it best: “My dad in rural Pennsylvania is really concerned about border security for some reason… they’re not taking car sales jobs in Mechanicsburg.” If you contextualize all their conjecture and insinuation, you’ll quickly realize these people don’t have any experience—tangential or anecdotal—about, say, the few dozen trans athletes who compete in female sports. It would be insightful to ask them why they care about something that has such a marginal effect on their existence. It’s pretty easy to gauge how much of this is a legitimate concern or how much is a proxy to dunk on trans people: When have these people ever cared about female sports? In what other context have these people cared about fairness, justice, equity, or representation? But whether they actually have strong feelings about any of this culture war riffraff is immaterial and, more than anything else, uninteresting—and they don’t even care enough to learn more about these issues. Swaths of agricultural and forestland are flattened to make way for more gaudy plastic McMansions because it’s still illegal to build apartments anywhere near a bus station, but they’d rather agonize over some fabricated, melodramatic wokeist censorship.

Facebook and reactionary cable news broke many of their brains, like handing a thawed-out caveman basic technology. In other instances, they reflexively disbelief any reporting that isn’t broadcasted from their preferred trough of toxic right-wing sludge. Mostly, the standard in which they judge the veracity of information has plummeted, and there are no repercussions for recklessly spreading misinformation. Trump and Fox News will fill those resulting spaces with a heady, sewage-forward stew of carcinogenic gossip and nonsense. When Elon Musk and his chittering tech goblins were gutting USAID, Fox ran with a story about how Joe Biden had been spending tens of millions of dollars on shipping condoms to Gaza and theorized that Hamas would use them in bombs or as balloons that would somehow float over the Iron Dome to attack Israel. In a healthier culture, a segment this absurd would’ve led to a complete obliteration of Fox’s reputation. But in our manifestly unhealthy culture, nothing happened aside from some useless refutation by objecting liberal outlets, as if their reporting would ever be kindly received by the type of people who’d support DOGE to begin with.

Put all this weirdly superior, gleefully deranged, relentlessly aggrieved incoherence into action and you have a form of stupidity that isn’t just blasting people with corrosive bullshit nonstop, but a government that is imposing these stupid beliefs onto all of us. All throughout the culture, our institutions are being put to depraved and unfamiliar use. The familiarity of these institutions can only act as a cover for so long; something like the National Institution of Health is being inverted to make and keep Americans sick, and a reckoning of that size is coming uneasily into view. The whole cabinet that Trump has staffed, and the dedicated stans who remain in the MAGA cult, live like reckless and strange and unaccountable idiots who are not so much incapable of learning as they are fundamentally uninterested in any perspective and allergic to any truth but their own. The whole federal government is like this, a collection of thirsty and bored radicals lurching toward metastasis.

MAGA as a movement is incompatible with democracy. It is a rejection of not just conventional wisdom but of consensus reality, done in defiance and with weird relentless performances of anger and signifying intensity. The politics these people profess is not about helping anyone, because it is hopelessly recursive, an obsessive fixation on enemies and problems. The terrified and fuming derangement that it has installed into America’s lowest-common-denominator brains has mutated into an army of impossibly unappeasable people with ambitions both vague and vast. They have come to understand that the dizzying righteousness is the point. With every post and provocation, it is absolutely as stupid and ridiculous as it looks, but they can’t imagine any other way of being.

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