Are we going to talk about how President Donald J. Trump and his administration decided to go on a QAnon bender last week?
It's the Fourth of July tomorrow, America's 250th birthday. A lot of folks who have something to gain from the Trump administration's policies are using this holiday to look even further away from the seriously disturbing behavior we are seeing.
Aside from the QAnon bender, it was revealed that the President has used his position to make 4 billion dollars since getting into office two years ago. That's 60-70% annualized growth, when most people complain about how long-term politicians get 3-4% annualized growth off of passive income.
I've never thought the right question is whether or not Trump is a Nazi. That question is the perfect distraction from the true danger of his presidency, which is coinciding with this important choice point in our nation's history.
The right question, or at least one of them, is whether a government has learned to use a cult's behavioral operating system as a tool of governance.
Over nine years, across millions of people, QAnon built a mechanism that converts citizens into passive observers of a drama they believe someone competent is managing. To them, it's the “greatest story ever told,” and being a spectator is like watching a movie.
You know who else starts to dissociate from life, such that life starts to feel like a movie? Really depressed people.
“Trust the plan,” one of the QAnon mottos, is an instruction to abdicate to the mythological leader.
When the White House posts Q-drops, it is activating an abdication impulse, one that is already installed, and pointing it at a specific political moment: five months before the midterms, 250 years into this country's history, when a historically unpopular president needs his base to stay passive enough not to fracture, and loyal enough to vote.
The historical comparisons to fascism are not entirely wrong, but they are also very imperfect. They also function as a distraction, because they make people look for jackboots and torch marches. Which, to be fair, we have seen things that look like that too.
But what we are seeing day to day is more of a multi-pronged assault on the public's mind, where ignorance thrives not by suppressing specific facts, but by hollowing out the systems that once produced and verified them.
This represents a systematic replacement of our capacity to interpret reality, along with a new dependence on a single authority's interpretation. It doesn't sound that serious when people start to struggle to interpret reality, but it actually is very serious.
Once that transfer is complete, you don't need jackboots. The population polices itself.
One of the interesting things about the historical figure Trump is often compared to (one who shall not be named but has a funny mustache) is that he learned that the old way of doing revolution was no longer useful, so he found a new way. In that case, he used legal means to take control before turning around and decimating everything.
I have a hard time not wondering if, similarly, Trump & Friends have realized that systematic erosion of the public mind is the new way to change this country without having to be straightforward about what they are doing and give us all an opportunity to decide if we agree.
It seems really obvious to me that if Trump had to accomplish his goals in ways that were strictly democratic, he would not be successful.
Every American needs to understand that the behavioral technology developed with QAnon has escaped its origin and is now operating at the level of official government communication.
When your government has learned to speak directly to the part of the brain that makes people stop trying to exercise control over their own lives, what do citizens who want to remain citizens actually do?