By I actually thought she had it in the bag. Dubious popular vote count, but decisive electoral college victory after Donald Trump embarked on a flop campaign that hemorrhaged crowd sizes, party supporters, and credibility. His once spicy speechifying trailed off into monotonous tirades, the Trump fortune was pilfered by the judicial abyss with a series of gut-punch courtroom losses, his constituency dominated the airwaves due only to how grossly unappealing they were, and the trademark cultural amnesia of the United States tinged MAGA as a gauche trick of yesteryear. Surely if American fascism were to envelop the world, it’d be in an evolved form of MAGA, a political ideology that hurt many and accomplished little.
Well, turns out, it’s just MAGA again. I thought Kamala Harris was going to win the presidency because Donald Trump was so bad at winning it for himself, and for no other reason. Well, turns out, she lost in a way that made George McGovern feel less alone. 2016 was a Lovecraftian event. This is a quiet crime scene investigation and ritualistic humiliation: there’s no narrative beyond “she lost.” No conspiracy to point to or voter fraud nonsense, just a straight-up cultural shift that represents how global politics are trending at large. The world is moving right, and it’s pretty bad. Some would say, like myself, it’s the worst. And Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Barack Obama, and the whole cadre of moderate Liberal dipshits are as much to blame as the fascists themselves.
What option do I have other than just listing it out? The Biden administration oversaw the absolute demolition of COVID prevention measures, gutting of pandemic-era social services as repeated infection rates continue to induce brain fog in grade-schoolers, the most feverish facilitation of Palestinian genocide since the chartering of Israel, incessant support for law enforcement, and the Vietnam-era crackdown on first amendment freedoms via the demonization of college protestors. Biden built the wall! He blamed it on contractual obligations and didn’t spend an ounce of what little octogenarian lifeblood there’s left in his walking corpse to combat it. In fact, this wall-building was the core tenet of Harris’ platform, haranguing on that deeply rightwing bi-partisan border bill, fully leaning into conservative hysteria and vowing to strengthen a border that already sufficiently strangles the desperate and impoverished. In moving to the right, these two knuckleheads alienated their base and looked like fucking phonies for the sliver of undecided voters they clamored after, all of whom ended up just going with the guy they know for a fact is a racist.
That’s one of the most embarrassing parts.
Joe and Kamala’s move to the right in no way, shape, or form actually enamored the right. To conservatives, it was a clown show of two desperate jesters stealing ideas from Trump just to get a drop of what winning tastes like. Harris trailed around the Cheneys only to win 5% of the Republican vote—just stellar stuff. Republicans called out Democrats as the party of endless war; with Harris proudly hoisting the world’s most lethal military in her DNC acceptance speech, the Democrats paraded themselves as the endless war party. Bravo!
It truly didn’t have to be this way. Biden begrudgingly dropped out as per dismal approval ratings and cratering re-election chances (Biden’s own internal polling had Trump winning the electoral college with 400 motherfucking points), leaving Kamala’s campaign with a home-run premise and teflon promise that she is, first and foremost, not Joe Biden. “Not being Joe Biden” is truly an incredible way to win an election, and they finally had it in their grasp. Then, on October 8th, in her long-awaited first live talk show appearance, Harris goes on THE VIEW and answers a question about what she’d do different from Biden with not only, “There is nothing that comes to mind,” and not just a reaffirmation that she had a hand in many of his key decisions, but she confirms that she will in fact include a Republican in her cabinet. Joe Biden accelerated the Palestinian genocide at a rate previously unseen; Harris then shut down a Palestinian protestor with “I’m speaking” as they were kicked out of the arena, merchandised the quote, sent Israeli sycophant Ritchie Torres to Dearborn, and ordered alleged psycho-rapist Epstein affiliate Bill Clinton to Arab-splain to Michigan Muslims why they should just bend over and take it.
What. Are. You. Doing?
She earned nothing and expected everything. “Forward” was meant as a rebuttal to Biden—to make it about Trump only sanctioned him as a viable opponent and centered him as he floundered at his lowest popularity. Re-doing the 2016 campaign and handing him Biden’s 2020 on a silver platter was suicide. Trump didn’t have to do a thing, Harris and Biden turned him into the candidate for change! It was the most effective voter outreach maneuver in decades. The numbers speak for themselves: there’s only one party getting whiter, and it’s not the Republicans. And it sure isn’t the fault of progressivism. In short: state propositions on abortion outperformed Harris in those same states, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar were handedly re-elected in districts Harris outright lost and barely won, and numerous femme senators and representatives won their seats in blowouts. November 5th was still a bloodbath, but evaluate the numbers and you will see a lingering support for the welfare of American citizens. People will show up for policies that clearly and directly make their lives better. As aesthetically and symbolically convenient it is to chalk this all up to misogynoir—ever prevalent and on the rise in a patriarchy as proudly traditionalist as ours—there is a much more tangled web of problems here. Democratic inaction normalized MAGA policies, and the Kamala Harris campaign legitimized them.
That is how you lose.
That is how WE lose!
And come on, are we really going to whine about third party voters? Let it be known that Jill Stein is such a hacky loser that she’s only got RFK beat by a margin of 20,000 votes, and that human hemorrhoid dropped out. Harris lost so hard that combining the sum of Stein’s nationwide third party votes and giving them to Kamala still would’ve put her, let’s see, about four million behind. And that’s that.
The Harris presidential platform was diet Trump, but with even less clarity. In the midnight hour, the Harris folks pulled out “federal spending for home health care” out of the same consultancy analyst hat they pulled out “supporting a regulatory framework for cryptocurrency” in her agenda for Black men. Getting policies out of her was like pulling teeth, even when all history points to voters being motivated by policies. People look at phone and do what phone say, people look at TV and do what TV say… So here’s a concept…. Say fucking anything. Policy wins. Americans are both stupider and more discerning than we think: a country shared by drop shipping entrepreneurs, wage slaves, and the sliver of a billionaire class whipping them all into high-efficiency profits will rationalize their rights being stripped for the potential at a bigger bang for their buck. Welcome to U.S. unity politics.
I’ve no interest in explicating all the cultural shifts that have led us to a Nega-Grover 2.0 historical anomaly. My beat is already sewing the cinematic medium into a historical tapestry over the span of the history we’re living in; there will never be one core text that can ever explain it all. But because I’m primarily “the movie guy,” there were a lot of shifts in other mediums I only privately remarked upon.
“Huh, Kanye West embarked on a press tour for his coming out as a Nazi, and a year later both Pitchfork and the homie in my texts are assessing the experimental engineering of VULTURES 1…”
“Weird, all the FANTASTIC BEASTS sequels have miserably underperformed, with Rowling only capturing new cycles for her umpteenth TERF rant, yet HOGWARTS LEGACY becomes the best selling game of 2023.”
“Normie #Resistance Dads are quote-retweeting Nick Fuentes clips with no knowledge that he’s a Nazi, and neither does anyone replying, and everyone’s just treating him like a legitimate media figure, hmm….”
”Wow, that’s a lot of YouTube dating show rage bait and inward misogyny present in the monetized social media trends of ‘homesteading,’ ‘tradwives,’ and ‘Girl Math’ that aren’t attracting the feminist correction they would’ve in 2017.”
“Hey, uh, Shane Gillis is famous now?”
“We’re saying ‘woke’ again?”
These all seemed like negligible shifts. Freak occurrences, but in the 2020s, freak occurrences are the expectation. They were inconsequential. Whoops!
The Democratic party’s arrogance prioritizes its fundamentally broken ability to vibe out the populace—a staunch refusal to act on the readily available data. Whereas Republicans latch onto a national mood and distort the data into an unrecognizable slurry of reawakened primordial fears. It’s accidentally genius stuff: there’s no need for a Trump News Network when he can influence the vibe enough so that everyone just sort of becomes it for him. When you get The Nelk Boys and Adin Ross shilling your ideology to a new generation of Hitler Youth free of charge, you’ve proven an iron grip on the social stratosphere. He’s left a calling card at the doorstep of every facet of American identity, but left no fingerprints. I’ll give the CNN talking heads this: it’s true, the man really does move like a Jersey crime boss. And as the RICO case builds and builds, Trump’s America has fashioned a federal arm that incentivizes the presence of a Trump-like figure. He is the skeleton key for the fullest potential of the evil arm of warmongering capital, which also explains why Democrats don’t fight that hard to keep him out. It’s kind of part of why they’re so ready to “peacefully transition” and hand over the reins with a smile after spending years running campaigns telling us that if he wins, then we’re all doomed. The only line of defense the Democrats have against influence this ingrained is to involve the CIA, and, folks, that’s when I stop typing so I don’t get the feds sent to my home.
They will never stop Donald Trump.
There is a stubborn denial to quash the dictatorial reign of conservatism because not only would it require publicly licking your wounds, but a Republican victory is still ultimately a net positive for neo-liberalism. So they don’t fight. Kamala Harris not only bails on her Howard University victory party after they’ve stood outside for hours in the quiet dread of her Pennsylvania results, but in her concession speech the next day, she grins while peddling platitudes about the darkest nights making the stars shine brightest. What few of the peasants who remain regale it as “exiting with grace.” In typical Liberal fashion, the nondescript “fight” rages on with the blaze of uncertainty and noncommittal initiatives. “The fight is not over!” they exclaim. So do we actually fight or is this a rhetorical fight, or like a hypothetical fight? Are the Democrats going to arm us with Canva subscriptions so we can infograph our way to saving democracy? “Don’t despair, organize!” they repeat. Are there orgs? Do we create them? Can you, for the love of God, provide an immediate resource and stop trying to sell me a T-shirt? “Provide for one another” they share with a performative compassion. How? How do we provide for one another? Which skills should we be honing, which trades should we be apprenticing, and with what severity should we make it our expertise? Like JOKER: FOLIE A DEUX, Harris raked in $1 billion and lit it on fire in a show of careerist farce. A few idiots call Todd Phillips “punk” for doing it, while Kamala is considered “brave.” Audit them both! See, now it’s an article about movies!
As we scream into the void about mutual aid, organizing, and community with no specific reference to preexisting outlets or tactics, it’s difficult not to consider California’s mortifying ballot results as a stunning communications failure by local organizations too busy posting-as-praxis to actually supply voter education. We legalized prison slavery. Los Angeles overwhelmingly supported a MAGA-brained district attorney who will turn the homeless and UCLA pupils into hamburger meat. We banned rent control. California, an idealized bastion of relaxed wealth and complacent snobbery, has always been a notorious spawn point for Republicans (4,484,000 Trump voters in 2020! Nixon! Reagan!) and has become a centralized radicalization point in the past decades thanks to the proliferation of Silicon Valley tech eugenicists morphing our physical reality via the digital realm. And somehow, we are still “Commiefornia.” That’s no good! Gavin Newsom put all his political weight behind outlawing homelessness, and now he’s in the midst of becoming the golden child for the 2028 election! People actually think taking Patrick Bateman to rally in Wisconsin is the pathway to success! That’s really no good! That we’ve no sturdy enough coalitions to fend off these absolute buffoons is a profound embarrassment. It’s kind of an issue that every male under 28 is crypto-Hitler-rape guy with the same unified taste and politcal perspective, and that every single leftist reposting digital flyers for their umpteenth march still can’t avoid getting kettled by the fattest cops in the western world.
We are not prepared for the current moment, but, God almighty, at least we’re cognisant of what the current moment, time of day, day of the year, and our own names even are. President Joe Biden will go down in history as one of the all time worst presidents; a pox on the globe, an anti-beacon of purpose or meaning. Joseph Robinette Biden Jr.’s legacy is that 70% of verified victims in Gaza are women and children. His monstrous, bulletproof ego motivated a power-clinching regime, deceiving the nation into trusting he was a transitional one-term president, and then the chickens coming home to roost for all of us once he left his potential successor less than 100 days to push the boulder up the hill. Lying to Americans about his health and mental acuity, shivving detractors via the press, and choking on his own spit as he pushed the Democratic party furthest to the right since he authored the 1991 Biden-Thurmond Violent Crime Control Act. Try the brutish oaf at the Hague, and when his short-circuited brain finally stops sputtering and he goes beddy-bye at 9 PM sharp for the very last time, bury him in an unmarked plot below a Sweetgreen development. It’s what he wanted for hundreds of thousands, which must mean that’s what he wishes for himself.
Let them all be humiliated. May Matthew Miller’s family resent being related to such spineless jelly, and may Karine Jean-Pierre’s impending media career fade into hurried obscurity so she’s forced to languish as a language arts teacher viciously mocked by never-ending cycles of seventh graders. May Vedant Patel never see peace. In 2016, Chuck Schumer declared that “for every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia,” was proven disastrously wrong, and then resumed the exact strategy for Biden and Harris. Resign! And with your pitiful career, drag away with you that erroneous dreck of an “Anti-Semitism Awareness Act” that exclusively functions to stifle pro-Palestinian protest and strengthen the ultimate Israeli mission: the grossly anti-semitic, top-down structural defiling of Judaism. Barack Obama has squandered a decade of tangible hope so he can roll in the mud of big tech contracts, scabbing, and botched consultations (the genius move of outreaching to Black male voters, among the most reliable Democratic voter demos, by telling them they’re misogynistic losers). Never show me that charlatan or his shitty filmmaker daughter’s faces ever again. Throw the Clintons in jail, fuck it. Pete Buttigieg, sit your rat ass down. Do not ever hand Pelosi or any of these dweebs your money. Whatever it takes to keep these losers as far away from defending the future of our bodies. We deserve fighters. We deserve winners. And we must grow them, because they currently do not readily exist.
It’s tempting to turn on your fellow man. They’re right there, and their enthusiastic embrace of poor man’s fascism was a reprehensible and selfish decision. It was a sick thing to do, and I don’t feel comfortable living my life with them. But what are you gonna do, kill 74 million people? To extend to them the materialist analysis of why they got to this point of accepted sociopathy is the only way through the mess, the only way to generate any salvation from this mutual hopelessness of a dead American dream. I’ve no interest in coddling them, and neither should you. But no one wins if some Trump voter in Louisiana gets his pets, car, home, and belongings swept away in an unprecedentedly devastating hurricane. Oh gee, that climate denier sure got his comeuppance: a drowned German Shepherd. Calling ICE on your MAGA Latino neighbor in hopes that maybe she has a cousin who can get deported is definitely a shock to the system, go get ‘em! However… If an architect of the social structure suffers? A donor of the new fascist order, an authority figure enforcing it, or a leader with the blueprint suffering? Hurting? Disappearing? Systematically replaced by a new vision that actually fights for one another? Generations still to come will prosper; bring them some scalps.
JOKER: FOLIE A DEUX is available to rent or purchase on digital platforms, and will be streaming on Max this winter.
Comments